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Chibocoton near by, the commander of which had put off in a small boat to learn the cause of the firing.
The war between France and England, known in history as King William's war, which broke out in 1688-9, greatly increased the number of these priva- teers, not a few of whom became pirates. If they adopted piracy, their method was to bear away for the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf, and that part of the Indian Ocean which washes the southern shore of Asia. The rich argosies of the Dutch and British East India Companies then traversed those seas, and ' there was also a rich coasting trade between the opulent cities of Arabia and the adjoining countries and India. These coasters were generally unarmed, and no match for the fierce, swift, corsairs which darted on them like a falcon on its prey. The booty secured, there were two ways of disposing of it. Sometimes the pirate himself returned to New York as an honest privateer and entered his cargo in the Admiralty Court, where it was sold by due process of law. Again he ran down with his plunder to the island of Madagascar, where the pirates had a grand rendezvous-a village with warehouses and maga- zines filled with gold and East India goods, and de- fended by a fort and stockade. Here he usually found a merchant-ship in waiting, sent out by some firm in New York with which he had an understand- ing, and which was ready to exchange the goods she had brought out for those taken by the pirates, or to purchase the latter for cash. This done, the merchant vessel sailed for New York, where her cargo was entered as East India goods secured in the
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regular way, the pirate meanwhile setting forth in quest of fresh victims.
This trade with the pirates soon came to be a regularly organized traffic, and enormous fortunes were made and lost in it. The fate of four ves- sels which all sailed from New York in July, 1698, for Madagascar, may be taken as an illustration. The first, the Nassau, Captain Giles Shelley, was laden with Jamaica rum, Madeira wine, and gun- powder. The rum cost in New York two shil- lings per gallon, and was sold in Madagascar for three pounds per gallon. The wine cost nineteen pounds per pipe, and was sold for three hundred pounds ; and the gunpowder we may suppose at a similar advance. In return, the Nassau purchased East India goods and slaves of the pirates, and tak- ing twenty-nine of the latter as passengers, sailed for home. The pirates paid four thousand pounds for their passage, and the voyage is said to have netted the owners thirty thousand pounds.
A sister ship, the Prophet Daniel, was not so for- tunate. She too cleared for Madagascar, ostensibly for slaves. Her supercargo, John Cruger, a young man of spirit and enterprise, who later became a great merchant, and mayor of the city, in his log- book of the voyage, gives this unique account of the fate of the vessel :
" 24th August (1699), arrived at Fort Dolphin (a famous pirate haunt on the African coast). I acquainted Mr. Abraham Samuel, the king of that place, of my arrival, and came with him to a trade. 12th September, I went with Mr. Samuel twenty-five miles up in the
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country, and on the second day after, I got the misera- ble news that our ship was taken by a vessel that came into the harbor the night before, whereupon I made all the haste down I could. We got some of the subjects of Mr. Samuel to assist us, and fired upon the pirate for two days, but could do no good. Then I hired two men to swim off in the night to cut their cables, but Mr. Samuel charged his men not to meddle with them (as I was in- formed); said Samuel having got a letter from on board the pirate, in which, I suppose, they made great promises, so that he forbade us on our lives to meddle with any of the said pirates. It appears that the manner in which they took us was as follows: When their ship came to an anchor in the harbor, they desired our boat to give them a cast on shore, they having lost their boat, and pretended to be a merchant-ship, and had about fifty negroes on board. At night the captain of the pirate desired that our boat might give him a cast on board of his ship, which was done ; and coming on board he de- sired the men to drink with him; and when our men were going on board their ship again he stopped them by vio- lence ; and at about 9 o'clock at night they manned the boat, and took our ship, and presently carried away all the money that was on board, rigging, and other things, and then gave the ship and negroes and other things that were on board to Mr. Samuel.
