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CHAPTER XIV
THE CITY AND ITS PEOPLE. 1652-1664 (GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
Condition of New Amsterdam ; not a drowsy place. - Its aspect. - Stuyvesant's town house. - 'The Duke's Plan.' - Houses in the city. - The abundance of food. - Ordinances regulating the con- duct of the people. - Slaves. - Indentured servants. - Drunken- ness. - Other transgressions, sins, and crimes. - Extracts from the court records. - Industry and wealth. - No aristocracy. - Decay of the patroonships. - Character of immigration. - New Amster- dam not an illiterate place. - Position of women. - The written legacies of New Netherland. - Its three poets. - Death of Van der Donck ; and of other prominent persons. - Augustine Herrman. - Nicholas Bayard
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER XV THE FALL OF NEW AMSTERDAM. 1663, 1664 (GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
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Stuyvesant accepts the aid of his people in government. - Development of his province. - Concern for it in Holland. - Moribund condition of the West India Company. - Schemes for the reorganization of New Netherland. - Charles II and his advisers for colonial affairs. -Their difficulties. - Their growing desire to possess the Dutch- American province. - Influence of George Downing ; and of James, Duke of York. - Captain John Scott. - The Atherton Company. - Scott's underhand activity in England. - The first step toward the acquisition of New Netherland. - Tribulations of the province. - A Land-dag or convention summoned ; its proceedings. - Insur- rection and confusion on Long Island. - Connecticut sends John Scott to Long Island. - His disloyal conduct there. - Remonstrance of the Five Dutch Towns. - Stuyvesant treats with Scott. - Pur- blind mood of the West India Company. - Attitude of the Dutch government. - King Charles is advised to seize New Netherland. - He grants it to the Duke of York. - The duke's patent. - Prepa- rations for the seizure of the province. - The expedition sails. - Another Land-dag meets at New Amsterdam ; its proceedings. - Arrest of John Scott. - Connecticut sends Governor Winthrop to take possession of Long Island. - Stuyvesant tries in vain to treat with him. - The English fleet arrives at Boston. - New Amsterdam prepares for defence. - Its helpless condition. - The English ships approach the city. - Negotiations. - Stuyvesant's people urge him to surrender. - Their last Remonstrance. - Articles of Surrender signed. - Stuyvesant surrenders New Amsterdam. - Colonel Rich- ard Nicolls installed as deputy-governor for the Duke of York. - New Amsterdam renamed New York. - Reports sent to Holland. -The so-called 'conquest' of New Netherland really a buccaneer- ing enterprise. - Diverse opinions about the validity of the English title to the province. - Attitude of its Dutch inhabitants .
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY VOL. I
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
CHAPTER I
EXPLORERS AND FUR-TRADERS
1524-1609-1621
Among all the enterprising people in the world who search for foreign countries, navigable waters and trade, those who bear the name of Netherlanders will very easily be able to hold their rank among the foremost, as is sufficiently known to all who have in any wise saluted the threshold of history. - Remonstrance of New Netherland to the States General of the United Netherlands. 1649.
AT the time when Cortez was completing the conquest of Mexico, when Pizarro was entering Peru, the region where the chief city of the New World now stands was made known to the Old World by a Florentine navigator, Giovanni da Verrazano. Bearing an explorer's commission from Francis I of France he sailed northward along the mainland of Amer- ica from about the thirty-fifth to the fiftieth degree of north latitude, and in the spring of 1524 entered the great bay between the fortieth and forty-first parallels, now called the Bay of New York. The letter, generally believed au- thentic, in which he made his report to his royal patron con- tains the earliest description of any part of the seaboard eventually covered by the Thirteen Colonies.
The next comer, probably, was Estevan Gomez, the Portu- guese pilot who had deserted Magellan in the straits off Pata- gonia. The accounts of his northern voyage, undertaken for the emperor Charles V, are brief and vague but indicate that in 1525 he may have seen the island of Manhattan. During the same century the bay was undoubtedly visited by other
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mariners, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch; it must have served at times as a refuge for the European fishing craft that already abounded farther north; and there is reason to believe that shallops if not ships carried Frenchmen and Spaniards up the great river as far, perhaps, as its junction with its chief affluent, the Mohawk. But there is no reason to put faith in the speculations of certain imaginative writers who identify this region with the famous but problematical Norumbega and even suggest as the site of a French fort named Norombègue an island in a lake on Manhattan known to history as the Collect Pond.
