Compelled by the physical condition of their country to become a maritime nation, while other circumstances directed them to commercial pursuits, they had long been the common carriers of the sea, and had availed themselves at an early date of the discoveries made by the Cabots, Verrazano, and other adventurous explorers in the century succeeding the voyages of Columbus. They had studied the weak points of that vast Spanish empire “where the sun never set,” and found in the war with Spain a good excuse to make use of their knowledge, and to send their ships to the West Indies and the Spanish main to prey upon the commerce of their enemies. The first proposition to make such an expedition, submitted to the States-General in 1581 by an English sea-captain, Beets, and refused by them, was undoubtedly conceived in a purely commercial spirit. Gradually the idea of destroying the transatlantic resources of Spain, and thereby compelling her to submit to the Dutch conditions of peace and to the evacuation of Belgium, caused the formation of a West India company, which, authorized to trade with and fight the Spaniards in American waters, appears in the light of a necessary political measure, without, however, throwing in the background the necessity of finding a shorter route to the East Indies.[780]
Although the scheme to form a West India company was first broached in 1592 by William Usselinx, an exiled Antwerp merchant, it was many years before it could be carried out. The longing for a share in the riches of the New World conduced in the mean time to the establishment of the “Greenland Company” about 1596, and the pretended search by its ships for a northwest passage led to a supposed first discovery of the Hudson River, if we may rely upon an unsupported statement made by officers of the West India Company in an appeal for assistance to the Assembly of the Nineteen in 1644. According to this document, ships of the Greenland Company had entered the North and Delaware rivers in 1598; their crews had landed in both places, and had built small forts to protect them against the inclemency of the winter and to resist the attacks of the Indians.
Of the next adventurer who sailed through the Narrows we know more, and of his discoveries we have documentary evidence. A company of English merchants had organized to trade to America in the first years of the seventeenth century. Their first adventures, directed to Guiana and Virginia, were not successful,[781] yet gave a new impetus to the scheme originally conceived by Usselinx. A plan for the organization of a West India company was drawn up in 1606, according to the exiled Belgian’s ideas. The company was to be in existence thirty-six years, to receive during the first six years assistance from all the United Provinces, and to be managed in the same manner as the East India Company. Political considerations on one side and rivalry between the Provinces on the other prevented the consummation of this project. A peace or truce with Spain was about to be negotiated, and Oldenbarnevelt, then Advocate of Holland and one of the most prominent and influential members of the peace party, foresaw that the organization of a West India company with the avowed purpose of obtaining most of its profits by preying on Spanish commerce in American waters would only prolong the war. Probably he saw still farther. Usselinx’s plan was, as we have seen, to compel Spain by these means to evacuate Belgium, and thus give her exiled sons a chance to return to their old homes. A wholesale departure of the shrewd, industrious, and skilled Belgians would have deprived Holland of her political pre-eminence and have left her an obscure and isolated province. On the other hand, each province and each seaport desired a share in the equipping of the fleet destined to sail in the interests of the proposed company, and as no province was willing to allow a rival to have what she could not have, the project itself between these two extremes of the opposing parties came to nought. It was only when Oldenbarnevelt, accused of high treason, had been lodged in prison, and the renewal of the war with Spain had been commended to the public, that the scheme was taken up again, in 1618.
Private ships, sailing from Dutch ports, had not been idle in the mean time; in 1607 we hear of them in Canada trading for furs, and in 1609 an English mariner, Henry Hudson, who had made several voyages for the English company already mentioned, offered his services to the East India Company to search for the passage to India by the north.
Under the auspices of the Amsterdam chamber of this company Hudson left the Texel in the yacht “Half Moon” April 4, 1609. His failures in the years 1607 and 1608, while in the employ of the English company, had discouraged neither him nor his new employers; but soon ice and fogs compel him, so we are told, to abandon his original plan to go to the East Indies by a possible northeast passage, and he proposes to his crew a search for a northwest passage along the American coast, at about the 40th degree of latitude. A contemporary writer states: “This idea had been suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the Western Ocean by the north of Virginia.” So westward Hudson turns the bow of his ship, to make a first landfall on the coast of Newfoundland, a second at Penobscot Bay, and a third at Cape Cod. Thence he takes a southwest course, but again fails to strike land under the 40th degree; he has gone too far south by one degree, and he anchors in a wide bay under 39° 5″ on the 28th of August. He is in Delaware Bay. Scarcely a week later, on the 4th of September, he finds himself with his yacht in the “Great North River of New Netherland,” under 40° 30´. A month later, to a day, he passes again out of the “Great mouth of the Great River,” homeward bound to report that what he had thought to be the long and vainly sought northwest passage was only a great river, navigable for vessels of light draught for one hundred and fifty miles, and running through a country fair to look upon and inhabited by red men peacefully inclined. Little did Hudson think, while he was navigating the waters named for him, that Champlain, another explorer, had recently been fighting his way up the shores of the lake now bearing his name, and that, a century and a half later, the great battle for supremacy on this continent between France and England,—between the old religion and the new,—would be fiercely waged in those peaceful regions.
