The pressure on New Netherland began in 1633 when a trading vessel from England invaded the Hollanders’ North River for furs. Her name was the William. She was the first English ship ever to ascend the Hudson. At the time, the annual returns there were estimated at 16,000 beaverskins, and no one was better qualified to appreciate this rich business than the factor in charge of the William; for, he was none other than a former Dutch commissary on the Hudson, Jacob Eelkens, who himself had driven a great trade with the Indians at Fort Orange. In 1623 however, after incurring the displeasure of the West India Company, he had been summarily discharged. Now he was in the employ of English merchants, William Cloberry and Company of London, and he was of a mind to square accounts.
Defying both Governor Wouter van Twiller and the threatening guns on Manhattan, Eelkens proclaimed haughtily that the Hudson River belonged to England and then proceeded upstream. Van Twiller didn’t fire on him. In fact, the irresolute Dutch governor broached a cask of wine while he deliberated on the situation. Not until he had been roundly twitted for timidity by his drinking companions did he acquire enough spirit to dispatch three ships with some soldiers after the renegade Hollander. By the time this force caught up with Eelkens, he was anchored near Fort Orange, where he had established a well-stocked trucking station ashore and was enjoying a lucrative trade for beaver with the natives, all at the expense of the frustrated Dutch commissary there.
Van Twiller’s soldiers, upon their arrival, arrested the turncoat interloper, and the William was convoyed back down the river to Manhattan where all the pelts aboard were confiscated. Then Eelkens, protesting loudly, was escorted with his empty ship out of the Narrows, never again to bother his countrymen on the Hudson.
But this same year, 1633, there was pressure of a more serious nature on the Dutch. It came overland, and it was not to be repulsed so easily.
The fur traders of New England hankered for the beaver that abounded in the valley of the Connecticut River where the Hollanders were taking annually some 10,000 skins. Of course Dutch Captain Adrien Block had discovered and explored the Connecticut, or “Fresh Water” as he called it, in 1614. And since fur traders from New Amsterdam bartered traditionally on the river, even establishing a temporary trading post and laying out the foundations of Fort Good Hope near the site of present-day Hartford in 1623, there was not much question in their minds about the jurisdiction of New Netherland. Admittedly, however, they had made no permanent settlements.
Neither had the English who now coveted the valley’s beaver meadows. However, they had lately done some exploring and liked what they found. Edward Winslow of New Plymouth went up the river in 1632 and was so impressed that he selected a site for a house. And John Winthrop of the Bay Colony let it out that because his colony extended “to the south sea on the west parte,” the Connecticut River, or the greater part of it anyway, belonged to Massachusetts under its charter.
So the Hollanders at New Amsterdam, a bit alarmed, bestirred themselves to complete the fort which had been commenced by them some ten years earlier. After buying “most of the lands on both sides” of the Connecticut River from the Indians, they built a strong house of yellow bricks at their old trading post and set up two cannon there to secure the river above them.
But, even while their commissary, Jacob van Curler, was building this fort in 1633, it was being enveloped by the New Englanders. Fur traders from Massachusetts Bay fought their way straight west through the wilderness that summer to reach the upper Connecticut valley north of Fort Good Hope. In the fall a party of Pilgrims from New Plymouth sailed up the river from the south for the same purpose.
It was John Oldham, an adventurous trader of ten years experience in New England, who pioneered the way for the English. With three companions he blazed what was to become known as the “Old Connecticut Path” from Watertown in Massachusetts to the Connecticut River. On his return he made an enthusiastic report on the valley and its beaver meadows, while delegations of Mohegans from the Connecticut valley offered alliances and otherwise made things most attractive to prospective settlers. They wanted the men of Massachusetts, or any other white men with guns, to settle among them. It was the only way they knew to even scores with their recent conquerors, the Pequots.
There were 4,000 Englishmen clustered about Massachusetts Bay at the time and quite a few were of a mind to get away. Puritanical intolerance, given free rein in this new American colony, was making too much of a strait jacket out of life for many of them. Connecticut sounded almost too good to be true. Some of the bold ones began making plans to migrate to the bounteous valley the following year.