Next in importance are the catalogues of Frederick Muller of Amsterdam, particularly the series, Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Plates on America,[905] begun in 1872, and which he calls “an essay towards a Dutch-American bibliography.” It was also under Mr. Muller’s direction and patronage that Mr. P. A. Tiele prepared his Mémoire bibliographique sur les journaux des navigateurs néerlandais réimprimés dans les collections de De Bry et de Hulsius, etc., Amsterdam, 1867. It covers those voyages not Dutch of which accounts have appeared in Dutch, as well as the distinctively Dutch collections. The compiler dedicated it to Mr. James Lenox, from whose rich collection he derived much help. Muller’s Catalogue (1872), no. 110; Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 1,002.
The best American collection of books on New Netherland is probably that now in the Lenox Library. Mr. Asher said of it some years ago (Essay, p. xlix, sub anno 1867) that it was “absolutely complete.”
B. New Amsterdam.—The earliest accounts of the town by Wassenaer (1623), De Laet (1625), De Rasiere (1627), and Michaelis (1628), have already been mentioned. (Cf. the paper on the first settlement by the Dutch in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vol. iii.) Stuyvesant, in his letter to Nicoll in 1664, claimed that the town was founded in 1623. This statement is repeated in De la Croix’s book, with De Vries’s additions, published in Dutch as Algemeene Wereldt-Beschrijving, 1705. (Asher, no. 19.) O’Callaghan, New Netherland, ii. 210, has established that the town was incorporated in 1653.
The original Dutch records of New Amsterdam have been put into English in MS. volumes in the archives of the city, and some parts of them are printed in Valentine’s New York City Manual, and in Historical Magazine, xi. 33, 108, 170, 224, 354; xii. 30; xiii. 39, 168. Cf. paper on the development of its municipal government in the Dutch period, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., May, 1882, and the papers on the city of New York in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vols. i. and iii. Some notes on the Indian incursions in and about New Amsterdam during the Dutch period are in Valentine’s New York City Manual, 1863, p. 533. The principal histories of the town are Martha J. Lamb’s (1877), M. L. Booth’s (1859), W. L. Stone’s (1872), and David T. Valentine’s (1853). The last comes down only to 1750, and this and Lamb’s are of the most importance.
NEW YORK AND VICINITY, 1666.
This fac-simile of the lower portion of the map entitled “De Noord Rivier, anders R. Manhattans, off Hudson’s Rivier, genaamt t’Groodt,” which appeared in a tract at Middleburgh (and also at the Hague in 1666 in Goos’s Zee-Atlas) in answer to the reply of Downing to the memoir (1664) of the deputies of the States-General. The cut is made from the reproduction in Mr. Lenox’s edition of H. C. Murphy’s translation of the Vertoogh and Breeden Raedt, New York, 1854. The North is to the right.
Something can be derived from the gatherings of J. F. Watson in his Annals of New York City and State, 1846, and the appendix to his Annals of Philadelphia, 1830. The reader will find interest in various local antiquarian quests, as exemplified in J. W. Gerard’s Old Streets of New York under the Dutch (1874).[906] A map of the original grants of village lots on the island, from the Dutch West India Company, is in the City Manual (1857), and in the same (1856) is a map showing the made and swampy lands, as indicating the original surface of the town. In other volumes (1852 and 1853), and in Valentine’s History, p. 379, is a modern plan of the city, showing the line of the original high-water marks and the location of the early farms. It is one of these farms, that of Dominie Bogardus, the pastor of the Dutch church, who so vigorously opposed Kieft’s plans, that is now the property of Trinity Church, and the source of a large revenue. (See the Key in Valentine’s History, p. 380.) The same serial preserves views of sundry landmarks, like the canal in Broad Street, of 1659 (in 1862, p. 515), a windmill of 1661 (in 1862, p. 547), a house built in 1626 (in 1847, p. 346). A plan of the fort built in 1633-1635 is in Valentine’s New York, p. 27; and at p. 38 is a plan of the town in 1642, as well as the author could make it out from existing data.
For the northern part of the island, James Riker’s History of Harlem, 1881, affords much interest, tracing more minutely than usual the associations of the early comers with their family stocks in Europe, and showing by a map the original locations of their house-lots at Harlem.