He landed at various places on the way, and was always civilly and hospitably welcomed by the red men, who brought him their wild abundance, and took in return what he chose to give. The marvelous richness of the vegetation, and the vegetable decay of ages, had rendered the margins of the stream as deadly as they were lovely; fever lurked in every glade and bower, and serpents whose bite was death basked in the sun or crept among the rocks. All was as it had always been; the red men, living in the midst of nature, were a part of nature themselves; nothing was changed by their presence; they altered not the flutter of a leaf or the posture of a stone, but stole in and out noiseless and lithe, and left behind them no trace of their passage. It is not so with the white man: before him, nature flies and perishes; he clothes the earth in the thoughts of his own mind, cast in forms of matter, and contemplates them with pride; but when he dies, another comes, and refashions the materials to suit himself. So one follows another, and nothing endures that man has made; for this is his destiny. And at length, when the last man has dressed out his dolls and built his little edifice of stones and sticks, and is gone: nature, who was not dead, but sleeping, awakes, and resumes her ancient throne, and her eternal works declare themselves once more; and she dissolves the bones in the grave, and the grave itself vanishes, with its record of what man had been. What says our poet?—
"How am I theirs,
When they hold not me,
But I hold them?"
In 1613, or thereabout, Christianson and Block visited the harbor and got furs, and also a couple of Indian boys to show the burghers of Amsterdam, since they could not fetch the great river to Holland. In 1614 they went again with five ships—the "Fortune of Amsterdam," the "Fortune of Hoorn," and the "Tiger of Amsterdam" (which was burned), and two others. Block built himself a boat of sixteen tons, and explored the Sound, and the New England coast as far as Massachusetts Bay; touched at the island known by his name, and forgathered with the Indian tribes all along his route. The explorers were granted a charter in the same year, giving them a three years' monopoly of the trade, and in this charter the title New Netherland is bestowed upon the region. The Dutch were at last bestirring themselves. Two years after, Schouten of Hoorn saw the southernmost point of Tierra del Fuego, and gave it the name of his home port as he swept by; and three other Netherlanders penetrated to the wilds of Philadelphia that was to be. A fortified trading post was built at Albany, where now legislation instead of peltries is the subject of barter. At this juncture internal quarrels in the Dutch government led to tragic events, which stimulated plans of western colonization, and the desire to start a commonwealth on Hudson River to forestall the English—for the latter as well as the Dutch and Spanish claimed everything in sight. The Dutch East India Company began business in 1621 with a twenty-four year charter, renewable. It was given power to create an independent nation; the world was invited to buy its stock, and the States-General invested a million guilders in it. Its field was the entire west coast of Africa, and the east coast of North and South America. Such schemes are of planetary magnificence; but of all this realm, the Dutch now hold the little garden patch of Dutch Guiana only, and the pleasant records of their sojourn on Manhattan Island between the years 1623 and 1664.
Indeed, the Dutch episode in our history is in all respects refreshing and agreeable; the burghers set us an example of thrift and steadiness too good for us to follow it; and they deeded to us some of our best citizens, and most engaging architectural traditions. But it is not after all for these and other material benefits that we are indebted to them; we thank them still more for being what they were (and could not help being): for their character, their temperament, their costume, their habits, their breadth of beam, their length of pipes, the deliberation of their courtships, the hardness of their bargains, the portentousness of their tea-parties, the industrious decorum of their women, the dignity of their patroons, the strictness of their social conduct, the soundness of their education, the stoutness of their independence, the excellence of their good sense, the simplicity of their prudence, and above all, for the wooden leg of Peter Stuyvesant. In a word, the humorous perception of the American people has made a pet of the Dutch tradition in New York and Pennsylvania; as, likewise, of the childlike comicalities of the plantation negro; the arch waggishness of the Irish emigrants, and the cherubic shrewdness of the newly-acquired German. The Dutch gained much, on the sentimental score, by transplantation; their old-world flavor and rich coloring are admirably relieved against the background of unbaked wilderness. We could not like them so much or laugh at them at all, did we not so thoroughly respect them; the men of New Amsterdam were worthy of their national history, which recounts as stirring a struggle as was ever made by the love of liberty against the foul lust of oppression. The Dutch are not funny anywhere but in Seventeenth Century Manhattan; nor can this singularity be explained by saying that Washington Irving made them so. It inheres in the situation; and the delightful chronicles of Diedrich Knickerbocker owe half their enduring fascination to their sterling veracity—the veracity which is faithful to the spirit and gambols only with the letter. The humor of that work lies in its sympathetic and creative insight quite as much as in the broad good-humor and imaginative whimsicality with which the author handles his theme. The caricature of a true artist gives a better likeness than any photograph.
The first ship containing families of colonists went out early in 1623, under the command of Cornelis May; he broke ground on Manhattan, while Joris built Fort Orange at Albany, and a little group of settlers squatted round it. May acted as director for the first year or two; the trade in furs was prosecuted, and the first Dutch-American baby was born at Fort Orange.
