USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 17
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Long ere this James must have understood that he would never get from his province what had been prophesied to him in 1664 - a revenue of £30,000 a year. But he still expected something and was getting less than nothing. When the frigates which had brought Andros to New York returned to England in the spring of 1675, James received payment for a cargo of 'timber and planks' to be used in the royal navy yard. Nevertheless, he said, he was more than two thousand pounds out of pocket for the expense of recovering his prov- ince. Nor had he secured the whole of it. New Jersey had managed to escape him. Massachusetts, said Andros, was claiming 'to Albany itself.' And Connecticut had of course refused to comply when in May, 1675, Andros sent it copies of the duke's new patent and his own commission to show that his boundaries extended to the Connecticut River, and asked that the neighbor colony might give speedy orders for the recognition of his Royal Highness's rights. As against the patent and the commission Connecticut cited its own patent of 1662 and its agreement with Governor Nicolls. This agreement, Andros replied, had been effected through
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an 'evident surprise,' had not been ratified in England, and in any case would have been wiped out by the duke's second patent. It would be impossible, he wrote home, for his gov- ernment to subsist without the addition of the Connecticut territory.
In June 'King Philip's War,' the fiercest of the conflicts that New England waged with its Indians, broke out in Ply- mouth Colony. John Winthrop, now near his death and no longer acting as governor of Connecticut, sent Andros the news. Early in July Andros answered that because of the Indian danger he was hastening his coming to those parts 'to take such resolutions' as might seem fitting 'upon this extraordinary occasion.' Connecticut did not want and would not take his aid. Dreading the Duke of York more than the Indians, the council of war recalled, to garrison Saybrook at the mouth of the river, a company of soldiers that it had sent toward Plymouth. The general court ordered the authorities at Saybrook to forbid Andros to land, counselled him not to molest the king's subjects, and in a formal protest denounced him as a disturber of the king's peace. Coming with three sloops and some soldiers Andros landed without opposition. An offer of the authorities to treat with him he refused, ordering that the duke's patent and his own commission be publicly read and saying that he would then depart unless asked to remain. The reply was a public read- ing of the protest of Connecticut which Andros denounced as a slander and a poor return for his proffered kindness. Satisfied for the moment with his assertion of the duke's authority, and fearing that the Indian war might spread be- yond the borders of New England, he set sail for the eastern end of Long Island and as he departed exchanged salutes with the Saybrook fort.
From Long Island he sent aid to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. On his way back to New York by land he dis- armed the island Indians and reviewed the militia. Summon- ing to Manhattan the chiefs of the New Jersey tribes he pledged them to peace. And then, after insuring vigilance in the city,
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he went up the river to Albany and more than a hundred miles westward into the Iroquois country. Here the savages re- ceived him with friendly promises and gave him the title 'Corlaer' which, they explained, was the name of a man whom they had always held dear. At Albany he established a board of Indian commissioners, composed of local officials, which existed thereafter until the year 1755. The most important body of the kind ever created in the colonies, it played a promi- nent part in their individual and their common concerns. Unfortunately the records of its proceedings, carefully kept from 1675 to 1751 and then bound in four folio volumes, have now disappeared.
By October the Indians were raiding and burning in New England from the Pemaquid district at the east to the upper valley of the Connecticut at the west. Andros sent word to Hartford that a savage who professed friendship had warned him that this town would be attacked. As the Senecas, the powerful western nation of the Iroquois, were attacking their old enemies the Susquehannas on the borders of Maryland, he wrote to the governor that he had engaged both Senecas and Mohawks to injure no Christians in their wars with other tribes and, offering his services to restore peace, invited some of the Susquehannas to visit him at New York. Early in January, 1676, he wrote again to Hartford that King Philip with four or five hundred braves had gone into winter quarters within forty or fifty miles of Albany. Actually, the camp was not more than twenty miles to the northeast of Albany. As the Hudson was frozen Andros could send up no soldiers, but the Mohawks, responding to his orders, kept 'continual parties out.' The New Englanders would not permit him to give more effectual aid on their own soil even though he promised that to 'remove all jealousies' he would forbear to press the duke's territorial claims. The Dutch traders they accused of selling arms and ammunition to Philip. Resenting this charge which, said Andros, seemed to make him an accomplice in the evil work, and asking the Connecticut authorities to specify the criminals, he told them that what
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they really wanted was that Philip's 'bloody crew' should be driven into New York to be dealt with there. In fact, wishing for the aid of the Mohawks but not of Governor Andros, Connecticut had asked that it might treat with the Mohawks on its own account and send its own soldiers up the Hudson - singular requests, Andros replied, from people who kept him 'a stranger to all the concerns' of their war, and certain if granted to 'breed distractions' among his Indians. Rhode Island, then controlled by Quakers, was the only New England colony that kept on friendly terms with New York and accepted help from its governor. Neverthe- less the Mohawks gave considerable aid, scattering all the hostile war parties that appeared in the vicinity of the Hudson.
