The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  First, refugees in the Netherlands began to press for permission to settle there. In 1620 a proposal was submitted by exiled English religious radicals, then dispersed through Rotterdam, Leiden, and southern England, to migrate to the Hudson region, and two years later the company received the settlement application of “diverse families” of Walloons and French refugees who had earlier sought to settle in Virginia. Though both petitions were denied or put off, it soon became clear that any benefit, from the fur trade or any other form of commerce, that might come to the company from its North American claims would require the establishment of clear title to the land, and that could happen only through permanent occupancy and effective use. It was for that reason—not to create a territorial settlement but to secure the Dutch claim to the land and with it access to the profitable fur trade—that in 1624 the Dutch West India Company decided to accede to the refugees’ request and authorized its Amsterdam chamber to begin to populate New Netherland.

  Within a few months that chamber had transported to the colony the first of a group of thirty Walloon and French families—perhaps 125 to 150 people in all—and in its provisional orders set out favorable terms for the settlers. In exchange for free passage, free land, easy credit, and freedom of private (not public) worship, the colonists—freemen, not employees of the company—agreed to the company’s control of land allotments, crop selection, the marketing of furs, the allocation of food and equipment, and all relations with the native peoples.7

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  Who were these first “Dutch” settlers who arrived at the mouth of the Hudson in the winter and spring of 1623–24? Calvinist French-speaking Walloons and French Protestants, they were part of the rootless refugee population that had crowded Leiden, that “centre for the network of refugee churches.” Many were on their third remove from their birthplaces in the Spanish Netherlands. Mingling in Leiden with the exiled English radicals, among them the Pilgrims, the Walloons had learned of the possibility of resettlement in Virginia and had petitioned for rights in that colony. Their carefully documented petition of 1621 had been written by their ambitious leader, Jesse de Forest, who himself typified the Walloons’ peripatetic life. Born in Avesnes, in northeastern France, he had fled with his family to Amsterdam and finally to Leiden, where he had become a moderately successful merchant and cloth dyer. His petition, addressed to the English ambassador, was explicit in identifying the would-be Walloon emigrants and the nature of their desires. Inscribed on a “round robin” which he enclosed with the petition were the names of 228 people, including 41 heads of household, 13 single men, and 130 children—the parent group of the small company that was settling in New Netherland. Like spokes in a wheel, the names and occupations of the independent householders were written on lines radiating out from a hub that contained the text of the petitioners’ promise to fulfill their obligations. An outer ring listed the numbers of children and servants associated with each of the heads of household. The whole formed a circle, a wheel, of information that was doubly revealing—of the desire that motivated the Walloon community in seeking displacement overseas, and of its family structure and occupations, hence its social character on the eve of emigration.

  Except for fourteen laborers, the Walloon petitioners of 1621 were artisans—cloth, metal, and leather workers, printers, hatters, vignerons, locksmiths, bakers, shoemakers, dyers, and carpenters. A few were of more elevated status: one was a medical student who apparently qualified as a pharmacist and surgeon, another was a student of theology, and still another was a “facteur.” Exemplars of the Protestant artisanry that would nourish small-scale enterprise, they traveled as families. Almost all the men were accompanied by their wives, and they listed an average of slightly more than three children per household. One, a sawyer, was prepared to migrate with eight children, another with seven, two with six, five with five. Committed Protestants who had fled a hostile world, they were French speakers among the Dutch, English, and Germans in Leiden, and they sought in America a world of their own, a world apart even from other similarly minded religious refugees; a place where they could live and worship entirely as they pleased; an isolated, self-governing settlement, in which, they hoped, “no others [would be] allowed to dwell … unless they shall have taken letters of citizenship [lettres de baillette].” They had proposed to build, in a district sixteen miles in diameter, a fortified “city”; there they would cultivate “fields, meadows, vineyards,” and they would retain the titles and amenities of traditional social ranks. Thus seeking to preserve their way of life—their own language, religion, and social structure—they sought, in 1621, to settle as a body in Virginia.8

  But the Virginia Company, to which the petition had been forwarded, thought “otherwise.” Besides the expense, which the company could not afford, it had no desire to compound Virginia’s difficulties by planting in its midst a self-governing enclave of opinionated, French-speaking religious refugees from the Netherlands. The English Puritans in Nansemond County were trouble enough. The Walloons would be welcome, the Virginia Company said, but not if they insisted on settling in “one grosse bodie.” They would be acceptable only if they were willing to be dispersed “by convenient nombers” among what the company fancifully described as the colony’s “principall citties, borroughs, and corporacions.”

