XIII
New Netherland’s South River
THE charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines, build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels.
Although the company was chartered in 1621, it did not commence operations until 1623. But then, during the next six or seven years, its success was phenomenal in the matter of profits—from waging war against Spain. So much so, that by 1629 its directors in Amsterdam were prone to speak slightingly of New Netherland, their trading colony in North America. “The trade carried on there in peltries is right advantageous but, one year with another, we can at most bring home fifty thousand guilders,” they complained.
For a plantation which at the time numbered no more than 300 inhabitants this would seem to be most productive, especially when compared to what the English had done in either Virginia or in New England. It was paltry enough, however, when compared with the loot of Spanish colonial strongholds that fell to the conquering Dutch merchants, or when weighed against the spoils of Spain’s silver fleet that Admiral Peter Heyn had captured in the name of the West India Company. In one fell swoop he took seventeen galleons laden with bullion and merchandise to the value of fourteen millions of guilders! From that operation alone the investors received a dividend amounting to well over half of the company’s paid-up capital.
Experienced Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, who had been appointed the first managing director of the West India Company’s colony in America, acted primarily as a chief fur factor for the company. During 1624, the first and only year of his governorship, he sent home pelts which brought 27,000 guilders. The next year his successor did even better. In 1626, the year that Peter Minuit received the formal title of Director General of New Netherland and purchased Manhattan from the Indians, one ship for Amsterdam was cargoed with “7246 beaver skins, 178¹⁄₂ otter skins, 675 otter skins, 48 minck skins, 36 wild cat skins, 33 mincks, 34 rat skins.” It also carried some oak and hickory to timber-hungry Holland.
This, incidentally, is the earliest known true manifest of a ship clearing from the present port of New York. In terms of today’s money the skins brought well over one hundred thousand American dollars. A right advantageous trade indeed!
In the spring of 1624 some thirty families, mostly French-speaking Walloons from the lower provinces fleeing persecution by Spanish inquisitors, had come over with Captain May in the New Netherland. They came as the plantation’s first real colonists, to raise livestock, to put their spades into the earth. May, as well as his successor, was charged with “spreading out” and more formally occupying New Netherland. It would prevent any further trouble with England about the possession of that country, it was hoped, since the English themselves had expounded the doctrine that “occupancy confers a good title by the laws of nations and nature.” In the case of their North American colony the Hollanders could afford a point of agreement on such a doctrine.
A part of this 1624 expedition is said to have been landed on Manhattan Island. Although the evidence has been attacked, it is not at all unlikely that May did promptly put some of the New Netherland’s passengers ashore at Manhattan to begin the replacement of any temporary works there. There must have been a truck house or two, huts and possibly even palisades in need of rehabilitation for permanent, year-round occupancy. The immediate occupation of such a strategic location at the mouth of the river could hardly have been neglected anyway, especially as it was necessary at the time to escort from the harbor a poaching French ship whose captain seemed bent on going ashore to set up the arms of his king and take possession of the country.
In any case, some eighteen families were conveyed up the Hudson to a previously selected site a few miles above the redoubt at Norman’s Kill. In this more convenient location a new fort was built, while the Walloons settled around it. Fort Orange, as they called this plantation, was within the limits of present-day Albany, New York. Here the Mohegans, as well as the Iroquois, came immediately with presents of beaver and other peltry to confirm their alliance with the Dutch, and the old trade continued to flourish under the new management of the West India Company.
It would appear that about this time a group of May’s people also went up the Connecticut River to establish a trading post near the present site of Hartford and to begin the construction of Fort Good Hope there. But the building of this outpost lagged. It was some years before the fort was completed and manned. When that came about, in 1633, Fort Good Hope had become a focal point of rivalry between the Dutch and the New Englanders for the beaver meadows of the Connecticut valley and a question mark in the matter of resolving jurisdiction over the country.
At the time of the planting of Fort Orange another part of May’s expedition, including some of the Walloon families, was dispatched to the Delaware, or South River, as the Hollanders now called it to distinguish it from the Hudson, their great North River.
