USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 8
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46
61
THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
deer's hair dyed red, and their polychrome coats of paint, they coveted the Dutchman's blankets, his coats, his hats, and even his lace-trimmed shirts. More than any of these they wanted his guns and powder and rum; and at first the Dutchmen were very ready to give them rum at least, for it showed 'whether they had any treachery in them.'
Although simple barter was of course the first method of exchange the Dutch quickly learned to use the Indians' money, wampum, which consisted of beads of two colors, called white and black but more precisely straw-color and a fine purple. The white were made from periwinkle shells, the black, which were twice as valuable, from the dark spot at the base of the shells of the clam. Both kinds were about as thick as a straw and less than half an inch in length. Smal- ler beads, although not used as money, were employed in ornamental work. This, however, bore no likeness to the beadwork that the modern Indian produces with little, round, varicolored beads of the white man's manufacture.
Labor gave wampum its worth in the eyes of the savage. With primitive stone awls the beads were shaped symmetri- cally, drilled, and polished. For use as currency they were strung on deer sinews or strands of fibre and then measured by the span or cubit. But 'belts' or scarves a few inches in width and sometimes ten feet in length were formed of these strands applied to strips of deerskin, often in hiero- glyphic patterns that had a mnemonic meaning. Thus gain- ing a symbolic or historic in addition to their pecuniary and decorative value, wampum belts were worn as ornaments by both sexes and as regalia by the sachems, were treasured as reserves of wealth, and were used for the gifts needed to ratify all formal dealings among the savages themselves or between them and the white men. Wampum, in short, was a useful commodity as well as a currency. In one form or another it was the Indian's substitute for the European's money, plate, jewellery, works of art, written records, and in- signia of rank and power. The tribes of the eastern coast of New England, who did not manufacture it, were poor and
62
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
feeble compared with those that did. It was produced chiefly around Narragansett Bay and at Oyster Bay and more easterly places on Long Island. From these sources it passed in great quantities up River Mauritius, for the Mohawks learned to exact it as tribute from the Algonquin tribes. While the English called it wampum, an Indian name for the white beads, the Dutch, adopting a more generic term, said zeewant or sewan. The most common Indian name for Long Island, Matowack, meant Land of the Peri- winkle; another, Seawanhacky, meant Land of Wampum, and a third, Paumanack, Land of Tribute.
The utility of the beads to the white man was based, of course, upon their value to the Indian who would seldom barter his corn and furs even for the European goods he most desired unless a payment in wampum was added. But in the dearth of small coin that afflicted all New World settlements wampum, throughout the northern colonies, soon passed cur- rent between white man and white, a certain number of beads being reckoned as a stiver or penny. Then value was usually computed not by measuring the strands but by counting the beads. Erelong this money was recognized as legal tender in New Netherland and New England, and in 1634 it was indorsed as such by the West India Company for use in its province. In Massachusetts it was not accepted for taxes after 1649, in Rhode Island it ceased to be legal tender in 1662, but in New York it did not wholly lose this character until after the beginning of the eighteenth century and was used in dealings with the remoter Indians for a much longer time. Even in our own day it has been manufactured on Staten Island for export to the West. Beaver skins, the main articles of internal traffic and of export during Dutch times, formed a standard of value according to which from time to time the government of New Netherland tried to regulate the worth of the beads; and so it is easy to see how the price of furs at Archangel might influence the fluctuations of clam-shell money on Manhattan. Of course the beads themselves were never sent to Europe.
- -
--
63
THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
In general the Dutchmen tried to treat the Indians well. By nature they were more gentle than the Puritan English- man; they did not share his hatred and contempt for aliens and heathen; and they were more strongly inclined by their special needs to a friendly policy. They depended more than the New Englander upon the trade in furs; and even while these were abundant in places close at hand they could be much more easily obtained by bargaining with native hunters and trappers than by personal quest in tangled forests and rapid streams. Therefore the Dutchmen conciliated the savages as middlemen between themselves and the beaver, and also as the only persons from whom, until they had wide cultivated fields of their own, they could supply themselves with food. In after years a Long Island sachem declared that the gifts of his people saved Adriaen Block and his men from starvation while they were building the Restless. Prob- ably many an early trader baffled death by the aid of similar ministrations. On the other hand, many must have met with a fate like John Colman's. One such unfortunate was Hendrick Christiaensen. Soon after he built the first Dutch trading post he was murdered by one of the Indians whom he had taken to Holland and afterwards brought back to their tribe.
