USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 9
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plentiful possession. Moreover, they were not dispossessed of their island but were only pledged, like tenants-at-will, to yield from time to time such portions of it as the white men might need - if, indeed, many of them used Manhattan as an actual abiding-place. Here and there on the island sites of Indian villages have been somewhat doubtfully identified; for the most part it seems to have been unin- habited although constantly frequented by the savages who lived on the neighboring shores. Of course Minuit gave, instead of useless money, articles that had an immense value in the Indians' eyes. Their character may be guessed from a list of the things paid seven years later for an extensive tract in the Connecticut Valley :
One piece of duffels twenty-seven ells long; six axes, six kettles, eighteen knives, one sword-blade, one shears, and some toys.
In after days such purchase lists included a greater variety of articles - needles, for instance, combs, petticoats, boxes, looking-glasses, pipes and tobacco, fishing hooks, jews'-harps, and small bells reckoned by the hundred.
At the time when Manhattan was bought the first building of which any authentic record remains was begun, the building that gave its name to the nascent town. 'A fort was staked out,' says Wassenaer, by 'Master Kryn Frederycke, an engineer'; it was to be 'of large dimensions' and to be called 'Amsterdam'; it was to have 'four points' and to be faced outside entirely with stone 'as the walls of earth fall down.'
The Hollanders now understood that while Fort Orange must be the headquarters for their traffic with the savages some spot on the great harbor must be their depot for trans- atlantic intercourse and the administrative centre of the province. The very best spot they could have chosen was the southern end of Manhattan. It commanded the mouth of the river and supplied a vantage-point whence a watchful eye could sweep the whole circuit of the harbor down to its
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far-off ocean gateway. It was low, not thickly wooded, and broken by beaches and little inlets where vessels could easily unload. So here the walls of the fort began to rise, and the rude cabins clustered which housed the settlers for a while.
It needs a lively effort of the imagination to reconstruct the aboriginal aspect of an island which the hand of man has so radically transformed - denuding, draining, and blasting it, raising its surfaces in many places and lowering them in others, to fit it for the enormous burden of iron, brick, and stone that it supports to-day.
Everywhere, in 1626, the surface of Manhattan was undulat- ing or much more abruptly broken into heights, valleys, and swamps. Beyond its southern end, which was then much narrower than it is now, lay low wooded hills and grassy vales dotted with many ponds, the largest of them spreading its clear deep waters over and around the spot where the Tombs prison now stands. The Dutch called this beautiful sheet of water the Kalck Hoek (Chalk Point) Pond because of the great heaps of shells accumulated by the Indians on its shore. Corrupting this term, the later-coming English said Collect Pond. A little isle rested on the bosom of the pond and green hills encircled it. For generations it was a favorite resort for pleasure seekers, fishermen, sportsmen, and skaters; and on its waters Fitch experimented with his steamboat in 1796 and 1797. Gradually its beauty and its usefulness waned; it became unsightly and unwholesome, and early in the nineteenth century it was drained and filled in.
Fed by perennial springs, the Kalck Hoek Pond discharged its overflow into both rivers - into the East River by a stream which the Dutch called the Fresh Water (a term applied by the English to the pond itself) and into the North River by the one which in modern times gave Canal Street its name. This longer rivulet connected the pond with a great marsh seventy acres in extent; just north of it lay two smaller ponds; and, joining with these, other marshes, pools, and brooks formed a continuous chain of watery places from the point where James Street now meets the East
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River to the one where Canal Street meets the Hudson. By means of these tortuous little channels the Indians often approached New Amsterdam when they came in their canoes to trade.
