USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 12
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After a long delay the Eendraght was released but 'saving and without prejudice to his Majesty's rights' to the disputed territory. If the Dutch, they were told, chose to remain in New Netherland without his Majesty's license they might 'impute it to themselves if hereafter they suffered.'
The States General, said the West India Company at this time, ought to maintain their own sovereignty, the freedom of the seas, and the validity of treaties made by their subjects with the 'unsubjugated' tribes of North America. It also loudly lamented its lack of the profits it had hoped to get from the colony it was spending so much money to maintain. On the other hand, as the letters of their first clergyman make clear, its colonists complained that the Company did not keep its pledges and expected them to maintain them- selves too soon. Where the many good things for the sup- port of life, Michaelius wrote, were in an uncultivated and wild state it was necessary that there should be better regula- tions and that people who had 'the knowledge and the imple- ments for gathering things in their season should collect them together.' Instead, as the people themselves explained a few years later, the Company flung a lot of hare-brained folk into Manhattan to be their guides and rulers, wanted to fill the land not with independent settlers but with its own servants, and tried to reap profits before they could rightly be expected. In consequence, its people tried in legal and illegal ways to evade its trading restrictions and soon began to desire lands of their own. Plainly, the Hollanders' attempt at coloniza- tion did not promise well.
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It should be understood, however, that in attempting colo- nization at all the Hollanders had set themselves a task which, difficult even to-day, was wholly novel then, and that they had gone about it in much the same way as the French and the English.
It was an age of monopolistic efforts, personal, corporate, and national, domestic and colonial. It was an age when it was held as a fundamental tenet of government that trade should be so regulated that the state as such should profit as greatly as possible, yet an age when governments, however powerful in seeming, were weak compared with those of to-day and precariously supplied with funds. Spain and Portugal, getting great stores of specie from America, kept foreign trade in the hands of the government itself. Else- where governments deputed the work. But individuals could not undertake it. Although capital had begun to grow abundant in private hands during the early years of the century, few persons could father enterprises involving great outlays and great risks. Therefore large mercantile schemes, including those in which colonization figured, were undertaken by corporations with the sanction of government and the promise of more or less valuable monopolies and, in certain cases, of support with force if needed. In England, in France, and in Holland the government was besieged with demands for distant territories, for subsidies, and for trading privileges intended to be used exclusively for the benefit of some sort of a company. Of course the appetite of those whom oppor- tunity favored grew by what it fed upon. It could not be expected that a company obliged to arm its merchant vessels, to protect them often with ships of war, and to maintain strong posts with garrisons and factors in uncivilized and hostile lands, would permit rivals to profit by its costly pre- cautions. And when it was understood, first by the Dutch but soon by all others excepting the Spaniards, that colonies could be made useful as markets for home products, then to governments and to corporations the reasons for monopolistic strictness seemed doubly strong.
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Expediency, not any broad and settled policy, guided the commercial practices of the Dutch. Thriving at home upon liberal trade regulations, in the East Indies they became the fiercest of monopolists, in North America monopolists of a less ruthless sort. What the West India Company here effected was only what its neighbors at the north and the south did or tried to do. The record of New France is a long list of monopolistic experiments. The story of the founding of Virginia and New England is a tangled tale of rival monopo- lists crying out against infringements of their privileges and against the granting of privilege to others, while a strenuous battle against monopolies of all sorts chiefly engaged the attention of the parliaments of James I. In this parliamen- tary struggle, however, colonial enterprises, still new and relatively few, were of minor moment. It was the course of the crown in regard to monopolies within the kingdom itself that provoked the famous Statute of Monopolies of 1624 and in after years formed a main reason for the revolt against Charles I.
