The purchasers of the tracts already mentioned—with one exception, associations of Dutch merchants—lost no time in sending out people to settle their colonies. Renselaerswyck, adjoining and surrounding Fort Orange, had in 1630 already a population of thirty males, of whom several had families, sent out by the Association recognizing Kilian van Renselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam, as patroon. The same men, associated with several others, among whom was Captain David Pietersen de Vries, had bought the present counties of Sussex and Kent, in the State of Delaware, to which by a purchase made the following year they added the present Cape May County, N. J. On December 12, 1630, they sent two vessels to the Delaware or South River, “to plant a colony for the cultivation of grain and tobacco, as well as to carry on the whale-fishery in that region.” They carried out the first part of the plan, but were so unsuccessful in the second part that the expedition proved a losing one. Undismayed by their financial loss, another was sent out in May, 1632, under Captain de Vries’ personal command, although information had been received that the settlement on the South River, Zwanendael, had been destroyed by the Indians, and all the settlers, thirty-two in number, killed. Arriving opposite Zwanendael, De Vries found the news but too true; and after visiting the old Fort Nassau, now deserted, and loitering a while in the river, he left the region without any further attempt at colonization. The pecuniary losses attending these two unfortunate expeditions induced the patroons of Zwanendael, two years later, to dispose of their right and title to these tracts of land to the West India Company.
Shortly before Minuit was appointed director of New Netherland, a number of Walloons, compelled by French intolerance to leave their homes between the rivers Scheldt and Lys, had applied to Sir Dudley Carleton, principal Secretary of State to King Charles I., for permission to settle in Virginia. The answer of the Virginia Company not proving satisfactory, they turned their eyes upon New Netherland, where a small number of them arrived with Minuit. For some reasons they left the lands first allotted to them on Staten Island, and went over to Long Island, where Wallabout,[782] in the city of Brooklyn, still reminds us of the origin of its first settlers. It will be remembered that Englishmen from Virginia (under Captain Samuel Argal, in 1613) had attempted to drive the Dutch from the Hudson River.[783] It is said that the Dutch then acknowledged the English title to this region under a grant of Queen Elizabeth to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, and made an arrangement for their continuing there on sufferance. Be that as it may, the West India Company had paid no heed to this early warning. Now, in 1627, the matter was to be recalled to their minds in a manner more diplomatic than Argal’s, by a letter from Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, which most earnestly asserted the right of the English to the territory occupied by the Dutch. This urged the latter to clear their title, for otherwise it said: “It will be harder and with more difficulty obtained hereafter, and perhaps not without blows.” Before the director’s appeal for assistance against possible English invaders reached the home office, the Company had already taken steps to remove some of the causes which might endanger their colony. They had obtained, September, 1627, from King Charles I. an order giving to their vessels the same privileges as had been granted by the treaty of Southampton to all national vessels of Holland,—that is, freedom of trade to all ports of England and her colonies. But their title to New Netherland was not cleared, because they could not do it; for they did not dare to assert the pretensions to the premier seisin, then considered valid according to that maxim of the civil law, “quæ nullius sunt, in bonis dantur occupanti;” nor did they later claim the right of first discovery when, after the surrender of New Netherland to the English, in 1664, negotiations were had concerning restitution. Only once did they claim a title by such discovery. This was when the ship “Union,” bringing home the recalled director Minuit (1632), was attached in an English port, at the suit of the New England Company, on a charge which had been made notwithstanding the King’s order of September, 1627, and which alleged that the ship had obtained her cargo in countries subject to his Majesty. The denial of this claim and the counter claim of first discovery by Englishmen set up by the British ministry failed to bring forth a rejoinder from their High Mightinesses of Holland.
When De Vries, having ascertained the destruction of his colony on the Delaware, came to New Amsterdam, he found there the newly appointed director, Wouter van Twiller, just arrived. He was, as De Vries thought, “an unfit person,” whom family influence had suddenly raised from a clerkship in the Company’s office at Amsterdam to the governorship of New Netherland “to perform a comedy,” and his council De Vries calls “a pack of fools, who knew nothing except to drink, by whose management the Company must come to nought.” De Vries’ prediction came near being realized. Seized with a mania for territorial aggrandizement, Van Twiller bought from the Indians a part of the Connecticut territory in 1633, and by building Fort Hope, near the present site of Hartford, planted the seed for another quarrel with the English at Boston, who claimed all the land from the Narragansetts nearly to the Manhattans under a grant made in 1631 to the Earl of Warwick, and under a subsequent transfer from the latter in 1632 to Lord Say and Seal’s company. Notwithstanding their numerical weakness, the Dutch kept a footing in Connecticut for nearly twenty years; but they could not prevent the same Englishmen from invading Long Island in a like manner, and being prominent actors in the final catastrophe of 1664. Another purchase made by Van Twiller from the Indians, also in 1633, which included the territory on the Schuylkill, the building of Fort Beeversreede there and additions made to Fort Nassau, put new life into the sinking settlement on the Delaware River, and thus gave color to the subsequent statement, made in the dispute with the Swedes, that they (the Dutch) had never relinquished their hold upon this territory.[784] Thoroughly imbued with a sense of the wealth and power of the West India Company, then in the zenith of its power, Van Twiller expended the revenues of his government lavishly in building up New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, and, without regard for official ethics, abused his position still further at the expense of the Company, by granting to himself and his boon companions the most fertile tracts of land on and near Manhattan and Long islands. His irregular proceedings, finally brought to the notice of the States-General by the law officer of New Netherland, led to his recall in 1637, when he was succeeded by William Kieft.
