USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 6
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FIGURATIVE MAPS: Originals in Royal Archives, the Hague; repro- duced in Col. Docs., I, in Doc. Hist., I (397), and in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I. - Brodhead, Two Ancient Maps of New Netherland in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 1845 (215), and Hist. of New York, I, Appendix; Fernow, Critical Essay on Sources accompanying his New Netherland (383).
ARGALL AND PLOWDEN: Beauchamp Plantagenet, Description of the Province of Belvil (354) ; Documents Concerning New Albion (355) ; Cal. S. P. Col., 1574-1660; Hazard, Historical Collections; Keen, Note on New Albion (356) ; Murphy, Appendix to his Voyages of De Vries (527); Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I, Appendix; Critical Essay on Sources accompanying Fernow, New Nether- land. - MASON'S LETTER OF 1623 (quoted) : in Col. Docs., III, and in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, Appendix.
ENGLISH SEPARATISTS : Hazard, Historical Collections; Bradford, Hist. of Plymouth Plantation (441) ; Morton, New England's Memorial (367) ; Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (437) ; Arber, Story of the Pilgrim Fathers (438) ; Murphy, The Plymouth Fathers (440) ; Ames, The May-Flower and Her Log (314) ; F. B. Dexter, The Pilgrim Church and Plymouth Colony in Narr. and Crit. Hist., III; H. M. and M. Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pil- grims (439) ; Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America (450).
WEST INDIA COMPANY: Original of Charter in Royal Archives, the Hague; printed in Aitzema, Saken van Staet en Oorlogh (346), in
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REFERENCE NOTES
Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (513), and, imperfectly trans- lated, in Hazard, Historical Collections, and in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, Appendix. - Col. Docs., I, II, XII; Van Meteren, Nederlandscher . . . Oorlogen; Lambrechtsen, Korte Be- schrijving .. . van Nieuw-Nederland (424) ; Asher, Dutch Books . . . Relating to New Netherland (7); De Jonge, Nederlandsche Zeewezen (350) ; Jameson, Willem Usselinx (507) ; Van Pelt, Ante- cedents of New Netherland (384) ; Campbell, The Puritan in Hol- land, England, and America; Cheyney, European Background of American History; Motley, John of Barneveld (63) ; histories of Holland.
CHAPTER II
THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1619-1624
'Tis the finest land for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon. - Henry Hudson. 1609. (Quoted by De Laet. 1625.)
IN 1619 Captain Thomas Dermer, sent out by Sir Ferdi- nando Gorges, the leading spirit of the Plymouth Company, to seek for the northwest passage, skirted the coasts from the Kennebec to Virginia and with the help of an Indian pilot ran an open pinnace through Long Island Sound, the East River, and the Narrows down to Sandy Hook. Describing this voyage, the first attempted in these waters by an English vessel, Dermer wrote that above the 'dangerous cataract' - meaning the tide-rips that the Dutch called Hellegat - a multitude of savages 'let fly' at him from the bank and that while he was in the bay he talked with others; but he did not mention seeing or hearing of any white men. Of his return voyage in 1620 two accounts exist. One, written by Gorges, says that Dermer, meeting with 'some Hollanders that were settled in a place we call Hudson's River, in trade with the natives,' forbade them the place as belonging by the king of England's order to his own subjects, and that the Dutchmen answered they did not so understand things, had found no Englishmen in the country, and therefore hoped 'they had not offended.' The other account, an anonymous pamphlet on the discovery and planting of New England, says less definitely that Dermer held 'a conference about the state of the coast' and their dealings with the Indians with some Dutchmen who had 'a trade in Hudson's River some years
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THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1619-1624]
before that time,' and that their answer 'gave him good content.'
These appear to be the earliest printed narratives in which Henry Hudson's river bears his own name. Probably they supplied the foundation for the story that Argall had visited Manhattan at an earlier day. They do not say where Dermer met the Dutchmen. Most likely it was in the Chesapeake region where Cornelis Mey was cruising in 1620, although a report on 'Mr. Dimmer's' (Dermer's) voyages, read before the Virginia Company in London in 1621, declares that he had entered the Hudson as well as the Delaware 'within which rivers were found divers ships of Amsterdam and Hoorn.'