In theory at least the Hollander considered the Indian a man like himself with analogous rights to his life, liberty, and possessions. The West India Company repeatedly pre- scribed that all lands taken by its settlers should be paid for to their owners' satisfaction and that the bargain should be formally ratified and recorded; Indians were not enslaved in New Netherland; and negotiation, not war, was the cus- tomary method of securing peace with the red man.
Peace was not always kept in New Netherland and, even in times of peace, by no means every Dutchman was kindly and righteous in his dealings with the savage. The settler's greed for furs, and afterwards for land, could best be gratified by quenching the red man's insatiable thirst for rum; and from this kind of traffic and the equally pernicious traffic in
64
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1619-
firearms and powder sprang most of the trouble that the white men experienced. Once, indeed, as will be told, their passion and cruelty provoked an Indian uprising which almost annihilated the settlement on Manhattan. But the memory of this tragic incident has too darkly colored most modern accounts of the Dutchmen's treatment of the aborigines. The governor, not the people, of New Netherland was chiefly responsible for it, and it was not a characteristic but an exceptional episode.
In spite of all official lapses and individual transgressions, savage rights, customs, and susceptibilities were respected in the Dutch province more generally than in New England, not to speak of Virginia where the Indians were never well treated and were constantly troublesome. The initial danger was greater in the Dutch province than on the New England coast which had so recently been swept by epidemic diseases that the settlers had time to grow numerous before, as they pressed westward into the Connecticut Valley, their Indian difficulties began. New Netherland was not only much more populous with red men but was also a borderland where the fierce, am- bitious Iroquois were in conflict with their hereditary Algon- quin foes, where the Mohawks especially were often in arms for years against the Algonquin Mohegans (Mohicans, May- kans, Mahicanders) who occupied both banks of River Mau- ritius in the neighborhood of Fort Orange. Yet neither as New Netherland nor as New York did the Dutchmen's prov- ince see all its Indians arrayed against it; it never thought it needful to sanction for the sake of its own safety such a measure as the officially permitted murder of Miantonomi; and from first to last, until the Revolutionary War broke out, it kept the powerful, irascible Iroquois as its friends and allies.
They often wavered in their fealty to the rulers of New York but they never renounced it in answer to the constant threats and solicitations of the French; and it dated from the early days of the Dutch. The tradition that in the year 1616 by the mouth of Norman's Kill certain Dutch fur-traders
65
THE BIRTH OF THE PROVINCE
1624]
smoked the pipe of peace with the sachems of the Mohawks and of some of the semi-subject Algonquin tribes is possibly a fable. Yet in spirit if not in fact it is true, for at the very first, formally or informally, the Dutch inaugurated that amicable method of dealing with the aborigines - showing a regard for their rights, a desire for their friendship, and a willingness to trust their promises - which in after years served to prevent the French from sweeping down by way of Lake Champlain and Hudson's River to the coast, and thus saved for the English their pivot province and in the end made possible their conquest of Canada.
VOL. I. - F
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS : Col. Docs., I, III (398) ; Cal. S. P. Col., 1574-1660, and 1675, 1676, Addenda, 1574-1674 (485).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES: Wassenaer, Historisch Verhael (216) ; De
Laet, Nieuwe Wereldt (427) ; O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Nether- land, I (382) ; Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405).
DERMER : his LETTER in Purchas, Pilgrims (449), and in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1841 (214). - Gorges, Brief Narration (365) ; Anon., A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Planting of New Eng- land (362) ; Baxter, Sir Ferdinando Gorges (205) ; Murphy, Ap- pendix to his Voyages of De Vries (527). - "MR. DIMMER'S REPORT": Brown, Genesis of the United States (202).
CORRESPONDENCE OF THE PRIVY COUNCIL WITH CARLETON : Col. Docs., III.
SEAL OF NEW NETHERLAND : Great Seals of New Netherland and New York (468) ; Werner, New York Civil List (129).