  Thus denied the refuge they had sought in Virginia, Leiden’s Walloons gave up their community effort and proceeded in separate subgroups to relocate themselves in several of the Dutch settlements in the Atlantic world. New Netherland’s fishing shacks and trading huts at the edge of an unexplored land were by no means the most attractive. The “West Indies,” then thought of as the whole of Latin America, and especially the settlements at the mouth of the Amazon and on the Wild Coast of Guyana (“a beautiful paradise, where one can live well without working”), were far more alluring. It was to this exotic tropical region—in fact a bloody battleground of contending colonial powers which Dutch traders and freebooters had frequented for twenty years—that De Forest led a small party of Walloons in a search for settlement sites. They turned first to land along the Amazon delta, which proved to be remarkably crowded with English, Irish, Spanish, and Dutch traders and adventurers, then north to the more promising banks of the Oyapock (“Wyapoko”) River. There, in 1624, huddled with a few companions in a village of the Yaos Indians, De Forest died, and with him died the Walloons’ hopes for a settlement in the beguiling Guyanese tropics.9

  There was nothing to distinguish this contingent of Walloons from the group of thirty Leiden families that sailed at approximately the same time to New Netherland. That region of North America was no less contested than the Amazon delta and no less controlled by native peoples whose goodwill was as necessary as it was unreliable. Knowing well the hostility of the other colonizing powers (a French vessel had immediately to be ejected from the Hudson basin) and the necessity of establishing Dutch occupancy, the experienced captain of the Nieu Nederlandt, Cornelis May, distributed the Walloon families strategically on each of the main rivers between the English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia. To control the southern area he stationed four families and eight men on an island in the Delaware River just north of the site of Philadelphia. Two families and six men were sent to the mouth of the Connecticut River, and a small garrison was established on Governor’s Island at the mouth of the Hudson. The rest were sent up the Hudson to reclaim the remains of an earlier Dutch trading station near present-day Albany, which they rebuilt into Fort Orange; there they began planting and trading with the Indians.10

  In this scattering of Walloon families, the Dutch laid claim to the “unoccupied” territory of the mid-Atlantic coast. But the Walloons, in these distant outposts, had neither the community they had hoped for nor the safety they sought. In a very strange land, living in isolated encampments, they looked forward to reinforcements and a more viable plan of settlement.

  Both arrived in 1625, with chaotic results. The company’s relief fleet of five
vessels (a sixth was captured by pirates) contained more Walloons from the Leiden community, but the majority of the newcomers were a wildly mixed company of sailors, traders, laborers, farmhands, and clerks drawn from the great ethnic melting pot of the Dutch coastal communities. Who, precisely, these newcomers were is not known: there are no records of their individual identities. What is known is that they, as opposed to the original Walloons, were almost all employees of the company or of investment groups of the Amsterdam chamber, and that they were at best “rather rough and unrestrained.” They had signed on “to get rich, in idleness rather than by hard work.” Why should they work? “As far as working is concerned, they might as well have staid at home … it was all the same what one did or how much one did, if only in the service of the company.” Like so many of the transient adventurers from many lands then arriving in the West Indies, they were, Richard Pares has written, “tough guys” who “quarrelled and drank and disobeyed,” wanderers easily engaged in duels, kidnappings, and rebellions, who had “to be kept at work by force.” The company had no illusions. They knew these recruits, following after the respectable Walloons, were a miserable lot. But what was to be done?