Jamestown and Plymouth were sustained for a time by stock companies of merchants to whom their profits were pledged. Massachusetts Bay was founded as a colony of a similar kind; the name preserved by its assembly, the ‘gen- eral court,' shows that this was merely the governing body of the company formed in England transplanted to the colony itself. Self-government was nowhere contemplated at the first. The early governors of Virginia were even more auto- cratic than Peter Minuit, appointing their own councillors. ' Assisted emigration' played a large part in the settlement of the southern colonies; and Lord Baltimore, who obtained his patent for Maryland in 1632, advertised like the West India Company for emigrants to go out under contract. The real difference between the English colonies and the Dutch was that in New England and Virginia the first arrangements were quickly changed when they proved economically unde- sirable while in New Netherland, although they were greatly modified in the course of years, they were never abolished.
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One reason for this was the fact that the West India Com- pany, unlike the English companies, had no rivals. Its sole right to adventure in America was never impaired, and was not even seriously questioned in Holland until the Company itself was at the point of death and the English were about to seize its province. Another reason may be read in the difference in number and in kind between the settlers in New Netherland and New England. Men were not leaving Hol- land in large numbers, as they were leaving England, because of religious or political discontent or, in spite of the testimony of Baudartius, for lack of industrial opportunities. Those that emigrated at this period were recruited and sent out for the sake of the service they might render to the Company or its patroons, and few could be found who were willing to go. In 1629, just at the time when wonderful waves of willing immi- gration began to sweep into Massachusetts Bay, the West India Company wrote in a Remonstrance against a proposed truce with Spain :
Moreover, the colonizing of such wild and uncultivated countries demands more inhabitants than we can well supply, not so much through lack of population, in which our provinces abound, as from the fact that all who are inclined to do any sort of work here procure enough to eat without any trouble and are therefore unwilling to go far from home on an uncertainty.
No trouble, distance, or uncertainty seemed deterrent to Eng- lish Puritans in the years when Charles I was ruling without a parliament. In throngs they flocked to New England - two thousand during the twelvemonth when Winthrop and Dudley came, twelve thousand within half a score of years. They were permitted to assume the government of their colony, many of them were men of substance, a great civil war soon distracted the attention of their motherland, and so they were able to erect in the New World a new commonwealth free for a long time from the control of parliament and crown. Mean- while the West India Company was trying to people its prov- nce from a land where men were free and content; and to
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this land every dissatisfied settler was eager to return. There- fore New Netherland grew very slowly and was only just gain- ing strength enough to throw off the last of the Company's swaddling-bands when it was seized for the king of England.
If even from its own self-seeking point of view the Com- pany did not deal wisely with New Netherland, for this fact also there are visible reasons. It was always hampered by the strife in Holland between the two great political parties one of which was from first to last its avowed enemy. Its constitution, resembling that of the Republic itself, stood in the way of energetic action upon debatable points, for although each of its five chambers was charged with special responsi- bilities none of them could do much without the indorsement of the Assembly of the XIX, and this executive body could do little without the consent of all the chambers. Moreover, the affairs of New Netherland seemed for many years of com- parative unimportance on the long list of those with which the Company had to deal.
To show why they seemed unimportant it suffices to con- trast the cargoes that were coming from River Mauritius with the sumptuous freights pouring in from South American, West Indian, and West African seas and shores. In 1624, for ex- ample, the Company reported to the States General:
Two ships have arrived from the coast of Guinea bringing, in addition to their freight of 627 pounds of gold, 1840 elephants' teeth, and 330 tons of pepper, news that the General there hath made an alliance and treaty with the Kings of Sabou and Ancora not to trade with anyone except with those of the Company, and that he is engaged in a like negotiation with a third King. And ... four ships have arrived from the Bay of All Saints, bringing the Viceroy and his son and the Jesuits prisoners.
Five years later four thousand cases of indigo, three thou- sand chests of sugar, and thirty-six thousand rawhides were brought home within a twelvemonth,
. . . as also the handsomest lot of cochineal that was ever brought into this country . .. a considerable quantity of tobacco which is
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now an important article of commerce; and finally a vast amount of wealth in all sorts of precious stones, silks and silk goods, musk, amber, all sorts of drugs, Brazil and log-wood, and other wares too numerous to mention here.
