USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 4
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When the seventeenth century opened, the authority of England was recognized by the fishermen along the New- foundland coasts. In 1602 Gosnold vainly tried to plant a colony on an island at the mouth of Buzzard's Bay. In the next-succeeding years a number of Englishmen coasted and touched upon the shores now called Maine and Massachusetts.
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But between Buzzard's Bay at the north and Roanoke Sound at the south no English foot trod American soil.
In 1604 James I concluded a treaty with Spain which, ex- cluding his subjects from the Spanish West Indies and thus putting a damper on their privateering ardor, helped to strengthen the genuine interest in schemes for colonization that was now spreading among them. A notable result im- mediately followed. In 1606 James licensed a joint-stock company to begin the planting of two colonies between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of north latitude in
. . . that part of America commonly called Virginia and other parts and territories in America either appertaining unto us or which are not now actually possessed by any Christian prince or people. . . .
Although the same charter covered both intended enterprises those who were concerned in them came to be called the London, London Virginia, or Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company. To the Virginia Company were reserved the lands between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth degrees, to the Plymouth Company those between the forty-first and forty-fifth degrees. The intermediate regions, embracing all between Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound, were left open as a sort of neutral territory, for, while each colony was to run a hundred miles along the coast and as far inland, each was enjoined to plant no settlement within a hundred miles of a settlement made by the other. The terms of the patent indicate the belief, more clearly expressed on the maps of the time, that a great body of water, called the Sea of Verrazano, lay only one or two hundred miles west of the Atlantic coast.
The bestowal of this charter was a momentous step, setting the kingdom of England on the path of empire and bringing its destinies into closer relation than before with those of the great continental powers. The commercial creed of the time rested on two fundamental articles: it assumed that the wealth of a nation was synonymous with the amount of specie it owned, and that monopoly was the only road to success - that the prosperity of one nation, therefore, must be achieved
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at the expense of others. Hence the passionate interest ex- cited by the New World when it proved to be a treasure house of silver and gold; and hence the struggle which soon began among the seafaring peoples of Europe to obtain footholds on American soil and to hinder others from doing the like. Transatlantic enterprise did not spring from a passion for conquest as such, a hunger to enlarge dominions, to extend political power. It sprang partly from a desire (much stronger in Catholic than in Protestant lands) to Christianize the heathen, and chiefly from a lust for the precious metals, a lust that soon embraced those transatlantic commodities by means of which the precious metals could be procured in the form of coin. Yet commercial enterprise of such a kind led, of course, to national expansion and international conflict. That common eagerness to monopolize the treasures of dis- tant lands which first found definite expression when Pope Alexander VI divided them between Spain and Portugal complicated at once and after a time controlled the political policies of western Europe. Portugal and Spain, then Hol- land, and then France and England, each striving to make itself the principal 'seat of exchanges' for the products of the Orient and the Occident, became the leading nations of Eu- rope; and mutual jealousies of commercial success, with the upgrowth of new powers and ambitions based upon it and of industrial developments stimulated by it (even, indirectly, in countries that never saw an American product), were mainly responsible for the ever-changing enmities and alliances, the ever-recurring declarations of war and treaties of peace, which kept all Europe in a turmoil down to the time when the first Napoleon was cast from his throne.
It was not very long before this influence of the newer continent was understood by the elder. It was a recognized factor in European politics even before Philip sent his Armada into the English Channel to decide whether Spain or England should be the future mistress of the seas: it was Philip's Indian gold, Sir Walter Raleigh had said, that endangered and disturbed the peace of Europe. Therefore there must
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have been statesmen who knew, whether James I knew it or not, that when he signed the charter which first bestowed upon Englishmen definite areas of American soil, England placed a valuable stake upon the great gaming-table of con- tinental politics and pledged itself to become a maritime power in a different sense from the one that its Drakes and Hawkinses had understood.