" Mr. Samuel took likewise away from me twenty-two casks of powder, and forty-nine small arms ; likewise all the sails belonging to the Prophet, which were on shore, and then sold the ship again to Isaac Ruff, Thomas Wells, Ed- mond Conklin, and Edward Woodman, as it was reported, for fourteen hundred pieces of eight. The purchas- ers designed to go from Fort Dolphin to the island of Don Mascourena, thence to Mattatana upon Madagascar,
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and so for America. Some days after there arrived at Fort Dolphin a small pinke called the Vine, from Lon- don, which took in slaves for Barbadoes, in which I took my passage, and was forced to pay for the same sixty-six pieces of eight and two slaves."
The captain of the pirate, Evan Jones, and sev- eral of the crew were known to Cruger, who records that they were from " Westchester, New York." Of the two other ships that sailed on the same . errand -slaves and East India goods,-one was captured by an East India Company's frigate, and the other by New York pirates-so we see that this question- able trade was not always prosperous. For it was a questionable trade. True, the merchants of New York were not supposed to know that these goods were obtained by piracy : they simply sent their cargoes to Madagascar, and purchased of factors these East India goods in return. Yet there were few in New York so simple as not to know whence these rich cargoes were derived.
While the trade lasted, it lent a sort of picturesque and Oriental magnificence to the city. Rare fabrics · of Teheran and Samarcand, costly perfumes, spices, ointments, and precious woods filled her warehouses ; Arabian gold was current coin; her women were arrayed in robes woven for Eastern queens ; jewels and gems of costliest workmanship in gold, silver, ivory, and pearl sparkled on their fingers and bosoms ; and in the merchants' houses were the Persian rugs and carpets, the bizarre bric-à-brac and curiously carved furniture of the East. New York was never so near the Orient as in those days. The pirate cap-
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tains were notable persons at this time. People pointed them out on the streets as now we point out a visiting magnate or literary celebrity. They were not termed pirates, but privateers; and as they dressed well, spent money freely, and were men of infinite jest, excellent story-tellers, they were freely invited to the tables of the resident gentry, and even to that of the governor himself. Indeed, his com- merce with the pirates was the scandal of Governor Fletcher's reign; but as he afterward cleared himself in an examination before the Commissioners of Trade in England, it is probable that his relations with them were not so bad as painted.
Edward Coates was one of the first of these free- booters of whom we have any account. In 1694, his ship appeared off the east coast of Long Island, having a few days previously divided eighteen hundred pieces of eight among her crew. Coates entered into negotiations with the authorities for permission to come up to the city. The Governor, it was charged, was given the ship, which he after- ward sold for 6800. Madam Fletcher was presented with chains of Arabian gold, rare gems, and precious silks 'and cashmeres from Indian looms. The council- lors, too, were handsomely feed, and then the pirate ship ventured to come up to her dock. Coates afterward averred that the ransom cost himself and his men £1,800.
Thomas Tew was another of these famous sea- rovers. He came to New York in the November of 1694 with "great wealth from the Indian seas." We have a description of this worthy. He was
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a slight, dark man of about forty who dressed richly and scattered gold profusely. His uniform was a blue cap with a band of cloth of silver. His blue jacket was bordered with gold lace, and further garnished with large pearl buttons. Loose trunks of white linen covered his lower limbs as far as the knee, where they gave place to curiously worked stockings. A rich chain of Arabian gold hung from his neck, and through the meshes of a curiously knit belt gleamed a dagger, its hilt set with the rarest of gems. This person, dispensing draughts of Sopus ale to whoever would drink, and throwing golden louis d'or about as carelessly as though they were stuyvers, soon became a familiar object in the streets and taverns of New York.
But this influx of ill-gotten wealth did not really benefit the city. Riches thus acquired never benefit in the end; the sum of human experience is and always will be, that honesty is the best policy. In this case, these fortunes, quickly won, created a dis- taste for the slower methods of legitimate trade ; they fostered rash enterprises and hazardous ven- tures, and very soon brought punishment and dis- grace. It was not to be expected that the powerful East India Company would long submit to such depredations on its property. It called the attention of the king and Privy Council to them, and again and again urged that a suitable naval force should be sent into the Indian seas to protect its property and capture the marauders. But alas, all the ship's frigates were engaged in the war with France; and then again, there was the difficulty of catching the
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THE STORY OF NEW YORK.
freebooters, who sailed in swift ships, and had a thousand hiding-places along the savage coasts.
