USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 13
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Returning from the East Indies, De Vries relates, he en- gaged as patroon with Godyn, Blommaert, Van Rensselaer, and De Laet in the attempt to colonize Swanendael on the South River. In 1632, when the destruction of the settle- ment was known, he went out himself with a ship and a yacht - the first patroon, he remarks, who visited America. At Swanendael he pacified the savages and, leaving his ship to engage in whale-fishing, went in his yacht down to Vir- ginia to get provisions which he thought he might not be able to obtain at New Amsterdam. Passing the places he called Point Comfort and 'Newport Snuw,' at Jamestown he was cordially received by the governor, Sir John Harvey, but when he told whence he came was informed that the bay of the South River was rightly Lord Delaware's Bay and the property of the English king 'and not New Netherland.' The Dutch had had a fort there, De Vries explained, and for ten years no Englishman had been seen there. Finally Har- vey said that 'there was land enough - we should be good neighbors,' and that the Dutch were in no danger if the people of New England did not come too near but 'dwelt at a dis- tance'; and when De Vries left he gave him some goats and a ram as a present for the governor at New Amsterdam.
Returning to the Delaware and sailing with both his ves- sels for New Amsterdam, on April 16, 1633, De Vries entered the harbor where he found the Soutberg which had brought 'the new governor, Wouter Van Twiller.' At once he had occasion to find fault with this personage.
Two days after his arrival there came from New Eng- land an English ship, called the William, intending to traffic with the Indians on Hudson's River. As supercargo it carried a Dutchman, the same Jacob Eelkins whom, years before, his Dutch employers had dismissed because of his treatment of the natives on the Fresh River. Now, says De Vries, despite his acquaintance with the country the West India Company would not employ him, rather 'seeking out an unfit person like this governor whom they had transferred from a clerkship to a governorship to perform a farce.' In-
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vited by Eelkins, Van Twiller went on board the William with De Vries and with some of his officials who got drunk and disorderly, making the Englishmen marvel that a governor should have no more control over them. After lying for a few days in the harbor the Englishmen declared their wish to go up the river which, they said, was theirs. This the Dutch- men denied, giving their proofs. Van Twiller, as Eelkins afterwards related in England, ordered the whole ship's com- pany on shore, and in their presence ran up the flag of the Prince of Orange and had three guns fired in his honor, where- upon Eelkins sent the gunner to the ship to hoist the flag of the king of England and in his honor to fire three guns. Then the William sailed up the river to Fort Orange - the first English ship to enter the Hudson. As it departed, says De Vries :
Wouter Van Twiller assembled all his forces before his door, had a cask of wine brought out, filled a bumper, and cried out for those who loved the Prince of Orange and him to do the same as he did and protect him from the outrage of the Englishman. . ..
The people laughed, said that they and the Englishmen were friends, and willingly drank the governor's wine. He had com- mitted a great folly, De Vries informed him; the English- man had no commission to come to New Netherland but merely a custom-house permit to carry passengers to New England. If it had been De Vries's own affair, he added,
I would have helped him away from the fort with beans from the eight-pounders and not permitted him to sail up the river - I would rather have held him back by the tail as he said he was a man from England. I told him that as the English committed some excesses against us in the East Indies we should take hold of them; that I had no good opinion of that nation for they were of so proud a nature that they thought everything belonged to them; were it an affair of mine I would send the ship Soutberg after him and make him haul down the river.
The captain was too truculent; it would have been folly to attack an English ship when the orders to keep the peace with
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friendly nations were so clear and strict. More wisely, Van Twiller sent the former governor, Bastiaen Crol, with one or more small vessels up the river in pursuit of the Englishman. Crol's testimony, given when he was examined in Holland a year later, differs in details from that given by Eelkins and his companions at about the same time in England, but there is no divergence in regard to the main facts. The Dutchmen did not attack or plunder the interlopers but pulled down the tent they had set up on the beach near Fort Orange as a place for traffic with the Indians, sent their goods, including some four hundred beaver skins, on board the William, boarded it themselves, hoisted the anchor, and started the ship down the river under convoy of a Dutch hoy. Before this happened, say the English affidavits, the director at Fort Orange, Hon- thum, and some of his people captured a shallop that be- longed to the strangers, ornamented it with 'green boughs' and came to the tent, sounding a trumpet and making very merry with 'a bottle of strong waters of three or four pints.'
