Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 4 (of 8) / French Explorations and Settlements in North America and Those of the Portuguese, Dutch, and Swedes 1500-1700

by Unknown

CHAPTER VIII.

NEW NETHERLAND, OR THE DUTCH IN NORTH AMERICA

BY BERTHOLD FERNOW,

Keeper of the Historical Records, State of New York.

SAYS Carlyle: “Those Dutch are a strong people. They raised their land out of a marsh, and went on for a long period of time breeding cows and making cheese, and might have gone on with their cows and cheese till doomsday. But Spain comes over and says, ‘We want you to believe in St. Ignatius.’ ‘Very sorry,’ replied the Dutch, ‘but we can’t.’ ‘God! but you must,’ says Spain; and they went about with guns and swords to make the Dutch believe in St. Ignatius. Never made them believe in him, but did succeed in breaking their own vertebral column forever, and raising the Dutch into a great nation.”

A nation’s struggle for religious liberty comes upon every individual member of that nation as a personal matter, as a battle to be fought with himself and with the world. Hence we see the Dutch, encouraged by the large influx of Belgians whom the same unwillingness to believe in St. Ignatius had driven out of their homes, emerge from the conflict with Spain, individually and as a nation, more self-reliant, sturdy, and independent than ever before.

Compelled by the physical condition of their country to become a maritime nation, while other circumstances directed them to commercial pursuits, they had long been the common carriers of the sea, and had availed themselves at an early date of the discoveries made by the Cabots, Verrazano, and other adventurous explorers in the century succeeding the voyages of Columbus. They had studied the weak points of that vast Spanish empire “where the sun never set,” and found in the war with Spain a good excuse to make use of their knowledge, and to send their ships to the West Indies and the Spanish main to prey upon the commerce of their enemies. The first proposition to make such an expedition, submitted to the States-General in 1581 by an English sea-captain, Beets, and refused by them, was undoubtedly conceived in a purely commercial spirit. Gradually the idea of destroying the transatlantic resources of Spain, and thereby compelling her to submit to the Dutch conditions of peace and to the evacuation of Belgium, caused the formation of a West India company, which, authorized to trade with and fight the Spaniards in American waters, appears in the light of a necessary political measure, without, however, throwing in the background the necessity of finding a shorter route to the East Indies.[780]

Although the scheme to form a West India company was first broached in 1592 by William Usselinx, an exiled Antwerp merchant, it was many years before it could be carried out. The longing for a share in the riches of the New World conduced in the mean time to the establishment of the “Greenland Company” about 1596, and the pretended search by its ships for a northwest passage led to a supposed first discovery of the Hudson River, if we may rely upon an unsupported statement made by officers of the West India Company in an appeal for assistance to the Assembly of the Nineteen in 1644. According to this document, ships of the Greenland Company had entered the North and Delaware rivers in 1598; their crews had landed in both places, and had built small forts to protect them against the inclemency of the winter and to resist the attacks of the Indians.

Of the next adventurer who sailed through the Narrows we know more, and of his discoveries we have documentary evidence. A company of English merchants had organized to trade to America in the first years of the seventeenth century. Their first adventures, directed to Guiana and Virginia, were not successful,[781] yet gave a new impetus to the scheme originally conceived by Usselinx. A plan for the organization of a West India company was drawn up in 1606, according to the exiled Belgian’s ideas. The company was to be in existence thirty-six years, to receive during the first six years assistance from all the United Provinces, and to be managed in the same manner as the East India Company. Political considerations on one side and rivalry between the Provinces on the other prevented the consummation of this project. A peace or truce with Spain was about to be negotiated, and Oldenbarnevelt, then Advocate of Holland and one of the most prominent and influential members of the peace party, foresaw that the organization of a West India company with the avowed purpose of obtaining most of its profits by preying on Spanish commerce in American waters would only prolong the war. Probably he saw still farther. Usselinx’s plan was, as we have seen, to compel Spain by these means to evacuate Belgium, and thus give her exiled sons a chance to return to their old homes. A wholesale departure of the shrewd, industrious, and skilled Belgians would have deprived Holland of her political pre-eminence and have left her an obscure and isolated province. On the other hand, each province and each seaport desired a share in the equipping of the fleet destined to sail in the interests of the proposed company, and as no province was willing to allow a rival to have what she could not have, the project itself between these two extremes of the opposing parties came to nought. It was only when Oldenbarnevelt, accused of high treason, had been lodged in prison, and the renewal of the war with Spain had been commended to the public, that the scheme was taken up again, in 1618.

Private ships, sailing from Dutch ports, had not been idle in the mean time; in 1607 we hear of them in Canada trading for furs, and in 1609 an English mariner, Henry Hudson, who had made several voyages for the English company already mentioned, offered his services to the East India Company to search for the passage to India by the north.

Under the auspices of the Amsterdam chamber of this company Hudson left the Texel in the yacht “Half Moon” April 4, 1609. His failures in the years 1607 and 1608, while in the employ of the English company, had discouraged neither him nor his new employers; but soon ice and fogs compel him, so we are told, to abandon his original plan to go to the East Indies by a possible northeast passage, and he proposes to his crew a search for a northwest passage along the American coast, at about the 40th degree of latitude. A contemporary writer states: “This idea had been suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the Western Ocean by the north of Virginia.” So westward Hudson turns the bow of his ship, to make a first landfall on the coast of Newfoundland, a second at Penobscot Bay, and a third at Cape Cod. Thence he takes a southwest course, but again fails to strike land under the 40th degree; he has gone too far south by one degree, and he anchors in a wide bay under 39° 5″ on the 28th of August. He is in Delaware Bay. Scarcely a week later, on the 4th of September, he finds himself with his yacht in the “Great North River of New Netherland,” under 40° 30´. A month later, to a day, he passes again out of the “Great mouth of the Great River,” homeward bound to report that what he had thought to be the long and vainly sought northwest passage was only a great river, navigable for vessels of light draught for one hundred and fifty miles, and running through a country fair to look upon and inhabited by red men peacefully inclined. Little did Hudson think, while he was navigating the waters named for him, that Champlain, another explorer, had recently been fighting his way up the shores of the lake now bearing his name, and that, a century and a half later, the great battle for supremacy on this continent between France and England,—between the old religion and the new,—would be fiercely waged in those peaceful regions.

The report brought home by Hudson, that the newly discovered country abounded in fur-bearing animals, created the wildest excitement among a people compelled by their northern climate to resort to very warm clothing in winter. Many private ventures, therefore, followed Hudson’s track soon after his return, and finally the plan to organize a West India company, never quite relinquished, was now, 1618, destined to be carried out. There was in this juncture less opposition to it; but still various reasons delayed the consent of the States-General until June, 1621, when at last they signed the charter. Englishmen from Virginia, who claimed the country under a grant, had tried to oust the Dutch, who had before this established themselves on the banks of the Hudson, under the octroi of 1614. The West India Company nevertheless, undismayed, took possession, in 1623, by sending Captain Cornelis Jacobsen Mey as director to the Prince Hendrick or South River (Delaware), and Adrian Jorissen Tienpont in like capacity to the Prince Mauritius or North River. Mey, going up the South River, fifteen leagues from its mouth erected in the present town of Gloucester, N. J., about four miles below Philadelphia, Fort Nassau, the first European settlement in that region; while the director on the North River, besides strengthening the establishment which he found at its mouth, built a fort a few miles above the one erected in 1618 near the mouth of the Normanskil, now Albany, by the servants of the “United New Netherland Company,” and called it “Fort Orange.”

Tienpont’s successor, Peter Minuit, three years later, in 1626, bought from the Indians the whole of Manhattan Island for the value of about twenty-four dollars, with the view of making this the principal settlement. This purchase and the organization, under the charter, of a council with supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority, must be considered the first foundation of our present State of New York, even though the titles of the officers constituting the council,—upper and under merchant, commissary, book-keeper of monthly wages,—seem to prove that in the beginning the Company had only purely commercial ends in view. Their charter of 1621, it is true, required them “to advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts,” but not until the trade with New Netherland threatened to become unprofitable, in 1627-28, was a plan taken into consideration to reap other benefits than those accruing from the fur-trade alone, through a more extended colonization. The deliberations of the Assembly of the Nineteen and directors of the West India Company resulted in a new “charter of freedoms and exemptions,” sanctioned by the States-General, June 7, 1629. Its provisions, no more favorable to liberty, as we understand it now, than that of 1621, attempted to transplant to the soil of New York the feudal system of Europe as it had already been established in Canada; and with it was imported the first germ of that weakening disease,—inadequate revenues,—which caused the colony to fall such an easy prey to England’s attack in 1664. While the charter was still under discussion, several of the Company’s directors took advantage of their position and secured for themselves a share of the new privileges by purchasing from the Indians, as the charter required, the most conveniently located and fertile tracts of land. The records of the acknowledgment of these transactions before the Director and Council of the Colony are the earliest which are extant in the original now in the possession of the State of New York. They bear dates from April, 1630, to July, 1631, and include the present counties of Albany and Richmond, N. Y., the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, N. J., and the southern parts of the States of New Jersey and Delaware.

This mode of acquiring lands from the Indians by purchase established from the beginning the principles by which the intercourse between the white and the red men in the valley of the Hudson was to be regulated. The great Indian problem, which has been and still is a question of paramount importance to the United States Government, was solved then by the Dutch of New Netherland without great difficulty. Persecuted by Spain and France for their religious convictions, the Dutch had learned to tolerate the superstitions and even repugnant beliefs of others. Not less religious than the Puritans of New England, they made no such religious pretexts for tyranny and cruelty as mar the records of their neighbors. They treated the Indian as a man with rights of life, liberty, opinion, and property like their own. Truthful among themselves, they inspired in the Indian a belief in their sincerity and honesty, and purchased what they wanted fairly and with the consent of the seller. The Dutch régime always upheld this principle, and as a consequence the Indians of this State caused no further difficulty, with a few exceptions, to the settlers than a financial outlay. The historians who charge the Dutch with pusillanimity and cowardice in their dealings with the Indians forget that to their policy we owe to-day the existence of the United States.

The country between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes and the Savannah River, was at the time of the arrival of the Dutch practically ruled by a confederacy of Indian tribes,—the Five Nations,—who, settled along the Mohawk and Upper Hudson rivers and in western New York, commanded the key to the continent. It was indeed in their power, had they pleased, to allow the French of Canada to crush the Dutch settlements on the Hudson; and had this territory become a French province, the united action of the American colonies in the French and Revolutionary wars would have been an impossibility. These Five Nations, called by the Jesuit fathers living among them the most enlightened but also the most intractable and ferocious of all the Indians, became soon after the arrival of the Dutch the stanch friends of the new-comers, and remained so during the whole Dutch period. The English wisely adhered to this Indian policy of the Dutch, and by the continued friendship of the Five Nations were enabled successfully to contend with the French for the supremacy on this continent.

The purchasers of the tracts already mentioned—with one exception, associations of Dutch merchants—lost no time in sending out people to settle their colonies. Renselaerswyck, adjoining and surrounding Fort Orange, had in 1630 already a population of thirty males, of whom several had families, sent out by the Association recognizing Kilian van Renselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam, as patroon. The same men, associated with several others, among whom was Captain David Pietersen de Vries, had bought the present counties of Sussex and Kent, in the State of Delaware, to which by a purchase made the following year they added the present Cape May County, N. J. On December 12, 1630, they sent two vessels to the Delaware or South River, “to plant a colony for the cultivation of grain and tobacco, as well as to carry on the whale-fishery in that region.” They carried out the first part of the plan, but were so unsuccessful in the second part that the expedition proved a losing one. Undismayed by their financial loss, another was sent out in May, 1632, under Captain de Vries’ personal command, although information had been received that the settlement on the South River, Zwanendael, had been destroyed by the Indians, and all the settlers, thirty-two in number, killed. Arriving opposite Zwanendael, De Vries found the news but too true; and after visiting the old Fort Nassau, now deserted, and loitering a while in the river, he left the region without any further attempt at colonization. The pecuniary losses attending these two unfortunate expeditions induced the patroons of Zwanendael, two years later, to dispose of their right and title to these tracts of land to the West India Company.