It was at this time that the notorious Edward Randolph, long employed by the advisers of Charles II to investigate and to report upon the affairs of the New Englanders, paid them his first visit. Many of his statements about them were gross exaggerations. Not so his report that if they had not slighted the 'friendship, advice, and offers' of Governor Andros the war would not have occurred or would have proved much less destructive. In spite of everything, he said, Andros had been 'very friendly and serviceable,' keeping the Mohawks from siding with Philip although he was denied the chance actively to employ them against him. An anony- mous Account of the Iroquois Indians, written evidently in 1682 and preserved in the Public Record Office, likewise declares that all New England might have been destroyed had not Andros maintained his influence over the Iroquois 'both as governor and trader.' Thus for the first time the importance of the Iroquois alliance was recognized although not as yet with reference to the Canadian French; and thus for the first time a governor of New York played, as such, a part of consequence in the affairs of colonies not his own.
King Philip's War ended with the death of the chieftain in August, 1676. The fear that it might set New York aflame had discouraged political agitation among the people of the province, and Andros had been as careful as possible not
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to excite them. For example, he imposed at Esopus and Al- bany a special tax to meet his outlays for defence but merely asked the more sensitive Long Island towns what they would contribute. They gave him very little; and undoubtedly they considered his request a fresh incentive to secure the power to lay their own taxes. When, two generations later, William Smith referred to the incident he called it an example of taxation 'by a kind of benevolence-a badge of bad times.'
In Maine an Indian war continued after Philip's War came to an end. Andros prevented the authorities of Massachu- setts from engaging the aid of the Mohawks but, as appears from a letter which he sent them by the hands of Mayor Dervall, consented to try to bring about a peace although, as he explained, all his 'friendly proffers' had been 'slighted' by his nearer neighbors. Securing a peace in the summer of 1677, he then asserted the duke's authority at Pemaquid, sending Lieutenant Brockholls to build a new fort and so to regulate trade that the duke's custom-house should profit. Thus he completed the reorganization of his province in all parts of which the Duke's Laws were now administered.
In April, 1677, he permitted representatives of Massachu- setts and Connecticut to covenant with the Iroquois under his own eye at Albany. This was the first time that any New Englanders had parleyed officially with the Indians of New York. In August there came for the same purpose an agent from Virginia and Maryland where the Senecas had crushed at last the Susquehannas.
It was not only to protect the other English colonies and to prevent them from breeding trouble in New York that Andros needed to maintain his influence over the Iroquois. All the Five Nations, cowed by the expeditions sent down from Canada in the time of Governor Nicolls, had freely ad- mitted those Jesuit missionaries who, as Governor Lovelace once remarked, pretended that they meant to advance only the kingdom of Christ but, it was safe to believe, kept also the kingdom of Louis XIV in mind. Moreover, the Frenchmen
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now had busy trading stations at the head of Green Bay and at the outlets of Lake Superior whence there was easy access to the small affluents of the tributaries of the Mississippi. Joliet and Marquette had descended the 'Meschasipi' to the mouth of the Arkansas. Count Frontenac, the governor appointed in 1672, aided by La Salle who was perhaps the first Frenchman to conceive the idea of hemming in the Eng- lish by a chain of western posts, had built Fort Frontenac on the northern shore of Lake Ontario where Kingston now stands; and here in 1673 the Frenchmen had held a friendly council with the chiefs of the Five Nations.
