Isaack de Rasieres (1559-1669 or later)
Born in Holland, Isaack de Rasieres was sent to America by the Dutch West India Company in 1626 to be chief trading agent (Opper Koopman) for the Company and Secretary to the new Director-General of New Netherland, Peter Minuit. While duties in government and commerce impeded each other so much that he wanted to drop his Secretaryship, De Rasieres dealt with the Plymouth Colony in his dual capacity. After an encouraging exchange of letters, he went to visit Governor Bradford in October, 1627, to reach an agreement on trade between the two colonies. De Rasieres, a man who liked order and futilely tried to impose it on the fur trade under his control, saw in the Pilgrim colony much that he strove for in New Netherland.
Among the wares which De Rasieres took to start business was a large quantity of sewan (i.e., wampum or “wampumpeag”), the belts of beads made from parts of the shells of the quahog, whelk, or periwinkle, which served as a kind of money among Indians who traded with the Dutch. De Rasieres hoped to spread the use of this medium of exchange among the New England natives, and with the fifty fathoms purchased from him in 1627, the Pilgrims accomplished this aim in two years. But instead of taking a big portion of their profit to New Netherland to buy wampum, as De Rasieres had planned, the Plymouth traders found other sources of supply and quickly rose to first place in the fur trade in New England. Sewan was easy to get from coastal tribes; the supply could not be controlled by anyone, as the shell-fish which make the raw material are very numerous. So De Rasieres merely helped turn the trading ambitions of the Plymouth Colony from fish to fur, the means by which the province ultimately paid its debts to the last of the Adventurers.
Some time after his return to Fort Amsterdam, De Rasieres lost his position as a result of factional disputes among the employees of his Company, and returned to Holland. He married a niece of one of the directors of the West India Company in 1633 and went to Brazil with her four years later, in the Company’s employ. Later information about him indicates only that he was still in Brazil in 1651, raised a family, and was thought to be in Barbados in 1669, after the Portuguese had ousted the Dutch from Brazil.
The text of De Rasieres’ letter to Samuel Blommaert which follows is substantially that by William I. Hull (from the original in the National Archives at the Hague) in J. F. Jameson (ed.), Narratives of New Netherlands 1609-1664 (“Original Narratives of Early American History”; 1909), 102-115. The fragment translated by J. A. C. Fagginger Auer in H. R. Shurtleff, The Log Cabin Myth (edited and with introduction by S. E. Morison; 1939), 106-107, has been incorporated in the Hull version, and the editor has changed the punctuation in spots and standardized proper nouns when possible. One sentence, partly omitted in other English versions, appears here thanks to translation by Prof. Rosalie Colie of Wesleyan University, who has kindly checked the rest of the English text against the Dutch. Notes by Jameson retained here have been marked, “J.F.J.”
An earlier translation by J. Romeyn Brodhead, from a transcript of the Dutch original, appears in New York Hist. Soc., Collections, second series, II, 343-354. The Dutch text, edited by A. Eekhof, has been printed in Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, new series, XV (1919), 249-280.
De Rasieres’ letter bears no date. Statements in it indicate that it was written after his return to Holland probably in 1628 or 1629. Several pages are missing in the middle.
Isaack de Rasieres to Samuel Blommaert[129]
c. 1628.
Mr. Blommaert: