We have to begin with announcing the lamentable fact that after a thorough search of every imaginable source of information, we have been unable to discover the existence of a Dutch Greenland Company prior to the year 1600. The works of Dutch historians, both ancient and modern, were carefully scanned, but all in vain. We began with a modern writer, N. G. Van Kampen, sometimes called by his fond and admiring countrymen, the Dutch Macaulay. He wrote an elaborate and extensive work of four or five octavo volumes on “De Nederlanders buiten Europa” (The Netherlanders outside of Europe), giving an eloquent as well as exhaustive review of those splendid achievements in various portions of the globe, which resulted in the establishment of the great Colonial Empire of the Dutch, even at this day second only to that of the English.

But there is found no mention of a Dutch Greenland Company or its doings either in these volumes or in Wagenaar, who lived in the eighteenth century and issued more than one monumental publication, or in Bor or Van Meteren of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These older writers let no event or transaction or institution of any importance escape them. They were not afraid of multiplying their volumes and therefore not at all deterred from noting even the minutest affairs that came within their ken, as they laboriously proceeded from year to year. But they are all strangely silent about this apocryphal company whose mariners were in the habit of sheltering themselves on Manhattan Island before 1600.

But now it is only fair to indicate how the tradition may have originated that there ever was such an organization as the Greenland Company. An appreciation of any reasonable grounds for its origin, will help us understand better how the mistaken statement came to be made, and to see that it was a mistake. There did exist in Holland a “Noordsche Compagnie” or Northern Company and there exists the most abundant and indubitable evidence that the terms “Northern Company” and “Greenland Company” were used interchangeably, and were both applied to the former association. This company was at first confined to the merchants of the Province of Holland, who had received their charter from the States-General, after the approval and endorsement of such a measure by the States of Holland. In 1617, the charter was renewed, but the merchants of Zeeland wished for the same privileges and the States-General granted a charter to a Zeeland “Northern Company” in May 28, 1622. Turning to the “Groot Placcaet Book,” Vol. I, Cols. 673, 674, we discover the two names in question in curious but instructive juxtaposition. The title of the act has Noortsche Compagnie, while in the body of the act we read Groenlandtsche Compagnie. In this same year (Dec., 1622), the Zeeland and Holland Companies were combined into one general or national “Northern Company,” but the act granting a larger charter mentions only the above name both in the title and in the body of it. It is to this Company that Moulton refers in his “History of New York” (p. 362) when he makes the assertion that “the Greenland Company was created in 1622.” He places this association on an exact level with the East and West India Companies.

“Thus the Northern Seas, Asia, Africa and America, were partitioned to three armed associations, possessing powers nearly co-extensive with those of the Republic.” The company chartered in 1622, (as we have seen), can not properly be classed as equal in importance or influence or power with the two great commercial associations named in one breath with it by Mr. Moulton. And we have seen also, that it did not officially bear the name he gives it, although that name might be interchangeable with the true one in the case of subordinate companies. Yet even this is not the case with the charter creating the original company confined to Holland Province alone, where there is no mention of the name “Greenland” in either the title or the body of the document. Lastly there is this significant circumstance about that earliest charter of any “Northern Company;” it bears date January 1614, and distinctly states “that no such company had ever been chartered before.”[12] This therefore settles the question as to whether it could possibly have been men in the employ of this company, miscalled the “Greenland Company,” who habitually sought relief from the rigors of an Arctic winter on the shores of the Hudson River in the year 1598. This could hardly have been when it was not erected or chartered until January 1614.

In the second place, if frequent or habitual visits to Manhattan Island were made by the Dutch in and after the year 1598, we are at a loss to comprehend the entire lack of recollection of such visits on the part of the Indians thereabouts. It is insisted on more than once in various accounts that both the vessel and the persons of its crew, were objects of boundless wonder to the natives, as they beheld the “Half-Moon” resting upon the waters of the bay or gliding up the river. De Laet, one of the earliest to write on Hudson’s discovery, publishing his “Nieuwe Wereld,” (New World) in 1625 and basing his statements on those of Hudson’s own journal, perhaps citing his very words, speaks as follows: “So far as they could judge and find out, there had never been any ships or Christians in this region before, so that they were the first who discovered this river and sailed up so far.” Such a declaration might need to be received with some suspicion, if the author had intended to maintain a claim of the first discovery for the Dutch as against other nations. But he could have had no reason to suppress the circumstance of the visits of the Dutch themselves to our river, in 1598. If that had been patent to De Laet he would have been only too glad to mention it, as only increasing the validity of the Dutch claims to those regions by the right of first discovery. He could have had no particular object in glorifying the Englishman Hudson’s exploit at the expense of the sailors of an exclusively and undoubtedly Dutch Greenland Company. But returning to the Indians, we notice in Vander Donck’s celebrated “Vertoogh,” written at New Amsterdam and published at the Hague in 1650, another arraignment of their poor memories. “Even at the present day those natives of the country who are so old as to recollect when the Dutch ships first came here, declare that when they saw them, they did not know what to make of them. Some among them when the first one arrived, even imagined it to be a fish or some monster of the sea.” Now the Indians might indeed have forgotten a visit made so long ago as 1524 or 1525, if Verrazano and Gomez really did discover the Hudson then, making but a brief stay and a rapid examination of its banks at best, but an habitual resort to its shores, or even one winter spent on the island at its mouth, in forts built to repel their attacks, only eleven years before Hudson came among them, the Indians could not possibly, it would seem, have so utterly forgotten in 1609.

