USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 10
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46
Of course the meaning of this passage must not be pushed too far. But even if it be taken in the most restricted sense it expresses an attitude of mind fundamentally different from that of the clergy of the young New England colonies.
The people of Manhattan and New Plymouth had met on Buzzard's Bay where, at Manomet, both colonies had trading houses. Manomet Creek, running southward into this bay, and Scusset Creek, running northward into Cape Cod Bay, were navigable for small boats, and the portage between them was not more than six miles in length. By this route the Plymouth people could go southward without sailing around the dangerous cape; and they saw that it was a desir-
86
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
able place for that ship canal which, always under discussion since their day, has not yet been built.
As early as the year 1623 the governor of Plymouth, Wil- liam Bradford, and the assistant governor, Isaac Allerton, sent by Edward Winslow to the backers of the colony in Eng- land a letter saying that its traffic with the Indians had fallen off and probably would not revive,
. . . seeing the Dutch on the one side and the French on the other side, and the fishermen and other plantations between both, have and do furnish the savages, not with toys and trifles, but with good and substantial commodities, as kettles, hatchets, and clothes of all sorts.
Four years later Governor Minuit opened direct communica- tion between the two colonies, sending to Governor Bradford by a special messenger a letter congratulating the people of Plymouth on the successful planting of their colony and offer- ing on behalf of his own people to trade with them in furs or other commodities. Prepared by Secretary De Rasières in two versions, Dutch and French, this letter is now accessible only as Bradford preserved it, the elaborately courteous form of address, which excited his surprise, standing in Dutch and the rest in an English translation. Bradford answered civilly; other messengers passed to and fro bringing him, as he re- corded, other 'kind letters,' likewise preserved for us in his Letter-Book, and on one occasion pleasing Dutch gifts, 'a rundlet of sugar and two Holland cheeses'; and before the end of the year Secretary De Rasières went himself to Plymouth. He and his companion, says Bradford, 'came up with their bark to Manamete to their house there.' From this house overland to the Pilgrims' settlement was a six hours' journey. De Rasières, he himself relates, had not 'gone so far this three or four years,' wherefore he feared his feet would fail him. So by his request the Plymouth people sent a boat to meet him at the head of Scusset Creek, and thus he came to Plymouth 'honorably attended with a noise of trumpeters,' these being a part of his own little suite. Kindly entertained for a few days, he then returned with a
87
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
number of Englishmen to his bark and sold them some of the goods with which it was laden.
Bradford's Letter-Book tells us that he and his people understood that the masters of these Dutch envoys
. . were willing to have friendship with us and to supply us with sundry commodities, and offered us assistance against the French if need were. The which, though we knew it was with an eye to their own profits, yet we had reason both kindly to accept it and make use of it.
In his History of Plymouth Plantation the governor adds that after this beginning the Dutch sent often to the same place 'for divers years,' exchanging tobacco for linen cloth, stuffs, and so forth, which was of 'good benefit' to the Plymouth people until the Virginians found out their plan- tation :
But that which turned most to their profit, in time, was an entrance into the trade of wampumpeake; for they now bought about £50 worth of it from them. . . .
That is, the Plymouth men bought wampum of De Rasières and his companions who told them how much the Hudson River Indians valued it and persuaded them that it would prove just as 'vendable' at Kennebec whither they went for peltry. This proved so true, says Bradford, that soon the Plymouth traders 'quite cut off' the traffic of the fishermen and largely that of the 'straggling planters' along the New England coast. Less happy results followed in later years. The Indian neighbors of the Englishmen had not known about wampum till the Dutch brought knowledge of it, and it wrought a great change in them. Condensing Bradford's longer explanation, Nathaniel Morton says that they grew 'rich and proud and powerful' by its use; previously 'they could not attain English ammunition'; but as they learned 'to make store of wampum they furnished themselves with guns, powder, and shot.' Neither the English nor the Dutch could be prevented by the most stringent ordinances from
88
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
selling these dangerous wares; and thus the root was planted of the worst troubles that New England was to know.
