Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [25]
By the second half of the seventeenth century, this aggressive expansion had brought the East India Company undisputed commercial hegemony in the Malay archipelago and a fat share of the carrying trade throughout Asia. Its shareholders made fortunes, often receiving annual returns on their investments in excess of 30 percent—occasionally as much as 200 or 300 percent. The company itself became one of Amsterdam’s largest employers and a bulwark of the city’s prosperity. Manning, outfitting, provisioning, and servicing its lines of great East Indiamen required the labor of thousands—seamen, artisans, stevedores, laborers, and clerks—in addition to the thousands more employed in sugar refining, cloth finishing, tobacco cutting, silk throwing, glassmaking, distilling, brewing, and other industries related, directly or indirectly, to the company’s operations.
In 1609, encouraged by the prospect of a long truce with Spain, the East India Company commissioned Henry Hudson to find a northeast route to the Orient. When he failed, it turned its attention to other matters, not least of all the 329 percent dividend it had just declared for 1610. For merchants outside the company, though, Hudson’s report that he and the crew of the Halve Maen had carried on a brisk trade in furs with obliging natives was tantalizing news. Despite the recent settlement of a French trading post at Montreal, the European market for furs remained so strong that smaller traders could still expect high returns with only a modest initial investment and little risk.
In 1610 a company of Amsterdam particuliere kooplieden (private merchant-traders) sent a single ship to the river “called Manhattes from the savage nation that dwells at its mouth” (soon renamed the Mauritius and, eventually, the North River). Rivals were close behind, and in the vigorous competition that followed, flinty Dutch captains like Hendrick Christiaensen, Cornelis May (after whom Cape May is named), and Adriaen Block won fame if not fortune.
Block’s voyage of 1613—14, his fourth to the Hudson, must have been the talk of the Amsterdam waterfront. When fire destroyed his first ship, the Tyger, he and his men wintered on Manhattan and, with Indian help, built a new ship, the Onrust (Restless), with which they explored the East River and Long Island Sound in the spring of 1614.
New Netherland, 1613/1614 Detail of the chart drawn by Adriaen Block. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
(A mulatto from San Domingo named Jan Rodrigues remained on Manhattan with a stock of goods to organize trade pending Block’s return.) The “Figurative Map” that Block brought back to Amsterdam later that year was the first to apply the name “Manhates” to Manhattan, first to show Long Island as an island, first to show the Connecticut River and Narragansett Bay, and first to use the name “New Netherland” for the lands between English Virginia and French Canada. (Block’s monument is the small island off the eastern end of Long Island that bears his name.)2
In 1614, knowing that competition was better for discovery than for profits, a group of Amsterdam’s principal merchants persuaded the States-General to set up a single firm, the United New Netherland Company, with exclusive rights to traffic in American pelts (much as had been done earlier in the East Indian trade). The company sent out at least four expeditions and established a fortified year-round factory, or trading post, on Castle Island in the North River, just below modern Albany. It was called Fort van Nassouwen (Nassau), a name already applied to two other Dutch factories elsewhere in the world, one on the Amazon River in Brazil and the other at Mouree, in West Africa. A contemporary report described the fort as “a redoubt, surrounded by a moat eighteen feet wide” and garrisoned by ten or twelve men with a dozen-odd cannon. Under its protection, company traders began to tap the river’s “great traffick in the skins of beavers,