Wherever they may have been spoken, Dermer's warning and the Hollanders' reply were unofficial utterances. But Dermer's report quickened the desire of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and some other members of the Plymouth Company to reestablish it with more clearly defined boundaries; and upon their petition in November, 1620, just before the Pil- grims from Leyden made their landing on Cape Cod, James I bestowed a charter creating a company with a new name, the Council for New England, and authorizing it to plant and to govern the territories from the fortieth parallel (about fifty miles south of Manhattan) to the forty-eighth and from ocean to ocean. Again the patentees were forbidden to take any places which the subjects of any other Christian prince occu- pied or possessed, but, said the charter, King James was cer- tain that such were nowhere in possession 'by any authority from their sovereigns, lords, or princes.' Evidently this was not an ingenuous statement for the patent included most of Canada as well as New Netherland, and the French govern- ment had not only authorized but directed the New World enterprises of its subjects. France, in fact, protested in regard to the new charter. The Dutch Republic said nothing.
In 1621 the Council for New England gave the colony at Plymouth a patent for the lands on which they had settled without defining their extent; James, as the king of Scotland, gave Sir William Alexander a patent for 'New Scotland'
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
which embraced what is now New Brunswick as well as Nova Scotia, the Acadia of the French; Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason obtained for themselves the country between the Kennebec and the Merrimac; and Sir George Calvert secured part of Newfoundland. Alexander tried without success to colonize his territories; but colonies - the beginnings of New Hampshire - were soon planted at the mouth of the Piscataqua and at Dover six miles up the stream; and by 1623 there were little settlements on Massa- chusetts Bay and one at least on the coast of Maine.
In 1621 England again formally denied the rights of Spain in America as based upon the gift of Pope Alexander VI; and, paraphrasing and emphasizing James's instructions to his patentees and Elizabeth's doctrine that 'possession' not mere 'prescription' gave a title, parliament declared that 'occupancy confers a good title by the law of nations and of nature.' Such announcements were necessary as the Span- iards were protesting against the English settlements in Vir- ginia and Bermuda, but on its own behalf England inter- preted them broadly. Saying nothing about the enterprises of the French, it entered a protest against those of the Dutch. In December, 1621, the privy council informed Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador at the Hague, that the Hollanders had left a colony in New England during the past year and were about to send out vessels, and instructed him to impress upon the States General the fact that by right of first occupation King James had a good and sufficient title to all lands between the fortieth and forty-eighth degrees, and to require that the Dutch plantations be discontinued and the intending ships detained. Carleton answered that some companies of Am- sterdam merchants had, indeed, begun a trade between the fortieth and forty-fifth degrees of latitude, had named localities there and kept 'factors there continually resident,' but that he could not learn of any colony and did not believe that one had been 'either already planted . . . or so much as intended.' All that the States General would say was that they knew of no Dutch settlement that infringed English rights.
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THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
In fact, no colony, no permanent settlement, had yet been planted in New Netherland. The existence of the West India Company was at first so precarious that almost two years after it received its charter only one-third of its desired capital had been subscribed. By virtue, however, of a provision in the charter, ships of individual merchants were sailing under special licenses and trafficking with the savages on the Great River, the South or Delaware River, Long Island Sound, the Fresh or Connecticut River, Narragansett Bay, and Buzzard's Bay. On the South River a fort was projected. As the second site chosen for the traders' blockhouse far up the Great River proved inconvenient in its turn, in 1622 they planned a stronger fortification, to be named Fort Orange and to stand a little farther north, on the present site of Albany. Jacob Eelkins, who had done well by the Indians as director in this region, dealt treacherously with them on the Fresh River and was dismissed from the Company's ser- vice. Farther east, at Manomet at the head of Buzzard's Bay, called Sloup Bay on the second Figurative Map, the Dutchmen now had a trading station separated only by the base of Cape Cod, a stretch of some twenty miles, from the Englishmen at New Plymouth.