In writing his history Governor Bradford did not refer to the most important matter under discussion between himself and Governor Minuit. In fact, from a transcript, professedly complete, of one of his letters to Minuit he omitted a passage bearing upon this matter. The full text in his Letter-Book, other letters there preserved, written to Minuit and to the Council for New England, and the Dutch accounts of the incident tell that he had questioned at once the right of the Hollanders to live or to trade in regions covered by the patents given by the Council for New England to the Plymouth people and others. The Council, he explained, had empowered its colonists to 'expulse or make prize of' any strangers or un- authorized Englishmen who should intrude within their limits, which extended down to the fortieth parallel; and although his people would not 'go about to molest or trouble' Minuit's but hoped to live in good correspondence with them, he desired them to forbear from trading in Buzzard's Bay, Nar- ragansett Bay, and the vicinity. Minuit's answer, says Bradford's summary, was very friendly but maintained the Hollanders' 'right and liberty to trade' in those parts which they had frequented undisturbed for many years, declaring that as the English had authority from their king so they themselves 'had the like from the States of Holland which they would defend.' Minuit asked that a commissioner to dis- cuss the question might be sent to Fort Amsterdam, Bradford that one might come to Plymouth. This was the reason why De Rasières made the journey and was received with so much formality. Bradford then urged the New Netherlanders to have the home authorities 'clear the title' of their 'planting in those parts' lest it become 'a bone of contention in these stirring evil times' and lest in after days an arrangement might be 'with more difficulty obtained ... and perhaps not without blows.' Finally both governors referred the matter to their superiors in Europe.
In spite of its tenor this correspondence was couched in the
89
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
friendliest words, and at the moment the home governments were not only friends but allies. In 1624 James I had entered into a defensive alliance with the Dutch; and in 1625 Charles I, soon after his accession, signed with them a treaty of defence and offence against Spain. This Treaty of Southampton opened the harbors of each country freely to the ships of the other; and in 1627, on petition of the West India Company, its benefits were extended to cover all colonial ports. No protest about the Dutch occupation of New Netherland was then uttered by England.
These European arrangements, however, did not quiet the uneasiness that Bradford's words had awakened in the prov- ince itself. As the West India Company informed the States General in November, 1627,
The last letters from New Netherland bring word that the English of New Plymouth threaten to drive away those there or to disturb them in their quiet possession and infant colony, notwithstanding ours heretofore had tendered to them every good correspondence and friendship. They therefore request the aid of forty soldiers for their defence. We would rather see it secured by friendly alliance.
De Rasières soon fell out with Governor Minuit and returned to Holland. There he wrote for Samuel Blommaert the long letter or report already quoted in regard to the bouweries on Manhattan. Describing also his visit to Plymouth it paints a more detailed picture of that place in its early days than has come down to us from any English pen, and it ex- plains even more clearly than do Bradford's letters why the New Netherlanders felt afraid of Bradford's people. When De Rasières reached Manomet, he says, the Englishmen there had just built a shallop to seek for wampum among the Nar- ragansett Indians but he had prevented them for that year by selling them fifty fathoms of it because he feared that
. .. the seeking for it would lead them to discover our trade in furs which, if they were to find it out, it would be a great trouble for us to maintain, for they already dare to threaten that if we will not leave off dealing with that people they will be obliged to seek other
90
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
means; if they do that now while they are yet ignorant how the case stands, what will they do when they do get a notion of it ?
Another mile-stone in the history of New Netherland was set in the year 1629.
At this time, six years after the organization of the West India Company had swept all the profits of traffic with the province into its coffers, its directors reported to the States General that, although the trade was 'right advantageous,' one year with another it returned at the most 50,000 guilders, while the expense of maintaining the plantations was very great for as yet the settlers were not a profit but a loss to the Company. In 1624, it appears, the Amsterdam Chamber had exported to Manhattan something more than 25,000 guilders' worth of goods while the returns, wholly in furs and timber, were valued at 27,000 guilders; and in 1627 the imports like the exports amounted to about 56,000 guilders. Meanwhile, the cost of the little colonial establishment and of transatlantic carriage was borne, of course, by the Chamber.