The report brought home by Hudson, that the newly discovered country abounded in fur-bearing animals, created the wildest excitement among a people compelled by their northern climate to resort to very warm clothing in winter. Many private ventures, therefore, followed Hudson’s track soon after his return, and finally the plan to organize a West India company, never quite relinquished, was now, 1618, destined to be carried out. There was in this juncture less opposition to it; but still various reasons delayed the consent of the States-General until June, 1621, when at last they signed the charter. Englishmen from Virginia, who claimed the country under a grant, had tried to oust the Dutch, who had before this established themselves on the banks of the Hudson, under the octroi of 1614. The West India Company nevertheless, undismayed, took possession, in 1623, by sending Captain Cornelis Jacobsen Mey as director to the Prince Hendrick or South River (Delaware), and Adrian Jorissen Tienpont in like capacity to the Prince Mauritius or North River. Mey, going up the South River, fifteen leagues from its mouth erected in the present town of Gloucester, N. J., about four miles below Philadelphia, Fort Nassau, the first European settlement in that region; while the director on the North River, besides strengthening the establishment which he found at its mouth, built a fort a few miles above the one erected in 1618 near the mouth of the Normanskil, now Albany, by the servants of the “United New Netherland Company,” and called it “Fort Orange.”
Tienpont’s successor, Peter Minuit, three years later, in 1626, bought from the Indians the whole of Manhattan Island for the value of about twenty-four dollars, with the view of making this the principal settlement. This purchase and the organization, under the charter, of a council with supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority, must be considered the first foundation of our present State of New York, even though the titles of the officers constituting the council,—upper and under merchant, commissary, book-keeper of monthly wages,—seem to prove that in the beginning the Company had only purely commercial ends in view. Their charter of 1621, it is true, required them “to advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts,” but not until the trade with New Netherland threatened to become unprofitable, in 1627-28, was a plan taken into consideration to reap other benefits than those accruing from the fur-trade alone, through a more extended colonization. The deliberations of the Assembly of the Nineteen and directors of the West India Company resulted in a new “charter of freedoms and exemptions,” sanctioned by the States-General, June 7, 1629. Its provisions, no more favorable to liberty, as we understand it now, than that of 1621, attempted to transplant to the soil of New York the feudal system of Europe as it had already been established in Canada; and with it was imported the first germ of that weakening disease,—inadequate revenues,—which caused the colony to fall such an easy prey to England’s attack in 1664. While the charter was still under discussion, several of the Company’s directors took advantage of their position and secured for themselves a share of the new privileges by purchasing from the Indians, as the charter required, the most conveniently located and fertile tracts of land. The records of the acknowledgment of these transactions before the Director and Council of the Colony are the earliest which are extant in the original now in the possession of the State of New York. They bear dates from April, 1630, to July, 1631, and include the present counties of Albany and Richmond, N. Y., the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, N. J., and the southern parts of the States of New Jersey and Delaware.
This mode of acquiring lands from the Indians by purchase established from the beginning the principles by which the intercourse between the white and the red men in the valley of the Hudson was to be regulated. The great Indian problem, which has been and still is a question of paramount importance to the United States Government, was solved then by the Dutch of New Netherland without great difficulty. Persecuted by Spain and France for their religious convictions, the Dutch had learned to tolerate the superstitions and even repugnant beliefs of others. Not less religious than the Puritans of New England, they made no such religious pretexts for tyranny and cruelty as mar the records of their neighbors. They treated the Indian as a man with rights of life, liberty, opinion, and property like their own. Truthful among themselves, they inspired in the Indian a belief in their sincerity and honesty, and purchased what they wanted fairly and with the consent of the seller. The Dutch régime always upheld this principle, and as a consequence the Indians of this State caused no further difficulty, with a few exceptions, to the settlers than a financial outlay. The historians who charge the Dutch with pusillanimity and cowardice in their dealings with the Indians forget that to their policy we owe to-day the existence of the United States.
The country between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes and the Savannah River, was at the time of the arrival of the Dutch practically ruled by a confederacy of Indian tribes,—the Five Nations,—who, settled along the Mohawk and Upper Hudson rivers and in western New York, commanded the key to the continent. It was indeed in their power, had they pleased, to allow the French of Canada to crush the Dutch settlements on the Hudson; and had this territory become a French province, the united action of the American colonies in the French and Revolutionary wars would have been an impossibility. These Five Nations, called by the Jesuit fathers living among them the most enlightened but also the most intractable and ferocious of all the Indians, became soon after the arrival of the Dutch the stanch friends of the new-comers, and remained so during the whole Dutch period. The English wisely adhered to this Indian policy of the Dutch, and by the continued friendship of the Five Nations were enabled successfully to contend with the French for the supremacy on this continent.