After Fort Nassau was destroyed by a freshet of ice and water in 1617, a new trading post was established by the Dutch in the same vicinity but in a more secure position. This was on a commanding rise overlooking the Hudson at the mouth of the Tawasentha, later known as Norman’s Kill. It was here, as tradition has it, that the tacit agreement of friendship and trade between the Dutch and the Iroquois was actually formalized as a treaty of alliance and peace.
The Mohawks were the prime movers of the pact, sending invitations to a grand council of the sachems of the Five Nations as well as their subjugated neighbors in the east and south. With the smoking of the calumet a binding covenant was made between the factors of the Holland merchants and all the Indian tribes represented at the council. The supremacy of the Five Nations over their aboriginal neighbors was confirmed, and the Dutch promised “firegun” reprisals against any who broke the peace on the frontiers of New Netherland.
And there was peace of a sort—while the merchants in Holland filled their coffers and the Indians acquired guns. Only occasionally did armed fur factors find it necessary to enforce the pact and then often to their sorrow. Once, for instance, when a detail from the fort took the part of some offended Mohegans, the Mohawks retaliated fiercely. They managed to kill the Dutch commander and three of his men. Capturing the remainder of the party, they cooked and ate one of them and burned the others.
But in the main there was the kind of armed peace that permitted the fur traders to extend the frontiers of New Netherland and by their discoveries gain additional trading privileges under their charter. This they had to do if they were to beat the French and the English to the vast untapped fur stores of the interior.
Early in the history of Fort Nassau, a party of three adventurous traders, led by one “Kleynties,” penetrated deep into the hinterland. Travelling west up the Mohawk Valley, they appear to have stumbled upon the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and eventually to have reached Carantouan, a palisaded town of the Susquehannock Indians.
Carantouan, now known as Spanish Hill, was just south of the present-day border between New York and Pennsylvania. It was built about the terraced slopes of a gigantic mound. The platter-like top of this mound with its man-made entrenchments was said by the Indians to have been occupied once by awesome spirits who spoke with thunder and killed men by making holes through their bodies. The spirits could have been sixteenth century Spanish explorers from Chesapeake Bay taking refuge there while searching for gold.
Only a short time before the advent of the three Dutchmen in this vicinity Carantouan had been visited by a Frenchman, Etienne Brule. With a delegation of Hurons he safely traversed the country of the Five Nations to reach this stronghold of the Susquehannocks in 1615. He wanted them as allies for Champlain’s pending attack on Fort Onondaga. Like the Hurons, the Susquehannocks were kinsmen but bitter enemies of the Five Nations, and they agreed readily enough to help in the attack. However their war dances took too long and they arrived too late—after Champlain’s defeat.
Etienne Brule returned to Carantouan with his savage friends to do a bit of bartering and to examine into the possibilities of extending the fur trade of Canada to the Susquehanna. In fact he descended the length of that river into the upper waters of Chesapeake Bay. But because of the temperate climate there he took it to be the coast of Spanish Florida and discreetly turned back.
THE MERCHANTS FILLED THEIR COFFERS, WHILE THE INDIANS ACQUIRED GUNS.