Hills were interspersed among these waters. One that was high enough to afford a fine view of all the lower part of the island rose where Grand Street now intersects Broadway. Beyond, there were sandhills toward the northwest, and a stream, called Bestavaar's Killtje (Rivulet), Minitie Water, or Minetta Brook, which drained another marshland lying where Washington Square lies now. North of this point the ridges of rock grew apparent which form a backbone for the island, like the keel of a very long and narrow inverted boat, and have determined where the principal north-and-south streets of the modern city should run. Here were higher hills, dense forests, and many little watercourses winding among rough ledges. A reach of low flatland formed the northeastern corner of the island. It was flanked toward the west by precipitous cliffs and the table-land, in some places two hundred feet above the Hudson, which grew famous in Revolutionary times as Harlem Heights and is crowned to- day by Morningside Park, the Episcopal cathedral, and the buildings of Columbia University. All the narrow elongated northwesterly end of the island was likewise high and rocky and densely wooded.
Soon after Minuit's arrival the colonists sent to the South River were brought back to Fort Amsterdam; and as the director at Fort Orange had foolishly embroiled himself in a war between the Mohawks and Mohegans, losing his own life thereby, all the families were brought down from this place in order, says Wassenaer, to strengthen the colony 'near the Manates who were becoming more and more accustomed to the strangers.' Sixteen fur-traders remained at Fort Orange, and on the South River a single vessel.
Minuit had brought a band of settlers from Holland, and more colonists must soon have followed for in 1628, says
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Wassenaer, the people at Fort Amsterdam numbered two hundred and seventy. It was then the largest settlement in the northern parts of America except Plymouth which by 1626 had three hundred inhabitants. By 1620 about five thousand persons had been carried to Virginia, and in 1626 twelve hundred and seventy-five were counted there, but only one hundred and eighty-two of them were gathered together at Jamestown. The French post which in 1608 Champlain had founded and named Quebec contained only one hundred and five, almost at the point of starvation.
The settlers at Fort Amsterdam, says Wassenaer, mostly lived by farming, and the West India Company supplied, at a price of course, the needs they could not meet by their own labor. Of the town he writes:
The counting house there is kept in a stone building thatched with reed; the other houses are of the bark of trees. Each has his own house. The Director and Koopman live together; there are thirty ordinary houses on the east side of the river which runs nearly north and south. . . . Men work there as in Holland; one trades upward, southward, and northward; another builds houses, and a third farms. The houses of the Hollanders now stand without the fort, but when it is completed they will all repair within so as to garrison it and be secure from sudden attack.
Before long the director-general and some of the other officials did move into houses within the walls of the fort, but the rest of the settlers did not because, as we read on another page, the natives lived 'peaceably' with them. The houses of the settlers were not, as Wassenaer's statement may seem to mean, on the eastern bank of the Hudson. East- ward of the fort they stretched along the shore of the East River where it met the harbor, forming a little street which, although now greatly lengthened, still keeps one of its original names, Pearl Street (Perel Straet). It was also called the Strand, but it is now well removed from the docks and wharves. Water, Front, and South Streets have been laid out beyond it upon reclaimed land, as Washington and West Streets have been added along the North River Shore.
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Houses 'of the bark of trees' were adaptations of Indian cabins or were built after a fashion described in later years by Cornelis Van Tienhoven, then the secretary of the province - with floors sunken for the sake of warmth some feet below the level of the ground and laid with planks, plank walls sheathed inside with bark, and a roof of beams covered with bark or sods. In houses of this sort, which Van Tienhoven describes as even more common in New England than in New Netherland, families could live 'dry and warm for two, three, and four years.' They were, indeed, better dwellings than the caves and the cabins of mud in which, in England as well as on the continent of Europe, many peasants were still compelled to live.
The fort, which was not finished until almost ten years had gone by, was about three hundred by two hundred and fifty feet in diameter and stood at the extremity of the island between the Bridge, Whitehall, and State streets and the Bowling Green of to-day, overlooking a reef of rocks which at a later time was filled in, extended, fortified, and called the Battery. The new Custom House stands upon its site, now at some distance from the shore. Its sally-port, guarded by a small redoubt or horn, opened toward the north on the Bowling Green which for generations was an unadorned space called the Plain and used for military exercises, for markets, and for public gatherings. Long the centre and focus of local life it is now a little green oasis in the business district of the city.