In 1623 the Dutch province was born. Until then it had been forming in embryo; it was a mere vaguely defined stretch of the American wilderness, covered by a Dutch name, visited by Dutch ships, and dotted with three or four Dutch trading posts. In 1623 it became, nominally at least, a political entity. The States General - and this was their real answer to the inquiry put by the English privy council two years earlier - formally constituted it a province and granted it the armorial rights of a countship. Its seal was a combination of Old World and New World emblems, showing a beaver surrounded by a string of wampum beads and sur- mounted by a count's coronet, with the legend Sigillum Novi Belgii.
The States General had delegated to the West India Com-
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
pany, for any colonial settlements it might make, all legis- lative, executive, and judicial powers, stipulating only that they themselves should confirm the appointment of the high- est officials and the instructions given them, that the Roman- Dutch law of the fatherland should prevail when special laws and ordinances issued by the Company did not meet all needs, and that persons convicted of capital crimes should be sent home with their sentences. The largest number of the direc- tors belonged to the Chamber of Amsterdam which adminis- tered four-ninths of the capital of the Company; and among them were included most of the members of the old New Netherland Company. To this Chamber was intrusted the control of New Netherland while the South American colonies soon to be taken from the Portuguese were controlled prin- cipally by the Zealand Chamber. The people of New Nether- land always claimed a right of appeal to the home government from the decisions of the provincial court established by the Company as well as a broader right to invoke its interest in the affairs of the province at large; and more and more as the years went on the States General directed, or tried to direct, both the general policy of the Company and its dealings with individual colonists. Nevertheless, until New Netherland became New York it was ruled by the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company acting under the executive committee called the Assembly of the XIX which represented the Company as a whole and in which a delegate from the States General had a seat.
In another sense also the year 1623 was the birth year of the province. Then the West India Company completed its organization. The States General had ratified its charter in an amplified form, and it stood ready for active work with a subscribed capital of 7,000,000 guilders, equal to $2,800,000 or at least four or five times this sum as money is valued to-day. The years 1623 and 1624 it devoted chiefly to preparations for the conquest of Brazil, yet its Amsterdam Chamber found time to aid in sending a shipload of emigrants to New Nether-
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THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
land. These were the first genuine settlers, the first Euro- peans who came not simply to traffic but to live, who meant to establish not merely 'factories,' as trading stations then were called, but also farms and towns; the first, so far as we know, who brought women and children with them.
In curious parallel to the fact that the Pilgrims who founded New Plymouth had thought of settling in New Netherland, the first actual settlers in New Netherland had wished to seat themselves in an English colony. Most of them were not Dutchmen but Walloons and Frenchmen - a handful among the many thousands of foreign Protestants who had been driven into the free Republic by the massacre of St. Bartholo- mew or the rigors of the Spanish Inquisition.
In July, 1621, a certain Jesse De Forest signed and presented to the English ambassador at the Hague a petition, written in French, on behalf of nearly threescore families 'as well Walloons as French, all of the Reformed religion.' De Forest, whose name was also written Des Forests and De Foreest, was himself a Walloon, born at Avesnes, and there- fore French in speech - a man of good burgher blood, a merchant-dyer by trade who since 1615 had been living at Leyden. His petition asked leave for his friends to establish a colony in Virginia with many special privileges. With it went a round-robin signed by fifty-six men and showing that their households numbered in all two hundred and twenty- seven persons. The request was referred to the Virginia Company which did not object to the emigrants but refused to help them or to grant them special privileges. Then, in August, 1622, after Jesse De Forest had secured from the provincial legislature of Holland and North Friesland a promise of transportation, the States General permitted him to 'inscribe and enroll' Protestant families to be sent to the 'West Indies.' This was a generic term for America at large, but New Netherland must have been definitely in De Forest's mind for the West India Company advised the pro- vincial legislature to promise him help, and it was evidently for his band of recruits that its Amsterdam Chamber supplied
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
a ship, called the New Netherland, of two hundred and sixty tons, larger by eighty tons than the Pilgrims' Mayflower. Early in March, 1623, it sailed for the Great River carrying thirty families 'most of whom were Walloons.' Cornelis Mey was its skipper and the director of the emigrants, Adriaen Joris was second in command. No list of the emigrants has been preserved but it is known that two of them were Joris (George) Jansen Rapelje and his wife, Catelina Trico, a native of Paris.