As England and France were at peace and their monarchs in close amity when Andros came over, he was instructed to preserve the Indian trade without giving the Canadians any offence. But if his province were not to lose all share in the fur trade, the major part of which Canada had already ab- sorbed, he could not even tacitly sanction the claim of the French that, by making treaties with them and receiving their missionaries, the Iroquois had acknowledged the sovereignty of their king. Therefore in 1677 he put forth the first definite assertion of authority over the Five Nations that was spoken on behalf of the English crown, instructing their sachems and the chief of the Jesuits residing among them that they were to deal with the French only 'as they are friends' - in no case 'to be commanded by them.'
Permitted by the duke to visit England on private busi- ness Andros set sail in November, 1677, leaving the province in charge of his first councillor, Lieutenant Brockholls. He was well received at court and knighted for his good service in New York. It does not appear that he spoke of establish- ing an assembly there. Reporting in writing upon the state of his province and upon his efforts to aid the New England- ers in their time of distress, he dwelt strongly on the weakness resulting from colonial subdivision and advised that the New England colonies be united and their militia put under the control of the crown. At his request Charles ordered an
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inquiry into the charge which had been loudly put forth in word and in print by the authorities of Massachusetts. and Connecticut - the charge that he and his people, or at all events his people, had fomented Philip's War by selling him guns and powder. Although it is possible that secretly, through Mohawk intermediaries, there had been some small traffic of this kind by Albany traders, the governor's strict prohibitions had gen- erally been obeyed. The charge of New England was based chiefly upon the words of a mischief-making Englishman at Albany who had been prosecuted and punished. Edward Randolph had written that even in Boston it was known by sober persons to be a mere report 'raised out of malice and envy' by men who hated any form of government unlike their own. Now the agents of Massachusetts could say nothing to support it. The king in council pronounced that there was no reason to believe it and forbade the New Eng- landers to repeat it unless they could follow it up by immediate legal prosecution and conviction. This they made no attempt to do.
When Sir Edmund Andros set sail for New York in May, 1678, England was at the point of engaging again in the war which France was still waging with Holland and its allies. But not again on the side of France. By the people at large the old fear of Holland's rivalry in trade was for the time for- gotten in a greater dread of the ambitions of the Most Catholic King, and, especially, a dread of what his friendship with their own king might portend for the liberties of the Protestant kingdom. Charles had been persuaded to marry Mary, the elder daughter of the Duke of York, against her father's wishes to his nephew William Prince of Orange, already recognized as the champion of continental Protestantism. In January, 1678, he was forced to conclude a treaty of alliance with the Dutch and to recall the troops he had permitted to remain with the French army; and parliament voted him a great sum of money with which to begin war against Louis XIV.
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Threatened in this fashion Louis decided to make peace, and in August France and the Republic concluded the Peace of Nimeguen. Holland preserved its territories intact; but it lay exhausted and shorn of much of its carrying trade; and, thenceforward the ally of England, it was destined to suffer as much from the friendship as it had from the enmity of its rival. France, acquiring Franche Comté and a strong foothold in the Spanish Netherlands, and dominant now on the continent as never before, had bought its military success by the ruin of the great commercial structure which Colbert had built up on a basis of maritime power. The chief gainer by the long war was England which had withdrawn from it four years before. Although the island kingdom exerted no influence again upon continental politics until after the fall of the Stuarts, it had made good use of its chance firmly to establish its dominion on the American seaboard; and, while its navy was not yet as strong as the navy of France, by the absorption of much of the commerce of both France and Holland it had achieved that leadership in ocean traffic which was to bring forth naval supremacy as its natural fruit.
Andros had sailed in a New England merchantman on May 27 and after a very long voyage reached New York on August 7. Of course he knew nothing about even the preliminaries of the peace concluded by France and Holland on August 10. What he brought was the news, very alarm- ing to his province he wrote home, of a probable war between France and England. Bearing a new commission, given by the duke as lord high admiral on colonial seas, to serve as vice-admiral within the borders of his government and to set up an admiralty court, he conferred admiralty jurisdiction upon the mayor's court of New York.
