[826] Beschrijvinge van Nieuw Nederlant, ghelijck het tegenwoordigh in staet is, etc., door Adrian van der Donck, beyder Rechten Doctoor, die tegenwoordigh noch in Nieuw Nederlant is, Amsterdam, 1655; second edition, 1656,—“Description of New Netherland as it now is, etc., by A. van der Donck, Doctor of Laws, who is still in New Netherland.”
[This work is perhaps the rarest and now the most costly of the early books on New York. Stevens (Historical Collection, nos. 200, 1,395) says, “Copies for the last forty years have usually sold for £12 to £21.” It is priced in Muller (1872 edition, nos. 1,079-81, 1877 edition, nos. 955, 956), 150 florins; in Leclerc (no. 866), 200 francs. Field (Indian Bibliography, no. 1,592) gives some reasons for supposing there was a third edition in 1656. (Cf. Asher, no. 7; Brinley, ii. 2,718; Carter-Brown, ii. 801, with supplement, no. 811; also no. 814; O’Callaghan, no. 2,315; Sabin, v. 482; Huth, v. 1514; Trömel, nos. 280, 281.) There is a view of New Amsterdam in the first edition which is not in the second. O’Callaghan, New Netherland, ii. 551, has a note on Van der Donck’s life and family. His book has been translated by General Jeremiah Johnson in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1841; see also second series, i. 125.—Ed.]
[827] Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in several of the American Colonies in 1679-1680, by Jasper Dankers and P. Sluyter, published from MSS. in his possession by Hon. Henry C. Murphy, in Collections of Long Island Historical Society, vol. i., 1867. See further on the Dankers and Sluyter Journal, the notes appended to Mr. John Austin Stevens’s chapter on “The English in New York,” in Vol. III.
[828] The hill below Albany, N. Y., on which the fort was built in 1618, is called by the Indians Tawalsontha, Tawassgunshee, Tawajonshe, “a heap of dead men’s bones.” Tas de jonchets would be the French for the same expression. Another place near Albany was called Semegonce, the place to sow; still another, Negogance, the place to trade; while semer and négoce (negocio) are the corresponding French words.
[829] Een kort Ontwerp van de Mahakvase Indianen, haer landt, tale, statuere, dracht, godes-dienst ende magistrature. Aldus beschreven ende nu kortelijck den 26 Augusti 1644 opgezonden uijt Nieuw Nederlant, Alkmaar, no date. It was published in Holland without his consent in 1651. Translated in Hazard’s State-Papers, i. 517 et seq., and by J. R. Brodhead in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., iii. 137. [Muller, Catalogue (1872), no. 1,089, says but one copy of this tract is known, which is among the Meulman pamphlets in the library of the university at Gand.—Ed.] For a biography of Megapolensis, see Manual of the Reformed Church in America, third edition, p. 378. Megapolensis says in one of his letters (Documents relating to the History of New York, xiii. 423), that in his youth he renounced popery; he could, therefore, hardly have been the son of a minister, as stated in the Manual.
[The general Indian Bibliography of T. W. Field must be held to indicate the sources of information regarding the condition of the natives at the time of the Dutch occupation. Bolton, in his West Chester County (1848), endeavors by a map to place the Indian tribes as they occupied the territory bordering the southern parts of the Hudson. Dunlap, New York, i. 20, gives a map showing the territory of the Five Nations. Dr. O’Callaghan translated in 1863 a paper in the State archives, entitled A Brief and True Narration of the Hostile Conduct of the Barbarous Natives towards the Dutch Nation, dated 1655, and gave the Indian treaty of 1645 in an appendix. Fifty copies only were printed (Field, no. 1,147). Judge Egbert Benson published in 1817, 1825, and in the N. Y. Hist. Coll., vol. vii., an essay on the Dutch and Indian names, of which a copy, with his manuscript additions, exists in Harvard College Library.
The most important of the works of the last century is Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Nations, originally printed at New York in 1727. The second and third editions were printed in London, and the English editors gave additions without distinguishing them. The best issue is the fourth, printed in New York in 1866, exactly following the 1727 one, and enriched with notes by John G. Shea, who gives also its bibliographical history. (Field, no. 341.) The first place among recent books on this confederacy must be assigned to Lewis H. Morgan’s League of the Iroquois. (Field, no. 1,091.) There is more or less illustrative of the early state of the Indians in Ketchum’s Buffalo (1864), for the Five Nations, as described in Field, no. 824; in Benton’s Herkimer County (1856), for the Upper Mohawk tribes. See also J. V. H. Clark’s Onondaga (1849), praised by Field, no. 323; A. W. Holden’s Queensbury (1874), for those of the northern parts; and in E. M. Ruttenber’s Indian Tribes of Hudson River (1872). Field, no. 1,334.—Ed.]
[830] [Published in English, with a biography of the writer, by Mr. J. Gilmary Shea in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., iii. 161, and separately, at Mr. Lenox’s expense, in 1862 as Novum Belgium, an Account of New Netherland in 1643-1644; and also in French, Description de Nieuw Netherland, et Notice sur René Goupil, etc.; cf. also Doc. Hist. of N. Y., iv. 15. Jogues was in New Netherland from August, 1642, to November, 1643. His Memoir is dated “Des 3 Riviéres en la nouvelle France, 3 Augusti, 1646,” and the original manuscript is preserved in the Hôtel Dieu at Quebec. Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 781.
Mr. Shea speaks of this “as the only account by a foreigner of that time,” not then being aware of the letter written eighteen years earlier by the Rev. Jonas Michaelius, the first Reformed minister in New Netherland. This manuscript, dated Aug. 11, 1628, “from the island Manhattans,” was priced in Muller’s 1877 Catalogue, no. 2,121, at 375 florins. H. C. Murphy printed an English version of it privately at the Hague in 1858; also in O’Callaghan’s Doc. Hist. of N. Y., vol. ii. It had originally appeared in the Kerkhistorisch Archief, Amsterdam, 1858. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 339. Muller issued a fac-simile of it in 1876, accompanied by the Dutch transcript and Murphy’s version, giving it a preface, and printing only a hundred copies. Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 2,122, and 1872, no. 1,053, where the original is said to be in the library of Dr. Bodel Nyenhuis at Leyden, who had bought it at the historian Koning’s sale in 1833. “Mr. Koning probably found it in the archives.” The letter is addressed to Adr. Smoutius, minister in Amsterdam. Historical Magazine, ii. 191.—Ed.]
[831] Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, Nieuw Nederlant, Nieuw Englant, etc., Amsterdam, 1651,—“Description of Virginia, New Netherland, New England,” etc. With a map and engravings.