A year after the charter was given, in 1607, the London Company planted at Jamestown in South Virginia the first English colony that justified the name. Two years later Juet spoke of it, writing that the Half Moon turned north- ward after reaching 'the entrance into the king's river in Virginia where our Englishmen are.' In 1607 also the Plym- outh Company tried without success to establish a colony in North Virginia, at the mouth of the Sagadahoc or Kennebec River. In 1609 the domain of the London Virginia Company was extended to include four hundred miles of seacoast and the breadth of the continent from ocean to ocean.
By this time the French had made a settlement at Port Royal on the great peninsula they called Acadia, now Nova Scotia, and Henri IV had bestowed a patent for 'Acadia, Canada, and other places in New France' which covered the continent from the forty-sixth down to the fortieth parallel, including the present sites of Montreal and Philadelphia. In 1608 Champlain set the foundations of Quebec; and in 1609 he and two other Frenchmen with a few score Huron and Ottawa Indians defeated a band of Mohawks at Ticonderoga near the great lake that bears his name. This, the first bat- tle within the borders of New York State in which white men were engaged, was fought, it will be noticed, in the year when Hudson entered his Great River.
Throughout all this early period the people, Dutch, Walloon, and Flemish or Belgian, of the seventeen provinces called the Netherlands or Low Countries did not think of American trade or colonization. Since the Middle Ages those of the Flemish provinces had been the chief manufacturers of
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Europe. Taking advantage of their position at the inter- section of the great trade routes from western Europe to the Baltic and from the Mediterranean along the Rhine to Eng- land, they and their Dutch neighbors made themselves, dur- ing the first half of the sixteenth century, the common carriers of the northerly nations. Gathering along the Baltic the products of the North, from the ports of Portugal and Spain those of the East and the West, and distributing them, with their own manufactured wares, to all countries above the Mediterranean, they played on a wider field of waters the part that had earlier been played by Venice and by the Hanse towns of Germany. First Bruges and then Antwerp became the chief mart of Europe, and Antwerp grew also into its financial centre.
In 1568 these seventeen provinces began their heroic attempt to resist the spiritual tyranny of the Inquisition and to recover from their sovereign, Philip II of Spain, the rights and privileges they had secured in 1477 from his grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, - the freest constitution that had yet been framed in Europe. In 1576, when the Spaniards had sacked, ruined, almost obliterated Antwerp, the ten Walloon and Flemish provinces abandoned the struggle, remaining Catholic and being known thenceforward as the Spanish Netherlands. The seven Dutch and Protestant provinces - Holland, Zeeland, Guelderland, Utrecht, Overyssel, Fries- land, and Groningen - united themselves by a compact called the Union of Utrecht, renounced their allegiance to Philip, and declared themselves an independent nation. Holland so far outranked the other provinces - as rich and powerful as all six together - that its name was soon used by foreigners to cover them all in a national sense. Right- fully, they were the United Netherlands. A loosely con- federated republic, their visible head and leader was William of Nassau, Prince of Orange-William the Silent. Stadholder of Holland and Zealand, in these provinces he was chief magistrate and commander-in-chief by land and sea, dignities which, originally held of the sovereign, were now made
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hereditary in his family. Elsewhere he had no authority save that which political influence and his commanding per- sonality won for him. Nor was the highest legislative body in the Republic, the federal assembly called the States Gen- eral, a real source of political power. It was a mere focus of the power which resided primarily in the municipal coun- cils that appointed the delegates to the provincial assemblies or States which in their turn appointed the members of the States General.
Up to this time when the rebellious Dutchmen formally declared their independence and when, as it chanced, Portugal and its colonies fell to the crown of Spain, they had continued to trade largely at Lisbon; and so indispensable were their services as ocean carriers that even after this time they sup- plied, under foreign flags, Spaniards as well as Portuguese, at home and in the West Indies, with the necessaries of life. Merchants, mechanics, and artisans from the crushed and desolated Spanish Netherlands streamed by scores of thou- sands into their towns, bringing reinforcements of capital, energy, and skill, and the centre of traffic and finance trans- ferred itself from Antwerp to Amsterdam. Even the inter- ference of Spain with the carrying trade of a people who by 1590 were annually building a thousand new vessels each year inured to their profit. It compelled them to traffic in the Mediterranean and to seek for themselves the wares of still more distant parts, and so developed them into explorers and traders of widest enterprise. Like the English but with more immediate success they learned to follow in the track of the Portuguese around the Cape of Good Hope to the countries which supplied Europe with its perfumes, dyes, drugs, and raw and manufactured cottons and silks, with its rugs and hangings, valuable woods, precious objects of metal, porce- lain, and glass, and above all with the pepper and other spices which alone made palatable the coarse and monotonous food of the time. Thus the war fostered instead of destroying the commerce of the young Republic while the fruits of its commerce enabled it to keep up the war.