JESSE DE FOREST AND THE FIRST IMMIGRANTS : Col. Docs., III; Cal. S. P. Col., 1574-1660; Baird, Huguenot Emigration to America [with facsimile of the petition and the round-robin] (229) ; De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes and of New Netherland (150); Riker, Harlem (209) ; Edmundson, The Dutch on the Amazon and Negro (165) ; Burr, The Guiana Boundary in Amer. Hist. Review, VI (52) ; Jesse Des Forests, Journal [Mss.] (151).
LETTER FROM THE BONNIE BESS: quoted from original in Duke of Manchester's Kimbolton Mss. in Wilson, ed., Centennial History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in . . . New York, N.Y., 1886. WALLABOUT: Stiles, Hist. of Brooklyn (293).
DEPOSITIONS OF CATALINA TRICO : in Doc. Hist., III (397). - Stiles, Hist. of Brooklyn, I, Appendix.
MEMORIAL OF KILIAEN. VAN RENSSELAER: in Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (513).
CASE OF THE CORPORATION OF NEW ENGLAND: in Clarendon Papers (101).
PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NEW YORK STATE: Cadwallader Colden, Observa- tions on the Situation . . . of the Province of New York (470) ; Shaler, Nature and Man in America (344), and Physiography of
66
67
REFERENCE NOTES
North America (436) ; Macauley, Natural, Statistical, and Civil Hist. of New York (410) ; Semple, American History and its Geo- graphic Conditions (203) ; Hulbert, Indian Thoroughfares (238), and Portage Paths (445) ; Reid, The Mohawk Valley (324).
NOMENCLATURE : Cooper, The Hudson River (339) ; Tooker, Origin of the Name Manhattan (330), Indian Names and Places in the Borough of Brooklyn (336), and Indian Names for Long Island (333); Thompson, Indian Names of Long Island (335) ; Beau- champ, Indian Names in New York (334) ; Schoolcraft, Aboriginal Names . . . of the State of New York (331) ; Benson, Memoir on Names (337). - AUGUSTINE HERRMAN (quoted) : Vindication of the Dutch Title to the Delaware River in Col. Docs., II. - "MAN- HATTAN ISLAND": Mines, A Tour around New York (393).
ABORIGINES : Jesuit Relations (248) ; Megapolensis, Mahakuase Indi- anen (323) ; Colden, Hist. of the Five Indian Nations (188) ; Beauchamp, The New York Iroquois (240), and Aboriginal Occu- pation of New York (38) ; Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (241) ; Ruttenber, Indian Tribes of Hudson's River (239) ; Simms, Frontiersmen of New York (194) ; Halsey, Old New York Frontier (195); Parkman, Conspiracy of Pontiac (126), Pioneers of France in the New World (191), and Introduction to Jesuits in North America (191) ; Donaldson, The Six Nations of New York (471) ; Ellis, The Red Indian of North America in Narr. and Crit. Hist., I (49) ; Squier, Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York (37).
WAMPUM: Roger Williams, Key into the Languages of America (267) ; Weeden, Indian Money and New England Civilization (235), and Economic and Social History of New England (168) ; Woodward, Wampum (533) ; Yates and Moulton, Hist. of New York, I (406) ; Anon., The Currency in New Amsterdam (148) ; Notes to Fur- man's ed. of Denton, Brief Description of New York (389).
For ENGLISH SEPARATISTS, WEST INDIA COMPANY, VERRAZANO, HUD- SON, JUET, and MAPS, see Reference Notes, Chap. I.
CHAPTER III
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1624-1631 (GOVERNOR MINUIT)
After these countries had passed into the hands of the Incorporated West India Company ... said Company purchased from the Ind- ians, who were the indubitable owners thereof, the island of the Manhathes, situate at the entrance of the river, and there laid the foundations of a city. - The West India Company to the States Gen- eral of the United Netherlands. 1634.
IN 1624 a Dutch writer named Baudartius quoted in a his- tory of the remarkable events of recent years a letter from New Netherland, the earliest of which any words are now remembered :
Here is especially free coming and going without fear of the naked natives of the country. . .. Had we cows, hogs, and other cattle for food (which we daily expect by the first ships) we would not wish to return to Holland, for whatever we desire in the paradise of Holland is here to be found. If you will come hither with your family you will not regret it.
