DUTCH VESSELS, 1618.
This cut is a fac-simile of one in the title of Schouten’s Journal, Amsterdam, 1618. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 87.
When, therefore, it is stated that Hudson abandoned the plan of seeking for a northeast passage, in the hope of finding, under 40° north latitude, a passage to the Western Ocean, as advised by his friends Captain John Smith, of Virginia, and Dr. Plancius, we are asked to accept as true a statement made and spread about for political purposes. These will be understood when we recall the motives for the establishment of the West India Company,—a project in which Plancius, a minister of the Reformed Church, and as such driven from his Belgian home by the Spaniards, gave his hearty and active co-operation to Usselinx. International law gave possession for his sovereign to any one who discovered a new land not formerly claimed by any Christian prince or inhabited by any Christian nation. To have a base for their operations in America against Spain, Holland required territory not so claimed, and the shrewd projectors undoubtedly deemed it most advisable to establish this base not only in an unclaimed but also in a hitherto unknown country. Therefore it was necessary to claim for Hudson the discovery of the river bearing his name, as the West India Company did in 1634,[802] although a few years before, in 1632, they had admitted by inference[803] that Hudson’s River was known to other nations under the name of Rio de Montañas, and of Rio de Montaigne, before Hudson saw it.[804] In the following decade the statement of 1634 was forgotten, and the company in 1644 claimed title by the first discovery of the Hudson and Delaware rivers, through ships of the Greenland Company in 1598.[805] Still later, in 1659, by the mouth of their diplomatic agents in Maryland and Virginia, it is asserted that Holland derived its title to New Netherland through Spain as “first discoverer and founder of that New World,” and through the French, who, by one Jehan de Verrazano[806] a Florentine, were in 1524 the second followers and discoverers in the northern parts of America.[807] Falsification in politics was evidently then, as it is now, a venial sin; the statements made for political purposes, although emanating from official sources, must, therefore, be accepted with due caution.[808]
As the history of New Netherland is closely connected with that of the West India Company, and as the West India Company was one of the great political factors in the United Provinces, the Dutch State-Papers[809] and the writings of contemporaneous authors[810] must be duly considered by the student of this period of our history.
Most prominent among contemporaneous writers is Willem Usselinx, the originator of the Dutch West India and Swedish South Companies, even though his writings have not always a direct bearing upon the history of New Netherland. We know little of the life of this remarkable man, beyond the facts that he was a native of Belgium and a merchant at Antwerp, whom the political and religious troubles of the period had compelled to leave his fatherland and to seek refuge in Holland; that, inspired by hatred against Spain, he conceived the plan of the West India Company; that for some unexplained reason the West India Company lost his services, which were then, about 1626, offered to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the establishment of the South Company.[811] As Usselinx chiefly wrote before the West India Company was organized, and as its advocate, his books and pamphlets, instead of being historical, are of a more or less polemical character. He never forgets what he had to suffer through Spain, and points out constantly how important to Holland is the commerce of the West Indies, and that in their peace negotiations with Spain the States-General must by all means preserve the freedom of trading to America. These writings date from before Hudson’s voyage in 1609, and Usselinx disappears from the list of writers after the publication of the patent granted by Sweden to the South Company in 1627, unless we admit the above-quoted West-Indische Spieghel to be his work. Asher, in his Bibliographical Essay, gives as the latest of his works the Argonautica Gustaviana,[812] and had evidently no knowledge of the Advice to Establish a new South Company, written by Usselinx in 1636.
The next writer to be considered had exceptional facilities in gathering his material. As director of the West India Company, Johannes de Laet[813] had of course ready access to the records, while as co-patroon of Rensselaerswyck he had an especial interest in the country where his daughter and son-in-law[814] had made their home. Two manuscript volumes in folio, written by De Laet himself, and now in the collection of Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, give us an idea of the painstaking diligence with which De Laet collected the matter of the books which he intended to write. These two volumes contain no material relating specially to New Netherland, but he made undoubtedly as extensive preparations for the chapter on the Dutch colony in North America in his Nieuwe Wereld,[815] as he had made for the others, by copying from the most authentic works on the subject, by talking with seafarers returned from the transatlantic colony, and by transcribing letters from private persons residing there. His intention to give to his fellow-citizens as perfect a description of the New World as circumstances would allow, was carefully carried out. It would have been difficult to produce anything better at the time when he wrote; and we must accept this book as the standard work on New Netherland of the seventeenth century, even though he makes in the book, as well as on its accompanying map, a few slight errors; saying, for instance, that “Manhattan Island is separated from the mainland by the Hellgate,” or that “Fort Orange stood [at the time of his writing, 1625] on an island close to the left [western] shore of [Hudson’s] river.”