Richer even than this was the booty brought home in 1627 by Admiral Pieter Heyn who captured near Havana the 'plate fleet' that was annually sent to Spain - nineteen ships laden with a hundred and forty thousand pounds of pure silver and other precious wares valued in all at 12,000,000 guilders, 'so great a treasure that never did any fleet bring such a prize into this or any other country.'
Barbarian kings, captured viceroys, ivory tusks by the thousand, gold by the hundredweight, silver by the ton, silk and perfumes, amber and jewels - it reads like a grand fairy tale from which we drop back to a very poor and prosaic bit of mother-earth when we think of Manhattan with its hamlet of bark huts and its bales of beaver skins. And this tale meant to the Hollander much more than fairylike riches. It meant the achievement of the task for which the Company had been created. It meant wealth and glory gained at the expense of the hated Spaniard, revenge for generations of oppression and half a century of pitiless war. To many eyes it meant the safety of the young Republic. Listen once more to the proud words spoken by the Company in 1629 when it was explaining that another truce with Spain would work its own 'utter ruin and desolation':
We have moreover captured some even of the King of Spain's galleons, hitherto considered invincible, besides some other of his men-of-war, exclusive of more than two hundred ships and barks which we have taken from his subjects and partly appropriated to our own use and partly destroyed. Our fleets also reduced and for a time kept possession of the rich and mighty city of San Salvador in Brazil, sacked Porto Rico, pointed out the way to seize its enclosed harbor, and destroyed the castle of Margrita. By all which acts have we not only drained the King of Spain's treasury but also further pur- sued him at considerable expense. We say, exhausted his treasury .. . by depriving him of so much silver which was as blood from the arteries of his heart.
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Here, in the reference to the sacking of Porto Rico, we learn how the church bells were got that rang in New Amsterdam. Not all the successful raids of the West India Company meant sustained possession, but by 1630 it had taken from the Portuguese (which meant from the king of Spain) a great part of Brazil; it had secured territories in Guiana, several towns on the Mexican Gulf, and some of the lesser West Indies; and within a few years it was to grasp the last remnants of Portu- guese dominion on the Gold Coast of Africa.
At the north few prizes and no rich conquests could be hoped for, no injury could be inflicted upon Spain. Nor in regard to peaceful traffic could the unimaginative look ahead except in the light of past and present facts; and judging by these they naturally ranked the promise of New Netherland far below that of the Company's other possessions and of the trade factories set by its sister association on East Indian shores. From the northern parts of America Europe had as yet got nothing that it greatly wanted excepting furs and tobacco - only furs and tobacco to set against the gold and silver, the silk, cotton, and dyewoods of southern lands, their coveted articles of art and luxury, their invaluable pepper and spices, and the sugar that was still rare in northern countries. It may be added that even in much later years, when the Dutch had no North American possessions but the English had many, England valued its West Indian islands more than the mainland colonies which sent it only products similar to those of Europe.
If all these facts are understood it does not seem strange that although the West India Company owned scores of vessels it appropriated only two or three for the trade and commerce of New Netherland. It should also be understood that by 1630 the Company was beginning to decline, partly because of its own optimistic extravagance, chiefly because it did not get the national support that had been promised it. Created as a weapon against the king of Spain, it was virtually thrown aside as a sword not needed when its own efforts and the re- sults of the first period of the Thirty Years' War had so
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weakened the Spaniard that he was no longer greatly to be feared. The Republic was tired of the long struggle, and although individuals had grown rich the national and the local governments were poor. Had the States General been a paymaster with full powers the Company might have been sustained in spite of the persistent antagonism of the Arminian party. But according to the peculiar constitution of the Republic the States General could force no province to pay its quota of any national obligation, nor could the provincial States force the municipalities whom they represented to consent to such payments.