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Soon after the year 1590 Willem Usselinx, a native of Antwerp, a merchant, navigator, and conspicuous promoter of commercial undertakings, urged these ambitious seafarers to form a great national company to prosecute the West India trade. This scheme was postponed, but small private companies were formed for the same purpose; and in 1602 an East India Company was incorporated with eight times as much capital as the English East India Company, chartered two years before. Uniting the strength and the wealth of all earlier associations engaged in the Oriental trade, this com- pany held the exclusive right to traffic for twenty-one years east of the Cape and west of the Straits of Magellan. At the end of its first year it paid its shareholders dividends of seventy-five per cent; at the end of six years its capital had risen in value from six to thirty millions of guilders.
Both England and France had aided the rebellious Dutch- men, although less for love of them than for hatred of Spain; and the defeat of the Armada, upon which Philip wasted resources that he might more wisely have expended on his armies, was a potent factor in the success of the United Provinces. England thought the creation of their East India Company, intended especially to compete with its own, a poor return for its military aid; and the event is, in fact, a landmark in the history of that commercial rivalry between the two nations which for generations was to grow more and more pronounced.
When Philip II died in 1598 France made peace with Spain; England, as has been told, did the same in 1604; and in 1606 Philip III wanted to come to terms with the revolted provinces. The negotiations fell through for the Dutch would not relin- quish their trade in the East Indies. But in the spring of 1609, five days after Henry Hudson sailed from Amsterdam in the Half Moon, Spain and the Republic concluded a truce for a term of twelve years. Thus the United Netherlands secured a temporary recognition of their independence and of their right to engage in Oriental traffic; and the supremacy of Amsterdam was assured by an agreement which, closing
VOL. I. - C
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the river Scheldt to commerce, completed the ruin of the Spanish Netherlands.
The seven Dutch provinces were then full of bold and hardy men, natives of their soil or refugees from other countries, whose only trade was fighting and whose one desire was still to fight the Spaniard - if no longer at home then on foreign seas and shores, if no longer for liberty then for glory and gold. The great Age of Adventure had not yet closed; what Sebas- tian Cabot called ' the great flame of desire to accomplish some notable thing' had not burned out; and the golden era of circumterrestrial traffic had begun. It is hard now to con- ceive of the vigor with which the new little nation threw itself into a world-wide commercial contest with its older and larger rivals, hard to realize the magnitude of its success, the extent of the power it wielded during the early part of the seventeenth century when it almost supplanted the Eng- lish in commerce with Russia, wrested their West African posts and a great part of Brazil from the Portuguese and built up a splendid empire on the foundations they had laid in the East Indies, and alone among Western nations had entrance to Japan; when it owned almost half the mercantile tonnage of Europe, absorbed the West India carrying trade, prac- tically monopolized shipbuilding, and gathered incalculable wealth from the fisheries upon which its very existence was based as that of other nations was based upon agriculture. It is more clearly remembered that at this same time the Dutch, achieving the first place in science, jurisprudence, philosophy, literature, and art as well as in trade and finance, made the University of Leyden the soul of the world's learning . and culture as the Bank of Amsterdam was the heart that controlled the international circulation of wealth.
The Bank of Amsterdam, the first in northern Europe, was established eighty-five years before the Bank of England, in 1609 - the year when the truce with Spain was signed and when Hudson found his Great River. Although France and England then stood ready, in theory, to contend with the traders of Holland for any spot they might wish to exploit
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upon the American coast, between Manhattan and Florida no spot except Jamestown was occupied by white men, north of Manhattan there were no white men nearer than Acadia and Quebec, and between Buzzard's Bay and Chesa- peake Bay, which John Smith explored in 1608, no spot was known to either Frenchmen or Englishmen. This accessible and fertile region, covered though it was by Spanish, French, and English verbal claims, was first explored and first settled by the Dutch.