Up the South River, on its east bank, at a strategic trading site also previously selected by Captain May, a new Fort Nassau was built. It was opposite the confluence of the Schuylkill River and the Delaware, the tongue of land on which Philadelphia was later founded by William Penn but which at the time of the Dutch arrival was the seat of probably the largest Lenni Lenape community in the valley. There, at Passyunk, lived the great chief of all the lower river Indians. Fort Nassau, the new Dutch trading post across the Delaware River, stood at the mouth of Timber Creek within the present limits of Gloucester, New Jersey.
Some soldiers and traders, together with a few of the Walloon farmers and their families who were originally to have settled a farming plantation on the lower west side of Delaware Bay, were eventually installed at Fort Nassau. There, they established trade relations with the natives. Others, it is said, with the addition of new recruits from Holland the following spring, were sent still higher up the river to build a house and operate a trading station on Verhulsten Island, near the present site of Trenton. This island, at the head of navigation just below the falls, was named for Captain May’s successor in 1625, William Verhulst, who made his headquarters on the South River. The site of the falls was an important Indian crossing from the valley of the Hudson, where the Lenni Lenape traditionally traded with other tribes.
The Lenni Lenape Indians, later called the Delaware by the English, were an Algonquin nation that inhabited all the immense valley of the Delaware. Tribal relatives occupied important villages even in the lower valley of the Hudson River. Relatively peaceful, the Lenni Lenape made their homes beside placid streams, in grass-matted huts thatched with the bark of cedar, the men fishing and hunting while their women tilled gardens of corn, beans, tobacco and squash. The men hunted fur-bearing animals whose pelts would be useful for winter body coverings. The women scraped the pelts with stone tools and dried them on wooden stretching racks, rubbing the animals’ brains and livers into the skins to help in the suppling process.
All was not quiet and peace for the Lenape however. They were subject to terrifying raids by the Susquehannocks (Minquas, the Dutch called them) as well as by the Iroquoian relatives of the Susquehannocks who lived farther up the valley of the Susquehanna River. These fearsome marauders stole their women, burnt their houses and devastated their gardens. Trapping beaver and muskrat for blankets or hunting the raccoon too far away from native grounds was a precarious venture for Lenape braves. In fact, some tribes had fled their more isolated villages for the safety of Passyunk on the Schuylkill before the white men came. Others, on the west bank of the lower river, had crossed over the Delaware to settle on the safer east bank.
So it was that at the coming of the Dutch these river Indians welcomed the Europeans’ guns. And the deliberative Hollanders bought land and made trade treaties with them while, at the same time, probing for avenues of trade with the Lenapes’ enemies, too. Although there were muskrat, mink, ordinary otter and some brown beaver on the South River, the Dutch well knew from previous dealings with the Iroquois that there were vast stores of the finer black pelts, both beaver and otter, and valuable “lion skins” cached in the “forts” of the Susquehannocks and their northern relatives. However, on the lower Delaware, it was principally muskrat that the Lenape had to offer, the market value of which was but a fraction of other pelts.
The muskrat, a bushy-furred member of the rodent family, resembles nothing so much as a big wharf rat. This was something with which the seagoing Dutchmen were only too familiar. As a matter of practice they referred to the kindred fur bearers in America simply as “rats.” Like the Englishmen they also marketed both the pelts and the musky cods, the fluids of which were useful for perfumes and as demothing agents.
Muskrats frequent tidewater marshlands and swamps. Their hind feet are oar-like, being slightly webbed and set obliquely to the legs, permitting a swivel action that propels them through the water. They steer themselves with their tails which are flattened sidewise. The Indians hunted and trapped these animals along their waterside runs very much as they did the beaver. And they often dumped the skinned carcasses of the “rats” into the communal stew pot, much to the disgust of the traders who had to partake of the feast which always preceded barter.
In the early days of the Dutch occupation on the South River, as it turned out, the Hollanders were not too successful in opening up trade with the Susquehannocks and their Iroquois relatives of the hinterland. The Susquehannocks were too busy subjugating the Lenni Lenape. By the time things settled down, after most of the lower river Indians had taken flight or been made tributary, the Susquehannocks were bartering in a more convenient market. They were selling pelts at the mouth of their own river among the English in the Chesapeake Bay.