These first settlers, farmers and artisans brought to the New World from a land that under long cultivation had acquired a semi-artificial, garden-like character, had to learn how to make use of the wealth of wild lands and woods for food. And they had to learn how to grow food where the freaks of an unfamiliar and uncertain climate must often have thwarted them and where the soil was encumbered by virgin forests in which, as they once naïvely wrote, the trees
68
69
1624-1631] THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
grew 'without order as in any other wilderness.' Yet the first letters they sent home were so cheerful and hopeful that, says Baudartius, many persons among those of foreign origin who had been forced to take refuge in Holland now resolved to emigrate
. . . in the hope of earning a handsome livelihood, strongly fancy- ing that they will live there in luxury and ease whilst here, on the contrary, they must earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.
The yacht Mackerel, soon sent out again by the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company with a cargo of 'neces- saries' for its settlers, fell a prey to privateers. Then one of the directors, Pieter Evertsen Hulft, fitted out three ships at his own expense, and the Company supplied an armed yacht as their convoy. Two of them carried farming imple- ments and seed with swine, sheep, and more than a hundred head of horses and cattle, some for breeding purposes. In the third ship, says Wassenaer's account of this year 1625, there went to Manhattan
. . . six complete families with some freemen, so that forty-five newcomers or inhabitants are taken out to remain there.
With the coming of this party 'to remain there' founda- tions for the city of New York were laid. It was then nearly five years since the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth, one year since they had received their first consignment of cattle from England.
The first white woman born in New Netherland - Sarah Rapelye, as the family name is now most often written - was born on June 9, 1625. She was the daughter of the Joris Jansen Rapelje, supposedly a Walloon, and his wife, Catelina Trico the Parisian, who had come with the first band of immi- grants on the ship New Netherland. Her birth is the first entered on a family register unquestionably authentic although not written by either of her parents. Like Sarah herself they never learned to write, signing their names with marks. The
70
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
register does not mention the place of Sarah's birth, but the depositions made by the mother in later years say that for three years after her arrival she lived at Fort Orange, and there undoubtedly her eldest child was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to Staten Island, then to New Amsterdam where Rapelye kept an inn, and later to Wallabout on Long Island. Sarah was twice married - first to a ship-carpenter, Hans Hansen Bergen, whose surname denotes his place of birth in Norway, and secondly to Teunis Gysbert Bogert. Her father's and also her husbands' surnames are still well known in New York and Brooklyn. A silver tankard that she owned is preserved by her descendants. In 1656, in a petition asking for a grant of land, she described herself as the 'first-born Christian daughter in New Netherland.' She did not say the first-born white child. The eldest white son of the province, the first white child born on Manhattan, was probably her senior.
His name was Jean Vigne or, in the spelling of the Dutch, Jan Vinje, Vinge, or occasionally Vienje, Finje, or Van Gee. His parents, Guleyn (William) Vigne and Adrienne Cuville, were Walloons from Valenciennes. The year of his birth is not known. Two Dutch travellers, remem- bered as the Labadist Fathers, who visited Manhattan in 1679 wrote that they had seen this oldest white native, and that he was about sixty-five years of age. It is hardly need- ful, however, to assume on such casual testimony from travellers who proved themselves at many points inaccurate observers that Jan Vinje was born in 1614 - that there was even one white woman on Manhattan as early as the year when Adriaen Block was building the Restless. Moreover, had their guess been accurate Jan Vinje would have been eighteen years of age in 1632 when his mother married a second time, whereas a prenuptial contract shows that he was still a child for whose schooling she and the stepfather promised to care. Yet it is probable that his birth antedated that of the town where, as long as the Dutch were in control, he took an active although not very prominent part in public affairs. He died in 1689 leaving no descendants.
---
71
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
These were not the first infants of pure white blood born within the limits of the Thirteen Colonies. Virginia Dare was born about 1587 in Raleigh's unlucky settlement on Roanoke Sound, Peregrine White in 1620 on the Mayflower while it lay off the point of Cape Cod, and the first-born Christian daughter of New England, the child of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, at Plymouth in 1624.
Willem Verhulst succeeded Cornelis Mey as the director of the nascent colony which grew a little during the year that he served. On December 19, 1625, his successor, Peter Minuit, embarked at Amsterdam in the ship Het Meewtje (The Little Sea-Mew) but was detained for nearly a month by ice in the Texel and did not reach Manhattan until May 4, 1626.
