USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 16
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Van Rensselaer was not at all sure that in so far relaxing its monopolies the Company had done wisely. There would
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be 'a great deal of fraud,' he wrote to Governor Kieft; al- though at first there would be 'something of a rush' and duties and freights might augment, this would soon cease; and the Company's agents would have such small opportunities to make profits that they would 'yearly fall behind.'
Certainly the immediate result was something like a 'rush' - an infusion of life, an increase of activity, such as the prov- ince had not seen before. Kieft imported from the West Indies horses, cattle, negroes, and salt. The Company be- stirred itself to send out settlers. Some of its employees ob- tained their discharge and began, lawfully now, to traffic as well as to plant on their own account. And at many places on and near Manhattan many acres were taken up for cul- tivation.
The Company had probably instructed Kieft to give deeds for lands already held in the province, for before it framed its new regulations he issued an ordinance granting his 'free people,' in answer to their prayers, permission to take out patents for their lands upon condition that they would pay as rent 'one couple of capons for a house and lot' and, after the end of ten years from the time of acquisition, tenths of 'all crops which God the Lord shall grant to the field.' The earliest of these ground briefs that has been preserved, the oldest title-deed to land on Manhattan, is dated June 20, 1638, and confirms the title of Andries Hudde to one hundred morgens 'behind Curler's land' on the Muscoota Flats, part of the De Forest farm which Hudde had obtained by mar- riage with Henry De Forest's newly made widow. A little older than this title-deed is the first recorded lease for land in New Amsterdam, given for 'two lots' on April 19 to Jan Jansen Dam, Jan Vinje's stepfather.
On the western shore of the North River Kieft granted for 550 guilders to Abram Planck, or Ver Planck, a son of the schout of Rensselaerswyck, the tract called Paulus Hoek, part of the defunct patroonship of Pavonia. Here also he leased a farm to Jan Evertsen Bout for the promised rent of one-
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fourth of the produce, and a little later another tract to a farmer named Teunissen who cleared and fenced the land, stocked it with cattle, sheep, goats, and swine, planted or- chards, and built a brew-house.
Across the East River the Long Island shore was soon dotted with farms. At its southeastern corner, opposite Coney Island, a man named Anthony Jansen, who was called Van Salee or sometimes 'the Turk' and is thought to have been a semi-Dutchman from Morocco, settled at a spot which, then named 's Gravesande after a town in Holland, became Gravesend when a few years later a party of English immi- grants obtained it.
In 1639 another plantation was started on the Muscoota Flats by Jochem Pietersen Kuyter, a Dane who had served as a naval commander in the East Indies. By special per- mission of the West India Company he made the voyage to New Netherland in an armed ship chartered for the purpose, bringing his family, many head of cattle, and a number of herdsmen. He named his farm Zegendael, Vale of Blessing, but it was commonly called Jochem Pietersen's Flat. An Indian trail ran back of this group of farms but of course the journeyings to and from New Amsterdam were commonly by water. Nearer New Amsterdam on the East River shore, at Deutel (now Turtle) Bay, Thomas Hall, the first English New Netherlander, obtained a half share in a tobacco farm.
For the Company Kieft bought from the Indians more lands on Long Island and the first secured on the mainland north of Manhattan in the region afterwards called West- chester. Here Jonas Bronck, another Dane who came in company with Kuyter, was the pioneer settler. The wide tract that he called Emaus was also known as Bronck's Land; when this name was lost in the name Morrisania the pioneer's still clung to a little river; and it is now borne by Bronx Park and by one of the boroughs of Greater New York. A drawing indorsed 'The plot of Bronckx his land' is in the State archives, and so is a contract, dated in July, 1639, which shows how the farm was cleared. Bronck VOL. I. - M
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leased it to two farmers who promised to plant it with to- bacco and maize, every two years breaking a certain amount of new ground and surrendering to Bronck for the planting of grain the part previously broken, paying no rent mean- while but engaging to repay the money that Bronck had advanced for their passage from Europe.
Before returning to Holland in the summer of 1636 Cap- tain De Vries had asked Van Twiller to 'register' Staten Island for him as he wished to return and plant a colony upon it. At the end of the year 1638 De Vries came again, in a Company's ship, with a few persons 'in his service' whom he settled on the island. But, discouraged by the fact that one of the directors of the Company who had promised to send him more settlers failed to do so, he leased this bouwerie and bought lands of the Indians, he relates, in a beautiful region called Tappaen on the west bank of the river a few miles north of Fort Amsterdam. Naming this bouwerie Vriessendael, by the end of the year 1640 he 'began to take hold of it.'