This scarcity of ships and urgency of the merchants introduces one of the most striking and dramatic chapters in the history of New York, and also that most notorious character of his age, Captain William Kidd. This person is a striking example of the power of a nation's ballad-makers. English min- strels have made his name a household word. Our own Poe and Irving have conjured with him most effectively. Fortune-hunters have prodded the sands of the Atlantic coast from Montauk Point to the Florida reefs in search of his buried treasure, while Sound skippers still see his low, black, rakish craft flying down the Sound in the scud of the departing storms. So much has been said of him in song and story, that the reader will no doubt be glad to know something of his actual career. When history takes him up, Captain Kidd was master of the trading barque Antigua, sailing between New York and Lon- don, and well known to the merchants of both cities as a bold and skilful navigator. In his certificate of marriage to Sarah Oort, widow, in 1691, he is styled "Captain William Kidd, Gentleman." He had a house and lot on Tienhoven Street (now Liberty), where his wife and their only child (a daughter) lived, and was a man of wealth and consideration. While the king and his ministers were considering the demands of the East India Company, Kidd was on the Atlantic bound to London. With him, as a passenger, sailed Robert Livingston, a leading char- acter in the province of New York, well born in
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MAP OF THE CITY IN GOVERNOR FLETCHER'S TIME.
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England, Town Clerk of Albany, Secretary of Indian Affairs, Commissary of the Provincial Army, and founder of the manor of Livingston. The two men knew of the king's strait, and over the Antigua's dinner-table formed a plan which, on their arrival in London, was pressed on the ministers and the king with all the influence they could command. The plan was, in brief, that Kidd, who knew most of the pirates frequenting New York and their haunts, should be given an armed vessel well manned, and, furnished with a private commission from the king, should go in pursuit of the pirates, and capture them wherever they could be found. Five of the leading noblemen of the realm-Somers the Lord Chancel- lor, the Earl of Bellomont, the Earl of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and the Earl of Oxford, with Livingston and Kidd, agreed to furnish the funds for the enterprise, and were to be repaid by a certain share of the property taken from the pirates. The king also was made a partner in the enterprise, receiving a share of the profits. The Adventure Galley, a large ship, was provided and manned with seventy men, and in her Kidd set sail, arriving in New York in the spring of 1696. He soon filled the city with placards asking for men to engage in his adventure, and beat up the town for recruits. Captain Kidd and his novel design of pirate-hunting became the talk of the day, and the army of nondescripts that then filled the city-pirates, privateersmen, ne'er-do- wells, young men from the country eager for adven- ture and booty-hastened to enroll themselves under his banner. One hundred more men were secured
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THE ROMANTIC AGE.
in this way; but the wiseacres of the port shook their heads over the affair. They said that when Captain Kidd put to sea, if he failed to capture any pirates to provide prize-money for his crew, they would mutiny and turn pirates themselves-which was, in fact, what happened. After patrolling the American coast for a while without result, Kidd bore up for the Red Sea, and nothing was seen of him in New York for nearly three years. Meantime, Colonel Fletcher had been recalled, chiefly because of his supposed collusion with pirates, and Richard, Earl of Bellomont, an Irish nobleman of the highest character, who had been very active against the freebooters, was appointed Captain-General of New York and New England, with special instructions to suppress piracy and smuggling in the colonies. Bel- lomont reached New York April 2, 1698, and was received with much rejoicing and stately ceremonial.
IX.
THE EARLIER CHURCHES OF NEW YORK.