A windmill to grind grain for the Company's employees stood close to the fort. One for general use upon the pay- ment of fees to the Company stood north of the Plain on the present line of Broadway, then an Indian path. The upper floor of the Company's counting-house was a storage place for furs; the lower held the supplies that it sold to the people. This was Manhattan's first 'general store.'
At the other end of the rudimentary street which began at the fort a dock was built by the mouth of a small creek that offered good facilities for the discharge of cargoes. Thus
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the commercial centre of the town was established; and it has never shifted its place, for the Broad Street of to-day, where the Stock Exchange stands, follows the course of the creek which the Dutchmen soon turned into a canal. Beaver Street got its name from a little branch of the creek called Beaver Canal.
While the people were awaiting a clergyman, says Was- senaer, two 'comforters of the sick' read to them on Sundays 'from texts of Scripture with the creed.' One Francis Molemaecker was busy building a horse-mill; over it was to be 'a spacious room sufficient to accommodate a large congregation,' and on it a tower 'where the bells brought from Porto Rico' would be hung. This is one of the very few touches of picturesqueness in the early accounts of Man- hattan - this mention of church bells that were evidently military trophies also, captured from the Spaniards in 1625 at Porto Rico where the same flag now flies that flies on Man- hattan. Comforters or visitors of the sick were, among the Dutch, authorized helpers of the clergy who did missionary work when a minister was not available and were commonly schoolmasters also.
An undated letter about the affairs of New Netherland written by Secretary De Rasières is to be attributed to the year 1628 when he had returned to Holland. Addressed to Samuel Blommaert, a member of the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company who seems to have been De Rasières' special patron, it says that Manhattan was inhabited by 'the old Manhatesen . .. about two hundred to three hundred strong, women and men,' and explains that although it was 'full of trees and in the middle rocky' in several places there was very good land to be tilled without much clearing. Six farms, four of which lay 'along the River Hellegat stretching to the south side of the island,' contained at least one hundred and twenty acres ready to be sown with winter seed, and 'at the most' had been ploughed eight times.
These six farms or 'bouweries' belonged to the West India Company. On the western shore of the island, extending
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from the fort to the present site of Trinity Church, lay the Company's garden and beyond it, as far as the Duane Street of to-day, stretched what was called its Bouwerie No. 1, reserved for the support of its officials and workmen. This, called successively in English times the Duke's Farm, the King's Farm, and when Queen Anne was on the throne the Queen's Farm, formed part of the broad tract that has since grown famous as the property of Trinity Church. Farther north another large bouwerie named the Bossen Bouwerie or Farm in the Forest, occupied the fertile tract on the shores of the North River, called by the Indians Sapponikan, where the village of Greenwich afterwards grew up.
The other farms, also prepared for cultivation by the ser- vants of the West India Company, were leased to individuals on terms which are explained in a petition addressed to the Amsterdam Chamber by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer in 1634 when he had himself planted a colony far up the North River. Speaking of contracts signed in 1630 he says that the Company leased to each farmer for a term of six years and for a rent which he does not specify 'a suitable farmstead provided with house, barn and granary with about fifty morgens' (one hun- dred acres) of land, and that for 600 guilders to be paid in six instalments it sold to each four horses and four cows with their foals and calves, two heifers, six sheep, six pigs, and 'wagons, ploughs, and the like implements.'
Thus the settlement on Manhattan was not a colony as we now understand the term - primarily a settlement of men; it was in the strict sense a colonial plantation - an invest- ment of capital. It was established and nurtured not for its own sake but for the sake of a European trading company. No settler had as yet a personal title, formal or informal, to a foot of land and none traded over seas for his personal account.