On the other hand, the furs of the lower Delaware River Indians were not hard to come by, even when they were good. Brown beaver by the bundle, when the Lenape had it, might be taken for a white clay pipe worth a mere pittance. To an Indian who had not yet learned the true value of such a tobacco pipe, with its smoothly beautiful bowl and straight stem, it was a treasure to accompany him to his grave. And, as for the Dutchman’s iron and his colored cloth, his liquor, his firearms, and especially the clothes he wore, these all represented unbelievable wealth to the savage. Quick to learn that he could acquire such amazing riches for a few animal skins, he would risk traffic with his aboriginal enemies if necessary to get the kinds of pelts the white men wanted.
But it was entirely different when it came to the food for which the Dutch in their early occupation of the Delaware valley had to depend on their native neighbors. Although the Lenape were perfectly willing to part with their own furs, and sometimes took extraordinary risks to get more of them, it was another matter when it came to corn and beans. With the Minquas constantly raiding, no treasure could tempt a Lenape chief to give up what little corn he might have to keep his people from starving.
It was this difficulty, coupled with the squeeze put on New Netherland by greedy directors of the West India Company, that soon brought about the recall of the South River settlers to Manhattan. One small yacht, the directors contended, would adequately take care of the South River trade at much less cost than maintaining garrisons there under the conditions with which they had to contend.
Anyway, it was asserted, the need for formal occupation of this distant outpost was less necessary now that England had joined the Netherlands in the war against Spain. All ports of each country were open to merchantmen and warships of the other, and both were committed to maintain fleets that were finally to rid the world of Spanish might. Under the circumstances the English would hardly risk offending their ally by disturbing any part of the Netherlands’ province in America.
So, after the government of New Netherland was formally taken over in 1626 by Peter Minuit, who forthwith installed a “Battery” on the southern tip of Manhattan Island for protection against the Spaniards and named the place “Fort Amsterdam,” the South River was all but abandoned as a plantation. Now and then Dutch factors put ashore at Fort Nassau to occupy it temporarily as a trading post, but by 1628 all the Walloon farmers had returned to the North River.
There, at Fort Amsterdam, the company now concentrated its own colonists and centralized the control of its fur trade, while promoting another scheme for the permanent planting of the outlying districts with farmers at no expense to itself.
The no-expense colonizing scheme was not a new one among the colonial powers of Europe, except for its dressing.
Members of the West India Company who at their own expense planted the unoccupied provinces of New Netherland were to become “patroons,” that is, proprietors of little colonial principalities with feudalistic “privileges and exemptions.” By transporting and settling a specified number of colonists, black slaves qualifying as such, a rich if otherwise undistinguished merchant of Amsterdam could elevate himself to the worshipful status of a feudal lord. Of course he had first to purchase his land from the Indians in conformance with Dutch policy. A little aqua vitae and a few jackets sufficed usually to keep that a relatively minor expense however.
There was only one hitch. A patroon could not engage in the fur trade. He had freedom of trade in any merchandise “except beavers, otters, minks, and all sorts of peltry.” The commerce in pelts was to remain the company’s monopoly.
Because of this restriction the early patroonships were destined to failure. Trade in furs was needed to help root a new plantation in the soil, as had already been proved so often on the wild American coasts. Only one of the early patroonships survived, Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s colony in the Albany area. And it was the illegal pursuit of private fur trade that suckled Rensselaerwyck through its infancy.
The earliest patroonship for which land was chosen in New Netherland was patented on the “South River” in 1630. Samuel Godyn and Samuel Blommaert, leading members of the company, were original partners in this venture which later included Captain David Pieters de Vries among others. Their original manor tract, called Swanendael, lay west of Cape Henlopen in Delaware Bay, but the proprietorship was later extended to the opposite shore including Cape May. The bay, reportedly, was a favorite haunt of whales, many having been sighted there in the past. It was decided that whaling would be a profitable enterprise in lieu of fur trading to support the plantation in its infancy.