A paper called the Journal of New Netherland which was written by or for Governor Kieft says that a number of per- sons whose time as bond-servants in Virginia had expired were now attracted to Manhattan by its repute as a good place to grow tobacco. Other Englishmen came from New England - so many in all that in 1639 Kieft prescribed for such residents an oath of allegiance to the States General the Prince of Orange, and the West India Company which pledged them
. . . to follow the Director or any of his council wherever they shall lead; faithfully to give instant warning of any treason or other detriment to this country that shall come to their knowledge; to assist to the utmost of their powers in defending with their treasure and their blood the inhabitants thereof against all enemies.
The Connecticut Valley was now hopelessly lost to the Dutch although for many years they refused to recognize the fact. By 1637 it had eight hundred English settlers
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including one hundred and fifty men of fighting age - some estimates say two hundred and fifty. They had not, how- ever, been living in comfort or in peace, for the Pequots were aroused against all Englishmen by Endicott's fierce treat- ment of the natives on Block Island and along the shores of the Thames. In 1637 the Valley settlers, so harassed that they could hardly grow food enough to keep themselves from starvation, took up arms in earnest, aided by Massachusetts and Plymouth and led by Captain John Mason and Captain John Underhill. Near the Mystic River they defeated the Pequots and, following them westward, beyond the Connecti- cut they crushed and dispersed the tribe. The Dutch were not involved in this Pequot War except as they figured in an act of mercy performed on behalf of their rivals. The Pequots having captured two English girls and carried them to the Thames where the Dutchmen had a trading post, says Winthrop's history, Van Twiller
. sent a sloop . . . to redeem the two English maids by what risk soever though it were with breach of their peace with the Pequods. The sloop offered largely for their ransom but nothing would be ac- cepted. So the Dutch, having many Pequods on board, stayed six of them (the rest leaped overboard) and with them redeemed the two maids. . . .
John Underhill, who wrote an account of the war, tells the story differently. He says, indeed, that Van Twiller ordered a vessel to rescue the girls even if thus the Dutch should 'hazard their peace' with the Pequots, but that the deed was actually accomplished by a Dutch skipper who stipulated that as a reward he should be allowed, in spite of the war, to continue to traffic along the Thames.
The defeat of the Pequots did not mean harmony in the Valley. The towns quarrelled among themselves about boundaries and about tolls exacted at the mouth of the river. Plymouth, Governor Bradford explains, felt deeply aggrieved because the founders of Windsor had planted themselves too near its own post. The land, said the Windsor men,
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was 'the Lord's waste' - 'waste' meaning in England the portion of land where all the freemen of a community had equal rights of pasturage; nevertheless, they would pay the Plymouth men if they would give up their post. Their 'unkindness,' says Bradford, was not soon forgotten; as the people of Plymouth were the first to sit down by the Connecticut they deserved to have held it 'and not by friends to have been thrust out as in a sort they were.'
On the other hand, Massachusetts was much displeased because all of those who went westward from its settlements except the founders of Springfield had, in spite of their promises, left its jurisdiction and established an independent commonwealth, the people of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor organizing in 1636 the court or legislature of Con- necticut and in 1639 adopting the constitution known as the Fundamental Orders. So angry, in fact, were the people of the Bay Colony that in 1638 Thomas Hooker complained to their governor on behalf of his own colony, saying that any one who wished to remove to it was looked upon in Mas- sachusetts 'as a Turk or as a man scarcely worthy to live.' And a letter written soon afterwards by Lord Say and Sele to Winthrop shows that the people of the Valley and the people of the Bay bitterly accused each other of using, in America and in England, disparaging words and underhand tactics to advance their own at the expense of their rivals' interests.
In 1639 when Captain De Vries visited the Connecticut he found that close to Fort Good Hope, which was held by less than two score soldiers, the English had built a little town (Hartford) with a fine church and more than a hundred houses. As instructed by Director Kieft he entered a pro- test, telling the English commander that 'it was wrong to take by force the Company's land which it had bought and paid for.' Although the Dutch had been there many years, said the Englishman, they had done 'scarcely anything,' and it was a sin to let such good land lie idle.