  The peopling of such wild and uncleared lands demands more inhabitants than our country can supply, not so much for want of population, with which our provinces swarm, as because all those who will labor in any way here can easily obtain support, and therefore are disinclined to go far from home on an uncertainty.11

  Such were the newcomers, 150 to 200 in all, who arrived in 1625 as reinforcements to the small Walloon contingent. They were forerunners of a generation of “Dutch” settler-adventurers who turned the mid-Atlantic territory into what a contemporary called “a wild country.” And with them came a huge cargo of farm equipment, seeds, plants, flour, trading goods, and a veritable menagerie of livestock—several hundred horses, cattle, hogs, and sheep. In the early summer the contents of this small fleet was disgorged, first on the Hudson harbor islands, then on the shores of Manhattan. And in charge of all of this was a new director of the colony, Willem Verhulst.12

  He was the first of a succession of directors (Pieter Minuit, Wouter van Twiller, Willem Kieft, and Petrus Stuyvesant would follow), the chronicle of whose administrations read at times like Tacitus’s annals of imperial Rome, replete with bitter rivalries, scandalous accusations, violent encounters, assassination attempts, executions, and above all bloody massacres of the native Indians and earth-scorching raids. The sources of the struggles varied in detail but they share common characteristics. The directors’ authority, so far from its source, was never beyond challenge in the colony and was always susceptible to undermining at home. Each was caught in the clash between ambitious settlers and strict orders from the profiteering West India Company. Each was faced with random encroachments on Indian lands that led to bloody reprisals, terror, and fear. Each—increasingly—was harassed by boundary problems created by aggressive foreigners invading Dutch territorial claims. And each had to somehow come to terms with the semi-independent, semiprivate competitive jurisdiction within the colony, the patroonship of Rensselaerswyck.

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  A huge domain, perhaps a million acres, surrounding Fort Orange on the upper Hudson, Rensselaerswyck was the one survivor of the program of patroonships projected in 1630. By then it had become clear that while the small population of company employees and free colonists had served to establish the Netherlands’ claim to the region, they had done little else. The huge debt the settlement had created for the company (the expeditions of 1624–25 alone had cost over 100,000 guilders) compounded losses incurred elsewhere. Some new strategy was needed if New Netherland was not simply to be abandoned. In 1628–29 the issue was heatedly debated at the company’s headquarters. One faction favored withdrawing the settlers altogether and maintaining only a small trading “factory” at New Amsterdam similar to Dutch trading stations in other exotic regions—on the coasts of Africa, India, Java, Ceylon, the Moluccas, and Formosa. Another plan, favored by the Amsterdam chamber and led by its leading merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer and others who supported an agricultural colony, was to privatize the effort. They advocated transforming the company’s role in New Netherland from that of a corporate entrepreneur—itself the financier, owner, and manager of the land and monopolist of its trade—to that of a supervising body, overseeing and profiting indirectly from the efforts of private investors who at their own risk would recruit settlers, populate the land, and make what profit they could from it. In June 1629, after a protracted controversy that reflected the company’s reluctance to engage in territorial conquest, the second alternative was adopted. In a charter of “Freedoms and Exemptions,” the company laid out the terms that would determine the peopling of much of the Hudson River valley for the next thirty-five years.

  That document, modeled on similar “freedoms” that had authorized private colonization in company settlements on the Essequibo River in Guyana and in Tobago in the Caribbean, granted “patroons” (a newly invented term for quasi-feudal lords) “perpetual fiefs of inheritance”: that is, the “free ownership” of land outside of Manhattan purchased from the Indians which might extend for twelve miles along a coast or riverside and as far inland “as the situation of the residents shall permit.” The patroons, like the manor lords in Maryland, were to have “high, middle, and low jurisdiction” over their tenants but allow appeals to the company in judgments of over fifty guilders, freedom to trade anywhere along the coast from Florida to Newfoundland, and all the profits they could produce from the land, its resources, and the fisheries. In exchange, the patroons were to settle at least fifty adults on their property in four years, use only company ships at fixed freight charges, ship products for sale through Manhattan and pay duties there, and respect the company’s priority in the fur trade. At the same time, individuals would receive “as much land as they can properly cultivate” and the right to hunt and fish in all public properties as well as in their own. The company promised to send military protection to the patroonships if needed, and, as long as it saw fit, “to supply the colonists with as many blacks as it possibly can.”13