But we will now give our attention more particularly to the document which asserts that the Dutch were on Manhattan Island as early as 1598. What was the nature of it, and to what degree of credence is it entitled? Mr. Brodhead in the explanatory heading which he usually prefixes to the documents in his collection states that it is a report made in 1644 by the Chairman of a Committee or Board of Accounts, appointed by the directors of the West India Company. Several documents were placed in his (the chairman’s) hands for the purpose of enabling him to furnish to the company a succinct review of events connected with the origin of the settlement on Manhattan Island, and with its progress up to that date. The writer begins with the story of the Dutch and their forts in 1598. Immediately after this the official historian glides easily into what he evidently either considers himself, or wishes others to believe, is the next stage in the history of the Manhattan Colony; namely this: “a charter was afterwards on the 11th of October 1614, granted by their High Mightinesses.” As if nothing of importance had happened between 1598 and 1614!

The question therefore arises, if this was meant for history in 1644, why was it written so imperfectly? It could not be that the fact of Hudson’s discovery, so vitally connected with the origin of Manhattan Colony, had been completely forgotten at that time, much less that after a careful examination of all the papers available to directors of the West India Company, the chairman of their committee should not have come across the record of that discovery. How then did he happen to pass it over in utter silence in his official report? Was it purposely suppressed? If so, what could have been the motive for this singular proceeding?

We think we can readily divine what the motive was, when we read in more than one English writer what use that nation contrived to make of the fact that the discovery of the Hudson River was achieved by an Englishman. Peter Heylin, who wrote before the surrender of New Netherland in 1664, remarks: “With him [i. e. Hudson] the Hollanders, in 1609, compounded for his charts and maps; but they were hardly warm in their new Habitations,” when Argall, Governor of Virginia, disputed their title to this region, which was looked upon as part of Virginia territory. The latter advanced this ingenious argument in support of his claim; “that Hudson, under whose sale they claimed that country, being an Englishman and licensed to discover those northern parts by the King of England, could not alienate or dismember it (being but a part or province of Virginia) from the Crown thereof.” This matter of a “sale” by Hudson, which was illegal, and the subsequent “right” of the English to New Netherland, is brought out again in a book written nearly a century later, or long after the problem which was unsolved in Heylin’s time—how to get the Dutch out and the English in—had been solved by Colonel Nicolls in 1664. In this book, William Smith’s “History of New York” (1757), we read, scarcely without a smile: “Henry Hudson, an Englishman, according to our authors[13] in the year 1608 [sic], under a commission from the King, his master, discovered Long Island, New York, and the river which still bears his name; and afterwards sold the country, or rather his Right to the Dutch. Their writers contend that Hudson was sent out by the East India Company in 1609 to discover a northwest passage to China. It is said however, that there was a sale; and that the English objected to it, though they for some time neglected to oppose the Dutch settlement of the country.”

Now we can readily appreciate why the Dutch West India Company might have a distinct and deliberate object in not being too exact in their history of Manhattan Colony. They would naturally be very shy of giving occasion or encouragement to a rival nation on the alert to press a claim avowedly made, however unjust, to territories entrusted to the Company’s care and government. It would to say the least have been very impolitic to give countenance to it in one of their own official papers. About twelve years later the directors, writing to Stuyvesant, while commending him for the reduction of New Sweden, at the same time remonstrated with him for having made a written agreement with the Swedish Commander. And they then put into so many words the shrewd policy which we suggest they followed in the present instance, saying; “What is written is too long preserved and may be produced when not desired, whereas words not recorded are in the lapse of time forgotten, or may be explained away” (O’Callaghan’s “New Netherland,” vol. II. p. 327). If Argall on the spot, and only a few years after the settlement; if Heylin in a book written and published before 1664, could make so much of Hudson’s nationality in the matter of his discovery, so that more than a hundred years after that event, sober historians could still cooly repeat the story of England’s supreme right, and quite cast aside the claims of the Dutch, then it may well have been considered in 1644 that it would be a dangerous concession to have even made an allusion to Hudson in a committee report. Under these circumstances, finding at home a possibly prevalent and convenient rumor about the Greenland Company and its vessels in New York bay and river, without any intention to deliberately falsify, the chairman of the committee simply incorporated the statement under discussion in his report. For business purposes, on a paper prepared by business men and not by historians, this may have been good enough history; but being preserved in this documentary form, and read in an age eager for documentary evidence and too ready to give undue weight to unpublished and original matter, the assertion derived an importance which it does not really deserve, and was not intended to possess. And so entirely unsupported is it by other proofs, or by the facts of history, that even the documentary character of this evidence has not prevailed to deceive wise and judicious investigators. It is clear that it did not commend itself as quite trustworthy for historical purposes to Dr. O’Callaghan. In quoting it, though it own assertion is entirely positive, he introduces its language by the cautious phrase, “it is said.” Brodhead, whose researches brought the paper to light, also deals very gingerly with it, holding it off at arms length, so to speak, and saying: “it needs confirmation”—and indeed, it certainly does.

Daniel Van Pelt.