From the banks of the Connecticut the Englishmen were
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casting their eyes westward toward River Mauritius itself. The land between these two rivers, wrote one Israel Stoughton to the governor of Massachusetts, was 'too good for any but friends.' In 1638 Theophilus Eaton, a wealthy merchant, and John Davenport, a non-conformist minister who had served among the English refugees at Rotterdam, came from England by way of Boston with a party composed chiefly of well-to-do Londoners and, without grant or title except from the Indians, took possession of a spot beyond the Connecticut which Adriaen Block had named Rooden- berg (Red Mount) because of great basaltic rocks that rose steeply from the plain. Here they laid the foundations of New Haven and in 1639, De Vries recorded, were building fifty houses. Even nearer than this to the Dutch there were English settlements - at Stratford just beyond the Housa- tonic, at Norwalk, at Stamford, and at Greenwich only thirty miles from Manhattan. And all that Governor Kieft could do was to buy more lands from the red men and compel the few people at Greenwich to acknowledge his jurisdiction. Their neighbors were within the jurisdiction of New Haven which, setting up at once a government of its own, remained for a generation independent of Connecticut.
In 1639 Lion Gardiner, the Scotchman who had built the fort at Saybrook, obtained from the Indians an island lying between the eastern points of Long Island which he called the Isle of Wight, now Gardiner's Island. From James Farrett, whom the Earl of Stirling had sent out as his agent, he secured a title that gave him manorial rights. His settlement was the first planted by a subject of the king of England within the present borders of New York; and his daughter Elizabeth, born in 1641, was the first child of British blood who is known to have been born within these limits. Her mother, it may be said, was a Dutchwoman whom Gardiner had married while serving in Holland as a military engineer under the Prince of Orange. His estate passed for eight generations from father to son and is still owned by descendants of his name. In his latter years he
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wrote a Relation of the Pequot Wars, which had occurred while he was in command at Saybrook.
The Dutch had not specifically claimed Gardiner's Island but they considered that the whole of Long Island belonged to them. Its eastern parts they had not bought of the na- tives, but all between the East River and Oyster Bay Van Twiller and Kieft had purchased. Therefore when Farrett, coming to New Amsterdam in 1640, asserted Stirling's right to the whole island, Kieft arrested him and turned him out of the province. Soon afterwards a party of emigrants from Massachusetts tried, as authorized by Farrett, to settle near Oyster Bay, the valuable spot where wampum was most largely manufactured, and as a first step threw down and insulted the Dutch sign of possession, the arms of the States General. By Kieft's command a few soldiers led by Secretary Van Tienhoven brought six of the intruders to Manhattan. After a few days' imprisonment they signed a promise to quit the jurisdiction of the Dutch. They then settled toward the eastern end of Long Island, founding Southampton; near by a party from New Haven had recently founded Southold; and with these enterprises Kieft did not try to interfere. Southold remained for a while under the control of New Haven. Southampton was independent, for Farrett made no effort to establish any kind of jurisdiction on Stir- ling's behalf.
In 1641, when the fall of Stafford and Laud had encouraged the enemies of King Charles on both sides of the sea, Massa- chusetts sent a little embassy to England. One of its mem- bers, the Reverend Hugh Peters, afterwards Cromwell's chaplain, who had lived in Holland and spoke the Dutch tongue, carried a letter of credence to the West India Com- pany with instructions to ask upon what terms it would sell its 'plantation' or would unite in 'advancing the great work' in America, and to urge that it would refrain from 'molesting' the English on the Connecticut who were willing to submit their title to the judgment of impartial persons, and that it would
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. consider the inhabitants of New England, who number about 40,000, a people covetous on their side of peace and of the propagation of the Gospel above all worldly things, and no ways desirous of causing the Company either trouble or loss.
Hugh Peters visited Holland but nothing came of his in- structions. At the same time Lord Say and Sele addressed a memorial to the Dutch ambassadors in England complain- ing about the state of things on the Connecticut where there were two thousand English and only 'five or six Dutch at most,' yet where the English had used no violence and the Dutch should be told to demean themselves in a 'peaceable and neighborly manner.' The States General instructed their ambassadors to explain that New Netherland was so weak it would make no trouble, adding for their private ear that neither would England make trouble, being 'rent in twain' by the rebellion against its king. Both these predic- tions were verified. Without hindrance and without help the Connecticut settlers were able to follow part of the ad- vice given in 1642 by Sir William Boswell the English repre- sentative at the Hague. Writing home about the encroach- ments of the Dutch in America Boswell said that he himself should be instructed to approach the States General in the matter while the Dutch ambassadors in England should be made sensible of the harm that would certainly befall the West India Company should quarrels arise and spread from those quarters. In the meantime the New Englanders should not forbear
. . . to put forward their plantations and crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of the places where they have occupied but without hos- tility or any act of violence.
