CHAPTER X.
THE ENGLISH IN NEW YORK, 1664-1689.
BY JOHN AUSTIN STEVENS.
THE trading spirit is not of itself sufficient to establish successful settlement, and monopolies cannot safely be intrusted with the government of colonies. The experience of the Dutch in the New Netherland established this truth, which later experience has fully confirmed.
Toward the middle of the seventeenth century Holland controlled the carrying trade of the world. Nearly one half of the tonnage of Europe was under her flag. Java was the centre of her East Indian enterprise, Brazil the seat of her West Indian possessions; and the seas between, over which were wafted her fleets, freighted with the rich products of these tropical lands, were patrolled by a navy hardy and brave. Yet it was at the very zenith of her power that her North American colony, which proudly bore the name of the Fatherland, was stripped from the home government at one trenchant blow.
The cause of this misfortune may be found in the weakness of the Dutch settlement compared with the more populous New England communities, which pressed, threatening and aggressive, on its eastern borders. Under the Dutch rule, New Netherland was never in a true sense a colony. Begun as a trading-post in 1621, and managed by the Dutch West India Company, it cannot be said ever to have got beyond leading-strings, and at the time when it fell into the hands of the English its entire population did not exceed seven thousand souls, while the English on its borders numbered not less than fifteen times as many.
Nor did the West India Company seem ever to comprehend that their hold upon the new continent could be maintained only by well-ordered and continuous colonization. Rapidly enriched by their intercourse with the natives of the sunny climes in which they established their strong posts for trade, they seem to have looked for no more from their posts on the North American coast, or to have had further ambition than to secure their share of the trade in furs, in which they were met by the active rivalry and greater enterprise of the French settlers on the Canadian frontier.
Yet the territory of New Netherland was by natural configuration the key of the northern frontier of the American colonies, and indeed, it may be said, of the continent. The courses of the Hudson and Mohawk form the sides of a natural strategic triangle, and with the system of northern lakes and streams connect the several parts of the broad surface which stretches from the mouth of the St. Lawrence on the Atlantic to the headwaters of the Columbia at the continental divide. This vantage-ground at the head of the great valleys through which water-ways give access to the regions on the slope below, was the chosen site of the formidable confederacy of the Iroquois, the acknowledged masters of the native tribes.
The English jealousy of the Dutch did not spring from national antipathy, but from the rivalry of trade. The insular position of England forced her to protect herself abroad, and when Protestant Holland, by enterprise and skill, drew to herself the commerce of both the Indies, her success aroused in England the same spirit of opposition, the same animosity, which had, the century before, been awakened by the aggrandizement of Catholic Spain. It was the Protestant Commonwealth of England which passed the Navigation Act of 1660, especially directed against the foreign trade of her growing rival of the same religious faith. In this act may be found the germ of the policy of England not only toward her neighbors, but also toward her colonies. This act was maintained in active force after the restoration of Charles II. to the throne. Strictly enforced at home, it was openly or secretly evaded only in the British American colonies and plantations. The arm of England was long, but her hand lay lightly on the American continent. The extent of coast and frontier was too great to be successfully watched, and the necessities of the colonies too many and imperious for them to resist the temptation to a trade which, though illicit, was hardly held immoral except by the strictest constructionists of statute law; and it was with the Dutch that this trade was actively continued by their English neighbors of Maryland and Virginia, as well as by those of New England. In 1663 the losses to the revenue were so extensive that the farmers of the customs, who, after the fashion of the period, enjoyed a monopoly from the King at a large annual personal cost, complained of the great abuses which, they claimed, defrauded the revenue of ten thousand pounds a year. The interest of the kingdom was at stake, and the conquest of the New Netherland was resolved upon.