One of his Dutch New Yorkers was accused at this time of making a personal attack upon the sea power of France. In the year 1689 Edward Randolph, writing to the Lords of Trade from the prison into which the people of Boston had then thrown him, referred to a Captain Le Moin, 'a great undertaker for pirates and promoter of irregular trade,' who
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some fifteen years before had brought into Boston harbor two or three 'very rich Dutch prizes' worth more than £100,000. This same Frenchman, Captain Bernard Le Moin, Le Moyne, or Le Moire as his name was indifferently written by English- men, was permitted in 1678 to enter the harbor of New York for supplies and for repairs to his privateering or piratical frigate, the Golden Fleece. Le Moire hired a pilot named Cornelisen to take the ship up to Deutel Bay on the East River shore; and Cornelisen, said Le Moire in a complaint lodged with the court and asking for damages to the amount of £10,000, ran her upon the rocks 'contrary to the rules of navigation and with wilful malice' so that she was forced to make the nearest land where she sank. This disaster is the first that is known to have happened in the harbor after the burning of Adriaen Block's Tiger in 1614.
A longer story although, as we have it, a story with more than one hiatus, tells of a certain sea-faring adventurer known as Captain John Rhoade, or Rhoades, 'of Boston' who during the absence of Andros in England had been brought under arrest from Pemaquid to Manhattan. He had been the chief actor in a little drama of colonial conquest which history has well-nigh forgotten.
In the summer of 1674, while New York was still New Orange, a Dutch privateer, the Flying Horse, coming up from Curaçoa under command of Captain Jurriaen Aernouts, stopped at New York to refit. Rhoade, who chanced to be at hand, persuaded Aernouts to attempt the conquest of Acadia, which England had recently restored to France, and shipped as his pilot after taking the oath of allegiance to the Prince of Orange. As there were in Acadia not more than four hun- dred scattered settlers it was an easy task for the Dutchmen to capture the fort at Pentagoet and the governor of the province therewith. Taking possession of the country in the name of the Prince of Orange they renamed it New Holland. Unable to garrison it, after raiding a long stretch of coast they carried their plunder and their prisoners to Boston. Aern-
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outs seems then to have left his conquest to its fate. Count Frontenac, as winter was approaching, could for the time do nothing more than ransom the captured governor. As soon as the warm weather came again, Rhoade returned to Acadia in a ship that he had fitted out at Boston and drove away some intruding New Englanders. The Bostonians, wanting the place for themselves, sent up an expedition to bring him back. And at Boston he and some of his companions were tried for piracy, convicted, and condemned to death but in the end merely banished from the colony.
The news of Aernouts' achievement was long in reaching Holland. Just when or how it was transmitted cannot be said, but in September, 1676, the recently reorganized West India Company issued to John Rhoade, upon his demand and in its own name only, a commission to remain and to main- tain himself in Acadia, to cultivate the land and to trade, paying duties to the Company. Some weeks later, on Octo- ber 27, 'in answer' wrote the Company, to the ‘remon- strance' of Nicholas Gouverneur, brother-in-law of Cornelis Steenwyck of New York, it issued to Steenwyck a commission to take possession of the newly gained territory and to ad- minister it as governor in the name of the Company and of the States General of the United Netherlands. His rights were not to prejudice those already bestowed upon Rhoade, and Rhoade was to render 'honor' to Steenwyck and to give him advice. The Company, it said, hoped that Steenwyck would develop for its benefit the agriculture and the fisheries of the country.
