VII
The Dutch Profit by a Mutiny
IN the late summer of 1609 a Dutch ship, the Half Moon, was cruising the coasts of America. It had an English master. The merchants of the Dutch East India Company had engaged the Englishman, Captain Henry Hudson, to search for a northeastern passage to China over the frozen top of the world. Instead, he sailed their ship west.
A mutiny compelled him to change his course, or so he later claimed. It seems that his twenty-man crew, mostly Dutch, had been accustomed to warmer seas. They refused to brave the northern cold.
Henry Hudson himself probably had come to recognize the impracticability of the Arctic route. No longer did he hold to the notion that because the sun shone continuously at the north pole for five months of the year temperate waters for navigation would be found there, that is, once the first belt of Arctic cold was pierced. Twice before, for English merchants of the Muscovy Company, he had tried for that northern route only to be frustrated by ice-choked seas—and mutinous crews.
The mutinies went unpunished it appears. Certainly, this was a most unusual outcome for the times. Such uncommon laxity on the part of an English ship’s master, together with Hudson’s similar behavior on subsequent occasions, could lead to the conclusion that he was too weak a disciplinarian ever to have been trusted with command.
Or, maybe this famous explorer was both dissembling and highhanded enough to manage always to have his way, even if it was necessary to employ such devious means as fomenting rebellions to his authority to achieve his secret purposes.
The latter is a tempting surmise. But if it is correct, Hudson may have tried it once too often.
On a later expedition to America as master of an English ship he perished at the hands of his crew. He and his young son along with a few loyal sailors were set adrift in a shallop in the great bay that bears his name, never to be heard of again.
Be all of this as it may, by fortunate circumstance or by pre-meditation Hudson had with him on his memorable voyage in 1609 a map that had been sent to him from Virginia by Captain John Smith. And there was a letter that had come with the map from his adventurous friend suggesting that a passage to China might be found in the west above 40° where Smith himself had “left off.” Everything pointed to a big sea on the backside of Virginia. Many of the Indians Captain Smith met on his explorations had confirmed its existence (their version no doubt of the Great Lakes). And there was much evidence of navigable rivers paralleling the Susquehanna above 40°. They probably led toward this sea!
So Henry Hudson, contriving to cooperate with the mutineers aboard his ship and in flagrant disobedience to the specific instructions of his Dutch employers, sailed west instead of northeast.
After surviving a storm that tore away her foremast the Half Moon made a landfall in America off Newfoundland where she came among a fleet of French fishing boats taking cod on the banks. Captain Hudson salted a few fish for his own stores, and then put down the coast of Nova Scotia to Maine. There, at Penobscot Bay, he had a new pine mast cut and proceeded to relieve some French-speaking Indians of their stock-in-trade without benefit of barter.
“We espied two French shallops full of the Countrey people come into the Harbour,” his clerk wrote, “but they offered us no wrong, seeing we stood upon our guard. They brought many Beaver skinnes, and other fine Furres, which they would have changed for redde Gownes. For the French trade with them for red Cassockes, Knives, Hatchets, Copper, Kettles, Trevits, Beades and other trifles.... We kept good watch for feare of being betrayed by the people, and perceived where they layd their shallops.... In the morning we manned our Scute with foure Muskets, and sixe men and tooke one of their Shallops and brought it aboard. Then we manned our Boat and Scute with twelve men and Muskets, and two stone Pieces or Murderers, and drove the Salvages from their Houses, and tooke the spoyle of them, as they would have done of us. Then we set sail....”
If the Dutchmen left hurriedly it was probably in fear of revenge. Maybe the Indians showed signs of retaliating. After all, the natives of this coast must have been getting annoyed by the ways of white men, considering that this sort of thing had been going on, sporadically, since the first Norsemen invaded their land some six hundred years earlier.
The Half Moon sailed on south to Cape Cod, which the crew noted had been “discovered by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602.” Here, the sailors made sport of an Indian they brought aboard, getting the savage so drunk that “he leapt and danced.” After that Captain Hudson put out to sea once more, to arrive off the Capes of Virginia about the middle of August.
