Hudson, at the time an experienced and skilled mariner in his mid-forties, married with three children, set off to sail over the top of the world via the northeast passage in a tiny seventy-foot ship with a crew of twelve. He returned after a horrifying ordeal, encountering an endless morass of ice, the only consolation of the voyage being its discovery of an abundance of whales. The next year, 1608, he set out a second time for the northeast passage but was again turned back by ice. When he followed his cherished idea of heading to the northwest by crossing the Atlantic, his crew rebelled and forced him to return to London. Confident of sailing off on a third voyage the next spring, Hudson was stunned and demoralized when the directors of the Muscovy Company turned him down. Fuming as he left their offices, he hardly had time to ponder his next move before being accosted by the illustrious Emanuel van Meteren, a foreigner who represented equally his country and its greatest corporation.
Van Meteren, the urbane and highly educated Dutch consul in London, presented Hudson with a tantalizing prospect that would allow the mariner to pursue his dream of exploration. He lured Hudson to Amsterdam at the behest of leading Dutch merchants who shared his vision for a northwest passage through North America to the Orient. These merchants were inspired by the start of a twelve-year truce with Spain, a pause in the Dutch Republic’s struggle for independence from a weary and near-bankrupt Spanish Empire.
England’s main trading rival offered Hudson good terms.
Not content with their existing trade routes to the East Indies, which were long and fraught with danger, the voc’s Council of Seventeen wanted to ensure that a potentially easier, shorter rival route, traversing regions not dominated by entrenched fortifications, was not pioneered by yet another competitor: the English. Hudson convinced the Seventeen of the viability of his northern route by claiming that as he sailed north past the Arctic Circle, the climate became warmer and he had seen grass-covered land that supported wild, roaming animals. Hudson’s claims, which then as now seemed counter to common sense, were nevertheless supported by the Dutch geographer and promoter Petrus Plancius, who claimed that “near the pole the sun shines for five months continually; and although his rays are weak, yet on account of the long time they continue, they have sufficient strength to warm the ground, to render it temperate, to accommodate it for the habitation of men, and to produce grass for the nourishment of animals.” So, in 1609, the year before his fateful and dramatic death and the same year that Coen first sailed to Indonesia, Hudson was employed by the Dutch East India Company to undertake a voyage to a wholly unlikely location for a passage to the spiceries.
Hudson set off from Amsterdam in early April on the Halve
Maen (Half Moon) under orders to retrace his earlier voyage to the north and east. His crew of about twenty were half Dutch and half English, neither group speaking the other’s language. Not surprisingly, Hudson soon encountered the same impassable ice that had thwarted his earlier voyages. Ignoring the terms of his contract, which specifically warned him “to think of discovering no other routes or passages, except the route around by the North and North-East above Nova Zembla,” he turned the ship around and rushed south and west across the Atlantic to follow up on a rumour he had heard from his friend Captain John Smith, from Jamestown in the colony of Virginia, who informed him that reports from several natives told of a great river or waterway that led to the west. By early July, the Half Moon sighted the coast of Newfoundland or Cape Breton and cruised south past Cape Cod, en route to Chesapeake Bay before turning north and slowly retracing the coastline to search for the secret opening that would guarantee Hudson’s historical immortality and, more importantly, wealth. Eventually, in September 1609, the Half Moon dropped her anchor in “a very good harbour, and four or five fathoms, two cables length from the shore,” at the mouth of a wide river that would soon bear Hudson’s name.
The Half Moon had anchored off what is now known as Coney Island, and a shore party rowed a small boat ashore to explore. They were astonished at the size of the “very goodly oaks . . . of a height and thickness that one seldom beholds” and encountered curious and friendly people who proffered tobacco and furs and wanted knives and coloured beads in exchange. Hudson and his men marvelled at the luxuriant vegetation, especially at the fruits dangling from trees and bushes, and at the wildflowers with their “very sweet smells.” They dallied for several days before the Half Moon pushed upstream to find the route to the Moluccas, passing by “that side of the river that is called Mannahata.” During the next several days, Hudson and his crew attempted to communicate with the local peoples who congregated along the shore or rowed alongside the ship in their canoes. More than once, Hudson plied the natives with liquor to get them to reveal the location of the western sea. He was amazed at the abundance of food and the sturdy construction of the dwellings in the numerous villages, as well as admiring the “great quantity of maize or Indian corn, and beans of last year’s growth, and there lay near the house for the purpose of drying, enough to load three ships, besides what was growing in the fields.” The crew then sailed upriver through a land they felt was “the finest for cultivation that I have ever in my life set foot upon, and it also abounds in trees of every description.”
After about 250 kilometres, coming near to the present city of Albany, the river narrowed and became too shallow for the Half Moon to navigate. Hudson reluctantly turned the ship around and floated back downstream to the ocean, thinking about how he could spin his failed venture into something positive to tell his employers.
