The French were therefore able to continue their penetration of America without the interference they might have had from the Virginians who settled Kent and Palmer’s Islands. In fact, they were now almost unmolested in an encirclement of the English colonies that would not stop until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River. And the Dutch were undisturbed by the Marylanders even in the neighboring valley of the Delaware, where they were now settling and trading in pelts under the very noses of Lord Baltimore’s people who claimed jurisdiction over some of those parts.
By the end of the century the fur frontier in Maryland had almost disappeared and the trade was no longer important in the economic life of the colony. The average value of skins exported per year didn’t exceed 650 pounds sterling. By then the Governor of Maryland was declaring that “this Countrey is an open Country and deales generally in Tobacco and not in furrs.”
XIII
New Netherland’s South River
The charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines, build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels.
Although the company was chartered in 1621, it did not commence operations until 1623. But then, during the next six or seven years, its success was phenomenal in the matter of profits—from waging war against Spain. So much so, that by 1629 its directors in Amsterdam were prone to speak slightingly of New Netherland, their trading colony in North America. “The trade carried on there in peltries is right advantageous but, one year with another, we can at most bring home fifty thousand guilders,” they complained.
For a plantation which at the time numbered no more than 300 inhabitants this would seem to be most productive, especially when compared to what the English had done in either Virginia or in New England. It was paltry enough, however, when compared with the loot of Spanish colonial strongholds that fell to the conquering Dutch merchants, or when weighed against the spoils of Spain’s silver fleet that Admiral Peter Heyn had captured in the name of the West India Company. In one fell swoop he took seventeen galleons laden with bullion and merchandise to the value of fourteen millions of guilders! From that operation alone the investors received a dividend amounting to well over half of the company’s paid-up capital.
Experienced Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, who had been appointed the first managing director of the West India Company’s colony in America, acted primarily as a chief fur factor for the company. During 1624, the first and only year of his governorship, he sent home pelts which brought 27,000 guilders. The next year his successor did even better. In 1626, the year that Peter Minuit received the formal title of Director General of New Netherland and purchased Manhattan from the Indians, one ship for Amsterdam was cargoed with “7246 beaver skins, 178¹⁄₂ otter skins, 675 otter skins, 48 minck skins, 36 wild cat skins, 33 mincks, 34 rat skins.” It also carried some oak and hickory to timber-hungry Holland.
This, incidentally, is the earliest known true manifest of a ship clearing from the present port of New York. In terms of today’s money the skins brought well over one hundred thousand American dollars. A right advantageous trade indeed!
In the spring of 1624 some thirty families, mostly French-speaking Walloons from the lower provinces fleeing persecution by Spanish inquisitors, had come over with Captain May in the New Netherland. They came as the plantation’s first real colonists, to raise livestock, to put their spades into the earth. May, as well as his successor, was charged with “spreading out” and more formally occupying New Netherland. It would prevent any further trouble with England about the possession of that country, it was hoped, since the English themselves had expounded the doctrine that “occupancy confers a good title by the laws of nations and nature.” In the case of their North American colony the Hollanders could afford a point of agreement on such a doctrine.