He nosed into the Chesapeake, possibly with the intention of visiting his friend Smith, but caution seems to have won out over the risk of exposing his Dutch-owned vessel to agents of the rival London Company. Being an Englishman himself, Henry Hudson knew only too well that the merchants of his native country made little distinction between a foreign competitor and a foreign enemy, especially when they had guns like those at Jamestown. He might risk disobeying his Dutch employers but not losing their ship—not before he’d made his grand discovery of a passage to the Orient. Perhaps, too, he turned a little sensitive about sailing under a Dutch flag with information furnished by a fellow Englishman.
So, a convenient “storm” blew the Half Moon back out to sea, and Hudson made his way northward, first to penetrate the Delaware River to shoal water, and then on to explore the river that now bears his name.
Numerous Europeans had visited this great river before him. The Norsemen under the leadership of Thorfinn Karselfni in 1011 may have been the first. Certainly in 1524 the Frenchman, Verrazano, and his amorous crew stopped off there to mingle with the friendly natives. Not many months afterward a Portuguese captain, Estevan Gomez, sailing for Spain, probably put into the river’s mouth. In fact, Spanish archives are said to indicate that during the sixteenth century many Spanish ships used the harbor for watering and refitting on their fishing and fur trading trips between Newfoundland and New Spain.
But Henry Hudson ascended the river as far as it was navigable and recorded what he observed and what he did. He it was who took back to Europe the first news of the vast store of fur skins to be had there. And that is what opened the valley of the Hudson to trade and settlement.
His memorable exploration of the river got off however to an inauspicious start in the Lower Bay. Here, it was recorded, “the people of the Countrey came aboord of us, seeming very glad of our comming, and brought greene Tobacco, and gave us of it for Knives and Beeds. They goe in Deere skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper. They desire Cloathes, and are very civill.” Yet, Hudson did not trust them, and mutual suspicion quickly clouded the atmosphere. There was fighting and a sailor was killed. Later, some Indians who came aboard were kidnapped. They were plied with liquor and dressed in red coats while the sailors made crude sport of them. Two were kept prisoners.
But then, after passing the Narrows and entering the river, the Half Moon stopped off at Manhattan to find the natives there most hospitable in spite of any news they may have had about the fights in the Lower Bay. With their women and children they swarmed about the little Dutch yacht in a bid for friendship and trade. Captain Hudson, however, now believing that he had at long last entered on the strait that led to “Zipangu where the palace roof was covered with gold,” did not tarry long to barter for pelts.
Certainly, he didn’t let the escape of the two captive Indians delay the passage of the Half Moon upstream, even though these savages swimming ashore made provocative signs of derision and scorn toward the white men.
It wasn’t until it became disappointingly obvious that he had reached the head of ship navigation that Hudson took time for barter. This was in the vicinity of present-day Albany. Here he again found the natives both hospitable and anxious to trade. In one instance, when he went ashore to eat fat dog meat with a chief of the country, the Indians broke their arrows and cast them into the fire to prove their friendship. Later they came flocking aboard, bringing beaver and otter skins which they exchanged for glass beads, knives and hatchets.
Still, the Englishman and his Dutch mate decided to test some of the chief men of the country for possible treachery by getting them intoxicated in the privacy of the Half Moon’s cabin. One of them got so drunk that he finally dropped to the floor unconscious. The subsequent raising of this savage from the “dead” created such an impression on his fellows that they brought tobacco, venison and shell money to the white captain in gratitude. They also wanted to get drunk again.
Indeed, after Captain Hudson had reluctantly turned his ship’s prow downstream in disappointment over not finding the long sought passage to the South Sea, he was besieged by chief men of the country who wanted more aqua vitae. They brought women aboard who “behaved very modestly,” and they made it clear to the captain that whatever he wanted in their land was his.
So Hudson now concentrated on acquiring the only thing of value he recognized—pelts. As the Half Moon proceeded leisurely down the river he traded in earnest with the “loveing countrey people,” encouraging any who had furs to offer in exchange for knives and beads to come aboard. The story is vividly logged.
On reaching the Highlands the “people of the Mountaynes came aboord us, wondring at our ship and weapons. We bought some small skinnes of them for Trifles.” But here real trouble started when an Indian in a canoe “got up by our Rudder to the Cabin window,” and stole a couple of shirts.