IN the period covered by the preceding chapter some interesting and even historic church edifices were built in New York. The first of these was the Dutch Reformed Church of St. Nicholas, on Garden Street. In 1691 the congregation became dissatis- fied with the stone church in the fort. It was grow- ing small for their numbers, and besides, it seemed unseemly that the temple of the Prince of Peace should be placed in the midst of warlike armament and preparations. They decided, therefore, to build a new church. On what is now Exchange Place- the narrow street whose towering buildings cast the shadows of late afternoon at mid-day-Mother Drisius then owned an extensive peach orchard, and she, on being appealed to, consented to sell it to the Consis- tory for a church site. The new building was com- pleted and dedicated in 1693, and was much the finest church edifice then in the country. It was built of brick, in the form of an oblong square, with a large steeple in front, in the base of which was a room large enough for the Consistory to hold its meetings. The windows were long and narrow, with small panes, on which Master Gerard Duykinck had
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THE EARLIER CHURCHES OF NEW YORK. 181
burned the arms of the principal families of the con- gregation. The bell, pulpit, and other furniture of the old church were transferred to the new, and many painted family escutcheons were afterwards added. In 1694, the silver workers of Amsterdam wrought out for it a silver baptismal bowl, on which were engraved sentences from the pen of Domine Selyns, indicating its spiritual significance. This in- teresting relic is still in use in Dr. Terry's church, corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-First Street, the lineal descendant of the Garden Street church .*
This church also enjoys the distinction of having been the first religious society chartered in the colony, its charter taking precedence of Trinity's by some months. The instrument gave it legal power to call its minister, to hold property acquired by gift or devise, and made payment of church rates com- pulsory on its members. Meantime the members of the Church of England had been worshipping in the chapel in the fort. In 1696 they too became dissatis- fied with the chapel, and decided to erect a church of their own. Governor Fletcher was warmly in favor of the project, and gave them the revenue of the King's Farm, which was one of the Governor's
* I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Chambers, of New York, for the following translation of the inscription, in old German characters, on the bowl :
" In mere water put no trust, 'T were better never to be born ; But see far more in Baptism, By which man comes never to be lost. How Christ, with his precious blood, Cleanses me from my sins, And by his Spirit makes me live, And washes my foul misdeeds."
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perquisites, for the term of seven years. This farm consisted of a garden, an orchard, pasturage for horses and cows, and a triangular grave-yard in one corner. The site of the present Trinity was chosen for the new church. Great interest in its erection seems to have been taken by all classes of people. Gifts of money and material were brought. Gover- nor Fletcher, in addition to other gifts, gave it a Bible ; the Earl of Bellomont some books of divinity ; Lord Cornbury, a black pall, on condition that no one belonging to the city should be denied the use of it. "For building the steeple," Lewis Gomez gave £1 2s .; Abraham Luilna, £1; Rodrego Pacheco, £1 ; Moses Levy, IId .; Mordecan Nathan, Ild. ; Jacob Franks, £1 ; and Moses Michael, 8s. 3d. The building was completed in 1696. It is said to have been one hundred and forty-eight feet long and seventy-two feet wide, and fronted toward the west. Its steeple, the pride of the city, was one hundred and seventy-five feet high. Over the main entrance was a Latin inscription, " Per augustam Hoc Trinita- tis Templum Fundatum est anno regni illustrissimi," etc., the full inscription in English being as follows :
" This Trinity Church was founded in the 8th year of the Most Illustrious Sovereign Lord William the Third, by the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and in the year of our Lord 1696, and was built by the voluntary contribu- tions and gifts of some persons, and chiefly enriched and promoted by the bounty of his Excellency, Colonel Ben- jamin Fletcher, Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of this Province, in the time of whose government the in-
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THE EARLIER CHURCHES OF NEW YORK. 183
habitants of this city, of the Protestant religion of the Church of England, as now established by law, were in- corporated by a charter under the seal of the province, and many other valuable gifts he gave to it of his private fortune."
Within, on the walls, were the arms and escutch- eons of the principal families. Nearest the chan- cel, a pew was set apart for the governor, and known as the "Governor's Pew," and which continued to be occupied by the chief magistrate so long as New York remained a colony. The first Trinity was en- larged and improved in 1737, and was destroyed by the great fire of 1776. The following description of the remodelled church, as it appeared in 1750, is given by William Smith, the historian of New York :
" It stands very pleasantly on the banks of the Hudson, and has a large cemetery open on each side, enclosed in front by a painted paled fence. Before it a long walk is railed off from Broadway, the pleasantest street in town. . . The church within is ornamented beyond any other place of worship among us. The head is adorned with an altar-piece, and opposite is the organ. The tops of the pillars which support the galleries are decked with gilt busts of angels winged. From the ceiling are sus- pended two glass branches, and on the walls hang the arms of some of the principal benefactors. The alleys are paved with flat stones. The rector is Rev. Henry Barclay, who has a salary of £100 a year, levied on all the other clergy and laity of the city, by virtue of an Act of Assembly procured by Governor Fletcher."