Up to this time the history of New Netherland is more or less a history of the acts of the director, who proceeded more like the agent of a great commercial institution than the ruler of a vast province. He assumed to be the head of the agency, and all the other inhabitants of the colony were either his servants or his tenants. Nominally he was also directed to supervise the proceedings of adjoining colonies of the same nationality; but they either died out, like Pavonia (New Jersey) and Zwanendael (Delaware), or as yet the interests of those private establishments, like Renselaerswyck (Albany) had not come in conflict with those of the Company so as to call forth the authority vested in the director. The relations with the Indians had also been amicable so far, a slight misunderstanding with the New Jersey Indians excepted; and the quarrel with the English about the Connecticut lands having been referred to the home authorities for settlement, this complication did not require any display of statesmanship. The province having been brought to the verge of ruin by Wouter van Twiller, up to the beginning of whose administration it had returned a profit of $75,000 to the Company, the abilities of his successor were taxed to their utmost to rebuild it, and his statesmanship was tried in his dealings with the Swedes, the English, and the Indians.
The absorption, for their own benefit, of the most fertile lands by officers of the Company had naturally tended to prevent actual settlers from coming to New Netherland, and the Company itself had thus far failed to send over colonists, as required by the charter. The incessant disputes between the Amsterdam department of the Company and the patroons of Renselaerswyck over the interpretation of the privileges granted in 1629, and the complaints of the fiscal[785] of New Netherland against Wouter van Twiller, which pointedly referred to the general maladministration of the province, at last induced their High Mightinesses to turn their attention to it. A short investigation compelled them to announce officially that the colony was retrograding, its population decreasing, and that it required a change in the administration of its affairs. But as the charter of the Company was the fundamental evil, the Government was almost powerless to enforce its demands, and had to be satisfied with recommending to the Assembly of the Nineteen of the West India Company the adoption of a plan for the effectual settlement of the country and the encouragement of a sound and healthful emigration. This step resulted in overthrowing the monopoly of the American trade enjoyed by the Company since 1623, and in opening not only the trade, but also the cultivation of the soil under certain conditions, to every immigrant, denizen, or foreigner. The new order of things gave to the drooping colony a fresh lease of life. Its population, hitherto only transient, as it consisted mainly of the Company’s servants, who returned to Europe at the expiration of their respective terms, now became permanent,—“whole colonies” coming “to escape the insupportable government of New England;” servants who had obtained their liberty in Maryland and Virginia availing themselves of the opportunity to make use of the experience acquired on the tobacco plantations of their English masters; wealthy individuals of the more educated classes emigrating with their families and importing large quantities of stock; and the peasant farmers of continental Europe seeking freehold homes on the banks of the Hudson and on Long Island, which they could not acquire in the land of their birth. These all flocked now to New Netherland, and gave to New Amsterdam something of its present cosmopolitan character; for Father Jogues found there in 1643 eighteen different nationalities represented by its population. Two other invasions, however, of New Netherland brought a people likewise intent upon the cultivation of the soil and trading with the Indians; but they were not such as “acknowledged their High Mightinesses and the Directors of the West India Company as their suzerain lords and masters,” and these caused some anxiety and trouble to the new director.
The first of these invasions, arriving on this side of the Atlantic in Delaware Bay almost simultaneously with Kieft, was made in pursuance of a plan long cherished by the great Protestant hero of the seventeenth century, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, to give his country a share in the harvest which other nations were then gathering in the New World. Various reasons deferred the carrying out of this plan, first laid before the King in 1626 by the same Usselinx who planned the West India Company; and not until 1638 did the South Company of Sweden send out their first adventure under another man, also formerly connected with the West India Company, Peter Minuit.
Kieft’s protest against this intrusion had no effect upon the Swedish commander and his colony, whose history is told in another chapter. More energy was displayed by the Dutch two years later in dealing with some Englishmen from New Haven, who began a settlement on the Schuylkill River, opposite Fort Nassau, and who were promptly driven away. Laxity and corruption on the part of the Dutch local director seems to have been the cause of the almost inexplicable patience with which the Dutch bore the encroachments made by the Swedes; and not until the government of New Netherland was intrusted to the energetic Stuyvesant was anything done to counteract the Swedish influences on the Delaware. Stuyvesant built in 1651 a new fort (Casimir, now Newcastle, Del.), below the Swedish fort Christina (Wilmington), the treacherous surrender of which, in 1654, to a newly arriving Swedish governor, led in 1655 to the complete overthrow of Swedish rule.
The next two years, to 1657, the inhabitants of the Delaware territory had to suffer under the mismanagement of various commanders appointed by the Director-General and Council, whose lack of administrative talent helped not a little to embarrass the Company financially. Under pressure of monetary difficulty, part of the Delaware region was ceded by the Company to the municipality of Amsterdam in Holland, which in May, 1657, established a new colony at Fort Casimir, calling it New Amstel, while the name of Christina was changed to Altena, and the territory belonging to it placed in charge of an agent of more experience than his predecessors. The remaining years of Dutch rule on the Delaware derive interest chiefly from an attempt by comers from Maryland to obtain possession of the country through a clever trick; from quarrels between the authorities of the two Dutch colonies brought on by the weakness and folly of the directors of the “City’s Colony;” and from difficulties with Maryland which arose out of the Indian question. With the surrender of New Amsterdam in 1664, the Delaware country passed also into English hands.