Shortly before Minuit was appointed director of New Netherland, a number of Walloons, compelled by French intolerance to leave their homes between the rivers Scheldt and Lys, had applied to Sir Dudley Carleton, principal Secretary of State to King Charles I., for permission to settle in Virginia. The answer of the Virginia Company not proving satisfactory, they turned their eyes upon New Netherland, where a small number of them arrived with Minuit. For some reasons they left the lands first allotted to them on Staten Island, and went over to Long Island, where Wallabout,[782] in the city of Brooklyn, still reminds us of the origin of its first settlers. It will be remembered that Englishmen from Virginia (under Captain Samuel Argal, in 1613) had attempted to drive the Dutch from the Hudson River.[783] It is said that the Dutch then acknowledged the English title to this region under a grant of Queen Elizabeth to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, and made an arrangement for their continuing there on sufferance. Be that as it may, the West India Company had paid no heed to this early warning. Now, in 1627, the matter was to be recalled to their minds in a manner more diplomatic than Argal’s, by a letter from Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, which most earnestly asserted the right of the English to the territory occupied by the Dutch. This urged the latter to clear their title, for otherwise it said: “It will be harder and with more difficulty obtained hereafter, and perhaps not without blows.” Before the director’s appeal for assistance against possible English invaders reached the home office, the Company had already taken steps to remove some of the causes which might endanger their colony. They had obtained, September, 1627, from King Charles I. an order giving to their vessels the same privileges as had been granted by the treaty of Southampton to all national vessels of Holland,—that is, freedom of trade to all ports of England and her colonies. But their title to New Netherland was not cleared, because they could not do it; for they did not dare to assert the pretensions to the premier seisin, then considered valid according to that maxim of the civil law, “quæ nullius sunt, in bonis dantur occupanti;” nor did they later claim the right of first discovery when, after the surrender of New Netherland to the English, in 1664, negotiations were had concerning restitution. Only once did they claim a title by such discovery. This was when the ship “Union,” bringing home the recalled director Minuit (1632), was attached in an English port, at the suit of the New England Company, on a charge which had been made notwithstanding the King’s order of September, 1627, and which alleged that the ship had obtained her cargo in countries subject to his Majesty. The denial of this claim and the counter claim of first discovery by Englishmen set up by the British ministry failed to bring forth a rejoinder from their High Mightinesses of Holland.

When De Vries, having ascertained the destruction of his colony on the Delaware, came to New Amsterdam, he found there the newly appointed director, Wouter van Twiller, just arrived. He was, as De Vries thought, “an unfit person,” whom family influence had suddenly raised from a clerkship in the Company’s office at Amsterdam to the governorship of New Netherland “to perform a comedy,” and his council De Vries calls “a pack of fools, who knew nothing except to drink, by whose management the Company must come to nought.” De Vries’ prediction came near being realized. Seized with a mania for territorial aggrandizement, Van Twiller bought from the Indians a part of the Connecticut territory in 1633, and by building Fort Hope, near the present site of Hartford, planted the seed for another quarrel with the English at Boston, who claimed all the land from the Narragansetts nearly to the Manhattans under a grant made in 1631 to the Earl of Warwick, and under a subsequent transfer from the latter in 1632 to Lord Say and Seal’s company. Notwithstanding their numerical weakness, the Dutch kept a footing in Connecticut for nearly twenty years; but they could not prevent the same Englishmen from invading Long Island in a like manner, and being prominent actors in the final catastrophe of 1664. Another purchase made by Van Twiller from the Indians, also in 1633, which included the territory on the Schuylkill, the building of Fort Beeversreede there and additions made to Fort Nassau, put new life into the sinking settlement on the Delaware River, and thus gave color to the subsequent statement, made in the dispute with the Swedes, that they (the Dutch) had never relinquished their hold upon this territory.[784] Thoroughly imbued with a sense of the wealth and power of the West India Company, then in the zenith of its power, Van Twiller expended the revenues of his government lavishly in building up New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, and, without regard for official ethics, abused his position still further at the expense of the Company, by granting to himself and his boon companions the most fertile tracts of land on and near Manhattan and Long islands. His irregular proceedings, finally brought to the notice of the States-General by the law officer of New Netherland, led to his recall in 1637, when he was succeeded by William Kieft.

Up to this time the history of New Netherland is more or less a history of the acts of the director, who proceeded more like the agent of a great commercial institution than the ruler of a vast province. He assumed to be the head of the agency, and all the other inhabitants of the colony were either his servants or his tenants. Nominally he was also directed to supervise the proceedings of adjoining colonies of the same nationality; but they either died out, like Pavonia (New Jersey) and Zwanendael (Delaware), or as yet the interests of those private establishments, like Renselaerswyck (Albany) had not come in conflict with those of the Company so as to call forth the authority vested in the director. The relations with the Indians had also been amicable so far, a slight misunderstanding with the New Jersey Indians excepted; and the quarrel with the English about the Connecticut lands having been referred to the home authorities for settlement, this complication did not require any display of statesmanship. The province having been brought to the verge of ruin by Wouter van Twiller, up to the beginning of whose administration it had returned a profit of $75,000 to the Company, the abilities of his successor were taxed to their utmost to rebuild it, and his statesmanship was tried in his dealings with the Swedes, the English, and the Indians.

The absorption, for their own benefit, of the most fertile lands by officers of the Company had naturally tended to prevent actual settlers from coming to New Netherland, and the Company itself had thus far failed to send over colonists, as required by the charter. The incessant disputes between the Amsterdam department of the Company and the patroons of Renselaerswyck over the interpretation of the privileges granted in 1629, and the complaints of the fiscal[785] of New Netherland against Wouter van Twiller, which pointedly referred to the general maladministration of the province, at last induced their High Mightinesses to turn their attention to it. A short investigation compelled them to announce officially that the colony was retrograding, its population decreasing, and that it required a change in the administration of its affairs. But as the charter of the Company was the fundamental evil, the Government was almost powerless to enforce its demands, and had to be satisfied with recommending to the Assembly of the Nineteen of the West India Company the adoption of a plan for the effectual settlement of the country and the encouragement of a sound and healthful emigration. This step resulted in overthrowing the monopoly of the American trade enjoyed by the Company since 1623, and in opening not only the trade, but also the cultivation of the soil under certain conditions, to every immigrant, denizen, or foreigner. The new order of things gave to the drooping colony a fresh lease of life. Its population, hitherto only transient, as it consisted mainly of the Company’s servants, who returned to Europe at the expiration of their respective terms, now became permanent,—“whole colonies” coming “to escape the insupportable government of New England;” servants who had obtained their liberty in Maryland and Virginia availing themselves of the opportunity to make use of the experience acquired on the tobacco plantations of their English masters; wealthy individuals of the more educated classes emigrating with their families and importing large quantities of stock; and the peasant farmers of continental Europe seeking freehold homes on the banks of the Hudson and on Long Island, which they could not acquire in the land of their birth. These all flocked now to New Netherland, and gave to New Amsterdam something of its present cosmopolitan character; for Father Jogues found there in 1643 eighteen different nationalities represented by its population. Two other invasions, however, of New Netherland brought a people likewise intent upon the cultivation of the soil and trading with the Indians; but they were not such as “acknowledged their High Mightinesses and the Directors of the West India Company as their suzerain lords and masters,” and these caused some anxiety and trouble to the new director.

The first of these invasions, arriving on this side of the Atlantic in Delaware Bay almost simultaneously with Kieft, was made in pursuance of a plan long cherished by the great Protestant hero of the seventeenth century, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, to give his country a share in the harvest which other nations were then gathering in the New World. Various reasons deferred the carrying out of this plan, first laid before the King in 1626 by the same Usselinx who planned the West India Company; and not until 1638 did the South Company of Sweden send out their first adventure under another man, also formerly connected with the West India Company, Peter Minuit.

Kieft’s protest against this intrusion had no effect upon the Swedish commander and his colony, whose history is told in another chapter. More energy was displayed by the Dutch two years later in dealing with some Englishmen from New Haven, who began a settlement on the Schuylkill River, opposite Fort Nassau, and who were promptly driven away. Laxity and corruption on the part of the Dutch local director seems to have been the cause of the almost inexplicable patience with which the Dutch bore the encroachments made by the Swedes; and not until the government of New Netherland was intrusted to the energetic Stuyvesant was anything done to counteract the Swedish influences on the Delaware. Stuyvesant built in 1651 a new fort (Casimir, now Newcastle, Del.), below the Swedish fort Christina (Wilmington), the treacherous surrender of which, in 1654, to a newly arriving Swedish governor, led in 1655 to the complete overthrow of Swedish rule.

The next two years, to 1657, the inhabitants of the Delaware territory had to suffer under the mismanagement of various commanders appointed by the Director-General and Council, whose lack of administrative talent helped not a little to embarrass the Company financially. Under pressure of monetary difficulty, part of the Delaware region was ceded by the Company to the municipality of Amsterdam in Holland, which in May, 1657, established a new colony at Fort Casimir, calling it New Amstel, while the name of Christina was changed to Altena, and the territory belonging to it placed in charge of an agent of more experience than his predecessors. The remaining years of Dutch rule on the Delaware derive interest chiefly from an attempt by comers from Maryland to obtain possession of the country through a clever trick; from quarrels between the authorities of the two Dutch colonies brought on by the weakness and folly of the directors of the “City’s Colony;” and from difficulties with Maryland which arose out of the Indian question. With the surrender of New Amsterdam in 1664, the Delaware country passed also into English hands.

Historians have hitherto failed to give due weight to the attempt of Sweden to establish this American colony, and to the effect it had upon the fortunes of the West India Company. The expedition of 1655, although politically successful, not only exhausted the ready means of the New Netherland Government, but also plunged it and the Company into debts which never ceased to hamper its movement, and which afterward rendered it impossible to furnish the province a sufficient military protection.

But no less a share in the final result of 1664 is due to the second invasion of the Dutch territory, made about the time when the Swedes first appeared on the Delaware, by Englishmen crossing over from Connecticut to the east end of Long Island. The whole island had been granted by the Plymouth Company to the Earl of Stirling in 1635; and basing their claims on patents issued by Forrest, the Earl’s agent in America, the invaders quickly settled in the present County of Suffolk (1640), and resisted all efforts of the Dutch to drive them off. Prejudicial to the Company’s interests as these encroachments upon their territory were, they were calculated to call forth all the administrative and diplomatic talents of which Kieft was supposed to be possessed; but unfortunately by his lack of these qualities he contrived to lay the colony open to a danger which almost destroyed it. The trade with the interior had led to an intimacy between the Indians and the Dutch which gave the natives many chances to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the habits, strength, and usages of the settlers; while the increased demand for peltries required that the Indians should be supplied with better means to meet that demand. They were consequently given firearms; and when thus put on the same footing with the white inhabitants, Kieft committed the folly of exacting from them a tribute as a return for aiding them in their defence against their enemies by the building of forts and by the maintenance of a military establishment. He even threatened to use forcible measures in cases of non-compliance. The war resulting from this policy lasted until 1645, and seriously impaired the finances of the Company and the development of the colony. Equally arbitrary and devoid of common-sense was Kieft’s administration of internal affairs. Before the beginning of the Indian war, upon which he was intent, circumstances compelled him to make a concession to popular rights, which he might use as a cloak to protect himself against censure. He directed that the community at large should elect twelve delegates to consult with the Director and Council on the expediency of going to war, and when fairly launched into the conflict he quickly abolished this advisory board,—the first representative body of New York,—but only to ask for an expression of the public opinion by another board a few months later in 1643. This, at last disgusted with Kieft’s tyranny and folly, set to work to have him removed in 1647. The people had not forgotten that in the Netherlands they had been self-governing, and had enjoyed the rights of free municipalities. Although all the minor towns had acquired the same privileges almost at the beginning of their existence, New Amsterdam, the principal place of the colony, was still ruled by the Company through the Director and Council. The opposition which he met from the burghers of this place was the principal cause of his recall.

The relations of New Netherland with its English neighbors during Kieft’s administration were in the main the same as under his predecessors. He continued to complain of the grievous wrongs and injuries inflicted upon his people by New Haven, but had no means to do more than complain. The stronger English colonies kept their settlement on the Connecticut, and established another within the territory claimed by the Dutch at Agawam, now Springfield, Mass.

The arrival of the new director-general was celebrated by the inhabitants of New Amsterdam with all the solemnity which circumstances afforded; and they were pleased to hear him announce that he “should be in his government as a father to his children for the advantage of the Company, the country, and the burghers.” They had good reasons to be hopeful. Petrus Stuyvesant, the new director, had gathered administrative experience as governor of the Company’s Island of Curaçao, and while in Holland on sick leave, in 1645, he had proved his knowledge of New Netherland affairs by offering acceptable suggestions for the better management of this and the other transatlantic territories of the Company. His views, together with instructions drawn up by the Assembly of the Nineteen for the guidance of the director, were embodied in resolutions and orders for the future government of New Netherland, which revolutionized and liberalized the condition of the colony. It was henceforth to be governed by the Director-General and a Council composed of the vice-director and the fiscal. The right of the people to be heard by the provincial government on the state and condition of the country, through delegates from the various settlements, was confirmed; and the carrying trade between the colony and other countries, which the reform of 1639 had still left in the hands of the Company and of a few privileged persons, was now opened to all, although under certain rather onerous restrictions.