“Our Masters Mate shot at him, and strooke him on the breast, and killed him. Whereupon all the rest fled away, some in the Canoes, and so lept out of them into the water. We manned our Boat, and got our things againe. Then one of them that swamme got hold of our Boat, thinking to overthrow it. But our Cooke tooke a Sword, and cut off one of his hands, and he was drowned.”
The next day as the Half Moon approached Manhattan the savages attacked in force. From their canoes and from the shore they launched showers of arrows. Foremost among them was one of the two natives who had been misused and held captive on the trip up the river until the escape. He led repeated assaults on the yacht. But the red men’s fury was feeble in its effect. The white men easily drove them off with musket and falcon shot, killing ten or more of them, and proceeded on their way.
Putting the river behind him Captain Hudson sailed for Europe, but not without much debate on the high seas about the Half Moon’s destination port. The crew once more threatened him brutally according to Hudson’s reports.
Here again “mutiny” served to resolve an awkward situation. The captain needed a safe haven while explanations were worked out, as much so as his recalcitrant crew. Disobedience when crowned with success is usually forgiven, but added to Henry Hudson’s disobedience was failure. No passage to China had been found.
After having agreed to winter in Ireland, Hudson managed to put into Dartmouth in England. From there he wrote a report of his voyage for the Directors of the East India Company at Amsterdam. And then, opportunely, his countrymen stepped in to rescue him. They “detained” him in England as one who had information of value to his own country, while the Half Moon was returned to its owners in Holland.
The Dutch East India Company, preoccupied with its profitable spice trade and its search for a shorter route to the East, promptly wrote off the cost of the voyage and closed the account. It was said at the time that all Hudson did in the west was to find a river and exchange his merchandise for some furs. But it was precisely those furs and the report of the harbor and river, all unexploited by any Europeans, that brought independent Dutch fur traders to the Valley of the Hudson the very next year.
Amsterdam merchants who bartered European and Eastern goods in Muscovy for furs had quickly taken note of the new possibilities in the west. There were no duties to pay the savages in America, such as those imposed on trade by the Czar. And a shipload of pelts could be had on Hudson’s River for an insignificant outlay of beads and trifles—as the French were doing on their great river in Canada. No time was lost in organizing a trial adventure.
In a ship loaded with “a cargo of goods suitable for traffic with the Indians,” and manned by some of Hudson’s own crew of the previous year, traders from Holland arrived at Manhattan in 1610. They found the savages there no less capricious than before, just as dangerously unpredictable, but obviously anxious to barter their pelts for the white men’s goods. After driving a profitable trade, it is said, the Dutchmen promised that “they would visit them the next year again, when they would bring them more presents, and stay with them awhile,” adding however that “as they could not live without eating, they should then want a little land of them, to sow seeds, in order to raise herbs to put in their broth.”
And so they did, coming each year, quite likely building a palisaded truck house and huts on Manhattan Island as early as 1613 to serve as a depot. Trading posts were established farther up the river and light-drafted shallops invaded the creeks and bays of the interior. Beavers were butchered wholesale by natives eager for hatchets, baubles and liquor. Within a few years furs were being collected in such quantity during the winter months that early spring ships from Holland could count on being cargoed along Hudson’s River with as many as seven thousand pelts.
To further this profitable trade and to encourage discovery in “New Netherland” the States General at The Hague granted a temporary charter of special privileges to merchants of Amsterdam and Hoorn who had formed a western trading association known as the United New Netherland Company.
By 1614 Hendrick Christiansen, a fur factor in the employ of Amsterdam merchants, had established a permanent trading post on Hudson’s River near the present site of Albany. Fort Nassau, as it was called, was well palisaded and moated, equipped with two large guns and eleven swivels, and garrisoned by a dozen armed traders. All were necessary precautions. The trading post was located on the border of the fiercest of all Indian tribes, the dreaded Mohawks of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Relatively peaceful tribes, Algonquian Mohegans and others, occupied most of the Hudson Valley east of the river and south of Fort Nassau along both banks. But the interior to the north and west was the home of the Five Nations, the terrible Iroquois: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. From palisaded forts deep in this hinterland their bloodthirsty young warriors sallied forth regularly to terrorize their neighbors.