A more considerable trade in commodities of various kinds might be built up with the province, the directors asserted, probably on the witness of De Rasières; but the soil being full of 'weeds and wild productions' could not be properly cultivated because of the scantiness of the population. A wish to own land seems to have been awakening among the settlers; at least, Michaelius begged that the directors would inform him how he might 'possess a portion of land' and at his own expense support himself thereon. And according to Kiliaen Van Rensselaer the Company had so neglected and mismanaged the affairs of its province that it was now driven to invite the cooperation of individuals.
There were, it appears, two parties among the directors, one favoring the colonization of the province, the other advocating its maintenance as a mere station for trade in the belief that colonists would prove a burden rather than a source of profit and would despoil the Company of the fur trade. After much discussion, however, a scheme to further and to regulate
91
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
colonization was agreed upon and, as embodied in a so-called Charter of Freedoms (or Privileges) and Exemptions, was ratified by the States General in June, 1629, and in printed form distributed through the fatherland.
By the terms of this charter the Company reserved for itself the island of Manhattan. Elsewhere persons of any sort of whom the director-general and council approved were to be permitted to take up, on their own account or that of some 'master,' as much land as they could properly cultivate and were to enjoy 'free liberty in hunting and fowling .. . in private and public woods and waters about their colonies.' Such persons were called 'freemen' or 'free merchants.' Much greater privileges were secured to any member of the Company who should engage to take out within four years at his own cost and risk fifty adult settlers. He might claim lands stretching sixteen English miles along the seacoast or one side of a navigable river, or eight miles along both sides of a river, and might exchange them for others should they prove undesirable. The introduction of more settlers would entitle him to more land; and within his domain he was to be a semi-independent 'patroon' or 'lord' with gaming and fishing rights, mill rights, tenths from the harvests and other privileges such as the great landowners of the fatherland enjoyed, with civil and criminal jurisdiction, the power to appoint all magistrates, and the right to send a delegate annually to Fort Amsterdam to consult with the director- general and council regarding affairs of common interest. These provisions marked the first step toward local self- government in New Netherland.
The people whom a patroon should send out were to bind themselves for a term of years and during this term were to be his subjects, swearing fealty to him and pledging them- selves not to leave his land and control. The Company promised to supply the patroons with African slaves if pos- sible; and to encourage immigrants to become their tenants it exempted their people but not the 'free' merchants or colonists for ten years from all obligation to pay taxes to the
92
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
provincial government. No free colonist was to claim land within twenty-four miles of a patroonship.
On the other hand the Company strictly ordered all colonists including the patroons to satisfy the Indians for their lands. It forbade them upon pain of banishment to manufacture cloth or stuffs of any kind - lest, of course, its own profits from the exportation of necessaries be diminished. It directed the patroons to render formal annual reports upon their colonies, and enjoined them to establish churches and schools. The most hotly debated point when the charter was framed had been the question of the fur trade. The final decision was that the patroons might trade the produce of their farms for furs in places where the Company stationed no commis- sary but must pay a tax of one guilder on each skin. In other commodities they might trade along the coast from Newfound- land to Carolina upon condition that they would bring their cargoes to Manhattan and there pay a duty of five per cent before reshipping them, and would send fish not to Holland but only to neutral countries upon payment of an export duty of three guilders a ton. All these prohibitions and limitations were set because the Company intended 'to people the Island of the Manathes first.' But as it had reserved Manhattan for itself this simply meant that its aim in trying to people any part of its province was to draw commercial profit from the settlers' enterprises. It was to transport colonists and goods at reasonable rates, cattle and farm implements free. If no Company ships were ready patroons might use their own, tak- ing on board an official of the Company; and for ten years they were to pay no import duties. Furthermore the Com- pany promised to finish at once the fort on Manhattan and to put it in good posture of defence.