The list, if so it may be called, of these early adventurers is more broadly international than the list of those who chanced upon any other spot that became conspicuous in our colonial history. To the fanciful it may seem a prophecy of the after record of the island where the most cosmopolitan community in America grew up. No one of whom it speaks, however, had any share in determining the history of Man- hattan. None awakened any real interest in this part of the western world. The general feeling of the time was expressed by Peter Martyr, the first historian of Spanish America, when he wrote, in reference to what Gomez called the 'pleasant and profitable' transatlantic countries of the north tem- perate zone:
What need have we of these things which are common with all the people of Europe? To the South, to the South for the great and exceeding riches of the Equinoctial; they that seek for riches must not go unto the cold and frozen north.
The history of Manhattan began when discoveries bore results - when the explorer gave clear directions where to find its great harbor, and traders and settlers were inspired to follow in his wake. This did not happen until the first decade of the seventeenth century. The Dutch colonists on Manhattan spoke with virtual if not with literal truth when, forty years later, in a document called the Remon- strance of New Netherland, they affirmed:
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1621]
In the year of Christ 1609 was the country of which we now pro- pose to speak first founded and discovered at the expense of the Gen- eral East India Company (though directing their aims and desires elsewhere) by the ship Half Moon whereof Henry Hudson was master and factor.
This East India Company was a great trading corpora- tion organized at Amsterdam in 1602, a score of years before the birth of the sister association, the Dutch West India Company, which was destined to own the American lands that Hudson discovered. Hudson was an Englishman and his name was Henry, or Henrie in the orthography of the time, not Hendrick as it has often been written. Nothing is recorded of his early years but he seems to have been well and widely known when, in 1607 and again in 1608, the Mus- covy Company of London sent him out to try to discover that short water-passage to the Orient of which all the mari- ners and traders in Europe were dreaming. Searching for it toward the northeast, he failed, of course, to find it; but the lesser discoveries he made and the dangers he survived spread his fame abroad. For a dozen years or more the Dutch had also been seeking for the northeast route, and after Hudson returned from the voyage of 1608 the East India Company invited him to Holland.
Not only at the northeast, it was then believed, might the coveted passage exist. Every one who saw or heard of a bay or strait or important stream on the Atlantic coast of North America fondly hoped that it would prove to be a lengthening, broadening waterway to seas beyond - through the Far West to the Farther East. Verrazano, the first ex- plorer officially sent out from France, was the first sent from any country to look for this northwest passage. Almost a century later Captain John Smith of Virginian fame was en- gaged in the same quest. Hudson himself had thought it might well be attempted west of Greenland, through Davis Strait; and when he talked with the directors of the East India Company he showed letters and charts, sent him by Smith, which told of a supposed sea 'leading into the western
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ocean' in about the latitude of 40°. But having their own 'aims and desires,' the directors engaged him to search once more to the northward of Nova Zembla and forbade him to think of searching elsewhere, but promised that, if he should fail, another route should be the subject of consideration for another voyage.
The contract signed with the directors who formed the Amsterdam Chamber of the East India Company on Janu- ary 8, 1609 (now preserved in the royal archives at the Hague), gave Hudson, to pay for his outfit and to support his family during his absence, a sum which was equivalent to $320 but had then four or five times its present purchasing power. Should he lose his life the directors were to give his wife the equivalent of $30. Should he find a good and practicable passage they would reward him at their discretion. After this contract was signed a message from the king of France invited Hudson to enter his service.
On April 4, 1609, Hudson sailed from Amsterdam with his Dutch commission in a Dutch vessel of eighty tons burden named the Halve Mane (Half Moon). Smaller than the car- rack of Columbus, it was a flat-bottomed two-master of a type designed to navigate the difficult approaches to the Zuyder Zee and called a vlieboot, a term which was derived from the island of Vlieland but has been translated 'fly-boat.' On April 6 Hudson passed into the open sea through the strait called Texel. His mate was a Netherlander; his clerk, Rob- ert Juet, who kept the log of the voyage and doubtless served as second mate, was an Englishman; and his crew of less than twenty men, Netherlanders and Englishmen, probably included his son John.