Peaceably the William was allowed to set sail for England. When its experiences were made known there its owners presented to the Dutch ambassadors a claim for damages against the West India Company. By rights, said the Com- pany, it should get damages from the English trespassers on its domain, and the States General ought to try at once to have the boundaries marked out between New Netherland and New England. The States General preferred that the matter should 'take its own course.' No damages were paid, there was no attempt to settle boundary lines. Again the New Netherlanders were left to take care of themselves; and diplomacy, which would do nothing for them in Europe, was the only arm of defence permitted them in America.
Although interesting as the first attempt of Englishmen to get a footing on Hudson's River the affair of the William was a mere episode of no historic importance. Very different in its immediate result and in its lasting consequences was the
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first attempt of the New Englanders to get a footing on the Connecticut River.
In his history of Plymouth Governor Bradford says that when Minuit's envoys visited his people in 1627 and saw them 'seated in a barren quarter' they told them of the Fresh River,
. . which they commended unto them for a fine place both for plantation and trade, and wished them to make use of it, but their hands being full otherwise, they let it pass.
If this invitation was given it was the friendly utterance of some irresponsible individual; the letters of Minuit and De Rasières show that they knew nothing of it and would not have indorsed it. In mentioning it Bradford does not say or hint that his people or any other Englishmen had then made any claim to the river or had even visited it. By the year 1633, he continues, the Dutchmen began 'to repent' of the invitation of 1627, endeavored to 'prevent' the Plymouth men, and, getting into the river 'a little before them,' set up a small fort and planted two pieces of cannon. In reality the Plymouth men made no effort to acquire lands in the Connecticut Valley until they knew that the Dutch had done SO.
As soon as Van Twiller took office his agents completed by formal purchase Crol's bargains with the Indians there, fin- ished Fort Good Hope, and mounted two guns for its defence. The Pequots, a tribe whose seat was between the Pequot River (the Thames) and the Connecticut but who had recently conquered the savages dominant in the Connecticut Valley, made the sales to the Dutchmen with the consent of the chief sachem of the dispossessed Indians. By this time Winslow, then the governor at Plymouth, had visited the river and selected a good place for a trading post, and his people, as Bradford tells, had tried with small success to traffic along its banks, urged to do so by some of the savages who had been driven away 'by the potency of the Pequots which usurped upon them.' In 1633 a pinnace from Plymouth chancing to
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be at Manhattan brought back word that the Hollanders had formally taken possession of the river where they had been trading for many years. Winslow then hurried with Brad- ford to Boston and suggested to Governor Winthrop that the two colonies should join in trafficking on the river and should erect a house there 'to prevent the Dutch.' The dispossessed Indians had also approached the Massachusetts authorities, 'for their end was to be restored to their country again,' and Winthrop had found their offers tempting. The Dutch on the 'River Quonektacut,' he recorded in his history of New England, got yearly 'about ten thousand beaver skins' which might be 'diverted' if the English should 'settle a course of trade' farther up the river. But his people, who had then been only two years in America, did not yet feel equal to an enterprise which he thought would be dangerous, and he himself was not sure that their patent entitled them to undertake it; so with his approval the Plymouth people adventured alone.
Yet, thinking best to assert English rights, Winthrop sent the new bark Blessing of the Bay to Manhattan, to inform Governor 'Gwalter van Twilly' that as the king of England had granted the 'river and country of Connecticut' to his own subjects the Dutch should forbear building there. His messengers were 'very kindly entertained' but in a 'very courteous and respectful letter' Van Twiller told him that the States General had granted the same parts to the West India Company and begged that the New Englanders would 'forbear the same' until the matter should be decided in Europe. The Dutch documents show that Van Twiller added that the powers at home ought to agree 'concerning the limits and partings of these quarters' and that their colonists ought to live as good neighbors in 'these heathenish coun- tries' where were 'divers heathen lands that are empty of inhabitants so that of a little part or portion thereof there needs not any question.'