Humbling every foe they met into complete submission the Iroquois enforced tribute and left a trail of carnage wherever they paddled their war canoes. They carried their conquests to the sea in the east, scourging the valleys of the Hudson and the Connecticut. Their chilling war cries sounded over the Great Lakes among the Eries, in the lower valley of the Delaware where lived the gentle Lenni Lenape, and down the length of the Susquehanna to the waters of Chesapeake Bay. War parties from their ancient forts forayed far to the south in the Valley of Virginia and crossed the Blue Ridge to follow the Piedmont plateau even into Carolina to take Catawba scalps and women.
For many generations the supremacy of the Iroquois had been acknowledged wherever their warriors went in search of victories and their national pride had grown with every conquest.
But now their own country was being invaded, from the north, from New France, by Huron and Algonquin enemies with the help of Champlain’s arquebusiers. And the Five Nations had sworn by the blood of the bear their undying enmity to these Frenchmen who first surprised them at Lake Champlain with their death-dealing firesticks.
It was the Mohawks, the proudest and bravest of the Iroquois and now the near neighbors of the Dutch, who had taken the brunt of that first Iroquois disgrace in 1609. Their portage path coming from the west terminated near Fort Nassau, and the Dutch traders didn’t find it difficult to cultivate them. Rankling with hatred against the French, the Mohawks were in a mood to be friendly with any gun-carrying white men who might become their allies.
Revenge of course is a powerful motive in the savage breast. On the other hand so is self-preservation. The risk of having enemies with the astonishing fireguns on both their flanks no doubt also entered into the Mohawks’ calculations.
In any case it wasn’t long before Dutch traders were fearlessly visiting villages deep in the country of the dreaded Five Nations, peacefully driving a great trade in furs while the savages learned to drink their fire-water and became better acquainted with the awesome weapons they carried.
In the meantime, late in 1615, the Iroquois did gain some satisfaction when Champlain and his Indian allies, after driving deep into their territory by way of Lake Ontario, were forced to withdraw in temporary defeat. A galleried and thickly palisaded fort at Lake Onondaga withstood the arquebuses, even though a movable tower was built by the attackers so that the Frenchmen might shoot down into the fort. Attempts by the Canadian force to fire the stockade proved unsuccessful too, due to contrary winds. And Champlain himself was so badly wounded during the battle that he had to be carried from the field on a litter of wickered branches.
After Fort Nassau was destroyed by a freshet of ice and water in 1617, a new trading post was established by the Dutch in the same vicinity but in a more secure position. This was on a commanding rise overlooking the Hudson at the mouth of the Tawasentha, later known as Norman’s Kill. It was here, as tradition has it, that the tacit agreement of friendship and trade between the Dutch and the Iroquois was actually formalized as a treaty of alliance and peace.
The Mohawks were the prime movers of the pact, sending invitations to a grand council of the sachems of the Five Nations as well as their subjugated neighbors in the east and south. With the smoking of the calumet a binding covenant was made between the factors of the Holland merchants and all the Indian tribes represented at the council. The supremacy of the Five Nations over their aboriginal neighbors was confirmed, and the Dutch promised “firegun” reprisals against any who broke the peace on the frontiers of New Netherland.
And there was peace of a sort—while the merchants in Holland filled their coffers and the Indians acquired guns. Only occasionally did armed fur factors find it necessary to enforce the pact and then often to their sorrow. Once, for instance, when a detail from the fort took the part of some offended Mohegans, the Mohawks retaliated fiercely. They managed to kill the Dutch commander and three of his men. Capturing the remainder of the party, they cooked and ate one of them and burned the others.
But in the main there was the kind of armed peace that permitted the fur traders to extend the frontiers of New Netherland and by their discoveries gain additional trading privileges under their charter. This they had to do if they were to beat the French and the English to the vast untapped fur stores of the interior.
Early in the history of Fort Nassau, a party of three adventurous traders, led by one “Kleynties,” penetrated deep into the hinterland. Travelling west up the Mohawk Valley, they appear to have stumbled upon the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and eventually to have reached Carantouan, a palisaded town of the Susquehannock Indians.
