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 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.
[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.
Van den Bogaert was engaged in a power-imbalanced homosexual relationship with his young, what would now be termed "under-age", African slave, Tobias.
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.