  While some company members still objected to the whole idea of patroonships or any other form of territorial control, the leading advocates of the new policy sprang into action. Four major investors immediately filed plans for patroonships: Van Rensselaer, for an estate on the Hudson River; Samuel Godijn, for one on the Delaware; Albert Burgh, also for one on the Delaware; and Samuel Blommaert, for one on the Connecticut. To share the risks and limited supplies and facilities, each drew the others in as junior partners and shareholders, thus forming in effect a cartel of prospective magnates. Van Rensselaer was first off the mark, having sent scouts to block out a claim to property on the Hudson and negotiate with the Indians even before the company had officially approved the program. Throughout 1629 and 1630 he was feverishly amassing supplies, livestock, and above all colonists for his property, Rensselaerswyck. Nothing came of Burgh’s and Blommaert’s plans, but Godijn’s project for the Delaware region began, like Van Rensselaer’s, swiftly. It ended abruptly, however, in one of the worst catastrophes of the era—a testimony to the vagaries of population recruitment in such enterprises, the great cost in human lives of such projects, and the deadly complexities of race relations in coastal North America.14

  GODIJN, head of the Amsterdam chamber of the West India Company and the dominant Dutch figure in Arctic whaling and trade with Muscovy, had general plans for colonial estates throughout the western colonies. But his major project was the patroonship he designed centered on a whaling station within an agricultural colony at the mouth of the Delaware River. He and his collaborators would surely make a fortune in whale oil in addition to other profits from trade and agriculture. An advance party selected land that stretched twenty-four miles north from Cape Henlopen along the west bank of the lower Delaware River, and induced a few Indians to agree to a “purchase.” To that site, now called th
e patroonship of Swanendael, Godijn and his partners, late in 1630, sent two vessels. One, instructed first to reinforce another colony of Godijn’s on the West Indian island of Tortuga, contained not only the granite blocks, timber, and iron equipment needed to build a fort and warehouse but also sixty Huguenot peasants and their livestock. The second carried indentured laborers, half a dozen Cape Verdean harpooners, and a load of supplies and trade goods.15

  There was trouble from the start. The second vessel was captured by pirates, and when the first, the Walvis, arrived at Tortuga, it was discovered that Godijn’s settlement there had been destroyed by the Spanish. The Walvis then proceeded to Swanendael, where it unloaded its cargo of Huguenots and building equipment. After construction began, the commander, ignoring his orders to begin whaling, left for home, to be succeeded by David de Vries, a former employee of the East India Company, a successful ship captain and privateer who had sailed and fought for years in the Far East and a typical adventurer—exuberant, expansive, and risk prone—seeking sudden wealth in the international scramble for colonial exploitation. While still preparing his relief expedition, word arrived that Swanendael had been destroyed. When in early December 1632 De Vries arrived on the Delaware to salvage what he could, he discovered, and recorded, a grim scene. The entire colony, even a guard dog, had been massacred. The fort, which turned out to have been a slim wooden palisade, had been burned, and “the skulls and bones of our people, and the heads of the horses and cows” were lying about “here and there.” Through an interpreter, De Vries learned that the settlers had erected a column topped by a metal plaque bearing the arms of the United Provinces. One of the chiefs innocently stole the plaque to make tobacco pipes, which so enraged the Dutch commander that other Indians, fearing reprisals, killed the culprit and produced his head or scalp as proof. That set up a bloody reaction on the part of the murdered chief’s “friends,” who vowed revenge. They waited until all but two of the settlers were working in the fields, then under pretense of barter entered the fort, murdered the two men with ax blows, riddled the guard dog with arrows, and went after the people in the field, killing them one after another. One boy, hidden in deep grass, escaped.16