How Steenwyck had become interested in the affair, why Gouverneur had remonstrated on his behalf, can only be con- jectured. It does not appear that he made any attempt to claim his new rights and titles; indeed, by this time the Canadians had reoccupied Acadia. Rhoade, however, did try to make some use of his privileges. So doing he trespassed on the trading rights of the Duke of York at Pemaquid; and thus it came about that in 1678 he was sent under arrest with his ship and his goods to Manhattan. Brockholls wrote to
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Pemaquid that Rhoade had 'taken possession' of the City Hall where he was confined, that his 'insolence and impu- dence' were 'beyond compare,' and that if he were at Boston doubtless the authorities would 'truss him up.' It seemed better to Brockholls to keep him until Governor Andros should return. Upon petition of the West India Company the States General directed their ambassador in London to urge that he be released and indemnified, and that the rights be respected which they themselves still claimed in Acadia al- though the French had then reoccupied it and the Treaty of Nimeguen did not mention it. No result followed. Thus died out the last echo of the voice of the Dutch Republic on the mainland of North America. The last commissions issued by the West India Company for any part of the continent, those bestowed upon Rhoade and Steenwyck, Steenwyck's a very stately looking document, are now in the library of the New York Historical Society. There is no record that Gov- ernor Andros received any instructions from England in regard to Rhoade. What he did about him is indicated, perhaps, by the record of a commission issued in October, 1678, to John Rhoades and six others to be justices of the peace in the Delaware dependency.
More than by anything else Sir Edmund was disturbed after his return by the temper of the Mohawks. He had never made a treaty with them, he explained to his superiors, always dealing with them as being 'under or part of' his government; but the New Englanders, who had first treated with them by his permission and afterwards tampered with them in unauthorized ways, had made them 'lie if not insolent which they never were afore.' Now he ordered that all in- terfering strangers be sent down to Manhattan for examination.
In the summer of 1679 La Salle sailed westward across Lake Erie in the brigantine Griffin which he had built on the Niagara River above the falls - the first ship borne by the waters of any of the Great Lakes. The Senecas had tried to interfere with this enterprise and sent word of it to Andros;
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the Oneidas, coming to Albany, declared that Corlaer governed the whole land westward to the Senecas' country; and the Onondagas and Cayugas transferred their conquests in the Susquehanna region to the government of New York so that the land could not be sold without Corlaer's sanction. On the other hand, Andros had not been able to put an end to Iroquois raids upon the borders of the southern colonies, So in October, after a flying visit to Pemaquid, he went once more to Albany, for the seventh time since he took up his task of government in 1674.
In November a certain Sieur de Saurel writing in Canada to the intendant Duchesneau, said that a Frenchman recently come from Manhattan reported that 'Madame the Gov- erness of Manatte,' meaning Lady Andros, when dining at 'one Mainvielle a French merchant's house,' meaning Gabriel Minvielle a leading citizen of New York,
. . . told him that news had come of a French fleet having entered the Thames and captured the English admiral and sunk a number of ships in sight of London; that the French have no longer freedom to trade at Orange, and that as soon as they arrive there they are sent to Manate and thence to Barbadoes.
In fact, as a precautionary measure at a time when, as De Saurel also wrote, there was much alarm at Albany because it was 'whispered about' that war had been proclaimed between England and France, Andros ordered that certain Frenchmen living in Albany should be sent away to the West Indies, and thus gave Frontenac much offence. Only subjects of King Charles, Sir Edmund announced, might settle in New York. As the Mohawks and the eastern Indians were fighting, in the autumn of 1680 he visited Boston, agreed that the New Englanders might renew their compacts at Albany, and again effected peace between the Indian tribes.
These journeys and conferences seemed to him hardly more essential for the welfare of his province than his efforts to assert the rights of the Duke of York in New Jersey.
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The political situation in England was growing more and more inimical to the duke as a Catholic who in 1676 had pub- licly acknowledged his faith. In 1678 he was even suspected by some, although never by Charles, of complicity in the al- leged Popish Plot against his brother's life. He could not, therefore, openly push his schemes to enlarge his power in America, yet he was hoping to get a new patent which would give him indisputable rights from the Connecticut River to the borders of Maryland. Therefore he had instructed Andros, after the Connecticut government refused to yield the terri- tories west of its river, to accept the boundary line running twenty miles eastward of the Hudson - temporarily, in the belief that some day the 'utmost limits' named in his exist- ing patent might be secured. As regarded New Jersey the situation was less simple.
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