Carantouan, now known as Spanish Hill, was just south of the present-day border between New York and Pennsylvania. It was built about the terraced slopes of a gigantic mound. The platter-like top of this mound with its man-made entrenchments was said by the Indians to have been occupied once by awesome spirits who spoke with thunder and killed men by making holes through their bodies. The spirits could have been sixteenth century Spanish explorers from Chesapeake Bay taking refuge there while searching for gold.
Only a short time before the advent of the three Dutchmen in this vicinity Carantouan had been visited by a Frenchman, Etienne Brule. With a delegation of Hurons he safely traversed the country of the Five Nations to reach this stronghold of the Susquehannocks in 1615. He wanted them as allies for Champlain’s pending attack on Fort Onondaga. Like the Hurons, the Susquehannocks were kinsmen but bitter enemies of the Five Nations, and they agreed readily enough to help in the attack. However their war dances took too long and they arrived too late—after Champlain’s defeat.
Etienne Brule returned to Carantouan with his savage friends to do a bit of bartering and to examine into the possibilities of extending the fur trade of Canada to the Susquehanna. In fact he descended the length of that river into the upper waters of Chesapeake Bay. But because of the temperate climate there he took it to be the coast of Spanish Florida and discreetly turned back.
THE MERCHANTS FILLED THEIR COFFERS, WHILE THE INDIANS ACQUIRED GUNS.
After his return up the river to Carantouan, Brule set out for home. This time he was captured in the country of the Five Nations. When those savages discovered he was a Frenchman, they plucked his beard hair by hair, tore his nails loose with their teeth, and staked him out for fire-brand torture. But then, just before it was too late, Brule mysteriously won their favor, was roundly feted, and in the end was permitted to escape back to Huron lands. In 1618 he made his way to Three Rivers in Canada, where Champlain at the time was driving a trade for beaver pelts with the Indians, and there he reported his discoveries.
However, getting through the Iroquois country to Carantouan—and getting back to Canada—had been a dangerous exploit, one that not many French traders would desire to emulate, not unless Champlain first brought the Five Nations to complete submission by force of arms. That, of course, the great French captain was never able to do; if he had, probably the French would have overrun the valleys of the Susquehanna, the Delaware and the Hudson.
In the meantime, if the three lost Hollanders from Fort Nassau did wander into the Susquehannock stronghold, they managed to get out of it with their whole skins. Maybe, having missed Brule, they posed as friendly Frenchmen, or even as Englishmen with whom the Susquehannocks had previously enjoyed such satisfactory dealings through Captain John Smith. Eventually, however, they were taken by other Susquehannock Indians, or “Minquas,” and ended up on the lower reaches of the Delaware River as captives held for ransom.
From there, it appears, word of their predicament reached Manhattan and Fort Nassau.
At the time, the spring of 1616, the Dutch factors on Hudson’s River were anxious to explore this other great river to the south that Captain Hudson had also discovered. Already investigated were the rivers to the east and north. Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, a trader in the employ of Hoorn merchants, had sailed east along the coast as far as Martha’s Vineyard. Another trader out of Amsterdam, Captain Adrien Block, went even farther in a small 16-ton yacht called the Onrust which he had built in New Netherland following the loss of his employers’ ship by fire. The little Onrust sailed through Long Island Sound, ascended the Connecticut, explored other streams and the bays along the coasts, and rounded Cape Cod northward to latitudes above present-day Boston.
It was claimed that Captain May had also sailed far enough south to touch at the cape that now bears his name. However, there appears to have been a little hesitancy about making any further discoveries in that direction that might be interpreted as encroaching on the English settlements in Virginia. Maybe the Dutch traders were especially cautious about disturbing the Virginians. It had been in the late fall of 1613 that the fiery tempered Englishman, Captain Samuel Argall, in a 16-gun frigate stopped off at Manhattan supposedly and forced token acknowledgement of the supremacy of the Virginia government. The Hollanders’ trade in Hudson’s River had been going very well; there had been no need to beg trouble abroad.
Now, however, the Dutch felt that their claims were better established by actual occupation on the northern river and no English were yet known to occupy or even trade upon the southern river that Hudson had discovered. Why not explore it with a view toward making further discoveries which under the Hollanders’ charter would give them additional trading privileges? And should they find their lost traders, would not those three have made enough discoveries in the hinterland to provide material for new claims—yes, even a new map of New Netherland?