Other descriptions of New Netherland besides the one in Wassenaer's general history were now getting into print and exciting a practical interest in the province. Possibly the
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most important of them was written with this end in view - the New World of Johan De Laet, published in 1625 and con- taining nine pages about the Dutch province - for De Laet was a member of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company. It said little of the colonists but described the country and the aborigines at length, quoting Hudson's journal and, it may be assumed, also making use of the reports drawn up by Block, Christiaensen, and Mey. It was in 1625 also that Juet's log of the Half Moon's voyage was printed in England. In 1630 a second edition of De Laet's book appeared with the first map of New Netherland that is known to have been printed, a map entitled Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium et Virginia. In preparing this the Figurative Maps may have been used, although there are many divergencies, and also one called Jacobsen's Map, drawn in 1621, which showed little more than the coast-lines. De Laet's gives their names to the North, South, and Fresh rivers, Hellegat, and Block's Island, locates the Manhattes on Manhattan Island and the western shore of the Hudson, and calls the town on the isl- and not Fort Amsterdam but New Amsterdam - the ear- liest known use of this name. Fort Amsterdam continued to be the official designation of the seat of the provincial government while the town was New Amsterdam or Am- sterdam in New Netherland. De Laet's map formed the basis of many others included in atlases published in later years.
More interesting than anything printed in Europe at this time are two letters written on Manhattan by the first clergy- man sent to the province, Jonas Michaelius. Fortunately preserved in the original manuscript, they are the earliest autograph papers of any kind written in the province that are known to exist.
Domine Michaelius - to use the Dutch title for a clergy- man, still often used in New York - had ministered to con- gregations in Holland, Brazil, and Guiana before the classis of Amsterdam, at the request of the West India Company, sent him to Manhattan for a term of three years. With his
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wife and three little children he sailed from the Texel on Janu- ary 7, 1628, coming by way of Bermuda and arriving on April 7. The first of his letters was addressed to Johannes Foreest of Hoorn, a man of patrician birth who was secretary to the executive council of the provincial States of North Holland and West Friesland and a member of the West India Company. Preserved by Foreest's descendants but forgotten until their books and papers were sold in 1902, it was then bought by an American collector and was published with a translation in 1904. It is dated August 8, 1628, 'From the Island of the Manhates in New Netherland.' The voyage from the fatherland, it says, had been 'difficult and perilous' and the treatment of the passengers 'rather severe and mean,' the cook being 'very wicked and ungodly' and the skipper 'as unmannerly as a buffalo.' The clergyman's wife suffered greatly and died five weeks after her arrival, which was the more to be deplored as both she and her hus-
band were 'well pleased with the country.' Manhattan was somewhat less fertile than other places and was trouble- some to till on account of 'the multitude of roots of shrubs and trees.' Food was scarce and dear, but ten or twelve more farmers 'with cattle and land in proportion' would have sufficed to help the settlers out of 'all difficulties.' The people were building new houses in place of the 'hovels and holes' in which they had 'huddled rather than dwelt.' They were cutting wood and erecting a sawmill so as to ex- port to the fatherland 'whole cargoes of timber fit for build- ing houses and ships.' Sawmills driven by the wind, it may be noted, were as yet unknown among the English. Vines that Foreest had given Michaelius had been planted and had sprouted; 'nut trees and currants' had failed to take root. In return for these gifts Michaelius was sending home, to be turned by a silversmith into the shanks of spoons, certain little bones of the beaver which the Indian women wore 'as finery and ornament.' Other parts of the letter are repeated in a more detailed and informing fashion in the clergyman's second epistle, written only three days later, on August 11
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which was discovered in Holland in 1858 and is now in the New York Public Library.