Their earliest official move was discreetly made and peace- ably met. In 1610 the States General suggested that the English and Dutch should join in colonizing Hudson's Great River as well as in prosecuting the East India trade. Nothing came of the proposal. The colonizing ambitions of England had only just begun to awaken, and as yet its trade did not even remotely rival Holland's. Its ambassador at the Hague was warned that if the two nations should 'join upon equal terms' the 'art and industry' of the Dutch would probably 'wear out ours.' The incident is interesting chiefly because it shows that at this moment England did not resent the fact that Holland was casting its eyes toward Virginia.
The earliest special map of the coasts so called was sent to Philip III of Spain in March, 1611, by Don Alonso de Velasco, his ambassador in England. As Velasco then wrote, it was a copy, secretly obtained, of one made by a surveyor whom James I had sent to Virginia in the previous year and who had returned 'about three months ago.' It portrays the Atlantic coast from Cape Fear to the northern point of New- foundland. It shows the 'River of Canada' and, without any name, Hudson's Great River, both of them flowing from the same supposed vast inland sea or inlet of the Pacific Ocean. With considerable accuracy it shows Sandy Hook, Staten Island, and the lower and upper bays that Hudson had explored, but it makes of Long Island a little islet and ignores Manhattan. None of these features bears any name; indeed, no European name is anywhere set between the entrance of Chesapeake Bay and an island off Narragan-
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sett Bay which Verrazano had called Luisa and subse- quent explorers Claudia - Block Island or perhaps Martha's Vineyard.
The scanty documents relating to the Dutch voyages to the Great River which immediately followed Hudson's and the brief references of contemporary writers have been vari- ously interpreted. But it seems certain that soon after the Half Moon was released at Dartmouth and returned to Amsterdam, some merchants of this place sent out a trading ship, probably manned in part by Hudson's sailors and com- manded by his mate; and that it was in 1610 or 1611 that two Netherland mariners chartered on their own account a ship in which they visited the Great River and brought back two Indian lads. These mariners were Hendrick Corstiaensen, or Christiaensen, who on his return from a West India voyage had already skirted the coasts near Manhattan, and Adriaen Block. When, soon afterwards, certain merchants of Amsterdam and of Hoorn sent out five vessels filled with goods for barter with the savages, Christiaensen and Block commanded two that went in company, Captain Cornelis Jacobsen Mey an- other. Lying in the great bay the traders sent their shallops in search of peltry into the neighboring lesser bays and inlets and far up the river.
Early in the year 1614 Block's ship, the Tiger, was ac- cidentally burned in the bay; but doubtless the rigging and sails were saved, for by the time that the waters were free from ice in the spring Block and his men had built and equipped another vessel, launching it from Manhattan or, more probably, from the neighboring Long Island shore. It was a decked yacht of about sixteen tons burden with a thirty- eight foot keel, measuring forty-four feet in length over all and eleven and a half feet in beam. Block called it the Onrust, a name that has come down to us, loosely translated, as the Restless. More accurately onrust means "restlessness," "trouble" or "strife"; and the Trouble, it seems probable, was what its skipper meant the boat's name to be. Onrust,
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it may be added, is now and doubtless has been for centuries the name of an islet in the Texel with which, of course, Block was familiar.
