He brought to the Half-Moon off the present city of Hudson,—then altogether too young to present him with its freedom in a box; and in a small boat was rowed up the fresh waters of the river beyond, as far as Albany,—the Trojans assert as far as Troy; but in this a-bridge-d compendium we cannot pause to lay our hands on the necessary documents to settle this question.
Dutch Gentleman trading with the Indians.
(p. 134)
Suffice it to say that there being no legislature in session at Albany, he got away without being fleeced, or even being obliged to listen to a speech from the speaker. He was also spared a sight of the collection in the Agricultural Hall, and thus kept his favorable opinion of the soil and its capacity. His report to his employers, on his return in November following, was such as to stimulate the company to send another vessel the next year to trade with the natives; a trade which was conducted too much on the “heads I win, tails you lose” system to be other than advantageous to the Batavian pedlers. A few of the traders remained, opening stores in the slow settlement of New Amsterdam; putting up a windmill in what is now Pearl Street, raising the wind very easily, and taking as generous a toll from the Indian grists, as the natives now take from the strangers who frequent the island in search of bargains. The settlement grew then, as now, by importation; for although its trade increased, it was not until 1625 that the first white child was born within the present limits of the State. The growth of the place, however, was such, that in 1613, Samuel Argal, returning from an expedition against the French settlement of Port Royal, was attracted into the harbor of New Amsterdam, where, finding several huts and the windmill, he compelled an allegiance, during his two days stay, to England. The arbitrary principles of James I., however, were too repulsive to the sturdy Dutch to make them adhere to this allegiance longer than the existence of the force which compelled it. The Republic of the United Netherlands, twisted together of the two strands, furnished the one by the religious freedom generated by the Reformation under Luther, and the other drawn out by the mailed hand of William of Orange from the hard clutch of Philip II. of Spain, held by its strong yet soft cord the early emigrants from it to New Netherlands to an affectionate loyalty and love for itself. In no country is patriotism stronger than in Holland. Small in dimensions, struggling against the whole force of the sea on the north, from whose overwhelming devastation it is only saved by dikes, anchored by gigantic stones brought from Norway, and built up from thirty to fifty feet higher than the land they guard; its flat meadow surface, ever moist with water, divided by canals which serve the purposes both of fences and roads in other lands, and through which the water is kept flowing by a wonderful and hourly worked system of pumping,—this little state, conquered from the sea by industry, from Spain and the Inquisition by bravery unmatched, from a moneyed aristocracy by incessant vigilance, stood a peer among the largest and proudest monarchies of Europe. Her traders carried their square-rigged, heavy sterned ships in every port from the Cape of Good Hope to Lapland; and Amsterdam drew bills of exchange against shipments of linen and woollen goods, manufactured by herself, and of spices imported from her East India possessions, upon every commercial city in the world. The sea-fowl that drifted across her bright, sparkling meadows daily from the ocean, which she held at arm’s-length,—although rolling its white surf higher than the chimneys of her houses,—could take a bird’s-eye view of a population the thriftiest, of cities the most prosperous, of homes the most comfortable, in Europe. While Dutch enterprise thus built up a happy state at home, and sent thriving colonies abroad, her scholars were advancing the republic of letters, and giving international law to the world. Grotius at this time defined the rights and duties of war, and helped to bridle its atrocities by bits hammered from the sickles and reaping-hooks of peace. No wonder, then, that the thick-set burghers of Utrecht, Haarlaem, Leyden, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, although transferred to a newer Amsterdam, clung with pride to their native land, damp though it was in every pore; and that the square vrouw gratefully preserved her family recollections along with her thickly quilted petticoats, her oleycooks, krulers, and her own dark, well-aired complexion.
The government of the settlement was, although commercial in its aims and purposes, very maternal, whether under the East India Company, which lasted until 1623, or under the West India Company, which then succeeded it with larger powers and authority. Under the last company Peter Minuit was sent out as the first governor, in 1625.
The same year some enterprising Hollanders courageously passed the East River, and bravely encountered the perils of a residence in Brooklyn, from whose Heights so many now look down upon the parent city of New York,—an unhappy type of our civilization in private life.
As yet all was serene in the infant colony of New Amsterdam, as if the lunar influence of the Half-Moon still shone upon its peaceful trade and growing profits. Invitations were sent to the people of Massachusetts Bay and their children in the valley of the Connecticut to come and take tea; and they in turn courteously asked the Amsterdamers to eat clam-chowder and pumpkin-pie, adding, however, at the bottom of the note, that they hoped, for reasons which they gave, that their guests would not bring with them any beaver-skins to swap with the Indians around Narragansett Bay.
The next year, 1626, Governor Minuit made a large real estate transaction, purchasing the whole island of Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four dollars,—a deed without a name in the annals of American settlements. As the purchase embraced fourteen thousand square acres, we leave it to the millions of advanced juvenile readers who, we expect, will use this history in schools, to cipher out the price per acre; while a still more forward class might determine the amount of land which such a sum would now procure in Wall or Nassau Streets. In 1629 the Dutch West India Company, in order to entice the Van Rensselaers, Van Vechtens, Van Warts, Van Wycks, Brinkerhoofs, and other brown-colored dwellers at home, away from their tulip-beds, canals, and storks, to the growing young colony, promised to any fifty persons who would settle upon it a tract of land upon the Hudson River sixteen miles in length, annexing only two conditions,—that the settlers should purchase the lands of the Indians, and make due provision for the minister and school-teacher.
Under this promise four companies, headed each by a leader, or patroon, settled the southern half of the present State of Delaware; for the Dutch claim extended from Cape Henlopen on the south to Cape Cod.
The next year an agent of the Van Rensselaers purchased a tract twelve miles square below Albany, paying for it in goods,—a tract which had many blank pages, over which contentious pens have been scribbling, sometimes with red ink, within the living memory of our readers.