In 1629 the Company lent the national government 600,000 guilders although it had not yet received the whole of its first subsidy, the one promised by its charter. In 1630 it claimed an additional 600,000 guilders as the compensation promised for special services rendered to the nation, and declared that in places where the quota was not forthcoming it would not distribute its recently declared dividend of 75 per cent. In 1632 it was permitted to send delegates to the provinces to urge the payment of their indebtedness but obtained only the quota of the province of Holland, 57 per cent of the whole. In 1634 when it was granted, in words, a subsidy of 700,000 guilders its decline was already talked about, and even the province of Holland now refused to pay until the other prov- inces should do so.
None of these facts, however, and no excuses that can be framed for the Company relieve it from the charge of a dull short-sightedness in its management of New Netherland. Its colonists were the sons and foster-sons of a land where in medieval times there had been vassals but no serfs and where the lords of manors had a limited jurisdiction - a land, nourished to greatness by trade and commerce, which for centuries had possessed rights of local self-government and, after an heroic struggle, had secured national independence and given to civil liberty a broader meaning than was else- where understood. The emigrants from this land now found
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themselves in a New World of limitless opportunity. They had entered it under tutelage but of their own free will, and this tutelage was not an actual despotism, for the Company was subject to supervision by the government of the father- land. Wise eyes could see from the beginning that such settlers would not long be satisfied with a system of auto- cratic administration and close commercial monopoly. A passage in Wassenaer's history, written before the town on Manhattan was founded, says of the first little settlements :
They have already a prosperous beginning; and the hope is that they will not fall through provided they be zealously sustained. ... For their increase and prosperous advancement it is highly necessary that those sent out be first of all well provided with the means both of support and defence, and that, being freemen, they be settled there on a free tenure; that all they work for and gain be theirs to dispose of and to sell it according to their pleasure; that whoever is placed over them as their commander act as their father, not as their execu- tioner, leading them with a gentle hand; for whoever rules them as their friend and associate will be beloved by them, as he who will order them as a superior will subvert and nullify everything ; yea, they will excite against him the neighboring provinces to which they will fly.
History could not write words much truer than these pre- dictions proved to be. The settlers at Fort Amsterdam were poor and humble but, said Michaelius, they were 'mostly freemen'; that is, they were neither bond-servants nor agricultural laborers accustomed to hire themselves out to others. They felt, if vaguely at first, that one of them had as good a title as another to make what he could of his New World chances, as good a title as the Company itself - that not monopoly but equal rights must be the New World recipe for success. And with clearer eyes they saw that the worst results of the system under which they lived sprang from the mistakes and misdemeanors of their local rulers, and that the appointment of such rulers implied indifference on the part of the Company. Therefore they began at once to complain and to struggle in legal and illegal ways for commercial free- dom, and as soon as they could they began to strive for a
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share in the local government. Nothing of this did the West India Company foresee; all the liberties and privileges it granted in later years it granted grudgingly; and in 1632, when it first heard definite murmurs of discontent, its only impulse was to tighten its bonds.
When the ship Eendraght at last reached Holland Peter Minuit, after an examination lasting several months, was dis- missed from the Company's service. Van Remund, sustained in his complaints against his chief, was sent back as secretary for the province. Wouter Van Twiller was appointed director- general and Bastiaen Crol was summoned home.
Van Twiller had been a clerk in the employ of the West India Company. Like Notelman he was a nephew of Van Rensselaer; but this time, the patroon informed Crol, he had had no hand in the appointment. In fact he was astonished at the changes the directors were making, going on the prin- ciple that they wanted to bring home almost all their people and to send out a wholly new set. But for his own influence, he said, Notelman also would have been recalled. To Van Twiller he gave a long series of memoranda instructing him how to look after the interests of Rensselaerswyck, and with him he sent out some colonists.
In the spring of 1633 Van Twiller arrived at New Amster- dam in a ship called the Soutberg (Salt Mountain) and, it appears from Van Rensselaer's replies, wrote his uncle that he had had a 'difficult and perilous' voyage but had escaped the Turks and taken a prize, and that he liked New Netherland and felt well there. The prize was a Spanish bark laden with sugar. With the governor came Van Remund; one Cornelis Van Tienhoven, sent out to be 'bookkeeper of wages,' an office now separated from that of provincial secretary; a clergyman, Domine Everardus Bogardus, sent by the Com- pany to take the place of Michaelius; New Amsterdam's first official schoolmaster, Adam Roelantsen; and one hundred and forty soldiers, the first seen in the province.
The soldiers, undoubtedly, were sent in answer to the
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request for aid against the New Englanders that Minuit had spoken after De Rasières' visit to Plymouth; but except as a defence against possibly troublesome Indians and a warning to the New Englanders not to resort to arms they could be of little service, for the States General still strictly forbade the Company to use force against men of any nation with which the Republic was at peace. Domine Michaelius probably re- turned to Holland at this time; it is possible that he visited New Netherland again before he died, in Holland, in 1646. The prenuptial contract which pledged Jan Vinje's mother and her second husband to send her children to school shows that there was a school of some sort in New Amsterdam even before the arrival of Roelantsen. The one that he set up was a free school, supported by the West India Company, under the supervision of the church, and, to judge by the customs of the fatherland, open to both boys and girls. Although it was interrupted during the Revolution it still exists, still under control of the church established by Domine Michaelius; and until recent years it received girls as well as boys. It is now called the School of the Collegiate Reformed Church in the City of New York. Founded two years before the Boston Latin School it is the oldest school in the United States.
Secretary Van Remund and four others composed the new governor's council. The new bookkeeper, Van Tienhoven, soon proved himself a pest to the colony. It is less easy to pronounce upon the character of Van Twiller. Certainly he is not to be identified with the person who bears his name in Washington Irving's farcical Knickerbocker History, a book that has done sorry work in distorting the story of New Amsterdam. Its comic-opera background with groups of foolish, plethoric burghers dozing, boozing, and smoking in comfortable chimney-corners bears, of course, no remotest likeness to the real New Amsterdam of 1633 - to the poor, stinted, struggling little frontier post where, only five years before, even the clergyman suffered hardship. Were Irving's the only pen to flout Van Twiller its jeers and the reproaches they imply might be dismissed unnoticed. Nor need full
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credence be given to the charges brought against Van Twiller, as against Minuit, by his subordinates with Van Remund at their head. But testimony of a similar sort, more convincing although possibly exaggerated, remains in a book written by a contemporary, Captain David Pietersen De Vries, and called Short Historical and Journal Notes of Several Voyages made in the Four Parts of the World.
Little is known of De Vries himself except what this book tells. Fortunately it is not a short but a long journal and a true sailor's book, frank, explicit, and emphatic. Born at Rochelle of Dutch parents of good social standing De Vries returned with them to Holland when four years old and from his youth up was trained to the sea. His journal tells of six long voyages, on all but the last of which he commanded one or more vessels. The first took him to the Mediterranean for grain and involved him in a brush with Turkish pirates. On the second he brought fish from Newfoundland to the Mediterranean where again he trafficked in grain and again fought the Turks, this time driving off with a crew of thirty men two galleys carrying five or six hundred. After a long dispute with the West India Company regarding a trading voyage that he wanted to make to Canada he entered the service of the king of France. This seems to have embroiled him again with the Company. In 1627, in command of a fleet of seven French vessels, he went to the East Indies on a voyage that lasted three years. Afterwards, between 1632 and 1644, he went three times to New Netherland, remaining there for many months. His journal contains the only extant description written by a Dutch seaman of the coasts and rivers of the province. It is also the only sustained personal narra- tive written by any one who figured in the affairs of the province. Fortunately it throws its vivid light upon the most dramatic scenes in the early history of New Amsterdam; and as its author reveals himself in its pages he wins interest as the most attractive, sympathetic figure of Manhattan's Dutch days.
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