The first colonizing expedition to Swanendael arrived in the spring of 1631 and planted at Whorekill, on present-day Lewes Creek, just above Cape Henlopen. Although the whaling proved a failure that year, the ship that brought over the colonists returning to Amsterdam with no more than a sample of oil taken from a dead whale found on the beach, it was said that the settlers did seed their land and had a fine crop by July. But then, as the story goes, a piece of tin was the instrument of their undoing.
They had emblazoned a small sheet of this metal with the arms of Holland and attached it to a pillar which was erected to proclaim their possession of the land. An Indian chief, happening along, appropriated the tin, probably with the idea of converting it into a shiny tobacco pipe. That savage whim, it was claimed, set off a chain of misunderstanding that ended in his own death and the massacre of the Dutch. Only one of the thirty-three settlers survived the carnage.
The Hollanders had built a brick house which should have served them well as a fort. They were also supposed to have surrounded the house with palisades, a requirement of the time, and to have had an Indian-fighting mastiff handy for just such an emergency. However, according to those who later argued with the company over responsibility for the failure of the Swanendael patroonship, the settlers at Whorekill were caught and butchered individually one day while laboring in the fields, unable to reach the safety of the palisades reportedly erected—while their fierce dog was unfortunately chained at the house.
If Whorekill, which may be translated as Harlots’ Creek, acquired its name as indicated, one cannot resist wondering whether playful Indian squaws, too much aqua vitae and vengeful braves might have had something to do with the demise of the Dutchmen. Certain it is that these first Europeans “left other reminders of their brief sojourn on the bay besides their skeletons,” for later Dutchmen who visited in this vicinity “with their goods where they traded with the Indians ... got the country dutyes, otherwise called the Pox.”
When Captain David de Vries came over as patroon in the winter of 1632-33 he built a lodging hut ashore, constructed “sloops” for whaling and set up a kettle for rendering oil. But although his harpooners killed a few whales, they were small and almost worthless for oil. The whale fishery was an economic failure.
Meanwhile, for some reason, Captain De Vries made peace with the savages who had slaughtered the original settlers on the Whorekill. There was no retaliation, surprisingly enough, for whatever happened on the creek the previous year. De Vries explained that the natives promised to provide him with food. But apparently they didn’t do so.
The Dutch patroon ascended the South River to barter for corn and beans. Twice during the winter he visited abandoned Fort Nassau where many Indians congregated on the news that he was in the river. However there was the usual difficulty about food. The Lenape were anxious to trade skins for his merchandise, even pausing in flight from the terrible Minqua to do so, but few of them were willing to part with corn.
De Vries did buy some of their pelts, though without much enthusiasm. Under an ambiguous agreement the company had recently made with the patroons, they were permitted to barter for pelts where no company factories were maintained. However, all skins taken under this arrangement had to be delivered at Fort Amsterdam for processing and shipment by the company to Holland. Such transactions were therefore not too satisfactory from an overall profit standpoint.
With the coming of spring, the Patroon of Swanendael went down the coast to call on the neighboring English at Jamestown for enough supplies to evacuate his people. The small profit on the pelts he had taken represented the only gain from the patroonship. It wasn’t too long afterward that the continuing wrangle over fur trading privileges, and other contentions, ended in the proprietors of Swanendael selling out their interests to the company, without having made any further attempt at colonization.
At the time of De Vries’ visit to the old Dutch works at Fort Nassau, he learned much to his surprise that an English shallop with seven or eight traders from Virginia had preceded him there. All the Virginians had been killed by the Lenape. Some of the chief men among the savages were jauntily wearing their victims’ jackets when they came to call on the Dutch patroon aboard his yacht that winter.
On the subsequent visit to Jamestown, which may have been prompted as much by curiosity concerning this invasion of the South River as by the need of supplies, Captain De Vries was told by Governor Harvey that these Virginians had indeed gone on an exploring voyage in those parts. And, although Harvey said there was no reason for Virginia traders to disturb the Hollanders, he nevertheless maintained the English claim to the Delaware valley and intimated that other countrymen of his would be going there too.