Meanwhile the Plymouth men made their move. As the Dutchmen threatened to bar their passage, says Bradford,
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. . . they having made a small frame of a house ready, and having a great new bark, they stowed their frame in her hold and boards to cover and finish it, having nails and all other provisions fitting for their use. This they did rather that they might have present defence against the Indians who were much offended that they brought home and restored the right Sachem of the place . . . so as they were to encounter a double danger in this attempt, both the Dutch and the Indians. When they came up the river the Dutch demanded what they intended and whither they would go; they answered, up the river to trade (now their order was to go and seat above them).
The Hollanders bade them strike their flag and stop. They replied that they would not molest the Hollanders but, no matter what these might attempt, would obey the orders of their governor at Plymouth :
So they passed along, and though the Dutch threatened them hard yet they shot not. Coming to their place, they clapt up their house quickly and landed their provisions and left the company appointed and sent the bark home; and afterwards palisadoed their house about, and fortified themselves better.
Winthrop tells the same story more briefly :
The company of Plymouth sent a bark to Connecticut, at this time, to erect a trading house there. When they came they found the Dutch had built there, and did forbid the Plymouth men to proceed ; but they set up their house notwithstanding, about a mile above the Dutch.
When Van Twiller heard, he ordered his commissary at Fort Good Hope to serve a formal protest on the English commander, notifying him to depart; and 'some while after- wards,' says Bradford, he
. . . sent a band of about seventy men in warlike manner with colors flying to assault them; but seeing them strengthened and that it would cost blood they came to a parley and returned in peace.
Van Twiller had contemplated no assault, for in reply to a prayer for permission to expel the intruding Englishmen
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the West India Company had merely reiterated the old com- mand to keep the peace. Friendly traffic between Dutch and English continued at Manhattan. Of the year 1634 Winthrop wrote:
Our neighbors at Plymouth and we had oft traded with the Dutch on Hudson's River ... we had from them about forty sheep, and beaver, and brass pieces, and sugar etc. for sack, strong waters, linen cloth, and other commodities.
Soon Winthrop's people followed the people of Plymouth with stronger strides. Now it was the Pequots who invited them. In giving the deed to the Dutch for the lands around Fort Good Hope the Pequots had agreed to Van Twiller's stipulation that the tract should be neutral ground where red men of all tribes might come to trade and none should molest another. But they had broken the pact, killing some of their rivals within the Dutch limits, and they had also slain one Stone, a skipper from Virginia, and his company while coming up the river to trade with the Dutchmen. The Dutch commissary executed some of the murderers. The Pequots then turned to the English as possible allies against the Dutch as well as against their principal red enemies, the Narragansetts; and in the autumn of 1634 their emissaries signed at Boston a treaty promising to surrender the re- maining murderers of Stone's party and to give Winthrop's people 'all their trade.'
In the spring of 1635 the general court of Massachusetts permitted groups of families in Watertown and in Dorchester to remove elsewhere provided they did not go out of its juris- diction. After hard overland journeys the Watertown people settled on the Connecticut where the town of Wethersfield grew up, and the Dorchester people close to the Plymouth trading house, founding the town of Windsor. In 1636 came the whole town of Newtown (from the spot now called Cam- bridge) led by its pastor, Thomas Hooker; and, instead of seeking an unoccupied tract, this party sat down 'a short gunshot' from Fort Good Hope on lands that the Hollanders
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had bought. Thus Hartford was founded, and soon its in- habitants were sowing and reaping almost at the gates of the Dutchmen's fort. In the same year a small company from Roxbury established themselves farther up the river at Agawam, afterwards called Springfield, at the intersection of the two important Indian trails which, when the white men had learned to use them, were known as the Valley Trail and the Bay Path.