Jesse De Forest did not come with them. In December, 1623, his brother Gerard, petitioning for a transfer to himself of Jesse's permit as a dyer, testified that Jesse had left Hol- land 'by the last ships that sailed from here for the West Indies.' It has usually been thought that he joined the great naval expedition sent out at this time to attack the Spaniards and Portuguese in the West Indies and South America and to plant colonies in Guiana where the Dutch had been established for some years. A journal written in French by Jesse himself and preserved in the British Museum has, however, recently been brought to notice by an English writer who, speaking merely of Dutch enterprises in South America, naturally makes no reference to De Forest's con- nection with the settlement of New Netherland. From this journal it appears that, De Forest having petitioned that a number of families which he had enrolled for emigration might be employed in the service of the West India Company, evidently in its southern possessions, the Company disap- proved of the request but permitted De Forest and certain 'heads of families' to visit the country and choose a place for themselves. Under De Forest's leadership ten such per- sons, all with French names, sailed in the ship Pigeon on July 1, 1623, which was four months after the departure of the New Netherland, five before the sailing of the great mili- tary expedition. After visiting the settlements on the Ama- zon they decided to remain on the Wiapico River where, on January 1, 1624, the Pigeon left them. Here they suffered great hardship for seventeen months, and then gladly availed
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THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
themselves of a ship sent out by the Company to bring them home should they so desire. Nothing more is known about Jesse De Forest. Certainly he never came to New Nether- land, but two of his sons did come in later years, and his descendants are numerous in New York and Connecticut.
The ship New Netherland, flying the flag of the province of Holland, touched at the Canary Islands and the 'Wild Coast' (Guiana), and early in May arrived in the harbor of Manhattan. Here it found a French ship whose captain in- tended to take possession of the country by erecting the arms of his king. Fortunately a Dutch yacht, the Mackerel, which had recently come from the West Indies, also lay in the har- bor; so, joining their forces and arming a smaller vessel with two guns, the Hollanders 'convoyed the Frenchman out of the river.' Never since that day has a French vessel ap- peared in the upper bay of New York with hostile or covetous intent.
Another danger, it appears, had more remotely threatened the Dutch immigrants. The letter of an anonymous English- man, dated May 4, 1623, and written on a ship called the Bonnie Bess while she was lying off the Isle of Wight, says that her company had been commissioned by 'high authori- ties' to explore Hudson's River,
. and if we there find any strangers, as Hollanders or others, . . we are to give them fight and spoil or sink them down into the sea.
But the Bonnie Bess did not try to execute these orders. No one molested the New Netherland's human cargo; and at once it was distributed through the broad province. Two families and six men went up the Fresh River, landed where Hartford now stands, and began to build a small fort which was named the House of Hope or Fort Good Hope. Another little party, taken to the South River, founded Fort Nassau near the site of the present town of Gloucester in New Jersey, about four miles below Philadelphia. Eighteen families, the largest band of settlers, were carried up the North River to
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
Fort Orange; and before the yacht Mackerel returned to Holland they were 'bravely advanced' for the grain they had planted was 'nearly as high as a man.' This means that the city of Albany was founded a little earlier than the city of New York, for only eight of the New Netherland's passengers were dropped on Manhattan and apparently they were all men who lived for a time in the traders' makeshift shelters. Nor does documentary evidence support the tra- dition that some of the Walloons settled at this time on the Long Island shore and that thus the spot called by the Dutch 'T Waal-boght and now called Wallabout (the site of the Brooklyn navy-yard) obtained its name, meaning Walloon's Cove. The first recorded settlement at this spot was not planted until 1636, and the name probably meant simply 'inner harbor' or 'bend in the harbor,' as it does in the city of Amsterdam where it marks a locality of a similar kind.