Shortly after this, when De Vries stopped off at Fort Amsterdam with his furs and the alarming news about the English, the Dutch provincial council dispatched an expedition once more to occupy Fort Nassau. A new house was built there and other improvements were made during the summer. Arendt Corssen, who went along at this time as the company’s commissioner in charge, also purchased from the Lenape a tract of land across the Delaware from Fort Nassau. There, probably on the west bank of the Schuylkill River and within the limits of present-day Philadelphia, he built a house and established a trading post.
This post of course promoted a more convenient trade with the western Minquas. It was also designed, no doubt, to serve as added evidence of the company’s maintenance of factories in the South River valley.
However, no English having appeared on the river during the summer and the Swanendael patroonship being inactive, these lonely outposts of the company were again deserted during the winter of 1633-34. A fur trader’s life in the winter wilderness, cooped up in a house surrounded by snow and unpredictable savages, must have been anything but enviable. The Hollanders on the South River could hardly be blamed for preferring their warmer and gayer quarters on Manhattan.
But then, in the summer of 1634 when no Dutch were about, an Englishman named Thomas Young sailed up the Delaware and planted the arms of his king ashore. He had come directly from England to trade in “Virginia,” under a license from the king, with special designs on the valley of the Delaware. Governor Harvey of Virginia lent all possible assistance to him when he stopped off in the Chesapeake to build trading shallops and gather information for his venture.
Captain Young traded extensively for beaver, otter and lesser furs, and he was much impressed by the abundance of elk and deer skins available in the Delaware valley. However, his ambition was to discover a northwest passage to the South Sea and he had secret instructions authorizing him to explore the Delaware, challenge any Dutch encroachment there, and plant forts to occupy the land if he wished to do so. He was stopped of course by the falls. Although he established an English post at Eriwoneck, where his lieutenant recorded that “we sate down,” the adventure was given over after a year or two.
Young himself was later captured by the French of Canada when, in his continuing quest for the elusive passage to the Orient, he ascended the Kennebec River, portaged to headwaters of streams that took him to the St. Lawrence and found himself unexpectedly before Quebec!
The English post that Captain Young established on the Delaware at Eriwoneck was opposite present-day Philadelphia. It is frequently mentioned as having been on Pennsauken Creek. However, since the Eriwoneck tribe appears to have been living close by if not at the site of Fort Nassau, it is more likely that the English captain simply “sate down” in the deserted Dutch fort. In view of his mission any other course would appear to have been inexpedient.
Captain Young discreetly makes no mention of Dutch works on the river, probably to avoid any perplexity over the Elizabethan theory about occupation proving right of possession. But his report admits of two contacts with Dutch traders. First he ran into a trading vessel from Manhattan which he accosted and chased from the river. Then a fresh expedition from Fort Amsterdam, which he reported had been sent to “plant and trade heere” by the Hollanders, was similarly forced to retire by the English captain.
Although the Dutch traders didn’t put up any fight in the face of Thomas Young’s well-gunned ship that summer, it was a different matter the next year when an English deserter brought word overland to Fort Amsterdam that a party of Virginia traders was occupying Fort Nassau.
An armed bark was immediately dispatched to the South River. It recaptured the fort and made prisoners of the Englishmen, about fifteen altogether including their leader, George Holmes. These captives, after being transported first to Fort Amsterdam where no one could decide what to do with them, were finally returned to Kecoughtan in Virginia. The New Netherlanders then installed and maintained a permanent garrison of traders at Fort Nassau under the management of Jan Jansen with Peter May as his assistant. All of which so discouraged other Virginians, who at the time were planning to follow in Holmes’ track, that they abandoned the project.
However, across the ocean, venturers of still another nationality were preparing to invade New Netherland’s South River. The Swedish people, aroused to territorial expansion by their late King Gustavus Adolphus, wanted a bridgehead in America. Profit-minded merchants, with the fur trade uppermost in their minds, were moving eagerly to accommodate them.