Possibly the West India Company got the idea of establish- ing patroonships in New Netherland from the great estates called 'captaincies' created by the Portuguese in Brazil. It can hardly be doubted that one of the reasons for creating them was a belief that the desire not merely for wealth but also for rank and power based upon the ownership of land
93
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
would be a potent spur to effort in the New World as it was in the Old, and that it might here be gratified by arrange- ments similar to those which the Old World had inherited from feudal times; for in Holland the great landed estates shared with the cities and chartered towns those rights of local self-government upon which the whole structure of the provincial and federal governments reposed. Nevertheless, the oft-repeated statement that the establishment of patroon- ships in New Netherland transplanted feudalism to its soil is not true except in a much modified sense. It is not true as it would be if applied to French arrangements in Canada; it is less true than it would be of the original arrangements in Maryland. The New Netherland patroonships were seign- iorial but not feudal properties; estates of the kind called in Holland new fiefs, nova feuda; estates divested of all burdensome attributes, hereditary allodial lands. Their owners were soon empowered to sell them in fee in whole or in part and, in whole or in part, to devise them as they might desire. They were given no military power and were directed to rule their people in accordance with laws which the Assem- bly of the XIX should frame. And their people were not serfs but tenants; they were bound by their own free act and only for short specified terms, and they had a right of appeal from the patroon's court to that of the director-general at Fort Amsterdam in all cases involving more than fifty guild- ers. Nor did these patroonships influence the development of New Netherland and New York as profoundly as is often said. They did not multiply and flourish as the West India Company expected or as tradition vaguely but persistently affirms. In fact only one patroonship succeeded and survived.
This was established by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer who be- longed by birth to the landed gentry of the fatherland, having an ancestral estate near Nykerk in the present province of Guelderland, but was educated as a merchant and in 1629, when he was about fifty years of age, was well known as a dealer in pearls and jewels at Amsterdam. Next to the directors of the West India Company stood a body of large
94
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
stock-holders called Chief Participants. They were not en- gaged in the daily management of the Company yet their consent was needed for any important decision, annual re- ports and accounts were submitted to them, and it had been agreed that the first two vacancies in the board of directors should be filled from their ranks. Van Rensselaer was the first director received into the Amsterdam Chamber in ac- cordance with this rule and also, apparently, the first of the special commissioners appointed from time to time from among the directors to attend to the affairs of New Nether- land. He seems to have been active in furthering the despatch of Jesse De Forest's pioneer band of emigrants; and certainly from the beginning he was the leading spirit in the party that favored the colonizing of the province by agricultural settlers.
His Letter-Book, a Memorial that he addressed to the West India Company in 1633, and a number of other papers, private and official, relating to the concerns of the province were pre- served by his descendants in Holland but were made known to students only about twenty years ago and were not pub- lished in their entirety until the State of New York issued them in an English translation in 1908. They throw new light not only upon Van Rensselaer's own activities but also upon the attitude of the Company toward its province and upon the character and conduct of some of its employees; and they add another name to the list, long supposed complete, of the governors of New Netherland.
It had been stipulated that directors intending to plant colonies under the Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions might send two agents to examine the country; in January, 1629, six months before the charter was ratified, Van Rens- selaer, Samuel Blommaert, and Samuel Godyn announced their intention to do so; and during the summer of this year sites for several patroonships were actually claimed. Michiel Paauw, Lord of Achtienhoven, an estate near Utrecht, claimed lands on the west shore of the North River opposite Manhat- tan - an advantageous place as the Indians frequented it who came to trade their furs with the Dutchmen - and an
95
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
island in the West Indies. Blommaert chose lands on the Fresh River, Godyn lands on the south shore of the bay of the South River, and Albert Conraedtsen Burgh a tract on the opposite shore of this bay and also the island of St. Vin- cent. And in this and the following year Van Rensselaer secured great tracts on the North River above and below Fort Orange, buying them of the Indians through his agents one of whom was Bastiaen Janssen Crol, the Company's com- missary or director at the fort.