Near Nova Zembla he found, as he had found before, that the ice prevented further progress. His motley crew was quarrelsome, possibly mutinous. Disregarding his instruc- tions he proposed to try for a northwest passage either through Davis Strait or in the latitude of 40° as John Smith had sug- gested. To the second plan his men consented. Early in July they were catching codfish on the Banks of Newfound-
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1621]
land, on the 12th of the month they saw the mainland coast, and on the 18th they entered a harbor, probably Penobscot Bay, where they lay for a week mending the ship's tattered canvas and stepping a new foremast.
The next landfall was on the elbowed cape which, as Juet noted, the Englishman Gosnold had discovered seven years before and had named Cape Cod. Holding a southwesterly course, on August 18 the Half Moon stood off the entrance of Chesapeake Bay. Turning northward then, sailing slowly, and keeping closer than before to the land, it tarried briefly in Delaware Bay which no white men had seen before; on the afternoon of September 2, as there was 'little wind,' it was brought to anchor in sight of the highlands called Nave- sink which rise just south of Sandy Hook - 'a very good land to fall with,' wrote Juet, 'and a pleasant land to see'; and on the 3d, rounding the Hook, it found safe shelter in the bay behind it. Here the ship remained for a week. The savages paddled out to it bringing 'tobacco and Indian wheat to exchange for knives and beads,' and thus began the com- merce of these regions with the peoples of Europe.
Meanwhile Hudson was sending his boats to explore the neighboring straits and the upper bay. On September 11 he took the Half Moon through the Narrows, and on the 12th started up the great river which, salt from the flushing of strong tides, he believed might be the much-desired passage to the Orient. Sailing by day, anchoring at night, on the 19th he was near the present site of Aibany where he remained four days, sending his boats some twenty-five miles farther north in search of a practicable channel. Convinced at last that the river was 'at an end for ships to go in,' on September 23 he started downstream, and on October 4 he left what Juet called 'the great mouth of the great river,' bearing back to Europe a knowledge of regions great to be. Passing out not through the Narrows but through an 'inlet' farther west - the strait west of Staten Island - he 'steered away east southeast and southeast by east off into the main sea.'
Some of his men were ill, some threatened mutiny, yet they
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refusedto return to Holland. So Hudson made for the coast of England and on November 7 reached Dartmouth. Here the ship was long detained by order of the English govern- ment while Hudson and his English seamen were forbidden to go to Holland. When the Half Moon was released, in June, 1610, Hudson sent his charts and his journal to the East India Company by her mate. They have disappeared, but portions of the journal were quoted by the historian De Laet in his New World, published in 1625, and the log or journal kept by Juet may be read in its entirety in the third book of Purchas his Pilgrimes, also published in 1625. Hudson's own fate is well known: seeking again for a north- west passage, this time with an English commission, he perished in the great northern bay which, like his Great River, now bears his name. Juet, who was one of the mutineers that cast him adrift in the icy solitude with his son and seven sick sailors, died of hardship on the return voyage. No portrait of Hudson exists, and no autograph. A portrait labelled with his name which is owned by the city of New York and hangs in one of its public buildings is certainly not authentic.