This, addressed not to a social superior but to a fellow- clergyman, the Reverend Adrianus Smoutius, is more inter- esting because more free and intimate in tone. It gives Michaelius's opinion of those 'devilish men' the aborigines, and of their manners, customs, and language. It says that by the death of his wife he was greatly 'hindered and distressed' as his daughters were yet small, white maid- servants were not to be had, at least none whom he was advised to employ, and the 'Angola slaves' - negresses fresh from Africa - were 'thievish, lazy, and useless trash.' He was not satisfied with the way the Company had treated him:
The promise which the Honorable Directors of the Company had made me of some acres or surveyed lands for me to make myself a home, instead of a free table which otherwise belonged to me, is void and useless; for their Honors well know that there are no horses, cows, or laborers to be obtained here for money. . . So I shall be compelled to pass through the winter without butter and other neces- saries which the ships did not bring out with them to be sold here. The rations which are given out, and charged for high enough, are all hard, stale food as they are used to on board ship, and frequently not very good; and even so one cannot obtain as much as he desires. . . . In consequence of this hard fare of beans and gray peas, which are hard enough, barley, stock-fish etc., without much change, I cannot fully recuperate as I otherwise should. The summer yields something, but what of that for one who has no strength? The savages also bring some things, but one who has no wares, such as knives, beads, and the like, or seawan, cannot come to any terms with them. . . . I have now ordered from Holland most all necessaries, but I expect to pass through the winter with hard and scanty food. The country yields many things for the support of life but they are all too unfit and wild to be gathered .. .
Coarse fare, no doubt, but it would have seemed luxury indeed to the starving Pilgrims at Plymouth during their first winter when they were thankful for meals of shell-fish and water. More cheerfully Michaelius continues :
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. As to the waters both of the sea and rivers they yield all kinds . of fish; and as to the land it abounds in all kinds of game, wild and in the groves, with vegetables, fruits, roots, herbs, and plants both for eating and medicinal purposes, working wonderful cures. . . The country is good and pleasant and the climate is healthy notwith- standing the sudden changes of cold and heat. The sun is very warm ; the winter is strong and severe and continues full as long as in our country. The best remedy is not to spare the wood, of which there is enough, and to cover oneself with rough skins which can also easily be obtained. ... Until now there has been distress because many of the people were not very industrious and also did not obtain proper sustenance for want of bread and other necessaries. But affairs are beginning to put on a better appearance, if only the directors will send out good laborers and exercise all care that they be maintained as well as possible with what this country produces.
A humble and prosaic little outpost in the wilderness was Governor Minuit's New Amsterdam. Its inhabitants, Domine Michaelius bears witness, were 'good people,' but they were 'for the most part simple' and had had 'little experience in public affairs.' There was no thought as yet of political rights in any shape, and no talk, like the Reverend John Robinson's, of the propagation of 'pure' forms of faith. Yet the pastor tells that he had formed a congregation and at the first service had had 'fully fifty communicants . . . Walloons and Dutch,' a goodly number in a community of less than three hundred souls. The Walloons, he explains, understood but little Dutch so he administered the Lord's Supper to them in French and read them a French sermon. One of the comforters of the sick who had preceded him, Bastiaen Janssen Crol, or Krol, had been sent to Fort Orange. as director of that post; the other, Jan Huyck, or Huyckens, Governor Minuit's brother-in-law, was the West India Com- pany's storekeeper. Both served as elders in the church organization that Michaelius at once effected, and so did the governor himself who had held a similar position in the French or Walloon church at Wesel. The little consistory that thus took shape is still alive - the consistory of the Collegiate Church of the City of New York. The communion
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of which it formed the corner-stone, called in early English times the Reformed Dutch Church in New York, after- wards the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in America, or in popular parlance the Dutch Reformed Church, unfortu- nately saw fit to strike the 'Dutch' from its name in 1867. It is the oldest communion in the Western world that repre- sents the Presbyterian branch of Protestantism. Its bap- tismal and other records as now preserved begin with the year 1639.
The first of its pastors, it may be noticed, spoke the earliest recorded words which foreshadow, dimly though it be, the most radical reform that the North American colonies were destined to work in the world-old art of government - the separation of church and state. In his second letter Michael- ius said :
And although our small consistory embraces at the most . . . not more than four persons all of whom, myself alone excepted, have also public business to attend to, I still hope to separate carefully the ecclesiastical from the civil matters which occur, so that each one will be occupied with his own subject. And though many things are still mixti generis, and political and ecclesiastical persons can greatly assist each other, nevertheless, the matters and offices belonging together must not be mixed but be kept separate in order to prevent confusion and disorder.
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