In the meantime the younger John Winthrop, son of the governor, had come in 1635 from England to Boston with a commission from Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and others to be 'governor of the River Connecticut' for a term of one year. From Boston he sent some twenty men under Lion Gardiner, a Scotch soldier, to build a fort on the Dutchmen's tract, Kievit's Hoek, at the mouth of the river. Driving off a party of New Netherlanders whom, just too late, Van Twiller had sent to occupy the place, Gardiner's party tore down the arms of the Republic from the tree where they had hung for three years and insulted them, said the Dutchmen, by putting 'a ridiculous face' in their stead. Saybrook sprang from this beginning.
There was much excuse for the New Englanders who thus pushed westward from their barren quarter into the rich valley that the Dutch had claimed. There was much for the New Netherlanders who bitterly resented the invasion. As firmly as Englishmen they believed in the right of their nation to regions which they had first seen, explored, named, opened to trade, and inhabited. They thought that the good rule laid down by Elizabeth for the checking of Spain and ap- proved by James and by parliament ought to work both ways - præscriptio sine possessione haud valeat. And they felt that insult was heaped upon injury when the New Englanders made a practice of calling them 'intruders' and saying that they 'encroached' where they were merely trying to hold what they had been the first to find. There was much reason why they should feel that Captain De Vries spoke the truth
VOL. I. - K
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when he said, after visiting the Connecticut settlements, that the New Englanders believed that
. . . they are Israelites, and that we at our plantation are Egyptians, and that the English in Virginia are also Egyptians.
In regard to the Plymouth men the Dutchmen had pecul- iar cause to feel aggrieved. Half a dozen of them, including Bradford himself, had been admitted freemen of the city of Leyden with the same rights and obligations as the native- born. More among them than those who came on the May- flower in 1620 had found refuge from persecution and distress in Holland, and some of them had Dutch wives or children born on Dutch soil. In fact, as the commissioners noted who were sent in 1664 by Charles II to investigate the condition of New England, even in the second generation the Plymouth people were called 'mongrel Dutch' by their neighbors. The deep gratitude they had often expressed for their welcome in Holland Governor Bradford had emphasized in the first of his letters to Governor Minuit, writing of
. . . the good and courteous entreaty which we have found in your country, having lived there many years with freedom and good content, as many of our friends do to this day . . . for which we are bound to be thankful and our children after us, and shall never forget the same but shall heartily desire your good and prosperity as our own forever.
This, says Bancroft, was the 'benediction of Plymouth on New Amsterdam.' This, however, was the whole of it - a few fair words immediately qualified. 'But,' the letter con- tinues, Minuit and his people would 'please to understand' that they had no right to their plantation, though doubtless they could get a title through the powers in Europe, and that they must not come to trade where they had been trading for years before Plymouth was founded. Bradford seems to have felt a touch of compunction when afterwards he added to his account of his people's entrance into the Connecticut River that they
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. . . did the Dutch no wrong for they took not a foot of any land they bought but went to the place above them and bought that tract of land which belonged to those Indians which they carried with them and their friends, with whom the Dutch had nothing to do.
The context as already quoted shows that Bradford and his people knew very well that the Dutchmen did not see things in this light.
Some of the Massachusetts men likewise owed personal debts of gratitude to the Dutch, notably Thomas Hooker who chose to settle upon the very lands of Fort Good Hope. Nor were he and his fellows unaware that they would thus give offence. One of the reasons he mentioned for wishing to move westward was the danger that the fruitful Connecti- cut Valley would be 'possessed by other Dutch and English'; and one of the arguments advanced by the general court of Massachusetts to dissuade him was that his party would be exposed to 'evident peril' from the Dutch who claimed the river and had 'already built a fort there.'