The first few months of the new administration fully justified the hope with which Stuyvesant’s arrival had been accompanied. The state in which Kieft had left the public morals compelled Stuyvesant to issue and enforce such orders, that within two months of his assuming the new duties the director of the Patroons’ Colony at Albany wrote home: “Mynheer Stuyvesant introduces here a thorough reform.” What the state of things must have been may be inferred from Stuyvesant’s declaration that “the people are without discipline, and approaching the savage state,” while “a fourth part of the city of New Amsterdam consists of rumshops and houses where nothing can be had but beer and tobacco.”

Unfortunately for his own reputation and for the good of the colony, he used his energies not solely to make provisions for future good government, but he allowed his feudal notions to embroil him in the quarrels of the late administration, by espousing the cause of Kieft, who had been accused by representatives of the commonalty of malfeasance in office. This grave error induced the home authorities to consider Stuyvesant’s recall; but he was finally allowed to remain, and in the end proved the most satisfactory administrator of the province sent out by the Company. It was his and the Company’s misfortune that he was appointed when the resources of the Company were gradually diminishing in consequence of the peace with Spain. He was thus constantly hampered by a lack of means; and when the end came, he had only from one hundred and fifty to two hundred soldiers, scattered in four garrisons from the Delaware forts to Fort Orange, to defend the colony against an overwhelming English force.

During the seventeen years of his administration Stuyvesant endeavored to cultivate the friendship of the Indians; and in this he was in the main successful, save that the tribes of the Mohegan nation along the Hudson refused to become as firm friends of the Dutch as their suzerain lords, the Mohawks, were. While Stuyvesant was absent on the South River, in 1655, to subdue, in obedience to orders from home, the Swedish settlements there, New Amsterdam was invaded by the River Indians and almost destroyed. The Colony and the Company had not yet recovered from the losses sustained by this invasion, nor from the draft made upon their financial resources by the successful expedition against the Swedes, when a few tribes of the same River Indians reopened the war against the Dutch. They first murdered some individuals of the settlement on the Esopus (now Kingston, Ulster County), and later destroyed it almost completely. With an expense at the time altogether out of proportion to the means of the Government, Stuyvesant succeeded in 1663 in ending this war by destroying the Esopus tribe of Indians.

The negotiations with the New England colonies for a settlement of the boundary and other open questions fall into the earlier part of Stuyvesant’s administration. Although he could flatter himself that he had obtained in the treaty of Hartford, 1650, as good terms as he might expect from a power vastly superior to his own, his course only tended to separate the two factions of New Netherland still farther. His espousal of Kieft’s cause had, as we have seen, alienated him from the mass of his countrymen, whose anger was now still more aroused when he selected as advisers at Hartford an Englishman resident at New Amsterdam and a Frenchman. He was accused of having betrayed his trust because he had been obliged to surrender the jurisdiction of the Company over the Connecticut territory and the east end of Long Island. Listening to these accusations, coming together as they did with the Kieft affair, the Company increased the difficulties surrounding their director by an order to make Dutch nationality one of the tests of fitness for public employment.

The people had already in Kieft’s time loudly called for more liberty,—a desire which Stuyvesant in the strong conservatism of his character was by no means willing to listen to. As, however, liberal principles gained more and more ground among the population, he at last gave his consent to the convocation of a general assembly from the several towns, which was to consider the state of the province. It was too late. The power of the Dutch in New Netherland was waning; Connecticut had been lost in 1650; Westchester at the very door of the Manhattans, and the principal towns of western Long Island were in the hands of the English; and a few months after the first meeting of the delegates the English flag floated over the fort, which had until then been called New Amsterdam.

The magnitude of the commerce of the United Provinces had long been a thorn in the side of the English nation; for years Cato’s Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam had been the burden of political speeches. Differences arising between the two governments, Charles II., only lately the guest of Holland, allowed himself to be persuaded by his chancellor, Shaftesbury, that this commerce would make Holland as great an empire as Rome had been, and this would lead to the utter annihilation of England. There was apparently no other motive reflecting “honor upon his prudence, activity, and public spirit,” to induce him to order the treacherous expedition which seized the territory of an unsuspecting ally.

When the English fleet appeared off the coast of Long Island the Dutch were not at all prepared to offer resistance, their small military force of about two hundred effective men being scattered in detachments over the whole province. Nevertheless Stuyvesant would have let the issue be decided by arms; but the people failed to support him, and insisted upon a surrender, which was accordingly made. They had not forgotten how he had treated their demands for greater liberty, and they expected to be favorably heard by an English government. New Amsterdam, fort and city, as well as the whole province were named by the victors in honor of the new proprietor, the Duke of York; while the region west of the Hudson towards the Delaware, given by the Duke to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, received the name of New Jersey in compliment to the latter’s birthplace. Fort Orange and neighborhood became Albany; the Esopus, Kingston, and all reminiscences of Dutch rule, so far as names went, were extinguished, only to be revived less than a decade later.

Although the treaty of Breda, July 21, 1667, had given to Holland (which by it was robbed of her North American territory) the colony of Surinam, the States took advantage of the war brought on by the ambitious designs of England’s ally, France, against Holland in 1672, to retake New Netherland in 1673. Again the several towns and districts changed their names,—New York to New Orange; Fort James in New York to Willem Hendrick; Albany to Willemstadt, and the fort there to Fort Nassau,—all in honor of the Prince of Orange. Kingston was called Swanenburg; and New Jersey, Achter Col (behind the Col). During the first few months after the reconquest the province was governed by the naval commanders and the governor, Anthony Colve, appointed by the States-General. The passionate character of the new governor may have induced the commanders to remain until matters were satisfactorily arranged under the new order of things. The different towns and villages were required to send delegates to New Orange with authority and for the purpose of acknowledging their allegiance to the States-General of Holland. All submitted promptly, with the exception of the five towns of the East Riding of Yorkshire on Long Island, which, however, upon a threat of using force if they would not come with their English colors and constables’ staves, also declared their willingness to take the oath of allegiance. A claim upon Long Island, petitions from three of its eastern towns to New England for “protection and government against the Dutch,” and an arrogant attempt made by Governor Winthrop of New Haven to lecture Colve, forced the latter into an attitude of war, which resulted in a bloodless rencontre between the Dutch and the English from Connecticut at Southold, Long Island, in March, 1674. “Provisional Instructions” for the government of the province, drawn up by Colve, estranged and annoyed its English inhabitants, who were declared ineligible for any office if not in communion with the Reformed Protestant Church, in conformity with the Synod of Dort. Therefore, when, after the failure of receiving reinforcements from home, New Netherland was re-surrendered to England (February, 1674), the States-General being obliged to take this step by the necessity of making European alliances, the English portion of the population were glad to greet (November, 1674) again a government of their own nationality, and the Dutch had to submit with the best possible grace.

[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]

OUR sources for the history of New Netherland are principally the official records of the time, which must be considered under two heads: the records of the governments in Europe which directly or indirectly were interested in this part of the world; and the documents of the provincial government, handed down from secretary to secretary, and now carefully preserved in the archives of the State of New York. Of the former we have copies, the procuring of which by the State was one of the epoch-making events in the annals of historiography. A society, formed in 1804[786] in the city of New York for the principal purpose of “collecting and preserving whatever may relate to the natural, civil, or ecclesiastical history of the United States in general and the State of New York in particular,” having memorialized the State Legislature on the subject, a translation was ordered and made of the Dutch records in the office of the Secretary of State. This translation—of which more hereafter—undoubtedly threw light upon the historical value and importance of the State archives, but proved also their incompleteness; and another memorial by the same society induced the Legislature of 1839 to authorize the appointment of an agent who should procure from the archives of Europe the material to fill the gaps. Mr. John Romeyn Brodhead, who by a residence of two years at the Hague as Secretary of the American Legation seemed to be specially fitted for, and was already to some extent familiar with, the duties expected from him, was appointed such an agent in 1841, and after four years of diligent search and labor returned with eighty volumes of manuscript copies of documents procured in Holland, France, and England, which were published under his own and Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan’s supervision[787] as Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, eleven volumes quarto, including index volume. The historical value of these documents, which the State procured at an expense of about fourteen thousand dollars, can not be estimated too highly. When made accessible to the public, they removed the reproach that “New York was probably the only commonwealth whose founders had been covered with ridicule” by one of her sons, by showing that the endurance, courage, and love of liberty evinced by her first settlers deserved a better monument than Knickerbocker’s History of New York.[788] Mr. Brodhead was unfortunately too late by twenty years to obtain copies of the records of the East and West India companies; for what would have proved a rich mine of historical information had been sold as waste paper at public auction in 1821. These lost records would have told us what the Dutch of 1608-1609 knew of our continent; how Hudson came to look for a northwest passage under the fortieth degree of north latitude; and how, where, and when the first settlements were made on the Hudson and Delaware,—information which they certainly must have contained, for the States-General referred the English ambassador, in a letter of Dec. 30, 1664, to the “very perfect registers, relations, and journals of the West India Company, provided with all the requisite verifications respecting everything that ever occurred in those countries” (New Netherland). We cannot glean this information from the records of the provincial government, consisting of the register of the provincial secretary, the minutes of council, letter-books, and land papers, for they begin only in 1638, a few land patents of 1630, 1631, and 1636 excepted. Even what we have of these is not complete, all letters prior to 1646 and council minutes for nearly four years having been lost. Where these missing parts may have strayed, it is hard to say. Article 12 of the “Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland, subscribed at the Governor’s Bouwery, August 27, O. S., 1664,” insured the careful preservation of the archives of the Dutch government by the English conquerors. In June, 1688, they were still in the Secretary’s office at New York; a few months later “Edward Randolph, then Secretary of ye Dominion of New England, carried away [to Boston] ye severall Bookes before Exprest,” says a Report of commissioners appointed by the Committee of Safety of New York to examine the books, etc., in the Secretary’s office, dated Sept. 23, 1689. Why he carried them off, the minutes of the proceedings against Leisler would probably disclose, if found. They remained in Boston until 1691, when Governor Sloughter, of New York, had them brought back. Comparing the inventory of June, 1688 (which states that there were found in “Presse no. 3 a parcell of old Dutch Records and bundles of Papers, all Being marked and numbred as y^ey Lay now in the said presse,”[789] which, to judge from the number of books in the other presses, must have been large) with an inventory and examination of the Dutch records made in June, 1753, under the supervision of the commissioners appointed by an act of the General Assembly to examine the eastern boundaries of the province, I come to the conclusion that the missing Dutch and English records were lost either in their wanderings between New York and Boston, or during the brief Dutch interregnum of 1673-74,[790] or perhaps in the fire which consumed Fort George in New York on the 18th of April, 1741, although Governor Clarke informs the Board of Trade that “most of the records were saved and I hope very few lost, for I took all the possible care of them, and had all removed before the office took fire.”

The inventory of 1753 shows that up to the present day nothing has since been lost, with the exception of a missing account-book and of some things which time has made illegible and of others which the knife of the autograph-hunter has cut out. It is difficult to say how much has gone through the latter unscrupulous method into the hands of private parties. The catalogues of collections of autographs sold at auction occasionally show papers which seem to have belonged to the State archives, but it is impossible to prove that they came thence. An examination, hurriedly made a few years ago, of the 103 volumes of Colonial Manuscripts of New York, showed that about three hundred documents had been stolen since Dr. O’Callaghan published in 1866 the Calendar[791] of these manuscripts. The then Secretary of State, Mr. John Bigelow, published the list of missing documents, calling upon the parties in possession of any of them to return the property of the State; and a month later he had the gratification of receiving a package containing about sixty, of which, however, only twenty were mentioned in the published list, while the loss of the others had not then been discovered. A thorough examination would probably bring the number of missing or mutilated papers to nearly one thousand. It is equally remarkable and fortunate, that during the war of the Revolution the records became an object of solicitude both to the royal Governor and the Provincial Congress.