A ship of some sort had been built by the Spaniards in Carolina early in the sixteenth century, and one, called the Virginia, by the Englishmen who tried to plant a colony on the Kennebec in 1608. The Restless, so far as is known, was the third white man's vessel launched on American waters. Certainly it was the first launched on the waters of Manhat- tan; it was the first that ever passed through the terrifying tide-rips between Manhattan and Long Island which Block called Hellegat (Hell Hole), copying perhaps the name of a branch of the Scheldt; and it was the first that, exploring Long Island Sound, made manifest that the island itself was not a part of the mainland. Following courses that none but Indian prows had known before, Block also explored a large stream which, contrasting it with the salty Great River, he called the Fresh River, and a bay which he called Nassau. Both of these are now known by Indian titles - the Con- necticut River and Narragansett Bay. Finding other rivers and many islands, one of which perpetuates his name, he pushed around Cape Cod into Boston Harbor which he called Vos Haven (Fox Haven). Turning about after he reached Nahant Bay, he fell in with his friend Christiaensen and re- turned with him to Holland, leaving his little Restless in the charge of Cornelis Hendricksen who seems to have been his mate. The southern shore of Long Island was also explored at this time, by Cornelis Mey cruising eastward as far as Martha's Vineyard.
In March, 1614, the States General, upon petition of many merchants, passed an ordinance which said that whosoever might discover any 'new passages, havens, lands, or places' should have the exclusive right to frequent them for four voyages. Encouraged by Block's report of his explorations, the merchants of Amsterdam and Hoorn who had already received cargoes of furs from the Great River then formed themselves into an association called the United New Nether-
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land Company, claimed the offered privileges, and in October received a charter which declared
. that they alone shall have the right to resort to, or cause to be frequented, the aforesaid newly discovered countries situate in America between New France and Virginia, the seacoasts whereof lie in the latitude of from forty to forty-five degrees, now named New Netherland, as is to be seen by a Figurative Map, hereunto an- nexed, and that for four voyages within the term of three years com- mencing the first January 1615 next coming, or sooner, to the exclu- sion of all others ..
This is the earliest existing mention of the name Nieuw Nederlandt. Just when or by whom it had first been con- ferred cannot now be divined. Its proper form in English is New Netherland, not New Netherlands; in the language of formality it was Nova Belgica or Novus Belgium. It was bestowed a little earlier than the name New England, for almost at the moment when it was officially recognized the Prince of Wales confirmed the name that Captain John Smith suggested should differentiate North from South Vir- ginia. Smith had been coasting the New England shore while Block was exploring Long Island Sound; and his map was executed at the same time as the first Dutch map of the regions that were soon to become a Dutch province. This was the 'Figurative Map' referred to in the charter of the New Netherland Company. Laid before the States General with Block's report upon his explorations, it had probably been prepared from rough charts that he brought home. If, as seems probable, it is a large paper map bearing no date which, long forgotten, was found in 1841 among the royal archives at the Hague, it embraces the coast from below the Delaware capes up to the western part of Long Island with an interior region extending much farther north. It shows Staten Island as well as a piece of Long Island but puts a cluster of islets where Manhattan should be. It gives names to none of these places, but several Dutch names, including Nassau and Kinderhoek, are written along the Hudson River,
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and on the coast that is now New Jersey Eyerhaven (Egg Harbor) and Sandhoek (Sandy Hook).
The charter of the New Netherland Company did not claim New Netherland for Holland or deny the right of other nations to traffic with its aborigines, but merely forbade any other Hollanders to interfere with the rights of the patentees. Nor did it create a joint-stock company but merely what was then called in England a 'regulated company,' each member of which traded on his own account with his own capital according to rules laid down by the company as such. In this manner a number of ships were sent to New Netherland during the three years that the charter covered, and they brought back rich freights of furs.
Hendrick Christiaensen served for a time in New Nether- land as factor for the merchants at home; and late in 1614 or early in 1615 he erected the first building of which any valid record remains. It was a little fort or blockhouse placed upon Castle Island which, close to the western shore of the river, is now within the limits of the city of Albany. Here, as some historians believe, the Dutchmen found the ruins of an old and forgotten French trading post. Their own, built for defence as well as for the storage of furs and protected by two large and eleven smaller cannon, was thirty- six by twenty-six feet in size, surrounded by a stockade fifty-eight feet square and a moat eighteen feet broad, and called Fort Nassau. Jacob Eelkins was in charge of its little garrison of ten or twelve traders during Christiaensen's absences. It became at once a gathering point for troops of Indians intent upon barter.
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