Joan Raye
Joan Raye (* 1698 in Amsterdam ; † August 11, 1737 in Paramaribo ) was Lord von Breukelerwaard, a sea captain with the Admiralty of Amsterdam and Governor General in Suriname .
Life
origin
The Raye family originally came from Antwerp , which they left for Amsterdam after the Spanish conquered the city in 1585. Here they worked their way up from small traders to sugar factory owners.
Joan Raye's grandfather had bought the Ambachtsherrlichkeit Breukelerwaard near Breukelen from the cathedral chapter of St. Marie in Utrecht in 1660 and thus became lord of Breukelerwaard. This title and the "glory" later passed to the grandson.
Joan was born as the first child of Joan (also called Jan) Raye (1660-1712) and Aletta Catharina Bicker (1671-1755) in 1698 and was baptized on June 10, 1699 in the Nieuwe Kerk . His mother came from the influential Amsterdam regent family Bicker . Joan had two siblings, brother Jacob (1703–1777) and sister Eva (1707–1776).
Youth, job, siblings
The quite wealthy Raye family moved from Amsterdam to Maarssen in 1698, shortly after the birth of their son Joan . Here the children received their school education. As an adult, Joan moved back to Amsterdam, where he was employed by the mayor from 1718 to 1735 as an auctioneer at the Old Fish Market. Although he did not have to be personally present as an auctioneer, it earned him a fixed salary of around 1,000 guilders a year . In addition, he received 2½% commission from the fish sold, which increased his income not insignificantly.
In 1724 he was also appointed captain of the sea by the Admiralty of Amsterdam without having to forego the lucrative source of income as an auctioneer. It was only after being appointed Governor General of Suriname by the Suriname Society in June 1735 that he resigned as a fish auctioneer. The office remained in the family, however, because a year later his brother Jacob Bicker Raye was appointed to the office. Jacob had meanwhile also adopted his mother's maiden name as his second surname. He also began to write an Amsterdam chronicle in 1732, Het dagboek van Jacob Bicker Raye 1732–1772. Sister Eva was also well looked after, because she had married the alderman of the city of Amsterdam Pieter van Loon, from the Amsterdam regent family Van Loon . One of the family's houses can be viewed as the Van Loon Museum on Keizersgracht 672 in Amsterdam.
Governor General of Suriname
After his appointment, he left Texel on October 6, 1735 with the ship Jacob Daniël to perform his office . Several sailing ships were waiting here for departure with the same destination.
One day later, the first three missionaries of the Moravian Brethren in Suriname, Berwig, Piesch and von Larisch were also supposed to start the long journey.
On December 20, 1735, the ship anchored at Fort Zeelandia with the new Governor General on board and he formally took over the official duties the following day. In the governor's palace, the bachelor met the widow of his two predecessors, Hendrik Temming and Carel Emilius Henry de Cheusses (also: Charles Aemilius), Charlotte Elisabeth née van der Lith (1700–1753), who had approval from the partnership after the death of their husbands to stay here. The widow Charlotte Elisabeth Henry de Cheusses, née van der Lith, was the owner and manager of the Berg en Dal plantation (Suriname) at the time . In addition, she was certainly one of the most influential people in the colony through her position as governor's wife.
Joan Raye came to Suriname at a time when there were a lot of unsolved problems in the colony. With the laying of the foundation stone for the new fortification structure Fort Nieuw Amsterdam , around a year before his arrival, the dispute over the cost allocation between the colonists (plantation owners) and the firm was still highly controversial. He also found a mountain of files at the Hof van Justitie . Around four hundred processes that had not started or had been completed had accumulated here.
As with his predecessors, especially Raye with his energetic manner faced a lot of resistance in the most important political body in Suriname at that time, the Raad or Hof van Politie . In this committee sat next to the chairman Raye as a representative of the society, council members from the planter aristocracy, with z. T. completely opposing interests. In addition to trying to gain more influence on decisions in the colony, the councils and colonists in the Raye case were also concerned with his assessment of the poor treatment of the slaves . After both sides had appealed to the law firm in several letters, the situation escalated when the councils complained in a petition to the Staten-Generaal about the despotic character of the new governor. After Raye had submitted a first rejected resignation request in 1736, the law firm of Suriname approved the second request from May 1737 this time. However, this message from Amsterdam no longer found him alive in Paramaribo.
In contrast to the records of his brother Jacob Bicker Raye, the church book of the Reformed congregation in Suriname states August 12, 1737 as the anniversary of the death of Joan Raye.
marriage
Like his predecessors, Governor Joan Raye succumbed to the charm of Charlotte Elisabeth, née van der Lith; because on March 2, 1737 he married the grande dame of Suriname. From this connection a boy was born on November 21, 1737. The third child of Charlotte, she had a daughter each with the deceased husbands, so she was born as a half-orphan. This son was baptized Joan after his late father. Like his two half-sisters, Joan Raye Junior left his mother in Suriname as a child. He traveled in August 1747 a. a. Accompanied by the slave Champagne and his father's nephew, Baron Jacob de Petersen , General Director of Guinea , who did not return to Holland directly but via Suriname for further training in Amsterdam. After his mother's death in 1753, his two uncles, Jacob Bicker Raye and Pieter van Loon, took over the guardianship. Joan Raye Junior died in 1823 as the fourth and last "Herr van Breukelerwaard" single and childless in Amsterdam on the Herengracht .