Hudson had studied the shores of his Great River and, bartering with their inhabitants, had collected samples of their products. The keen tradesmen of Holland saw that harvests might be reaped by following where he had led the way. The riches flowing for a century from the Occident into Spain and Portugal had inflamed the imagination of all Europe; although it still longed for a short route to the Orient it believed that its treasuries might be filled to over- flowing from almost any part of America. There were, in- deed, no precious metals among the trophies of Hudson's voyage. But he had seen high hills where he thought there might be mines of silver and copper; and he had brought back skins of the beaver, the otter, the marten and fox. In those days, when houses were scantily heated, furs were worn in- doors and out by men as well as women, and even in the south of Europe were more highly prized than velvets and brocades. Holland dealt largely in them, sending each year scores of
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1621]
vessels to bring them from Archangel. In 1607 Dutch mari- ners had found their way into Canadian waters and returned with valuable pelts such as the French had long been gather- ing there. As Hudson now showed that it was possible to find them in a more accessible region still untrodden by Euro- peans, and to buy them with cheap trinkets and stuffs of the coarsest kinds, how could enterprise neglect the chance? At this moment Dutch enterprise felt equal to any and every sort of commercial effort. The East India Company could not concern itself with Occidental undertakings, but without its help the merchants of Holland followed up Hudson's dis- coveries. And, so doing, they were led by gradual steps to found colonies on shores already coveted and verbally claimed by other European nations.
The Turks permanently blocked the old routes of traffic between Asia and Europe when they took Constantinople in 1453 and within the next half-century conquered Mesopota- mia, Arabia, Greece, Syria, and Egypt. Vasco da Gama, rounding Africa, found for the Portuguese a new route, an 'outside route,' to the East while Columbus was throwing open what was not yet understood to be the new hemisphere of the West. And between 1519 and 1522 Magellan's expe- dition circled the globe. In consequence, the main currents of trade were turned from the Mediterranean, the Danube, and the Rhine out into the Atlantic, and the seats of com- mercial power shifted from Italy and Germany to Portugal and Spain, later to the Netherlands, France, and England.
To the eyes of Christendom all heathen and uncivilized countries were mere fallow fields for possible conquest, pos- session, exploitation. In 1493, probably to prevent antici- pated strife between Portugal and Spain, the titular head of Christendom, Pope Alexander VI, bestowed upon Portugal all those parts of the 'unknown world' still unpossessed by other Christian nations which lay east, upon Spain those which lay west, of an imaginary line drawn through the Atlantic from pole to pole; and in the following year the
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grantees compacted that this line should run 370 leagues to the westward of the Cape Verd Islands. Eagerly the Spaniards entered upon the conquest of the vast American domain all of which the Pope had intended them to possess. The Portuguese soon discovered that a portion of it, the great projecting shoulder of Brazil, lay east of the demarcation line, and here they established successful colonies; but even these the king of Spain acquired, with their mother-country, in the year 1581.
Meanwhile the rest of Europe did not accept the fiat of the Pope, feeling, as Francis I explained, that probably it was not justified by the testament of Father Adam. England and France eventually claimed the same wide region, the whole of North America down to the Florida peninsula, - the Eldorado which, in 1512, Ponce de Leon had discovered for Spain. England was the first to move, France the first in actual acquirement. The Italian whom the English called John Cabot, commissioned by their king Henry VII to con- quer, to occupy, and to possess what countries or places he and his sons might newly find, hoped like every one else to make his way to China; and he thought he had reached it when, in 1497, he set up the standards of England and Venice on the shore of Labrador. In 1498 he and his son Sebastian sailed down along the American coast, possibly as far as Cape Hatteras, but made no landfall.
The English did not follow up this beginning upon which long afterwards they based their title to a great part of the North American continent. On the other hand the French, who based theirs upon Verrazano's landfalls of 1524, began in 1534 to explore the gulf and river which they called St. Lawrence, claiming the country for their king and erecting a white man's post long before any was set within the limits of our Thirteen Colonies. In 1540 a viceroy was appointed for Canada, Newfoundland, and the adjacent regions down to the fortieth parallel. In 1542 a short-lived French colony was set on the banks of the St. Lawrence, and in 1562 another, by a band of Huguenots, on the shore of what is now South Carolina.
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1621]
France and Spain were at war during all this time. The voyage of Gomez in 1525, revealing coasts which the Spaniards had not seen before, reënforced their claim to the whole of America; and in 1565 they fortified a post on Ponce de Leon's peninsula, now the town of St. Augustine, the oldest in the United States. But the northern parts of the new hemisphere they thought of value chiefly as a barrier which might shut off their rivals from access to the Orient; and other nations did not fear to enter these parts after the sea power of Spain was scotched by the destruction of the Great Armada in 1588.