The latter, fearing that the destruction of the records would “unhinge the property of numbers in the colony, and throw all legal proceedings into the most fatal confusion,” requested, Sept. 2, 1775, Secretary Bayard, whose ancestor, Nicolas Bayard, also had them in charge when the English retook New York in 1674, to deposit them in some safe place. Bayard, struggling between his duties as a royal officer and his sympathies as a born American, hesitated to take the papers in his charge from the place appointed for their keeping, but packed them nevertheless in boxes to be ready for immediate removal. Sears’s coup de main in November, 1775, and the intimation that he intended speedily to return with a larger body of “Connecticut Rioters” to take away the records of the province, induced Governor Tryon to remove “such public records as were most interesting to the Crown” on board of the “Dutchess of Gordon” man-of-war, to which he himself had fled for safety. When called upon, Feb. 7, 1776, by order of the Provincial Congress, to surrender them, he offered to place them on board a vessel, specially to be chartered for that purpose, which was to remain in the harbor. He pledged his honor that they should not be injured by the King’s forces, but refused to land them anywhere, because they could not be taken to a place safer than where they were. “Shortly afterwards,” he writes to Lord Germain in March, 1779, “the public records were for greater security (the Rebels threatening to board in the night and take the vessel) put on board the ‘Asia,’ under the care of Captain Vandeput. The ‘Asia’ being ordered home soon after the taking of New York, Captain Vandeput desired me to inform him what he should do with the two boxes of public records. I recommended them to be placed on board the ‘Eagle’ man-of-war.” The records not “most interesting to the Crown” (most likely including the Dutch records) were taken with Secretary Bayard to his father’s house in the “Out Ward of New York,” where a detachment of forty-eight men of the First New York City Regiment, later of Captain Alexander Hamilton’s Artillery Company, was detailed to guard them. In June of the same year, 1776, they were removed to the seat of government at Kingston, N. Y. Almost a year later two hundred men were raised for the special duty of guarding them, and when the enemy approached Kingston this body conveyed them to a small place in the interior (Rochester, Ulster County), whence they were returned to Kingston in November, 1777. From that date they followed the legislature and executive offices to New York in 1783, and finally in 1798 to Albany, where they have since remained. In New York the records which were carried off by Governor Tryon, and had been in the mean time transferred from the “Eagle” to the “Warwick” man-of-war and then returned to the city in 1781, were again placed with the others. At the instance of the New York Historical Society, the Dutch part of the State records were ordered to be translated; and this duty was entrusted by Governor De Witt Clinton to Dr. Francis A. van der Kemp, a learned Hollander, whom the political dissensions in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century had driven from his home. Unfortunately, Dr. van der Kemp’s knowledge of the English tongue was not quite equal to the task; nor was his eyesight, as he himself confesses in a marginal note to a passage dimmed by age, strong enough to decipher such papers as had suffered from the ravages of time and become almost illegible. This translation, completed in 1822, is therefore in many instances incorrect and incomplete; grave mistakes have been the consequence, much to the annoyance of historical students. Some of the errors were corrected by Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan, who published in 1849-54, under the authority of the State, four volumes of Documents relating to the History of the Colony (1604-1799), selected at random from the copies procured abroad, from the State archives, and from other sources. In 1876 the Hon. John Bigelow, Secretary of State, directed the writer of this paper to translate and prepare a volume of documents relating to the Delaware colony, which was published in 1877; another volume, containing the records of the early settlements in the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys, translated by the writer, followed in 1881; this year will see a third, on the settlements on Long Island; and a fourth, to be published later, will contain the documents relating to New York city and the relations between the Dutch and the neighboring English colonies. These four volumes contain everything of a general and public interest, so that the parts not translated anew will refer only to personal matters.

These being the official sources of information for the history of New Netherland, it is proper to inquire whether they are trustworthy beyond doubt. The charge made by Robert Thorne, of Bristol, in 1527[792] against the “Portingals,” of having “falsified their records of late purposely,” might be repeated against the Dutch wherever the claim of first discovery of the country is discussed.

I have already stated that one of the motives, and perhaps the principal one, for establishing the West India Company was of a political nature. The destruction of Spain’s financial resources was to lead to an honorable and satisfactory peace with Holland. Spain relied for the sinews of war on its American colonies; and we must inquire how much of the information relating to location and extent of these colonies had reached the Dutch notwithstanding the Spanish efforts to suppress it.

Hakluyt says:[793] “The first discovery of these coasts (never heard of before) was well begun by John Cabot and Sebastian his son, who were the first finders out of all that great tract of land stretching from the Cape of Florida unto those Islands which we now call the Newfoundland, or which they brought and annexed to the Crown of England [1497].”

RIBERO’S MAP, 1529.

[This is a section of the Carta Universal of the Spanish cosmographer, Diego Ribero. It needs the following key:—

1. R. de St. iago.

2. C. de Arenas (Sandy Cape).

3. B. de S. Χρō-al.

4. B. de S. Atonio.

5. Mōtana Vde.

6. R. de buena madre.

7. S. Juā Baptista.

8. Arciepielago de Estevā Gomez.

9. Mōtanas.

10. C. de muchas yllas.

11. Arecifes (reefs).

12. Medanos (sand-hills).

13. Golfo.

14. R. de M[=o]tanas.

15. Sarçales (brambles).

16. R. de la Buelta (river of return).

A. “Tiera de Estevā Gomez, la qual descrubrio por mandado de su mag^t el año de 1525: ay en ella muchos arboles y fructas de los de españa y muchos rodovallos y Salmones y sollos: no han alla do oro.”

The map, which is described more fully in another volume, has been the theme of much controversy, it being usually held to be the result of Gomez’s explorations; but this is denied by Stevens. References upon it by the Editor will be found in the Ticknor Catalogue, published by the Boston Public Library. It is of interest in the present connection as being one of the current charts of the coast, though made eighty years earlier, which Hudson could and did take with him. How he interpreted it is not known. In our day there is much diverse opinion upon its points. Mr. Murphy, for instance, in his Voyage of Verrazzano, puts the Hudson River at 5, and Cape Cod at 10. Sprengel, who published a memoir on this map in 1795, thought Hudson’s river was the one between 10 and 11. Asher, in his Henry Hudson, p. xciii, takes the same view. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine, p. 304, and in his Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von America, p. 43, makes the river between 10 and 11 the Penobscot, and the hook near 2 Cape Cod, though he acknowledges some objections to this interpretation of the latter landmark, because the names between 2 and 8 are those that in later maps are given to the New Netherland coast. It seems to the Editor, however, as it does to Kohl, that Ribero had fallen into a confusion of misplacing names, common to early map-makers, and that we cannot keep the names right and accept the strange geographical correspondences which, for instance, Dr. De Costa imposes on the map in his Verrazano the Explorer, when he makes the hook near 2 to be Sandy Hook, at New York Bay, and the bay between 10 and 11 the Penobscot, which he thinks “clearly defined,” while “Ribero gives no hint of the region now embraced by Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.” It is difficult to accept Dr. De Costa’s “wildly exaggerated” Sandy Hook, or his notion of “Dr. Kohl’s confusion” in regarding the great gulf of these early maps, shown between 2 and 10, as the Gulf of Maine. With all the difficulties attending Kohl’s interpretation, it presents fewer anomalies than any other. There is so much uncertainty at the best in the interpretation of these early maps, that any understanding is subject to change from the developments now making in the study of this early cartography.—Ed.]

I will not assert that the Cabots actually saw and explored the whole coast from Florida to Newfoundland, but they must have brought away the impression that the land seen by them was a continent, and that no passage to the East Indies could be found in these latitudes, but should be looked for farther north. A map in the collection of the General Staff of the Army at Munich;[794] supposed to have been made by Salvatore de Pilestrina about 1517, shows that the cartographers of that period had accepted this Cabot theory as a fact. The voyage of Esteban Gomez in 1524, sent out “to find a way to Cathay” between Florida and the Baccalaos,[795] resulted only in discovering “mucha tierra, continuada con la que se llama de los Baccalaos, discurriendo al Occidente y puesta en XL. grados y XLI.”[796]

The next voyage along the coast of North America, made in 1526 by Lucas Vasquez de Aillon and Matienzo, must be considered of importance for the cartography of the first half of the sixteenth century; for their discoveries, although of no direct benefit to them or to Spain, proved to Spanish map-makers and their imitators that North America was not, like the West Indies, an archipelago of islands, but a continent. Even though Ramusio, in the preface to vol. iii. of his work, published in 1556, declares it is not yet known whether New France is connected with Florida or is an island, the maps made shortly after Aillon’s voyage[797] show that the cartographers had decided the matter in their minds.

This knowledge was not confined to the map-makers and officials, who might have been forbidden to divulge such information. A contemporary writer says, in 1575:—

“La forme donc de la Floride est en peninsule et come triangulaire, ayant la mer qui la baigne de tous costez sauf vers le Septentrion.... Au Septentrion luy sont Hochelaga [Canada] et autres terres.... Or ce pays Floridien commence à la grande rivière, que les mondernes ont appelé de St. Jean [Cape Fear River?], qui le separe du pays de Norumbeg en la nouvelle France.”[798]

And I refer further to the divers Descriptiones Ptolemaicæ[799] published during the sixteenth century,—books accessible to the public of that day, and most likely known to and read by every navigator of the Atlantic.

To bring this information still nearer home to Henry Hudson, I mention the map made by Thomas Hood, an Englishman, in 1592,[800] and the work of Peter Plancius, published in 1594.[801] Hudson, an English navigator, could hardly have been ignorant of his countryman’s production, which shows under 40° north latitude the mouth of a river called Rio de San Antonio, the name given to Hudson’s River by the earlier Spanish discoverers. Before starting on his voyage in the “Half Moon,” Hudson had been in consultation with Dr. Peter Plancius, who adds to his chapter on “Norumberga et Virginia” a map, incorrect, it is true, as to latitudes and other details, but nevertheless showing an unbroken coast-line.

DUTCH VESSELS, 1618.

This cut is a fac-simile of one in the title of Schouten’s Journal, Amsterdam, 1618. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 87.

When, therefore, it is stated that Hudson abandoned the plan of seeking for a northeast passage, in the hope of finding, under 40° north latitude, a passage to the Western Ocean, as advised by his friends Captain John Smith, of Virginia, and Dr. Plancius, we are asked to accept as true a statement made and spread about for political purposes. These will be understood when we recall the motives for the establishment of the West India Company,—a project in which Plancius, a minister of the Reformed Church, and as such driven from his Belgian home by the Spaniards, gave his hearty and active co-operation to Usselinx. International law gave possession for his sovereign to any one who discovered a new land not formerly claimed by any Christian prince or inhabited by any Christian nation. To have a base for their operations in America against Spain, Holland required territory not so claimed, and the shrewd projectors undoubtedly deemed it most advisable to establish this base not only in an unclaimed but also in a hitherto unknown country. Therefore it was necessary to claim for Hudson the discovery of the river bearing his name, as the West India Company did in 1634,[802] although a few years before, in 1632, they had admitted by inference[803] that Hudson’s River was known to other nations under the name of Rio de Montañas, and of Rio de Montaigne, before Hudson saw it.[804] In the following decade the statement of 1634 was forgotten, and the company in 1644 claimed title by the first discovery of the Hudson and Delaware rivers, through ships of the Greenland Company in 1598.[805] Still later, in 1659, by the mouth of their diplomatic agents in Maryland and Virginia, it is asserted that Holland derived its title to New Netherland through Spain as “first discoverer and founder of that New World,” and through the French, who, by one Jehan de Verrazano[806] a Florentine, were in 1524 the second followers and discoverers in the northern parts of America.[807] Falsification in politics was evidently then, as it is now, a venial sin; the statements made for political purposes, although emanating from official sources, must, therefore, be accepted with due caution.[808]

As the history of New Netherland is closely connected with that of the West India Company, and as the West India Company was one of the great political factors in the United Provinces, the Dutch State-Papers[809] and the writings of contemporaneous authors[810] must be duly considered by the student of this period of our history.

Most prominent among contemporaneous writers is Willem Usselinx, the originator of the Dutch West India and Swedish South Companies, even though his writings have not always a direct bearing upon the history of New Netherland. We know little of the life of this remarkable man, beyond the facts that he was a native of Belgium and a merchant at Antwerp, whom the political and religious troubles of the period had compelled to leave his fatherland and to seek refuge in Holland; that, inspired by hatred against Spain, he conceived the plan of the West India Company; that for some unexplained reason the West India Company lost his services, which were then, about 1626, offered to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the establishment of the South Company.[811] As Usselinx chiefly wrote before the West India Company was organized, and as its advocate, his books and pamphlets, instead of being historical, are of a more or less polemical character. He never forgets what he had to suffer through Spain, and points out constantly how important to Holland is the commerce of the West Indies, and that in their peace negotiations with Spain the States-General must by all means preserve the freedom of trading to America. These writings date from before Hudson’s voyage in 1609, and Usselinx disappears from the list of writers after the publication of the patent granted by Sweden to the South Company in 1627, unless we admit the above-quoted West-Indische Spieghel to be his work. Asher, in his Bibliographical Essay, gives as the latest of his works the Argonautica Gustaviana,[812] and had evidently no knowledge of the Advice to Establish a new South Company, written by Usselinx in 1636.