Nearing the mouth of the river, Hudson proposed further exploration but was threatened “savagely” by his crew. Changing his plans, he steered “strait across the ocean” and put into port— not in Amsterdam, but in Dartmouth, England—in the fall. He dashed off a letter to his employers, the Dutch East India Company, describing his voyage and requesting additional funds to undertake another voyage the following year. Not surprisingly, the directors were not amused. They demanded that Hudson return the Half Moon to Amsterdam immediately. But as he was reluctantly readying his ship for departure, he was arrested by the English government for “voyaging to the detriment of his country” and was ordered not to leave England. There was a rumour going about that he had made a great discovery for the Dutch, and the English did not want to lose the information.
Hudson was commanded to appear before the king in London, and a guard was placed at the door to his home. The Dutch consul, van Meteren, fuming, fired off a report to Amsterdam decrying the actions of the English government. “The English are inconstant, rash, vainglorious, light and deceiving, and very suspicious, especially of foreigners whom they despise,” he claimed. “They are full of courtly and affected manners and words, which they take for gentility, and wisdom.”
Although the voc soon dismissed Hudson’s discoveries as being of no value, less than a year later some individual Dutch merchants not affiliated with the company were intrigued by the possibility of trading for furs. They “again sent a ship thither, that is to say, to the second river discovered, which was called Manhattes.”
Van Meteren published his assessment of Hudson’s voyage, proclaiming the discovery to be Dutch. He described “as fine a river as can be found, wide and deep, with good anchoring ground on both sides” and said that the land was inhabited by a “friendly and polite people” who were eager for mutually beneficial trade. What they had to trade was what drew the interest of Amsterdam merchants on the lookout for new opportunities. Any merchants who were shut out of the voc monopoly trade, who preferred greater control over their investments and who were no longer intrigued by the failed waterway to the East Indies, which would have been under the control of the voc anyway, were attracted by van Meteren’s claims of “many skins and peltries, martins, foxes, and many other commodities.” A sea route to Cathay or the Indies was all well and good for dreamers, but the promise of immediate and guaranteed returns from an industry that was much closer and safer was as good as gold
. A vast region of land unoccupied by any European power lay between New France to the north and English Virginia to the south.
These attractions meant that in the years after Hudson’s voyage, independent Dutch mariners and merchants sailed the rivers, explored inland, probed the coast, established relations with peoples of the coast and the interior and constructed a number of primitive huts and trading factories as far inland as present-day Albany. Within a few years of Hudson’s voyage, the natives were trading the “soft gold” of beaver furs at independent Dutch trading posts along the three rivers near Manhattan: the Hudson, the Connecticut and the Delaware. Since no roads led into the dense forests, rivers were the great arteries of travel and commerce, and the land staked by the Dutch at the southern tip of Manhattan Island was to become the epicentre of trade, solidifying Dutch territorial claims and giving rise to one of the world’s great commercial cities. Here traders began by bartering manufactured trinkets for beaver pelts. Fur was exceedingly valuable in Europe for lining coats, collars, capes and muffs. Beaver fur was particularly useful, because underneath the outer long glossy coat was a denser layer of soft, tightly growing shorter hairs that, in a toxic and dangerous industrial process, could be made into felt, a substance that could be, in turn, made into durable, warm and fashionable hats. The traders also found Hudson’s boasts of the land’s agricultural potential to be accurate, and within a few years a ramshackle collection of huts had been constructed at the southern tip of the island and the land cleared for farming.
When the English captain and explorer Thomas Dermer cruised to the mouth of the Hudson River in 1617, also looking for the fabled northwest passage to the spiceries, he was shocked to discover “divers ships of Amsterdam and Horna who yearly had there a great and rich trade.” He was even more astonished to discover “some Hollanders that were settled in a place we call Hudson’s River, in trade with the natives.” It was the start of a long association of the Dutch with this new land.
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THE TWELVE-YEAR PEACE BETWEEN SPAIN AND THE United Netherlands from 1609 to 1621 inspired the commercial activity by private merchants in America. During the peace far-thinking members of the States General deliberated on how to damage Spain when hostilities resumed. They planned to finance a war of independence by tapping private capital, using the web of commercial networks and the host of skilled mariners and navigators that had been developed and nurtured through trade. “The vehicle seized upon was grandiose in design,” the historian Thomas J. Condon writes in New York Beginnings: The Commercial Origins of New Netherland, “and incorporated a West India Company which, through subsidization, would become a partner of the state in the war against Spain. Ranging over the vast sweep of the New World, the company would aim to choke off the life strength of Spain at its roots. To do this the efforts of the company were to be directed into the twin channels of war and trade—in that order and with no fine line drawn between the two.” On June 3, 1621, the States General granted an initial twenty-four-year charter to the Dutch West India Company, modelled after its flourishing and famous eastern counterpart, which was then under the auspices of Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s draconian and bloody vision. This company’s governing council was called the Nineteen, or the Lords Nineteen, consisting of powerful merchants, financiers and politicians who headed and represented the five chambers or subscription centres that provided the capital to launch the venture. Private trade in New Netherland would not be permitted after 1623 , when the company’s monopoly would begin.