Until the latter decades of the sixteenth century the Eng- lish remained an agricultural and pastoral people. They fished, indeed, and they exported raw materials - tin, lead, and especially wool. But they lagged far behind continental peoples in industrial activity; sea-girt though they were, they had claimed no part in Mediterranean traffic; the nations through whose lands this traffic naturally flowed northward had outrivalled them in trading on the North Sea and the Baltic; and their carrying trade they left to Italians, Germans, and Netherlanders. Their first strong impulse to develop into an industrial nation came from the great influx of Flemish artisans which began when the Netherlands took up arms against Spain; and, similarly, they thought little of mari- time enterprise until they were tempted out on the high seas by the chance to carry slaves to the West Indian colonies of Spain, to capture the gold and silver that Spanish ships were bringing home from the New World, and, while thus bene- fiting themselves, to chastise those who so bitterly perse- cuted adherents of the new Reformed religion.
Much earlier than this there were voices that urged the importance of sea power as a bulwark against the enemies of England and a means of bringing its own trade into its own hands. One, for example, spoke in the fine poem called Libellus de Politia Conservativa Maris, written in the first half of the fifteenth century and, much later, included in Hak-
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luyt's famous collection of English voyages. But its vigor- ous cry that Englishmen should make themselves 'masters of the narrow seas' antedated by nearly a century the first reference to America that survives in English literature. This occurs in a poem, called An Interlude of the Four Elements and written about the year 1520, which laments that Englishmen were not the first to take possession of such distant lands and to win the honor of extending their king's dominions. Now and again in the succeeding decades the same feeling found emphatic utterance; and it spread and deepened when the marriage of Philip II with Queen Mary, bringing hundreds of Spaniards to England, widened and clarified insular ideas regarding the possibilities of New World enterprise. Nevertheless for two generations the Cabots' voyages had no practical result except a development of the English fisheries off Newfoundland where French fishermen had long been active. They were practically forgotten dur- ing half a century of successful privateering, buccaneering, and slave-trading. Not until 1576 did Martin Frobisher start upon the first English voyage in search of gold mines and the northwest passage.
Up to this time Europe may well have thought that Spain and France were destined to divide the New World between them, England contenting itself with a forcible taking of tribute on the ocean and the American seaboard. Then the prospect changed. In 1578 Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Hum- phrey Gilbert a patent which authorized him to discover and to occupy any remote and uncivilized lands 'not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.' When, in 1584, his patent was transferred to his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, it still more distinctly specified lands 'not actually possessed of any Christian prince nor inhabited by Christian people.' Meanwhile Elizabeth, formally protesting against the all-embracing claims put forth by Spain when it demanded the return of the treasures captured by Drake, had laid down in 1580 as a rule of international action the doctrine that neither first discovery nor a mere verbal assertion of right
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could hold good unless sustained by actual occupation : præscriptio sine possessione haud valeat. The Spaniards, she declared, had no right to countries which they had not really occupied but had merely touched upon here and there, build- ing huts and naming rivers and capes.
In the patents Elizabeth bestowed she did not mention the Cabot voyages; but when Gilbert, in 1582, set up the arms of England on the shore of the harbor of St. John's in Newfoundland, reading his commission to the fishermen of many nations who frequented the place, he took possession for his queen by right of the discoveries of John Cabot. In 1584 Raleigh, inspired by French example, sent out an expe- dition which explored the coasts north of Florida. They were then named Virginia; and the English long applied this term to the whole seaboard up to Newfoundland while the French included the same coasts, with Newfoundland and Canada, in the general term New France. In 1585 and in 1587 Raleigh's emissaries vainly tried to establish a colony on Roanoke Sound.
These were the only English experiments in colonization during Elizabeth's reign. It was not a fear of what they might lead to, it was the rage and dread inspired by the depredations of her sea-rovers upon Spanish commerce, that led Philip II to try in 1588 to crush forever the maritime power of England by sending out his Great Armada. Yet English energy and ambition were growing fast, and they were greatly stimulated when, at the end of the century, Hakluyt began to publish the wonderful series of travellers' tales, historic documents, and expositions of the value of sea power, commerce, and exploration which he spent many devoted years in collecting.
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