So, Cornelis Hendricksen who now had the Onrust in his charge went out in that little yacht to investigate the prospects on the “South” River and to see if he might find and ransom the three traders held captive there.
Hendricksen’s voyage was entirely successful. After charting the west shores of Delaware Bay, he entered the river and ascended it possibly as high as present-day Philadelphia. The river’s banks abounded with game, the country was pleasant, and the climate which was “the same as that of Holland” delighted the crew of the Onrust. Above all, there were ample prospects of a great traffic in pelts. On the banks of the Christina where Wilmington now stands and at other places along the shores of the Delaware River, Hendricksen drove a most profitable trade with friendly Indians for “sable,” mink, otter and beaver.
And, meager though his report is in the matter of details, somewhere along the river he was successful in ransoming his three captive countrymen from the Minquas for “kettles, beads, and other merchandize.”
Hendricksen returned quickly to Manhattan and sailed for Holland. There, he laid before his employers a report of his discoveries “between the thirty-eighth and fortieth degrees of latitude,” together with a map of New Netherland embracing the lower reaches of the Delaware River as well as the hinterland discoveries of the three traders he had ransomed. Excitedly, the merchants went before the States General of the United Netherlands and prayed not only for an extension of their special charter which was soon to expire but for an extension of the geographical limits of New Netherland.
In the original charter, New Netherland had been described as “situated in America, between New France and Virginia, the seacoasts of which lie between the 40th and 45th degrees of latitude.” The Dutch claim was thus neatly set down as the exact territory of the overlapping claims of France and England on the Elizabethan theory that it was the possession of neither of those countries as it was not occupied by either of them.
Now the merchants wanted the limits extended by two degrees in the south—to include the Delaware valley. Their arguments were impressive. The Delaware had not been occupied by the English, or even explored by them. What if Captain Samuel Argall had looked in on the bay and named it for his English governor of Virginia? That was a year after Henry Hudson had discovered it for the Dutch.
The States General demurred however, postponing any decision. There were problems at home and abroad that took precedence, and within the framework of a grand solution of those problems was a plan to create a great western trading company similar to the Dutch East India Company.
Ever since the defeat of the Armada there had been those in the United Netherlands who had urged striking at Spain’s sources of revenue in the East and West Indies as the surest way to hasten that nation’s decline. The Dutch East India Company, a military trading organization, had been chartered with this in mind. That was before Spain virtually acknowledged the independence of the Dutch Netherlands in 1609 by agreeing to a truce. After that, however, the Peace Party in the Dutch Netherlands had been strong enough to resist demands that a similar company be organized to exploit America and harass the Spanish there. It was considered dangerous to Holland’s newly gained peace and independence to goad the Spaniards in that quarter—or to offend the English, or the French either for that matter.
But the War Party led by Prince Maurice of Orange and the Calvinist clergy, and backed by such important Flemish emigres as Amsterdam’s great merchant, William Usselinx, wanted to resume the war with Spain in order to gain complete independence for all the Netherlands. Usselinx particularly urged the necessity of challenging Spanish hegemony in America. He wanted a government-sponsored Dutch West India Company to prosecute the pursuit of gold and silver, the conduct of the fur trade with the Indians and the destruction of the Spanish commercial monopoly in the New World.
It was the probability of being forced into forming this company, a company which would incidentally assume control over New Netherland, that kept the States General from renewing the New Netherland Company’s charter. Certainly, concern over possible friction with the English or the French prevented any territorial broadening of the charter or of the individual trading licenses which were issued after the charter’s expiration.
By the New Netherland Company’s charter the States General had in effect defined and acknowledged the borders of New France in the north and Virginia in the south. They recognized that it would be bad enough in the interior when the French realized that New Netherland traders were aligning themselves with the Iroquois enemies of New France. But it would be much worse to tangle with the English on the coasts—the Virginians in the south, and now those other Englishmen preparing to stake out “New England” in the north.
The Peace Party in the Netherlands didn’t want any trouble and they wished the Orangers who had gone out to America would stay in the valley of Hudson’s River, where no Englishmen had ever attempted to trade for furs. However, that was not to be. The fur traders would push on; the War Party would have its way.