Breukelerwaard plantation
Shortly after his arrival in Suriname, Governor Joan Raye had a sugar cane plantation built on the upper reaches of the Commewijne . Here, areas had already been reclaimed and coffee was planted under the plantation names Zell, Sell or Cell . It is conceivable that the predecessor of Joan Raye in office, Henry de Cheusses, whose family seat was in Celle , had already started planting. Under the new owner Raye, the plantation was converted to the production of sugar.
Joan Raye had sent the former society slave Coffy to his brother Jacob Bicker Raye in Amsterdam to order the necessary materials for the plantation . Raye had the slaves for his outstanding service in nursing from Henry de Cheusses released and given the name Joan Breukelerwaard. We read about this in the passenger list: on April 5, 1736, a certain Joan Breukelerwaard, a free negro and former law firm Coffy, sailed to Amsterdam on the ship Zaandam . Bicker Raye noted about this in his chronicle under Anno 1736 : "Brother Joan sent a black man, Jan Breukelerwaard, to Holland. After looking around here for five months, he traveled back to his native country on December 21st."
After receiving the news of Brother Joan's death, almost a year later, Bicker Raye wrote in his chronicle and diary: "He not only left a pregnant widow, but also a plantation that had just begun to plant a new sugar plant here, for which reason the material, consisting of several thousand bricks, woodwork and ironwork, has to be shipped every day. "
During the inventory of the Breukelerwaard plantation in October 1737, there were still mostly coffee plants here. The plantation was worked by 118 slaves and had a total value of 84,175.17 guilders.
After the death of her husband, his widow took over the plantation business. Charlotte Elisabeth van der Lith was married five times and died in Paramaribo as a widow du Voisin, widowed Audra, widowed Raye, widowed Henry de Cheusses, widowed Temming. When the plantation was inventoried again after her death on August 6, 1753, it was a 1400 acres (1 acres = approx. 0.43 ha ) large sugar plantation with a water mill and 193 slaves. Their total value was estimated at 277,879.20 guilders.
Watercolor Breukelerwaard
The watercolor shown here in the section was made by Eric Dhanilal from Suriname in 2008 and is the property of the main author of this article. The model was a painting by CL Timme, which was created between 1770 and 1793 and was commissioned by the descendants of Charlotte van der Lith.
Description of the superstructures on the plantation, center right: residential house (around 400 m² in size), tea house, ironing house, servant living and warehouse, kitchen and wash house, hospital, grain house, dovecote, sheepfold, chicken coop, cowshed; left of the house: three rows of slave houses, water wells for the slaves, boathouse, carpenter's shop, material shed, distillery, stone water basin for the distillery, sugar cane intermediate storage, water mill with cooking house (there were 4–7 sugar kettles here), barrel maker building and a guard house at the dock.
See also
literature
- GW van der Meiden: Betwist bestuur. Een eeuw strijd om de macht in Suriname 1651–1753 , De Bataafsche Leeuw, Amsterdam 1987, ISBN 90-6707-133-1 .
- Jacob Bicker Raye: Het dagboek van Jacob Bicker Raye 1732-1772. Naar het oorspronkelijk dagboek medegedeeld by Ms. Beijerinck en Dr. MG de Boer, tweede druk, HJ Paris, Amsterdam 1968. Online version of Het dagboek .
- Reinhard Breymayer : Goethe , Oetinger and no end. Charlotte Edle von Oetinger, née von Barckhaus-Wiesenhütten, as Werther "Fräulein von B .." Heck, Dußlingen 2012. - ISBN 3-924249-54-7 , p. 66 with note 115; P. 59 f. - Joan Raye Junior was a half-brother of Henriette von Lindau, b. Henry de Cheusses, the mother of Heinrich Julius von Lindau , Goethe's friend and unfortunate ("Wertherischen") admirer of Charlotte von Barckhaus-Wiesenhütten, a sister of the painter Louise von Panhuys, who worked in Suriname, and Carl Ludwig von Barckhaus, Minister of State for Hessen-Darmstadt gen. of meadow huts .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek (NNBW) , accessed on February 2, 2016.
- ↑ City Archives Amsterdam, baptismal register , accessed on August 18, 2018.
- ^ Museum van Loon , accessed on February 2, 2016.
- ↑ Koloniaal Suriname: Gereformeerden , accessed on February 2, 2016.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Raye, Joan |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch military, plantation owner and governor general in Suriname |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1698 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Amsterdam |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 11, 1737 |
| Place of death | Paramaribo |