The next writer to be considered had exceptional facilities in gathering his material. As director of the West India Company, Johannes de Laet[813] had of course ready access to the records, while as co-patroon of Rensselaerswyck he had an especial interest in the country where his daughter and son-in-law[814] had made their home. Two manuscript volumes in folio, written by De Laet himself, and now in the collection of Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, give us an idea of the painstaking diligence with which De Laet collected the matter of the books which he intended to write. These two volumes contain no material relating specially to New Netherland, but he made undoubtedly as extensive preparations for the chapter on the Dutch colony in North America in his Nieuwe Wereld,[815] as he had made for the others, by copying from the most authentic works on the subject, by talking with seafarers returned from the transatlantic colony, and by transcribing letters from private persons residing there. His intention to give to his fellow-citizens as perfect a description of the New World as circumstances would allow, was carefully carried out. It would have been difficult to produce anything better at the time when he wrote; and we must accept this book as the standard work on New Netherland of the seventeenth century, even though he makes in the book, as well as on its accompanying map, a few slight errors; saying, for instance, that “Manhattan Island is separated from the mainland by the Hellgate,” or that “Fort Orange stood [at the time of his writing, 1625] on an island close to the left [western] shore of [Hudson’s] river.”

The title of De Laet’s next work[816] is very misleading, for one would naturally expect to find the history of the first settlement on the soil of New York in all its details;[817] but the name of New Netherland is only mentioned, as it were, by accident. Still the book has its value for the student of the philosophy of American history, for in the preface the author frankly admits that the object of the West India Company was war on Spain, and he congratulates the country upon the successes so far obtained; and he further shows how the Company, organized for warlike purposes, could not give any attention to a country which, under the circumstances, required the utmost care for its profitable development. Considering that De Laet was personally interested in New Netherland as co-patroon of Rensselaerswyck and through the marriage of his daughter to an inhabitant of the province, it is astonishing to find so little said by him of the actual occurrences there. It may be that reasons of policy and prudence restrained him from baring to the public eye many things for which the Company could be called to account. The new race, however, with which his countrymen had come in contact, had sufficiently excited his interest to induce him to study their habits and speculate upon their origin, so that when the learned Grotius published a treatise on the American Indians,[818] De Laet rushed into the field combating Grotius’s theories.

While De Laet reports the events in New Netherland up to a given date as a member of the Government saw them, we have two authors before whose eyes some of these events took place, and who in writing about them criticise them in the manner of subjects and citizens. To the first of these, David Pietersen de Vries, Artillerie-Meester van d’ Noorder Quartier, Mr. Bancroft gives the credit of being the founder of the State of Delaware.[819] How far the abortive attempt of establishing the colony of Zwanendael, mentioned in the narrative, and the voyage bringing over the colonists may be called “the cradling of a state,” I leave others to decide. De Vries published in 1655 an account of his voyages[820] made twenty years before, and tells us in his book, in the most unvarnished manner and with the bluntness of a sailor, how badly New Netherland was being governed under the administration of Minuit and Van Twiller. No doubt as to the veracity of his statements can be entertained, as in his case there could be no motive for “divagation.” He views the loss of his Delaware colony with the proverbial equanimity both of a Dutchman and of a sailor, and stands so far above the coarseness of manners and life in his time, that he considers officials addicted to drink not much better than criminals. Where he speaks of matters not seen by himself, and of the Indians and their mode of life, he follows closely the best authority to be found; namely, the work of Domine Johannis Megapolensis.

The other author, Jonker[821] Adrian van der Donck, Doctor of Laws and Advocate of the Supreme Court of Holland, has done more to give to his contemporaries a full knowledge of the country of his adoption, and to implant in the country itself better institutions, than any other man. Sent over in 1642 as Schout (sheriff) of the Patroons’ Colony of Rensselaerswyck, he in 1647 left this service in consequence of a quarrel with the vice-director, and purchased from the Indians the colony of Colen Donck, now Yonkers, for which he received a patent in 1648.[822] A controversy arose about this time between the Government and several colonists, among whom was Van der Donck, which led to a remonstrance being drawn up, to be laid before the States-General for a redress of certain grievances which they had so far failed to obtain either from the provincial governor or the West India Company.[823] It is a contemporaneous relation of events in New Netherland signed by eleven residents of New Amsterdam. Its probable author was Van der Donck; at least his original journal was the source from which this “Remonstrance” was derived. The form in which Governor Stuyvesant seized it[824] is, however, different from the one in which it was published. In the latter it is divided in three parts: 1. A description of the natives and of the physical features of the country; 2. Events connected with the earliest settlements of the country; 3. Remonstrance against the policy of the West India Company. The tone and character of such a document must be necessarily aggressive; but, even though the reply to it by the provincial secretary, Van Tienhoven,[825] denies most of its allegations, it certainly contains valuable and trustworthy information.

Van der Donck’s next work, acknowledged by him as his own,[826] is an improvement on De Laet’s similar description. The time which had elapsed since De Laet’s publication had taught different lessons, and Van der Donck’s personal experience in the country described by him could not fail to give him a better insight than even the best written reports afforded to De Laet. But, with the latter, this author falls into the error of ascribing to the Indians a statement that the Dutch were the first white people seen by them, and that they did not know there were any other people in the world. This assertion is contradicted by the Long Island Indians, who talked with a later traveller, telling him that “the first strangers seen in these parts were Spaniards or Portuguese, who did not remain long, and afterwards the Dutch came.”[827] The so-called “Pompey Stone,” in the State Geological Museum, might be taken for another contradiction of De Laet’s and Van der Donck’s statements. Still more apparently contradictory evidence might be the similarity of some so-called Indian words with words of the Latin tongues.[828] Nor is Van der Donck correct in the relation of the discovery of the country by Hudson, and the map accompanying his work has several grave errors. The description of the physical features of the country, of the animals, and of the Indians is followed by a discourse between a patriot and a New Netherlander on the conveniences of the new colony, in which the questions are asked and answered, whether it is to the advantage of Holland to have such a flourishing colony, and whether this colony will ever be able to defend itself against foreign enemies.

Another resident of New Netherland, the Reverend Johannis Megapolensis (van Mekelenburg), one of the few educated men who came to this country at that early date, has given us a book which, though not strictly referring to the history of the country, must yet be considered as one of the collateral sources, and finds its most appropriate place here, following the Descriptions. As minister of the Reformed Church at Rensselaerswyck, whither he was called by the patroon in 1642, he came soon in close contact with the Indians; and having learned the difficult Mohawk language, he became, several years earlier than the New England preacher, John Eliot, a missionary among the Indians. The result of his labors was an account of the Mohawks, their country, etc.[829] This account was closely followed by De Vries, as mentioned above, and by most of the other writers on the Indians.

A large share of the material for this work Megapolensis must have received from Father Jogues, a Jesuit missionary whom the Dominie rescued from captivity among the Mohawks. The letters of this courageous and zealous servant of the Church to his superiors teem with information concerning the Indians, whom he endeavored to Christianize,[830] and at whose hands he died.

Either the financial success of De Laet’s works, whose copyright had in the mean time expired, or else the interest in New Netherland affairs which had been newly aroused by the presentation to, and discussion before, the States-General of the Vertoogh, led to the compilation in 1651[831] of a book on New Netherland by Joost Hartgers, a bookseller of Amsterdam, which is nothing more than a clever arrangement of extracts from De Laet’s Description, second edition, the Vertoogh, and Megapolensis’ Indian treatise. Of much greater importance and value to the historical student is an anonymous publication of 1659, the title of which gives no idea of its real contents. Like most popularly written works of the day discussing topics of public interest, it is in the form of a conversation between a countryman, a citizen, and a sailor, who discuss the deplorable depression of commerce, navigation, trade, and agriculture in Holland, and speculate on the best means to improve this state of affairs.[832] The author speaks of New Netherland matters with a positiveness which puts it beyond a doubt that he had been in that country.[833] Only a few pages are given to the description of New Netherland, but the propositions advanced on colonization, self-government of colonies, free-trade, and slavery are all aimed at the West India Company and its American territories. These propositions are of such a broad and liberal character, that they would do credit to any writer of our more enlightened times. A similar feeling of hostility against the West India Company and New Netherland, both then (1659) in a condition to invite criticism, pervades the work of Otto Keye,[834] who advocates the colonization of Guiana as being more rational and profitable than that of New Netherland. Starting with the argument that a warm climate is preferable to a colder one, on account both of physical comforts and of greater commercial advantages, he gives a description of the two countries, the bias being of course in favor of Guiana.

The most remarkable of all the contemporary Dutch books appeared also anonymously in 1662.[835] The description of the country given in this work adds nothing new to our store of information, and the book itself has therefore been ranked by American historians with such compilations as the works of Montanus, Melton, and others, who simply reprinted De Laet, Van der Donck, etc. It is, however, of great value, for through it we obtain an insight into the Dutch politics of the day, which had so far-reaching an influence on the history of New Netherland and on its colonization. The fight between the Gomarian (Orangist) and the Arminian[836] (Liberal) parties, which had so long prevented the first organization of the West India Company, had never been settled and was now revived. The De Witts, as leaders of the Arminians, were as much opposed to this organization as Oldenbarnevelt had been. Whether the ulterior loss of New Netherland, to which this opposition finally led, embarrassed them as much as is stated[837] or not, it was certainly at this time (1662) in the programme of the Arminian party to destroy the West India Company, and by reforming the government of New Netherland build up the country. This seems to have been the motive for writing the Kort Verhael, which, according to Asher,[838] was written by a journalist, opposing the third ultra-radical and the Orangist parties, in conjunction with a Mennonist. It will be remembered that in 1656-1657 part of the South River (Delaware) territory had been surrendered, for financial reasons, to the authorities of Amsterdam, and had ceased to be in the jurisdiction of the Governor-General of New Netherland. The plan[839] submitted to the burgomasters in the Requests and Representations, etc., aimed at a further curtailing of the Company’s territory in that region by planting there a colony of Mennonists, with the most liberal self-government, under the supreme jurisdiction of the city of Amsterdam; while the vehemence with which Otto Keye and his work favoring Guiana at the expense of New Netherland are attacked shows that the Anti-Orangists, though bent upon ruining one of the principal factors of the Orange party, were by no means inclined to give up New Netherland as a colony. A work from which copious extracts are given in the Kort Verhael, and called Zeker Nieuw-Nederlants geschrift,—“A Certain New Netherland Writing,”—seems to be lost to us; also a work, Noort Revier,—“North River,”—mentioned by Van der Donck.

The works of Montanus,[840] Melton,[841] and a few others[842] deserve no more mention than by title, as being compilations of extracts from books already referred to; and with these closes the list of such contemporary and almost contemporary Dutch works on New Netherland as are either purely descriptive or both descriptive and historical.

Of the contemporary Dutch works of purely historical character, not one treats of New Netherland alone; but the Dutch historians of the time could not well write of the res gestæ of their nation without referring to what they had done on the other side of the Atlantic. The first of them in point of time, Emanuel van Meteren,[843] gives us in his Historie van de Oorlogen en Geschiedenissen der Nederlanderen,[844] a minute description of the discoveries made by Hudson, and must be specially consulted for the history of the origin of the West India Company. Although credulous to such an extent that the value of his painstaking labors is frequently endangered by the gross errors caused by his credulity, he had no chance of committing mistakes where, as in the case of the West India Company, everything was official. His information regarding Hudson’s voyage of 1609, we may assume, was derived from Hudson himself on his return to England, where Van Meteren lived as merchant and Dutch consul until 1612, the year of his death.

The next Dutch historian whose work is one of our sources, Nicolas Jean de Wassenaer,[845] takes us a step farther; but he too fails to give us much more than a record of the earliest years of the existence of the West India Company. His account of how this Company came to be organized differs somewhat as to the motives from all others.[846]

With the works of Aitzema,[847] Saken van Staat en Oorlogh in ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, 1621-1669, and Herstelde Leeuw, 1650,[848] and with Costerus’s Historisch Verhael, 1572-1673, we come to the end of the list of Dutch historians giving us information of the events in New Netherland. But I cannot allow the reader to take leave of these Dutch books without a few words concerning the first book printed which treated of New Netherland. The Breeden Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien ... gemaeckt ende gestelt uijt diverse ... memorien door I. A. G. W. C., Antwerpen, 1649,[849] is neither purely historical nor descriptive, but its polemic character requires such constant allusion both to the events in, and to the geography of, New Netherland, that we must class it among the most important sources for our history. Its authorship is unknown, and has been subject to many surmises.

