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Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert (1612/13 – 1648) was an early Dutch settler in New Netherland (present-day New York), explorer, and barber surgeon. Van den Bogaert's personal journal from his expedition into Iroquois country, A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635, is the first written description of the Mohawk Valley and among the first ethnographical accounts of the Iroquois people and the Mohawk language.[1] He is also notable for being among the first known people in the Americas to be killed as a result of their homosexuality.
Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1612 or 1613 |
| Died | 1648 |
| Cause of death | Drowning |
| Occupation | Barber surgeon |
| Known for | Explorer, Killed because of Homosexuality |
Van den Bogaert was employed as a commissary, a business agent, of the Dutch West India Company at Fort Orange, the site where the present-day city of Albany would later develop. After a stall in the company's lucrative fur trade with the Indigenous Iroquois People, Van den Bogaert and two others were ordered to embark on an expedition to enquire for an explanation for the lack of business and to restore the fur trade.[2][3]
Van den Bogaert penned a daily journal of his expedition from 1634 to 1635. He recorded not only the daily activities of his party, but also wrote of the geography of the land and of Iroquois life, settlements, healing rituals, and language.[4] The journal is the earliest known record of the interior west of the Hudson.[5] As one of the earliest European accounts of the Iroquois Five Nations, it is also of great historical and ethnological value.[6][7]
A wordlist, found at the end of Van den Bogaert's journal, is the earliest known philological treatment of the Mohawk language in existence.[8]
The existence of Van den Bogaert's journal only came to light in 1895,[9] and contemporary interest in the text only surged after an English translation by Charles T. Gehring (with annotations by William A. Starna) in 1991. Gehring's translation of the journal inspired George O'Connor’s first graphic novel, Journey into Mohawk Country, which uses the events of the journal as its sole material.
Van den Bogaert was engaged in a power-imbalanced homosexual relationship with his young, what would now be termed "under-age", African slave, Tobias.[10]
Toward the end of 1647, Van den Bogaert was caught having sex with Tobias and they both were jailed at Fort Orange. Cognizant that the punishment for homosexual relations throughout the Dutch Empire was death, they escaped together and fled north for the Iroquois lands with which van den Bogaert was well acquainted from his expedition.[11][12]
He and Tobias were subsequently found and captured by Dutch soldiers and returned to Fort Orange. Van den Bogaert, in a final act of desperation, escaped again from the fort's prison. During this escape, Van den Bogaert attempted to cross the frozen over Hudson River, but fell through the ice and drowned.[12] He had not yet even reached his 40s at the time of his death. The fate of Tobias is unknown.[13]
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