Fortune was kind. King Charles, instead of discussing prior rights, offered an alliance; at home, the bickerings of sects were healed. Peter Minuit came out as director-general and paid his twenty-four dollars for the Island—a little less than a thousand acres for a dollar. At all events, the Indians seemed satisfied from Albany to the Narrows. The Battery was designed, and there was quite a cluster of houses on the clearing back of it. An atmosphere of Dutch homeliness began to temper the thin American air. The honest citizens were pious, and had texts read to them on Sundays; but they did not torture their consciences with spiritual self-questionings like the English Puritans, nor dream of disciplining or banishing any of their number for the better heavenly security of the rest. The souls of these Netherlander fitted their bodies far better than was the case with the colonists of Boston and Salem. Instead of starving and rending them, their religion made them happy and comfortable. Instead of settling the ultimate principles of theology and government, they enjoyed the consciousness of mutual good-will, and took things as they came. The new world needed men of both kinds. It must, however, be admitted that the people of New Amsterdam were not wholly harmonious with those of Plymouth. Minuit and Bradford had some correspondence, in which, while professions of mutual esteem and love were exchanged, uneasy things were let fall about clear titles and prior rights. Minuit was resolute for his side, and the attitude of Bradford prompted him to send for a company of soldiers from home. But there was probably no serious anticipation of coming to blows on either part. There was space enough in the continent for the two hundred and seventy inhabitants of New Amsterdam and for the Pilgrim Fathers, for the present.
Spain was an unwilling contributor to the prosperity of the Dutch colonists, by the large profits which the latter gained from the capture of Spanish galleons; but in 1629 the charter creating the order of Patroons laid the foundation for abuses and discontent which afflicted the settlers for full thirty years. Upon the face of it, the charter was liberal, and promised good results; but it made the mistake of not securing popular liberties. The Netherlands were no doubt a free country, as freedom was at that day understood in Europe; but this freedom did not involve independence for the individual. The only recognized individuality was that of the municipalities, the rulers of which were not chosen by popular franchise. This system answered well enough in the old home, but proved unsuited to the conditions of settlers in the wilderness. The American spirit seemed to lurk like some subtle contagion in the remotest recesses of the forest, and those who went to live there became affected with it. It was longer in successfully vindicating itself than in New England, because it was not stimulated on the banks of the Hudson by the New England religious fervor; it was supported on grounds of practical expediency merely. Men could not prosper unless they received the rewards of industry, and were permitted to order their private affairs in a manner to make their labor pay. They were not content to have the Patroon devour their profits, leaving them enough only for a bare subsistence. The Dutch families scattered throughout the domain could not get ahead, while yet they could not help feeling that the bounty of nature ought to benefit those whose toil made it available, at least as much as it did those who toiled not, but simply owned the land in virtue of some documentary transaction with the powers above, and therefore claimed ownership also over the poor emigrant who settled on it—having nowhere else to go. The emigrants were probably helped to comprehend and formulate their own misfortunes by communications with stragglers from New England, who regaled them with tales of such liberties as they had never before imagined. But the seed thus sown by the Englishmen fell on fruitful soil, and the crop was reaped in due season.
The charter intended, primarily, the encouragement of emigration, and did not realize that it needed very little encouragement. The advantages offered were more alluring than they need have been. Any person who, within four years, could establish a colony of fifty persons, was given privileges only comparable to those of independent princes. They were allowed to take up tracts of land many square miles in area, to govern them absolutely (according to the laws of the realm), to found and administer cities, and in a word to drink from Baucis's pitcher to their hearts' content. In return, the home administration expected the benefit of their trade. Two stipulations only restrained them: they were to buy titles to their land from the Indians, and they were to permit, on penalty of removal, no cotton or woolen manufactures in the country. That was a monopoly which was reserved to the weavers in the old country.
This was excellent for such as could afford to become patroons; but what about the others? The charter provided that any emigrant who could pay for his exportation might take up what land he required for his needs, and cultivate it independently. Other emigrants, unable to pay their fare out, might have it paid for them, but in that case, of course, incurred a mortgage to their benefactors. In effect, they could not own the product of the work of their hands, until it had paid their sponsors for their outlay, together with such additions in the way of interest on capital as might seem to the sponsors equitable.
The Company further undertook to supply slaves to the colony, should they prove to be a paying investment; and it was chiefly because the climate of New York was less favorable to the Guinea Coast negro than was that further south, that African slavery did not take early and firm root in the former region. Philosophers have long recognized the influence of degrees of latitude upon human morality. The patroon planters could dispense with black slaves, since they had white men enough who cost them no more than their keep, and would, presumably, not involve the expense of overseers. Everything, therefore, seemed harmonious and sunshiny, and the Company congratulated itself.