It may cause astonishment that the writers of Holland, a country then renowned for its learning, should not have thought it worth their while to write a history of their transatlantic colonies. But we must bear in mind, first, that the settlement of New Netherland was neither a governmental nor a popular undertaking; second, that in the beginning the West India Company had no intention of making it a colony, and that the people, who came here under the first governors as the Company’s servants, and also those who later came as freeholders, were hardly educated enough, even if they had not been too busy with their own affairs, to pay much attention to, or write of, public matters. The few educated men were officers of the Company, and did not care to lose their places by speaking with too much frankness of what was going on. Whatever they desired to publish they had to submit to the directors of the Company, and it is not likely that any unpleasant information would have passed the censor. Third, the Company did not desire any information whatever concerning New Netherland, except what they thought fit, to be given to the public,[850]—hence the obstacles which prevented Adrian Van der Donck from writing the history of New Netherland in addition to his Description,[851] and the scanty information which the contemporary historian has to give us.

Subsequent Dutch writers found a good deal to say about the Dutch colonies on the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The most trustworthy among them is Jean Wagenaar,[852] who, beginning life as a merchant’s clerk, felt a strong desire for acquiring fame as an author. He studied languages and history, and at last wholly devoted himself to Dutch history. His Vaderlandsche Historie is held in Holland to be the best historical work written, although his political bias as an opponent of the House of Orange is evident. Wagenaar is, however, more an annalist than a historian. As official historiographer, and later Secretary of the City of Amsterdam, he had free access to the archives; hence his statements are not to be discredited. His account of the circumstances under which Hudson was sent out in 1609 differs materially from all other writers. “The Company,” he says, “sent out a skipper to discover a passage to China by the northwest, not by the northeast.” A resolution of the States of Holland, quoted by Wagenaar, proves that previous to Hudson’s voyage the Dutch knew that they would find terra firma north of the Spanish possessions, and contiguous to them.[853]

The scantiness of information concerning New Netherland in Dutch books explains why we can learn still less from the writings of other nations; for sectional or national feeling caused either a complete silence on colonial affairs, or incorrect and contradictory statements, leading many to rely on hearsay, unsupported by records.

Among the earliest works (not in Dutch) speaking of New Netherland, we have the work of Levinus Hulsius (Hulse), a native of Ghent, distinguished for his learning, and after him his sons, who published, at Nürnberg, Frankfort, and Oppenheim, a Sammlung von 26 Schiffahrten in verschieden fremde Landen,—“Collection of twenty-six Voyages in many Foreign Countries,”—between the years 1598 and 1650; the twelfth part of this work chronicles the attempts of the English and Dutch to discover a passage by way of the North Pole, and includes Hudson’s voyage.[854] The twentieth part refers likewise to voyages to this continent, and specially to our coast. Other German works of this early period can only be mentioned by their title, because for the above reasons they are not sufficiently correct to be considered trustworthy sources of information.[855] Their titles show them to be not much more than “hackwork,” with little value to the contemporary or any later reader. But when we find that a celebrated geographer of the time, Philipp Cluvier (born at Dantzic, 1580, died 1623), omits all mention of the existence of such countries as New England and New Netherland, we can well understand how difficult it must have been to gather material for a universal geography.[856] Later editors of the same work, writing in 1697, had then apparently only just learned that up to 1665 a part of North America was called Novum Belgium. Hardly less ignorant, though he mentions Virginia and Canada in describing the bounds of Florida, is Gottfriedt in his Neuwe Archontologia Cosmica, Frankfort, 1638; yet he too was a distinguished geographer.[857]

Turning to the English, we find a few credible and a great many very fantastic and unreliable writers, treating either specially or incidentally of New Netherland. The first mention of the Dutch on the Hudson is made in a little work, republished in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,[858] in which it is stated that an English sea-captain, Dermer, “met on his passage [from Virginia to New England] with certain Hollanders who had a trade in Hudson’s River some years before that time (1619).” This is probably the first application of Hudson’s name to the river. In a letter[859] from the same traveller, dated at a plantation in Virginia, December, 1619, he describes his passage through Hellgate and Long Island Sound, but does not say anything about the settlement on Manhattan Island.

This letter of Dermer and the Brief Relation first informed the English that “the Hollanders as interlopers had fallen into ye middle betwixt the plantations” of Virginia and New England.[860] The Description of the Province of New Albion[861] informs us that “Capt. Samuel Argal and Thomas Dale on their return [from Canada in 1613] landed at Manhatas Isle in Hudson’s River, where they found four houses built, and a pretended Dutch governor under the West India Company’s of Amsterdam share or part, who kept trading-boats and trucking with the Indians;” but the official correspondence[862] between the authorities of Virginia and the Home Government proves that Argal and his party never went to New Netherland, although they intended to do so in 1621; for, hearing that the Dutch had settled on the Hudson, a “demurre in their p^rceding was caused.”[863] The motive for making the above-quoted statement concerning Argal’s visit in 1613 is apparent. The imposing pseudonym under which the Description of New Albion appeared was probably assumed by Sir Edmund Ploeyden (Plowden), to whom in 1634 Lord Strafford, then viceroy of Ireland, had granted the patent of New Albion[864] covering the Dutch possession, and who therefore had an obvious interest adverse to the Dutch title. Its publication at the time, when the right of the Dutch to the country was being discussed between England and the States-General of Holland, was intended to influence the British mind. It contains a queer jumble of fact and fancy, and it is not necessary to say more about its claims to be an historical authority than has already been published in the Memoirs of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.[865]

Considering that, according to Van der Donck, Sir Edmund Ploeyden had been in New Netherland several times, it seems almost incredible that he should have made such astonishing statements, if he was the author of the book. A perusal of a work published a few years previous to the Description of New Albion would have set him right, at least so far as the geography of the country was concerned.[866] The author of the Short Discovery has very correct notions of the hydrography of New Netherland, acquired apparently by the study of Dutch maps; but the distances and degrees of latitude are as great a puzzle to him as to many other geographers and seamen of that day. As he wrote before the Dutch title to New Netherland was disputed, he is of course silent concerning the English claims to the territory.

The historian writing of New Netherland to-day has the advantage of being able to consult the journal of a governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, who took an active part in the occurrences which he describes.[867] Although it does not cover the whole of the Dutch period of New York, and his puritanical bias is occasionally evident, we have no more reliable source for the history of the relations between the colonies.

The few historical data given in the next book to be considered[868] are of interest, as the author endeavors to “assert the rights of the English nation in vouching the legal interest of England in right of the first discovery or premier seizure to Novum Belgium.” They show, however, also how in so short a period as a man’s life even contemporary history can be distorted. According to Heylin, who takes Sir Samuel Argal as his source, Hudson had been commissioned by King James I. to make the voyage of 1609, and after making his discoveries sold his maps and charts to the Dutch. The Dutch were willing to surrender their claims to Sir Edmund Ploeyden, he says, for £2,500, but took advantage of the troubles in England, and, instead of surrendering, armed the Indians to help them in resisting any English attempt to reduce New Netherland. Leaving aside Plantagenet’s New Albion, we meet here, in a work which the author’s high reputation must immediately have placed among the standard works of the day, a most startling falsification of facts and events which had occurred during the lifetime of the author. It is impossible to account for it, even if we suppose that these statements were made for political effect; for the men who read Heylin’s book had also read the correct accounts of Hudson’s voyages, and knew that Heylin’s statements were false. The learned prelate is only little less at fault in his geographical account. Although he tells us that Hudson gave his name to one of the rivers, he mentions as the two principal ones only the Manhates or Nassau or Noort and the South rivers, being evidently in doubt which is the Hudson. Heylin had studied geography better than his contemporary Robert Fage, who published about the same time A Description of the whole World, London, 1658, but he is utterly silent as to New Netherland. In 1667, when he published his Cosmography, or a Description of the whole World, represented by a more exact and certain Discovery, he had learned that “to the Southwest of New England lyeth the Dutch plantation; it hath good ground and good air, but few of that Nation are inhabiting there, which makes that there are few plantations in the land, they chiefly intending their East India trade, and but one village, whose inhabitants are part English, part Dutch. Here hath been no news on any matter of war or state since the first settlement. There is the Port Orange, thirty miles up Hudson’s River,” etc. This was written three years after New Netherland had become an English colony, when New York city numbered almost two thousand inhabitants, and some ten or twelve villages were flourishing on Long Island.

The best description, or rather the most ample, written by an Englishman, is that of John Josselyn, who published his observations made during two voyages to New England in 1638-1639 and 1663-1671.[869] Although he had been in the country, his notions concerning it are somewhat crude. New England, under which name he includes New Netherland, is thought to be an island formed by the “spacious” river of Canada, the Hudson, two great lakes “not far off one another,” where the two rivers have their rise, and the ocean. His account of the Indians, of their mode of living and warfare, is highly amusing, and at the same time instructive, although no philologist would probably accept as correct his statement that the Mohawk language was a dialect of the Tartar. Nor would the botanist place implicit faith in the statement that in New England barley degenerated frequently into oats; and the zoölogist would be astonished to learn of “frogs sitting upon their breeches one foot high.” His credulity has led this eccentric raconteur into describing many similar wonderful details; but his work is nevertheless of value, as giving, I believe, the first complete description of the fauna and flora of the Middle Atlantic and New England States. In some of his historical data he follows Plantagenet, probably at second-hand through Heylin, and is so far without credit.

Religion, which had already done so much to increase the population of the colony on the Hudson, was to cause a new invasion by the Dutch into their old possessions. While Arminians and Gomarists, Cocceians and Vœtians, were continuing the religious strife in Holland, a new sect, the Labadists, sprang up. The intolerance with which they were treated compelled their leaders to look out for a country where they might exercise their religion with perfect freedom. An attempt at colonization in Surinam, ceded to Holland by England in the Treaty of Breda, 1667, having failed, they turned their eyes upon New York, then under English rule, and in 1679 sent two of their most prominent men—Jasper Danckers and Peter Sluyter—across the ocean to explore and report. The account of their travels was procured, translated, and published by Mr. Henry C. Murphy in the Collections of the Long Island Historical Society.[870] It tells in simple language, showing frequently their religious bias, what the travellers saw and heard. The drawings with which they illustrated their journal give us a vivid picture of New York two hundred years ago. As they talked with many of the men who had been prominent in Dutch times, their account of historical events acquires special interest. The tradition then current at Albany, that the ruins of a fort on Castle Island indicated the place where Spaniards had made a settlement before the Dutch, is discredited by them; but the discovery of the so-called Pompey Stone, an evident Spanish relic, at not too great a distance from the Hudson River, makes it desirable that this tradition should receive special investigation. It is true the Indians in Van der Donck’s time who were old enough to recollect when the Dutch first came, declared that they were the first white men whom they saw;[871] but their descendants told these travellers “that the first strangers seen in these parts were Spaniards or Portuguese; but they did not remain long, and afterwards the Dutch came.” The Spaniards under Licenciado d’ Aillon had made landings and explored the country south and east of New York, and may not one of their exploring parties have come to Albany and fortified themselves?

While Aitzema gives us, in his Saken van Staat, the Dutch side of the public affairs in the seventeenth century, Thurloe,[872] in his Collection of State Papers, uncovers English statesmanship and diplomacy. His official position as secretary to the Council of State under Charles I., and afterwards to the Protector and his son, gave him a thorough insight into the workings of the public machinery, and makes his selection of papers extremely valuable. Among them will be found a document of the year 1656 on the English rights to New Netherland, which is highly interesting. I can refer only by title to other works of the seventeenth century speaking of New Netherland, as they are only either more or less embellished and incorrect repetitions of former accounts, or because they are beyond my reach.[873]

Skipping over a century, we come to the work of a native of New York, the History of the Province of New York from its first Discovery to the Year 1732, by William Smith, Jr. Considering that it was written and published before the author had reached his thirtieth year,[874] and that he had to gather his information from the then rare and scanty libraries of America and the official records of the province, the work reflects no small credit on its author. For the discovery by Hudson, he follows the accepted version,—that Hudson in 1608, under a commission from King James I., first landed on Long Island, etc., and afterward sold the country, or rather his rights, to the Dutch. Smith’s knowledge of law should have prevented his repeating this statement, for he ought to have been aware that Hudson could not have had any individual claim to the country discovered by him. Another statement, repeated by Smith on the authority of elder writers,—namely, that James I. had conceded to the Dutch in 1620 the right to use Staten Island as a watering-place for their ships going to and coming from Brazil,—a careful perusal of the correspondence between the authorities of New Netherland and the Directors of the West India Company, then within easy reach, would have told him to be untrue or incorrect. If there were any truth in this statement, for which I have not found the slightest foundation, it would only prove that, with their usual tenacity of purpose, the Dutch, having once determined to settle on Manhattan’s Island, could not be deterred from carrying out their project. Although admitting that, in the long run, it would have been impossible for the Dutch to preserve their colony against the increasing strength of their English neighbors, he condemns the treachery with which New Netherland was wrested from the Dutch. It is to be regretted that with so many official Dutch documents as Smith found in the office of the secretary, he did not write the history of the Dutch period of the province with more detail, and that he studied those which he consulted with hardly sufficient care.

