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Lenape men, by contrast, thought agriculture unmanly and devoted their energies to hunting and fishing. European observers were often appalled to find them relaxing after their return while their women toiled away in the fields, though this reaction had less to do with sympathy for the women than with ideas about “laziness.” Europeans believed that agriculture was a respectable occupation for men, while hunting and fishing were chiefly recreational: one was work, the other mere sport. (“They labour not much, but in absolute necessity,” Charles Lodwick reported to the Royal Society, and “mostly employ themselves in hunting and fishing.”) Indeed, the apparent reluctance of their men to work only reinforced the impression that the Lenapes had done little to subdue and develop the land.

Pen and ink sketch of a Native American woman and local fish by Jaspar Danckaerts, c. 1679/1680. (United States History, Local History & Genealogy Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

The sexual division of labor and the matrilineal organization of clans and phratries accorded women considerable importance in communal affairs. Each sachem was chosen from among the sons—sometimes even daughters—of a sister of the old sachem, and the actual choice might well have been made by the older women of his phratry. There is also evidence that after divorce, which was a simple matter for Lenape women (as well as for men), they retained possession of all household effects and that their children invariably remained with them because they were of the same lineage.

Seasonal habitation sites, few tools and personal possessions, the lack of domesticated animals, disorderly planting fields, a classless and stateless social system, matrilineal kinship, indifference to commerce—what all of this added up to, for many Europeans, was a deeply inferior way of life, mired in primitive poverty. It seemed the very antithesis of civilized existence, a devilish inversion of the proper order of things. To the Dutch, all Indians were wilden—savages—while the English likened them to the despised “wild Irish,” whose seasonal migrations with their sheep and cattle appeared utterly incompatible with civilization.

True, they didn’t appear to be suffering. “It is somewhat strange,” Nicholaes van Wassenaer admitted, “that among these most barbarous people, there are few or none cross-eyed, blind, crippled, lame, hunch-backed or limping men; all are well-fashioned people, strong and sound of body, well fed, without blemish.” “Some have lived 100 years,” Charles Lodwick marveled. “Also,” Jasper Danckaerts added, “there are among them no simpletons, lunatics or madmen as among us.”

Indeed, that the Lenapes lived so contentedly in what looked to Europeans like a setting of wonderful “natural” abundance made them all the more contemptible. How could people living in such a place fail so utterly to take advantage of the opportunities that lay all around them? They ought to have been civilized and rich, but they weren’t. It was only a short step to the conclusion that they didn’t deserve to be there at all.

THE FUR TRADE

A map of the New World drawn by Juan de la Cosa in the first decade of the sixteenth century hints that Europeans—probably anonymous fishermen looking for cod—may have visited Lenapehoking when Christopher Columbus was still exploring the Caribbean. The first solid evidence of such a visit, however, conies with the arrival of a French vessel, La Dauphine, piloted by the Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano. King Francis I of France and a syndicate of Lyons silk merchants had commissioned Verrazzano to find a northern route to China and Japan—the same “Indies” that Columbus dreamed of finding. In March 1524, after a fifty-day crossing from Madeira, La Dauphine began crawling up the coast from Cape Fear. By mid-April she passed Sandy Hook and anchored in the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn.

As they