The Dutch West India Company was chartered with two main objectives: piracy and a productive (that is, profitable) settlement of its North American territories, which would also serve as a base for further pirate raids on Spanish shipping.
The company would make money for its investors and speculators both by trading in the West Indies and North America and by attacking and seizing Spanish ships in those regions.
“The incorporated West India Company,” the States General declared, “ought not to enter, in the beginning, into a dispute with the subjects of neighbouring Kings and Princes, but much rather observe good correspondence and friendship towards them.” Nevertheless, one of the company’s first undertakings was to outfit a military assault on the Spanish sugar plantations at Bahia in 1623–24 that involved twenty-three ships and more than three hundred men. In 1625 the company attacked and plundered San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in 1628 Admiral Piet Hein sallied forth with a mighty squadron and ambushed a sixteen-ship Spanish silver fleet with cargo valued at over eleven million guilders, allowing the company to pay a 50 per cent dividend that year. Over the next decade the company financed the operations of more than 700 ships and 67,000 men, who returned triumphantly with over 500 prizes of enemy shipping that fetched over 40 million guilders at auction. Clearly, early investors were amply rewarded by this new business venture.
The company also established trading posts in West Africa, the Antilles and other islands in the Caribbean, and Surinam and Guyana in South America, as well as conquering the Portuguese colonies in Brazil. Throughout the 1620s the company likewise sought to consolidate its hold on central-eastern North America, a region that promised not only to be profitable for the fur trade but also to serve as a way station or base for West India Company ships en route to the plundering grounds in the Caribbean. The first twenty-four families of company colonists sailed from the Netherlands with Captain Cornelis May aboard the Nieu Nederlandt in 1624 . They scattered into the remotest regions of the vast, sparsely inhabited land, which was mainly populated by native Americans of various tribes, principally the Lenape and the Mahicans. These hardy and exceptionally brave souls built from the wilderness “some hutts of Bark,” trading forts, or factories, along the major rivers. More settler/employees arrived the following year, and they were soon sending to Amsterdam furs valued at 27,000 guilders per year. Some began farming on Manhattan, “a convenient place abounding with grass.” Cattle roamed the fields while windmills, sawmills and rough wooden barracks rounded out the settlement of New Amsterdam. “Had we cows, hogs, and other cattle fit for food (which we daily expect on the first ships),” wrote one enthusiastic colonist, “we would not wish to return to Holland, for whatever we desire in the paradise of Holland, is here to be found.”
The company’s directors did not share this settler’s enthusiasm for the land. The new settlement was supposed to be a trading outpost, not a beachhead of Dutch colonial expansion. The provisional orders governing the actions of the employees firmly placed the company’s interests first: the settlements would be run as trading posts, ruled by a governor appointed by the directors; decisions would come from head office, not from the ground up. The settler/employees were “to obey and to carry out without any contradiction the orders of the Company then or still to be given, as well as all regulations received from the said Company in regard to matters of administration and justice.” They would fulfill the needs of the company by living where they were directed to live; planting crops as dictated by the company; providing labour on the fortifications and other essential buildings, such as the governor’s house, as needed; and performing military service when required. After six years, these adventurous pioneers might be given some land to do with as they chose, so long as they obeyed company directives. It would not be quite the idyllic plantation on the edge of paradise that many longed for: labourers in the primary settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, called New
Amsterdam, as one of their first tasks were directed to construct a rudimentary star-shaped earthen and palisade fort. They gave it the thematically appropriate, if uninspired, name of Fort Amsterdam.
The citizens of this peculiar company town on the edge of the North American wilderness were a rough lot. They were fed “hard stale food, such as men are used to on board ship,” and took shelter in run-down hovels where they “huddled rather than dwelt.” Drunkenness, fighting, theft, assault, murder and rape were frequent crimes reported among the mostly male population
. One in four establishments in New Amsterdam was a grog house or beer and tobacco emporium. Considering that the population consisted mostly of indentured servants, employees and slaves owned by the company, the chaotic and immoral behaviour of the citizens had only one source: the company, which, despite its apparent disgust with the settlement and its people, made a hefty profit from its monopoly on the sale of beer and liquor to them—a profit that was second only to its profit from furs. Squalor, filth and disorder reigned supreme.
Under a series of mostly incompetent and corrupt governors, and as a result of the company’s subtle pressure to restrict development, the colony was slow to flourish. Company directors in the Netherlands feared that settlement might actually be bad for business, as settlers would demand services such as schoolteachers, church ministers, a legal system and military defence—all of which cost money. Farming and conflict with the natives over land might disrupt the flow of valuable furs.
The company instead preferred the population to be kept low in numbers and directly employed by them. A few independent people might operate a small farm or engage in their own personal trade, so long as they sold their furs or produce to the company and bought all their goods at the company store. One early governor, Peter Minuit, who became famous for allegedly buying all of Manhattan for sixty guilders’ worth of trade goods, was recalled to Amsterdam because he was not effective enough in curbing the growing private trade in furs. This was a trade that nearly all the settlers participated in to augment their meagre wages, despite the company’s best efforts to put a stop to it.
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