By 1641 only a field of thirty acres back of the Dutchmen's Fort Good Hope was left to them of all the wide easterly region they had thought to make their own, and even this they did not possess in peace. The Hartford people tried to seize' it, destroyed the crops, carried away horses and cattle, beat the Dutchmen, and blocked up their fort with
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palisades so that it could be entered only from the water side. Tired of protesting over and over again in words, and stung to disobedience of the Company's orders, Kieft directed Councillor La Montagne to go with fifty men to relieve the little garrison and to 'curb the insolence of the English there- abouts' but was forced by the outbreak of Indian troubles near Manhattan to countermand the order. In the spring of 1642 he forbade his people to buy, directly or indirectly, the produce of the stolen land where, as the ordinance recites dramatically and in detail, the Englishmen had left no sort of 'cruelty, insolence, nor violence' unused while the Hol- landers could only prove by their conduct that they were 'better Christians' than those who 'go about there clothed with such outward show.'
Denying all charges of truculence the Hartford people said that the Dutch garrison received fugitives from their justice, helped their prisoners to break jail, bought goods that had been stolen from them, and sold guns to the Indians. Asking counsel, however, from Massachusetts, they got the advice to proceed more moderately - as, for example, by letting the Dutchmen have more land than their remnant of thirty acres. Then they sent commissioners to Manhattan to buy Fort Good Hope. Kieft had no authority to sell it, and they refused his offer of a lease.
From a third source - now from New England - the Dutch possession of the South River was threatened in 1641. In the spring of this year a ship put in at Manhattan bear- ing twenty families sent from New Haven by a 'Delaware Company' which had been formed to trade in furs and em- braced, it is said, almost all the chief residents of the town. Through their leader the intending settlers gave Kieft a pledge that unless they found unappropriated lands they would establish themselves under the government of New Netherland and take the oath of allegiance. Nevertheless, when they reached the river they bought of the Indians, who, here as elsewhere, were ready enough to sell their acres more
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than once, a tract of land within the Dutch territory; and the general court of New Haven decided that they should remain there 'in combination with this town.' Soon after planting his Swedish colony in this same neighborhood Peter Minuit had died, probably in the West Indies on his way back to Europe, while his colonists were so discouraged that they resolved to remove to Manhattan. In 1640 and 1641, however, they were strengthened and heartened by the arrival of more settlers some of whom the Swedish Company had been permitted to embark in Holland. Now, when Kieft sent two vessels from Manhattan to compel the Englishmen 'to depart directly in peace,' the Swedes gave the Dutchmen their aid. Brought first to Manhattan the intruders were sent back to New Haven. One who still persisted in trading on the river was soon afterwards arrested in New Amsterdam and compelled to pay duties on his cargo of furs. Thus New Haven reaped from its costly enterprise only outraged pride and a large money loss; and it long remembered the fact as a bitter grievance against the New Netherlanders.
In 1642 Queen Christina of Sweden sent out to govern her colony an old soldier named John Prinz - 'a man of brave size,' wrote Captain De Vries, 'who weighed over four hun- dred pounds.' He was instructed to maintain friendship with the Dutch but to 'shut up' the river so that no one could trade there for furs except as agent for the Swedish company. Thus was firmly planted the colony called New Sweden, the only one that Sweden ever established in America.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS: Col. Docs., I, XII, XIV (398) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (513).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : De Vries, Voyages (527) ; O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I (382); Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405).
DE VRIES (quoted) : his Voyages.
KILIAEN VAN RENSSELAER (quoted) : in Van Rensselaer Bower Manuscripts.
THE TOWN: Wassenaer, Historisch Verhael (216).
LAND GRANTS : Col. Docs., XIII, XIV; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch; Land Titles in New York City, in Pasko, Old New York, I (412) ; Stiles, Hist. of Brooklyn (293).
BUTTERMILK CHANNEL: De Peyster, Remarks on the Changes in the Buttermilk Channel in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 1848 (215).
ANNETJE JANS'S FARM: Nash, Anneke Jans Bogardus (245) ; Anon., Anneke Janse and her Family (246); Gerard, Anneke Jans Bogardus and her Farm (244); Putnam, Annetje Jans' Farm (247) ; Schuyler, Colonial New York (395).