To legalize such acquisitions of territory Director-General Minuit in council signed and sealed deeds which pledged the savages to abide by their compacts and confirmed the pur- chasers in their rights. The oldest document preserved in the archives of the State of New York is the deed which thus ratified Paauw's purchase of the lands 'called Hobocan Hackingh' opposite Manhattan, now covered by the city of Hoboken. It defines boundaries as precisely as was possible with an unsurveyed tract, and says that certain Indians act- ing for the other 'joint owners' were present when it was signed, on July 12, 1630. The deed attesting Godyn's right to the South River tract was given in the same month, Van Rensselaer's deed for the first of his purchases in August. Thus Paauw, Godyn, and Van Rensselaer became respectively the first landowners within the borders of the present States of New Jersey, Delaware, and New York.
Deeds of this kind sanctioning purchase from the Indians are usually referred to as 'land patents.' Deeds which in after years confirmed a colonist in the possession of lands already occupied for some time, or granted him by the provincial government from those in its own hands, are called 'ground briefs' from the Dutch term grondbrief. Both kinds were public records essential to validity of title. 'Transports' or transfers, mortgages, and all other private compacts in which real estate was involved were also officially attested and recorded; and records of this sort, as well as land patents and ground briefs, were preserved in the office of the secretary of the province but in a separate series distinct from those relat-
-
96
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
ing to transactions in which the government figured. Thus immediately and systematically the Dutch introduced into the New World practices assuring the validity of titles and facilitating transfers of land which had prevailed in various parts of the Netherlands for generations before they were perfected and made general in the time of Charles V, but which were utterly unknown in the England of the seventeenth century and, indeed, are still to be desired in the England of to-day.
Michiel Paauw, latinizing his surname which in English would be Peacock, called his patroonship Pavonia, a name still kept alive by the Pavonia Ferry. Although there is a village near Antwerp called Hoboken and a surname thence derived was known in New Netherland, Hobocan Hackingh, which survives as Hoboken, seems to have been an Indian name, a belief corroborated by the fact that the Dutchmen spelled it variously with no apparent memory of the Flemish village in mind.
Paauw kept in his own hands the settlement, management, and possible profits of his patroonship. But before Van Rensselaer, Blommaert, and Godyn obtained their lands they agreed to develop them on joint account, each patroonship under the personal direction of one of the four who should have a two-fifth share therein (his associates having each a one-fifth share) with the title Patroon and the right to expend on his own responsibility sums of less than 2000 guilders. In this fashion Van Rensselaer retained the management of the North River patroonship to which he gave the name of his estate at home, Rensselaerswyck.
None of these Amsterdam investors ever came to America but they and others continued to take up lands. Van Rens- selaer, Blommaert, and Godyn each claimed a West Indian island, and six members of the Zealand Chamber likewise declared themselves as patroons in the West Indies or on the coast of Guiana. Before the end of 1630 Paauw enlarged Pavonia by securing the adjoining tract where Jersey City
97
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
stands and the whole of Staten Island. A deposition made in 1659 by Cornelis Melyn who had then for some years owned the greater part of Staten Island says, without mentioning Paauw, that on July 12, 1630, it was bought by Minuit for the West India Company and that the Indians received for it 'some duffels, kettles, axes, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, jews'-harps, and divers other small wares.'
Van Rensselaer at once enlarged Rensselaerswyck, purchas- ing lands on both banks of the river. In some ways his site was even better than Paauw's. If the fact that Fort Orange was a Company fur-trading post forbade him to gather pelts near by, on the other hand the fort promised protection for his people, and he could hope for profit in selling provisions to the garrison. The Company's commissary, Crol, not only acted as his agent in buying lands but also supervised the laying out of farms when, before the end of 1630, the first settlers arrived; and, with Governor Minuit's permission, the Company's laborers aided in the work. In January, 1631, Van Rensselaer sent out another band of settlers - tobacco planters, two Scandinavians to run a sawmill and a grist- mill, and some laborers. Brick and tile kilns were soon started, and thus was established in New Netherland the only patroonship that was destined to exist for more than a few precarious years.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.