Most of what is known about the New Netherland and its passengers is told in the earliest printed story of the fortunes of the province, which forms part of an Historical Account of the Memorable Events of the Years 1621 to 1632 written by Claes (Nicholas) Wassenaer, a Dutch physician. The method of dating employed in this work, which was published in annual sections each dealing with the events of the preceding twelvemonth, has led one or two writers to believe that the year 1624, not 1623, saw the first planting of New Nether- land. But they have overlooked Wassenaer's express state- ment at the end of the section compiled in 1624 that the description of this planting would be 'related in the com- mencement' of the part next to follow as there was not room for it in the part in hand. Moreover, while it is certain that Jesse De Forest went to South America in the summer of 1623, it is unlikely that he departed before his recruits for New Netherland embarked. The evidence of one of these recruits, Catelina Trico, preserved in an affidavit made before Governor Dongan of New York in 1685, when she was a very old woman, has no value, for she could not then remember whether she had arrived in 1623 or 1624. In another deposi-
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THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
tion, made in 1688, she said that she came in 1623 but mis- called the ship that brought her. All official documents written by the Dutch, in the province or in the fatherland, which mention the voyage of the New Netherland refer it to 1623; and so does a Memorial laid before the West India Company in 1633 by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer who had been a member of the Amsterdam Chamber and during many years was more actively concerned than any other individual in the peopling of the province.
Thus it was mixed seed that first was sown in the American province which was to be conspicuous always for its cosmo- politan character.
The Walloons were a people of Celtic blood descended from the Belga of Caesar's time, akin to a large part of the Dutch people but speaking an old French dialect and occupying the provinces of Artois and Hainault which now form the north- western part of Belgium and the northern corner of France. These two provinces, in which Avennes and Valenciennes were the principal towns, had joined with the Dutch and Flemish Netherlands in their revolt against Spain; but as they were difficult of defence and their population was pre- dominantly Catholic, they had been the first to return to their allegiance. Then their Protestant inhabitants moved in large numbers into the Dutch provinces. They supplied several brigades to the armies of the Republic and some of them, it seems, took part in the earliest American ventures of its sons, for Champlain, writing home in 1615 about certain 'Flemings' who were trafficking near the fortieth degree of latitude, said that three who had been captured by Canadian Indians were returned to their friends as their speech proved them to be Frenchmen.
Walloons, however, formed only one element in the hetero- geneous population from which New Netherland was to draw its settlers. In the corner of Europe where the Dutch, Flemish, French, and German provinces approached each other, native strains of blood were mixed and political affini-
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
ties had often changed; and this natural complexity was in- creased by the waves of Protestant immigration which, directing themselves chiefly toward the Dutch provinces but eddying over a much wider area, flowed in from England and Scotland, from the northern and western parts of France, and, after the Thirty Years' War began in 1618, from Bohemia, the Palatinate, and the central parts of Germany. From the people of these border lands, from the many kinds of for- eigners who had found asylum in the Republic itself, and from their half-Hollandized children as well as from the pure Dutch and Flemish stocks, the colonists of New Netherland were year by year recruited while the Scandinavian countries also sent it their quota. Its settlement did not bear witness, like the settlement of New England, to the discontent of men of a single land with their home conditions but to a much wider agitation, to the general unrest produced by the great European struggle between Protestantism and Catholi- cism.
Many of the founders of New Netherland were bilingual; family names were hardly used as yet by the middle and lower classes from which all but a scanty few of them came; such as did exist were written as any writer chose; and fami- lies of different origin were constantly intermarrying. There- fore, even when the immediate parentage and the place of birth of one of these founders is known it is often impossible to pronounce upon his nationality. It is lawful, however, to speak of them collectively as Hollanders, for as Hollanders they came to America, and in America they still considered themselves sons of the Dutch Republic.
By the end of the year 1623 these Hollanders, in planting their trading posts and little settlements, had dropped the first seeds of civilization on the soil of what afterwards be- came five of the Thirteen Colonies - New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware - and in the first two had laid the foundations of enduring communities. The English plantation in Virginia was then thirteen years old and the one at Plymouth was three years old while tentative
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