MUSCOOTA SETTLEMENTS: Riker, Harlem (209) ; Pirsson, Dutch Grants (207) ; De Forest, The De Forests of Avennes and of New Netherland (150).
VAN DINCKLAGEN (quoted) : Ecc. Records, I (167).
KIEFT: Breeden Raedt (76); Van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu- Neder-Land (423).
BOGARDUS: Ecc. Records, I; Manual of Ref. Church (96) ; Valen- tine, Domine Bogardus (69).
CORNELIS MELYN (quoted) : Cornelis Melyn MSS. in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Library.
DUTCH SHIP AT COWES: Col. Docs., III.
TRADE WITH VIRGINIA : Col. Docs., III; Cal. S. P. Col., 1574- 1660.
SWEDES ON THE DELAWARE: Col. Docs., I, II, XII; Acrelius, New
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REFERENCE NOTES
Sweden (387); Keen, New Sweden [with bibliography] (388). - PETER MINUIT : see Reference Notes, Chap. III.
ARENDT VAN CORLAER: Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts; Reid, The Mohawk Valley (324). - JOURNAL wrongly attributed to Van Corlaer : Wilson, Arendt Van Corlaer and his Journal in Annual Report of Amer. Hist. Association, 1895.
NEW PROJECT : in Col. Docs., I.
JONAS BRONCK : Shonnard and Spooner (538) and other histories of Westchester County. - LEASE in Col. Docs., XIII.
JOURNAL (or SHORT ACCOUNT) OF NEW NETHERLAND : in Col. Docs., I.
OATH FOR ENGLISHMEN : in Col. Docs., XIV, and in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I.
CONNECTICUT AND NEW HAVEN SETTLEMENTS : Col. Docs., II, III; Hazard, Historical Collections (102) ; Records of Connecticut Colony (125) ; Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven (372) ; Bradford, Hist. of Plymouth Plantation (441) ; Winthrop, Hist. of New England (368). - JOHN UNDERHILL (quoted) : his News from America (369). - HOOKER TO WIN- THROP : in Conn. Hist. Soc. Collections, I. - SAY AND SELE TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Col- lections, 5th Series, I. - STOUGHTON TO WINTHROP : in Hutch- inson, Original Papers (311).
LION GARDINER: C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and his Descend- ants (197) ; D. Gardiner, The Gardiner Family and ... Gardiner's Island (196) ; A. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 3d Series, X; Lamb, The Manor of Gardiner's Island (198). - His Hist. of the Pequot War in C. C. Gardiner, as above, in C. C. Orr, Hist. of the Pequot War, Cleveland, 1897, and in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 3d Series, III [with an incorrect biography].
FARRETT: Col. Docs., II, III; Thompson (291), and other histories of Long Island. - His GRANT to Gardiner in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1869.
HUGH PETERS : Col. Docs., I, II.
SAY AND SELE TO THE DUTCH AMBASSADORS: in Col. Docs., I.
BOSWELL TO CONNECTICUT : in Records of Connecticut Colony.
NEW HAVEN AND THE DELAWARE : Col. Docs., II, XII; Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven.
CHAPTER VI
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
1638-1643
(GOVERNOR KIEFT)
Kieft thus being made Director had now a path wherein, with good appearance and without being subject to much being said, he could have acquired honor and distinction. . .. Passing by divers trifling abuses . . . be it known then that he had a long time nourished in his own bosom the design of making war upon the Indians of New Netherland because they had refused him certain contributions, which they had done for reasons, saying that they did not consider themselves bound to contribute to the Director of the Netherlanders. - Breeden Raedt. 1649.
THE regulations adopted by the West India Company in 1638 did not settle the disputes about patroons and their colonies. They failed, as has been indicated, to please the one patroon who had really established a colony. And Van Rensselaer was all the more dissatisfied because this colony was not flourishing as he had hoped. He was not content with the services rendered him by either of his nephews, Van Twiller and Notelman. His people, most of them in debt to him for advances when they reached Rensselaers- wyck, and all forbidden to trade their products except with his own commissary, found it hard to gain anything although he directed that the merchandise he sent out should not be bartered at such rates as would deprive them of all their share of profit from the farms. Discouraged and disobedient they turned to contraband traffic. Every peasant in the colony, wrote De Vries when he visited it in 1640, was a
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