Before a proper interest in the history of New York had been reawakened after the exciting times of the Revolution and of 1812, it revived in the European cradle of New York to such an extent as to bring forth a valuable contribution to our historical sources from the pen of the learned Chevalier Lambrechtsen.[875] Its value consists principally in the fact that the author had access to the papers of the West India Company, since lost, and that it instigated research and called attention to the history of their State among New Yorkers, several of whom now set to work writing histories.[876] Not one of them is of great value now, the documents procured in the archives of Europe having thrown more and frequently a different light on many facts. Many statements are given as based on tradition, others are absolutely incorrect,[877] and none tell us anything about New Netherland that we have not already read in De Laet, Van der Donck, and other older writers.

To the anti-rent troubles in this State and to the researches into the rights of the patroons arising from them, we are indebted to the best work on New Netherland which has yet been written. Chancellor Kent’s assertion, that the Dutch annals were of a tame and pacific character and generally dry and uninteresting,[878] had deterred many from their study. Now it became an absolute necessity to discover what privileges had been held by the patroons under the Dutch government, and, upon examining the records, Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan was amazed to find a vast amount of historical material secluded from the English student by an unknown language. The writing of a history of that period, which had been a dark page for so long a time, immediately suggested itself; and as about the same time the papers relating to New York, which the State had procured abroad, were sent home by Mr. Brodhead, the agent of the State, the plan was carried into effect, and the History of New Netherland, or New York under the Dutch, by E. B. O’Callaghan, New York, 1846, vol. ii. 1850, made its appearance.[879]

It is perhaps beyond the possibilities of the human mind to write history, not simply annals, from a thoroughly objective point of view; but the historian must try to suppress his individuality as far as he can, or at least to criticise only the events of a remote period from the standpoint of that period, and not from his own, which is more modern and advanced. Dr. O’Callaghan followed no philosophy of history. He tried to suppress his individuality as Irishman, Canadian revolutionist, and devout Romanist; but occasionally it was stronger than his will, and impaired the objectivity and fairness of his judgment. Yet the descendants of the settlers of New Netherland owe to him a greater debt than to any of their own race, for he, first of any historian, has shown us the colony in its origin—the steadiness, sturdiness, and industry of the colonists, who were men as religious as the New England Puritans, but more tolerant towards adherents of other creeds. Notwithstanding this historian’s desire to be accurate in his statements, his unqualified reliance upon previous writers has on several occasions led him into errors, the gravest of which is perhaps the repetition of Plantagenet’s story of Argal’s invasion. I have tried to show above that the English documents disprove this statement, which O’Callaghan repeats on the authority of Heylin.

J. Romeyn Brodhead, the collaborator of Dr. O’Callaghan in editing the documents procured for the State by his agency, was the next to enter the field as a writer on the history of New York. While Dr. O’Callaghan in a few instances allows his inborn prejudices to make him criticise the actions of the Dutch too harshly, and without due allowance for the times and circumstances, Mr. Brodhead, a descendant both of Dutch and English early settlers, fails on the other side, and becomes too lenient. Generally, however, his History of New York is written with great independence of judgment and with thorough criticism of the authorities. It is to be regretted that death prevented the completion of the work, which does not go farther than 1691; but what Mr. Brodhead has given us must, for its completeness and accuracy of research, and for the genuine historical acumen displayed in it, rank as a standard work and a classical authority on the subject.[880]

There are many additional works to be consulted by those who desire reliable information on the early history of New York,—the more general histories (like Bancroft’s, chap. xv.), monographs,[881] and local histories, the Transactions of the various historical societies of the State, etc.; but the passing of them in review has been in some degree relegated to notes.

When the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said that man was born to contemplate the heavens, the sun, and the moon, he might have added also the earth and its formation in all its details, and enjoined on his disciples the necessity of representing the result of such contemplations by maps and charts. We require a map fully to understand the geography and chorography of a country; hence a study of the maps made by contemporaneous makers becomes the duty of the writer of New Netherland history. I have already stated that the coast of New York and the neighboring districts were known to Europeans almost a century before Hudson ascended the “Great River of the North,” and that this knowledge is proved by various maps made in the course of the sixteenth century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river between the fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should be this latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther north. The configuration of the coast-line shows that they meant the mouth of the Hudson. Only one, however, of these sixteenth-century maps, made by Vaz Dourado at Lisbon, in 1571, gives the Hudson River in its almost entire course, from the mountains to the bay. A copy of this map, made in 1580, which found its way to Munich, was probably seen by Peter Plancius, who induced Hudson to explore that region of the New World, so little known to Europeans at that time. Although Vaz Dourado’s map enlightens us so very little, I mention it because his map must lead to the investigation of the question whether the Dutch under Hudson were the first to navigate the river.

FROM THE FIGURATIVE MAP, 1616.

[Brodhead’s statements regarding the finding of this map are in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1845, p. 185; compare also his New York, i. 757. The original parchment map measured 2 × 2 feet, and showed the country from Egg Harbor, in New Jersey, to the Penobscot, 40° to 45°. The paper map covered the territory from below the Delaware Capes to above Albany, and is three feet long. The original is in colors, which are preserved in the chromolithograph of it issued at the Hague in 1850 or thereabout. (Asher’s List, no. 1; Muller’s 1877 Catalogue, no. 2,270.) There is a reduction of it in Cassell’s United States, i. 247.—Ed.]

The oldest map of the territory now comprising the States of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, and known as “The Figurative Map,” was found by Mr. Brodhead in the archives at the Hague. It is on parchment, and is beautifully executed. A fac-simile copy, taken by Mr. Brodhead, was deposited in the State Library at Albany, and reproductions have been published in the New York Colonial Documents, vol. i., also in Dr. O’Callaghan’s History of New Netherland. It purports to have been submitted to the States-General of Holland in 1616, with an application for a charter to trade to New Netherland, but it was probably produced then a second time, having done duty before on a similar occasion in 1614, with a map exhibiting the Delaware region on a larger scale. This 1614 map was on paper, and was found by Mr. Brodhead in the same place, and may be seen in similar reproductions, accompanying those of the 1616 map. Who the draughtsman of either was, is unknown. An inscription on the latter refers to draughts formerly made, which were consulted, and to the report of some men, who had probably been the Dutchmen captured by the Mohawks and mentioned in Captain Hendricksen’s report (New York Colonial Documents, i. 13). De Laet seems to have had these maps before him when he wrote his Novus Orbis, and to have constructed the map accompanying his work from these two. Notwithstanding the great care and detail exhibited in them, they are necessarily inaccurate, but highly interesting and instructive, as they indicate the location of the several Indian tribes at the time of the arrival of the Dutch and of the Spaniards before them. The names given on these maps to some of the Indian tribes are so unmistakably of Spanish origin, that it is hard to believe they were not first applied by the Spaniards, and afterwards repeated by the Indians to the before-mentioned three Dutch prisoners among the Mohawks. We find one tribe called “Capitanasses,” while in colloquial Spanish capitanázo means a great warrior; another, whom the Dutch later knew as Black Minquas, is designated by the name of “Gachos,” the Spanish word gacho being applied to black cattle. Still another is called the “Canoomakers;” canoa being a word of the Indian tongues of South America,[882] the North American Indian could only have learned it from the Spaniards, and in turn have taught its meaning to the Dutch. Even the Indian name given to the island upon which the city of New York now stands, spelled on the earliest maps “Monados, Manados, Manatoes,” and said to mean “a place of drunkenness,” points to a Spanish origin from the colloquially-used noun moñas, drunkenness, moñados, drunken men. If to these indications of Spanish presence on the soil of New York before the Dutch period we add the evidence of the so-called Pompey Stone,[883] found in Oneida County, with its Spanish inscription and date of 1520, and the names of places given in their corruption by the Dutch in a grant covering part of Albany County (“Semesseerse,” Spanish semencera, land sown with seed; “Negogance,” place for trade, Spanish negocio, trade), we can no longer hesitate to believe that the traditions reported by Danckers and other writers mentioned before had some foundation, and that the Spaniards knew and had explored the country on the Hudson long before the Dutch came, but had thought, as Peter Martyr expresses it, after the failures of Esteban Gomez and the Licenciado d’ Aillon, “To the South, to the South, for the great and exceeding riches of the Equinoctial; they that seek gold must not go to the cold and frozen North.” The Spaniards never considered North America as of any value in itself; they looked upon it only as a barrier to the richer fields of Asia.

Dr. O’Callaghan had in his collection[884] a copy, on vellum, of a map entitled “Americæ Septentrionalis Pars,” from the West-Indische Paskaert, which he added to the maps in the first volume of the New York Colonial Documents. The maker of it was A. Jacobsen, and, to judge from the fac-simile of the West India Company’s seal exhibited on it, he made it for that company in 1621. It bears internal evidence that Jacobsen had as model one of the elder Spanish and English maps, as he retains some Spanish and English names for places, which on the Dutch maps just mentioned have Dutch names. No attempt is made to give details of interior chorography. The coast-line is fairly correct, and the rivers named are indicated by their mouths.[885]

The next in the order of date is also a manuscript map, of which a reduced copy was published by Dr. O’Callaghan in his History. Although it is only a delineation of part of New Netherland, the manor of Rensselaerswyck,[886] it is of importance to the historian, who in consulting it has to exercise his judgment to the utmost. Made in 1630 by Gillis van Schendel at the expense of six dollars, which paid also for four copies on paper, it shows, in the very year in which the land was purchased from the Indians and patented to the patroons, such a large number of settlements on both sides of the river, as to create the suspicion that it was made to induce emigration from Holland, where the four copies on paper were sent. De Laet, whose share of the land, as one of the patroons, is designated by De Laet’s Burg, De Laet’s Island, De Laet’s Mill Creek and Waterfall, makes no reference to this map.

The first printed map of New Netherland accompanies De Laet’s Novus Orbis, under the title of “Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium, et Virginia.” In outline it resembles the map of 1621 by Jacobsen, while the details are taken from the maps presented to the States-General. It is very vague, however, and does not even give the names of any river. Long Island is represented by three islands, and the Delaware River rises, as on the 1616 map, out of a large lake in the Seneca country.[887]

PART OF DE LAET’S MAP, 1630.

Jacobsen’s map of 1621 seems to have been used by Robert Dudley in his Atlas, upon which an Italian engraver, Antonio Francesco Lucini, worked; and Lucini’s signature is attached to a “Carta particolare della Nuova Belgia è parte della Nuova Anglia, d’America carta ii.,” which constitutes a part of Dudley’s work.[888] He seems to have consulted Spanish, Dutch, and English maps of more or less correctness, but understood none of them well. The Hudson is called “Rio Martins ò R. Hudsons.” Manhattan’s Island is in its proper place, with New Amsterdam marked on it; but the name “Isla Manhatas” is given to the land between Newark Bay, Passaic River on the west and the Hackensack on the east; while the strip of land now called Bergen Point is called “Oster’s Ilant.” The position of Manhattan has evidently troubled him very much, for we find the name again inserted covering the eastern townships of Westchester County. Stratford Point, at the mouth of the Housatonic, is “Cabo del Fieme,” while Long Island, called “I. di Gebrok Land,” is a group of six islands, the largest of which bears the correct name of Matouwacs, and Fisher’s Island is called “Isla Lange.” Staten Island, “I. State,” is relegated, shorn of its dimensions, to Newark Bay, and its space divided by “I. Godins” and one of the six islands in the Long Island group called “C. Godins.” The low coast of New Jersey, near Long Branch, is properly named “Costa Bassa.” Thence going south, we come to “Porto Eyer” (Egg Harbor) and “I. Eyer,” “C. Pedras Arenas” (Barnegat), “C. Mai,” “Rio Carlo” (Delaware), and “C. Hinlopen ò C. James.” The student of our early cartography must revert often to the rival maps and atlases of Blaeu and Jansson. The elder of the Blaeus, W. J. Blaeu, was long a maker of maps and globes,[889] and began to be known, with his map of the world, in 1606. He had issued many other maps when, in 1631, he collected them into his Appendix Theatri Ortelii (103 maps), the earliest of his atlases, which he later remodelled and enlarged, sometimes giving the text in French, and sometimes in Latin; that of 1638 being known as his Novas Atlas, and containing fourteen American maps. After several intermediate issues,[890] following upon the death of the elder Blaeu in 1638,[891] his atlas, under the care of his son, John Blaeu,[892] was issued with various texts, and with a wealth of skill rarely equalled since, as the Atlas Major.[893]

Jansson produced a rival of the earliest Blaeu atlas in 1633, with one hundred and six maps.[894] In 1638 it was called Atlas Novus, and had seventeen maps of America.[895] In 1639 a French edition was called Nouveau Théâtre du Monde, with new maps by Henry Hondius, son of the elder Hondius, eighteen of them being American, and that on New Netherland following De Laet’s map. It includes New England and Virginia, and is the original of various later maps.[896] A fifth part of the Nouveau Theatre was added in 1657, containing coast charts of America. Jansson reached his best in his Orbis Antiquus, of about even date (1661) with Blaeu’s best.