It would also, said the general court, be exposed to danger from the resentment of the English government which had given no one permission to settle in the valley. In truth, none of the English parties that chose lands below the Massachu- setts line had any title to them except by virtue of the general claim of the crown of England to the greater part of the con- tinent and of purchase from Indians who denied that they had assented to the antecedent purchases of the Dutch. In the eyes of the English crown they were simply squatters. Soon they all said that they held under a grant given by the Earl of Warwick, president of the Council for New England, to Lord Say and Sele and his associates - the grant under which Saybrook was planted on the Dutchmen's tract at the mouth of the river. But they never were able to produce any document supporting this assertion; Warwick's right to make the grant to Say and Sele cannot now be proved by any existing evidence; and at the time it was not recognized by the Council for New England which in 1635 gave the territory between Narragansett Bay and the Connecticut to
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another patentee. Moreover, none of the settlers excepting those at Saybrook thought of the Warwick grant when they established themselves, and only those at Saybrook ever bought any lands of Say and Sele's agent. This quasi claim, however, based upon the Warwick grant, which therefore came to be called 'the Old Patent for Connecticut,' was the only title that any of the settlers below Springfield had to their lands until Connecticut Colony obtained a charter from Charles II in 1662.
From other quarters vaguer dangers threatened Van Twiller's province. Lord Baltimore's patent for Maryland, saying that its northern border touched New England, ig- nored the existence of New Netherland, and so, more dis- tinctly, did two other patents that were bestowed upon British subjects.
In 1632 Sir Edmund Plowden and eight associates peti- tioned King Charles, explaining that there was a 'remote place within the confines of Virginia' about a hundred and fifty miles north of Jamestown 'and a convenient isle there to be inhabited called Manatie or Long Isle . . . not formerly granted,' and that they were willing to settle there three hundred persons to fish, to make wine, salt, and iron, and to raise corn and cattle, wherefor they asked for a patent under the seal of Ireland to cover the said island and 'thirty miles square of the coast adjoining.' Of the Dutch colony this petition said nothing. But preserved with it is a paper entitled The Commodities of the Island Called Manati or Long Isle Within the Continent of Virginia - seemingly, with the exception of Hudson's journal and Juet's log-book, the first description written in English of any part of what is now the State of New York. And this paper, lauding the fertility, the climate, and the trading possibilities of the island, evi- dently with reference to its eastern parts, declares that there would be good hope of gain if friendly intercourse could be maintained with the savages and with Virginia on the south, New England on the north, and 'the Dutch plantation 60
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miles on the west' where, says another paragraph, there were 'two Dutch forts.' It was in answer to the petition thus reënforced that in 1634 Sir Edmund Plowden and his associates got from the viceroy of Ireland the grant of the province of 'county palatine' called New Albion, now best remembered in connection with the baseless story of Samuel Argall's visit to Manhattan - a province that was to embrace 'Manatie or Long Island,' the adjacent 'Hudson's or Hudson's River isles' including, of course, the true Manhattan, and a mainland tract forty leagues square extending down to the coast to Cape May. At about the same time Charles I, who had given back Canada and Acadia to the French in 1632 but declared in 1633 that he had not thereby abandoned his right to Acadia, confirmed the privileges of Sir William Alexander, now known as Earl of Stirling and Viscount Canada; and early in 1635 the Council for New England bestowed upon him a great part of Maine and, ignoring Plowden's grant, 'the Island of Mato- wack or Long Island' to which it gave a new name, the Isle of Stirling.
It was fortunate for New Netherland that Charles and his counsellors were growing more and more distrustful of the independent and heterodox attitude assumed by the New Englanders at a time when disaffection was rife in the king- dom itself. As people of 'refractory humors' they were denied the favors asked by their agent Edward Winslow, including the permission to displant their French and Dutch neighbors. This was partly due to the influence of Sir Ferdi- nando Gorges who had always hoped to see all the New Eng- land settlements united under his own control. Now in a petition to the king he said that, although the agents of Plymouth 'pretended' that the Dutch had entered the Con- necticut River without their knowledge, it would be unsafe to give them more authority because they were 'openly dis- affected' and, in fact, were seeking 'to fortify themselves by the aid of the Dutch' - an assertion that would have sounded oddly enough to Van Twiller and De Vries. By 1634 the flood of Puritan emigration so alarmed the government that it
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