Minuit was the first director who bore a formal title - Di- rector-General of New Netherland. Other duly appointed officials came with him, and in accordance with instructions which we know only by their results he established a gov- ernment for his province. Thus he heads the long list of the governors of New Netherland and New York, although throughout Dutch times not governor but director-general was the title attached to the office.
Minuit was of French Huguenot descent but his birthplace was Wesel, a city - then in the Duchy of Cleves, now in the Rhine Province of Germany - which was a great gathering place for Protestant refugees. He probably left Wesel in 1624 when it was taken by the Spaniards. His name is now written as he himself wrote it. By virtue of the happy orthographic freedom that then prevailed his contempora- ries sometimes made it Menuet, Minuict, Minuyt, or Men- ewe, which is evidently a Dutch transliteration of its French sound, and sometimes Germanized it into Minnewit or Minnewitz.
In the government established for New Netherland, as in those of early New England, there was no separation of legis- lative, judicial, and executive powers. All were delegated
72
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1624-
by the Amsterdam Chamber to the director-general, a council of five members, a koopman, and a schout-fiscal. The coun- cillors served in a double capacity, as advisers of the governor in his executive tasks and as a court of justice over which he presided. The koopman was the Company's 'bookkeeper of wages' as well as secretary for the province. The schout- fiscal, the chief law officer of the province, was charged with such important and varied duties that he ranked next to the governor. He was both sheriff and public prosecutor; under the orders of the council he arrested, guarded, and arraigned all accused persons and superintended their trials, bringing out (of course in accordance with practice in the fatherland) the evidence for as well as against them. He transmitted accounts of all court proceedings to the West India Company, and was responsible for the publication and execution of all laws and orders issued by the local or the home authorities, and thus for the enforcement of the customs regulations and the examination of ships' cargoes. Both he and the koop- man reported not through the governor but directly to the Company - an arrangement which, encouraging meddlesome- ness in them, suspicion in the governor, did not work for official harmony.
With the councillors when they sat as the court were associated such captains of the Company's ships as might be in the port, on certain occasions some of the principal in- habitants or servants of the Company, and, in an advisory capacity, the schout-fiscal when he was not acting as prose- cutor. Appeals from the decisions of the court lay to the executive committee of the Company, the Assembly of the XIX.
Jan Lampo was the first schout-fiscal of New Netherland, Isaac De Rasières its first koopman and secretary. The names of Minuit's councillors, as appended to the earliest document now extant, dating from July, 1630, were Bylvelt, Wissinck, Brouwer, Pos, and Harmensen.
At some time during the summer of 1626 Minuit bought from the Indians the island of Manhattan. This is told in a
73
THE FOUNDING OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1631]
letter written from Amsterdam to the States General at the Hague by the delegate who represented them in the Assembly of the XIX. It is the oldest known manuscript that relates to the local history of Manhattan, and the oldest manifest of a trading vessel cleared from the port. It runs:
HIGH AND MIGHTY LORDS,
Here arrived yesterday the ship Arms of Amsterdam which on the 23d September sailed from New Netherland out of the Mauritius River. They report that our people there are of good cheer and live peaceably. Their wives have also borne children there. They have bought the island Manhattes from the savages for the value of sixty guilders. It is 11,000 morgens in extent. They had all their grain sown by the middle of May and harvested by the middle of August. They send small samples of summer grain, such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, canary seed, beans, and flax.
The cargo of the aforesaid ship is :
7246 beaver skins, 36 wildcat skins,
178 half otter skins, 33 minks,
675 otter skins,
34 rat skins,
48 mink skins, Much oak timber and nut-wood.
Herewith
High and Mighty Lords, be commended to the grace of Almighty God.
At Amsterdam, the 5th of November, Aº 1626.
Your High Mightinesses' Obedient P. SCHAGHEN.
It has sometimes been said that Minuit cheated the sav- ages, buying as they thought only a plot for a garden and then claiming the whole of the island. Schaghen's letter disproves this, and so does the record of the prices willingly accepted by the Indians elsewhere in New Netherland for great stretches of their soil. Even though money at that period was much more valuable than it is to-day, sixty guild- ers (about $24) may seem a small price for an island almost twenty-two square miles in extent - thirteen miles and a half in length and two and a half in width at the broadest part. But it would have been an absurd price for a garden plot. Land, it should be remembered, was the Indians' one
74
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.