In Mr. Edward Armstrong’s essay on Fort Nassau a map in private hands is mentioned which seems to be little known. It exhibits the grant made to Sir Edmund Ploeyden of the Province of New Albion, and was printed at London in 1651. It is a strange combination of knowledge and ignorance, if not intentional deceit, purporting to have been made by “Domina Virginia Farrer,” and shows the headwaters of James River to be within ten days’ march of the California coast.[897]

A map of the Delaware territory was made, about 1638, by Måns Kling, for the Swedish Government. A later map of the same region, made by the Swedish engineer Peter Lindstroem in 1654, unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1697, when the Royal Palace at Stockholm burned down, is reviewed in another chapter. A Dutch map of the Delaware, made about 1656, has also been lost.[898]

Mr. Asher[899] and Mr. Armstrong incline to the opinion that the earliest of the later group of maps made during the Dutch occupancy is the original state of what is called Dancker’s map, known under the title of Novi Belgii Novæque Angliæ necnon Pennsylvaniæ et Partis Virginiæ tabula, multis in locis emendata a Justo Danckers, and supposed to date between 1650 and 1656.[900] The map purporting to be the oldest, and which there is reason to believe was this earlier plate retouched, is the Novi Belgii, etc., tabula multis in locis emendata a Nicolao Joannis Visschero, of which Asher speaks of a copy in the Royal Library at the Hague.[901]

SKETCH OF PART OF VISSCHER’S MAP.

It was afterward included in what is known as Visscher’s Atlas Minor.[902] Visscher’s map, with its view of New Amsterdam, was reproduced in what is known as Van der Donck’s map, Nova Belgica sive Nieuw Nederlandt,[903] which appeared in the second edition of the Beschrijvinge van Nieuw Nederlant, 1656.

Van Der Donck’s New Netherland.

[EDITORIAL NOTES.]

A. Bibliography.—In the bibliography of New Netherland, the first place must be given to the Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, by G. M. Asher, Amsterdam, 1854-1867, the work appearing in parts. It embodies the results of work in the royal library and in the royal archives at the Hague; at Leyden in the library of the University and in that of Dr. Bodel Nyenhuis, rich in maps, and particularly in the Thysiana Library, which he found a rich field; and at Amsterdam, among the extensive stock of Mr. Frederick Muller, without whose assistance, the author says, the book would not have been written.[904] In his Introduction he gives a succinct sketch of the history and geography of New Netherland.

Next in importance are the catalogues of Frederick Muller of Amsterdam, particularly the series, Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Plates on America,[905] begun in 1872, and which he calls “an essay towards a Dutch-American bibliography.” It was also under Mr. Muller’s direction and patronage that Mr. P. A. Tiele prepared his Mémoire bibliographique sur les journaux des navigateurs néerlandais réimprimés dans les collections de De Bry et de Hulsius, etc., Amsterdam, 1867. It covers those voyages not Dutch of which accounts have appeared in Dutch, as well as the distinctively Dutch collections. The compiler dedicated it to Mr. James Lenox, from whose rich collection he derived much help. Muller’s Catalogue (1872), no. 110; Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 1,002.

The best American collection of books on New Netherland is probably that now in the Lenox Library. Mr. Asher said of it some years ago (Essay, p. xlix, sub anno 1867) that it was “absolutely complete.”

B. New Amsterdam.—The earliest accounts of the town by Wassenaer (1623), De Laet (1625), De Rasiere (1627), and Michaelis (1628), have already been mentioned. (Cf. the paper on the first settlement by the Dutch in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vol. iii.) Stuyvesant, in his letter to Nicoll in 1664, claimed that the town was founded in 1623. This statement is repeated in De la Croix’s book, with De Vries’s additions, published in Dutch as Algemeene Wereldt-Beschrijving, 1705. (Asher, no. 19.) O’Callaghan, New Netherland, ii. 210, has established that the town was incorporated in 1653.

The original Dutch records of New Amsterdam have been put into English in MS. volumes in the archives of the city, and some parts of them are printed in Valentine’s New York City Manual, and in Historical Magazine, xi. 33, 108, 170, 224, 354; xii. 30; xiii. 39, 168. Cf. paper on the development of its municipal government in the Dutch period, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., May, 1882, and the papers on the city of New York in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vols. i. and iii. Some notes on the Indian incursions in and about New Amsterdam during the Dutch period are in Valentine’s New York City Manual, 1863, p. 533. The principal histories of the town are Martha J. Lamb’s (1877), M. L. Booth’s (1859), W. L. Stone’s (1872), and David T. Valentine’s (1853). The last comes down only to 1750, and this and Lamb’s are of the most importance.

NEW YORK AND VICINITY, 1666.

This fac-simile of the lower portion of the map entitled “De Noord Rivier, anders R. Manhattans, off Hudson’s Rivier, genaamt t’Groodt,” which appeared in a tract at Middleburgh (and also at the Hague in 1666 in Goos’s Zee-Atlas) in answer to the reply of Downing to the memoir (1664) of the deputies of the States-General. The cut is made from the reproduction in Mr. Lenox’s edition of H. C. Murphy’s translation of the Vertoogh and Breeden Raedt, New York, 1854. The North is to the right.

Something can be derived from the gatherings of J. F. Watson in his Annals of New York City and State, 1846, and the appendix to his Annals of Philadelphia, 1830. The reader will find interest in various local antiquarian quests, as exemplified in J. W. Gerard’s Old Streets of New York under the Dutch (1874).[906] A map of the original grants of village lots on the island, from the Dutch West India Company, is in the City Manual (1857), and in the same (1856) is a map showing the made and swampy lands, as indicating the original surface of the town. In other volumes (1852 and 1853), and in Valentine’s History, p. 379, is a modern plan of the city, showing the line of the original high-water marks and the location of the early farms. It is one of these farms, that of Dominie Bogardus, the pastor of the Dutch church, who so vigorously opposed Kieft’s plans, that is now the property of Trinity Church, and the source of a large revenue. (See the Key in Valentine’s History, p. 380.) The same serial preserves views of sundry landmarks, like the canal in Broad Street, of 1659 (in 1862, p. 515), a windmill of 1661 (in 1862, p. 547), a house built in 1626 (in 1847, p. 346). A plan of the fort built in 1633-1635 is in Valentine’s New York, p. 27; and at p. 38 is a plan of the town in 1642, as well as the author could make it out from existing data.

For the northern part of the island, James Riker’s History of Harlem, 1881, affords much interest, tracing more minutely than usual the associations of the early comers with their family stocks in Europe, and showing by a map the original locations of their house-lots at Harlem.

C. Local Histories.—The Editor is not aware of any considerable bibliography of New York local histories, except as they are included in F. B. Perkins’s Check List of American Local History. Some help may be derived from the Brinley and Alofsen Catalogues, and others of a classified character. We have indicated in another Note the labors of Mr. Munsell for the Albany region. An edition of G. Furman’s Antiquities of Long Island, edited by F. Moore in 1875, includes a bibliography of Long Island by Henry Onderdonk, Jr. The most considerable of all the local histories is Stiles’s History of Brooklyn, 1867-1870, which gives a map of the Breuckelen settlements in 1646. The Faust Club in 1865 issued (125 copies) an older book, G. Furman’s Notes of Brooklyn, which had originally appeared in 1824. Benj. F. Thompson’s History of Long Island, 2d ed., 1843, is the most comprehensive of the accounts of that island, while N. S. Prime’s History of Long Island is more particularly concerned with its ecclesiastical history. There are various lesser monographs on the island towns, like Riker’s Newton (1852), Onderdonk’s Hempstead (1878), etc. Cf. also Historical Magazine, viii. 89; and in the same, vi. 145, Mr. G. P. Disosway recounts the early history of Staten Island.

Mr. Fernow translated and edited in the Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York, vol. xiii., the papers in the State archives upon the history and settlements on the Hudson and the Mohawk (1630-1684), as he has said in the text, which must stand as the basis for much which is given in the special treatises of Bolton on West Chester County (or such thorough monographs as that of C. W. Baird on the History of Rye, 1781 in this county), P. H. Smith on Duchess County, 1877, not to name others. The more remote parts of the State have little or no connection with the Dutch period.

D. The Dutch Governors.—Mr. George Folsom has a paper on the governors in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., vol. i. On Peter Minuit, the first governor, there is a paper by J. B. Moore in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1849, p. 73, and another in Historical Magazine, xiii. 205. An autograph of Kieft is given herewith. Of Stuyvesant, the last governor, who survived the surrender, and died in 1672 (Brodhead, ii. 183), we have various memorials. His portrait is preserved, belonging to Mr. Robert Van Rensselaer Stuyvesant, and has been engraved several times,—Dunlap’s New York, vol. i.; O’Callaghan’s New Netherland, vol. ii.; Lamb’s New York, i. 127; Gay’s Popular History of the United States, vol. ii. (Cf. Catalogue of the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Gallery, no. 67.) Two reminders of him long remained to New Yorkers,—his house in the Bowery, which is shown as it existed at the time of his death in Valentine’s New York, p. 53, and in his Manual, 1852, p. 407; and in Watson’s Annals of New York, p. 196, as it stood later perched upon so much of the original knoll as improvements had not removed. The old pear-tree associated with his name is depicted in Valentine’s Manual, 1861, p. 533, and in Lossing’s Hudson River, p. 416.

Mr. Fernow contributed to the Magazine of American History, ii. 540, a monograph on Stuyvesant’s journey to Esopus in 1658. See also 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, vi. 533.

E. Levinus Hulsius’s Collection of Voyages.—The twenty-six parts of this work were originally issued between 1598 and 1650, and this long interval, as well as their German text finding more popular use than the Latin of De Bry, has conduced to make sets much rarer of Hulsius than of De Bry. Scholars also award Hulsius the possession of more judgment in compiling and translating than is claimed for De Bry. Asher printed in 1833 a Short Bibliographical Memoir of Hulsius, which became, when extended, his Bibliographical Essay on the Voyages and Travels of Hulsius and his Successors, in 1839; and in this he doubts if a perfect set of all the editions of all the parts had ever been got together. An approximate completeness, however, pertains to the sets in the Carter-Brown and Lenox libraries, as described in the Catalogue of the former, vol. i. p. 467, and in the Contributions to a Catalogue of the Lenox Library, no. i, New York, 1877. The set described in this shows all the first editions of the twenty-six parts, with second issues of three of them, Latin as well as German of two of them; two parts successively issued of one of them (part xi.) and other copies with variations of three of them. There are eighteen second editions, counting variations (one is lacking); nine third editions or variations; six fourth editions (with one lacking); two fifth editions (with one lacking). This would indicate that an absolutely complete set, to include every part, edition, and variety, would increase the twenty-six parts to seventy-three. The Carter-Brown copy seems to be less perfect. The Huth Catalogue shows a complete series of first editions only.

Tiele’s Mémoire Bibliographique pertains to such voyages in this collection as were made by Dutch navigators. Sabin’s Dictionary, viii. 526, gives fuller collations for the parts relating to America. Quaritch printed a collation in 1860.

Bohn published a collation of Lord Lyndsay’s copy.

The Lenox Library possesses MS. Collations of the Grenville and other sets in the British Museum, of those in the Royal Library, Berlin, and the City Library of Hamburg.

Sets of such completeness as collectors may hope to attain have been quoted at £335 (Crowninshield sale, 1860,—all first editions but one), and 6,700 and 4,500 marks.

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