Another interesting church of that day was that of the French Huguenots-Église Françoise à la
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Nouvelle York-which began its organized existence in 1688, although, it is said, sermons were preached in the French tongue as early as 1628. Its members were chiefly Huguenots-Protestants of France who had been driven from their homes and firesides by the cruel persecution of Louis XIV. Their history is a very interesting one, although we can refer to it but briefly. In 1598, Henry IV. of France issued his " Edict of Nantes " (so called because first pub- lished in the city of Nantes), which, in large measure, granted religious liberty to his Protestant subjects. In 1785, this edict was revoked by Louis XIV., and all persons were required to conform to the Catholic faith on pain of death or banishment. Rather than obey this despotic act, 400,000 people of the best blood of France left their homes and took refuge in Holland, England, Prussia, and other Protestant countries. Thousands came to New York, and held here their ancient worship. November 10, 1687, Rev. Pierre Peiret, of the county of Foix in Southern France, arrived, and the scattered sheep found in him a shepherd. He organized the church at once. October 10, 1788, Domine Selyns wrote: "Our French brethren are doing well, and their congrega- tions increase remarkably by the daily arrival of French refugees." In that year they built a small church which stood on the site of the present Prod- uce Exchange. It was the only Huguenot Church in the colony, and the people used to come in covered wagons on a Saturday from Long Island, Staten Island, New Rochelle, and other places, outspan their horses, and spend the night in their wagons
THE EARLIER CHURCHES OF NEW YORK. 185
that they might be ready for service in the morning. On the 8th of July, 1704, Lord Cornbury laid the corner-stone of a new church for them, called Le Temple du St. Esprit. This church stood for years on the northeast side of Pine Street, and is still re- membered by older citizens. By 1710 it had become one of the wealthiest and strongest in the city. John Fontaine, a traveller, who visited New York in 1716, speaks of attending service there, and observes that "it is very large and beautiful, and within it there was a very great congregation." The same traveller tells us that there was then a French Club in New York. The old church was taken down in 1831, and its bell, the gift of Sir Henry Anhurst, was given to the French church at New Rochelle (now Trinity Episcopal), which, it is said, still retains possession of it.
The first Presbyterian Church in New York was erected in Wall Street in 1719, and is identical with that which now worships in Dr. Van Dyke's stone church on Fifth Avenue, near Eleventh Street. The first Baptist Church in the city was built in 1760, on Gold Street, near John. The Methodists held services in New York as early as 1766, under the leadership of Philip Embury, a local preacher ; but their first house of worship, the present John Street church, on John, near Nassau, was not built until 1768.
X.
LORD BELLOMONT'S STORMY REIGN.
NOT long after Governor Bellomont's arrival, it became apparent that his selection was a very un- wise one. He was a cold, austere, somewhat bigoted man, of excellent intentions, but lacking in tact, pliancy, and the personal magnetism so necessary in a ruler of men. He was prejudiced against Gov- ernor Fletcher and his friends, the chief men of the city, and took no pains to conceal his belief that · they were in league with thieves and pirates. His first public act was an exceedingly impolitic one-he espoused the cause of the Leislerites, which had been held in abeyance under Governor Fletcher, and so fomented the faction that it was roused into activity again, and became a disturbing and dangerous ele- ment. He issued a writ restoring to their families the estates of Leisler and Milborne, and as these had by this time passed into the hands of innocent parties, the injustice of it nearly provoked a riot in the city. His attempts to suppress piracy, smug- gling, and the "manors," or great landed estates, which had been granted by Governor Fletcher and his predecessors, were equally unwise and futile. These were admittedly great evils ; but an entrenched
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