Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [26]
Expiration of the New Netherland Company’s charter at the end of 1617 touched off another competitive free-for-all. The end of the Twelve Year Truce with Spain was approaching, moreover, and a controversy raged about what would come next. One party, known as the Remonstrants because of their opposition to dogmatic Calvinism, advocated peace; the other, whose less tolerant interpretation of Calvinist doctrine gave them the name Counter-Remonstrants, urged the resumption of all-out war. The war party scored its first major victory in 1619 at the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort in English), which gave the Dutch Reformed Church a strictly orthodox foundation and identified it irrevocably with a new, more aggressive Dutch nationalism.
A second Counter-Remonstrant victory came in 1621, when the States-General handed New Netherland and the fur trade over to a new and far larger enterprise, the Geoctroyerde West-Indische Compagnie, or West India Company. Capitalized at 7.5 million guilders, the West India Company received a monopoly over all Dutch trade with west Africa and the Americas. Like the East India Company, it had two purposes: to make money by trade and to make money by making war on Spain.3
Amsterdam’s waterfront The West India Company’s compound can be seen at the foot of the bridge on the right. Detail of a map by Balthasar van Berckenrode, 1626. (Municipal Archives, Amsterdam)
Shares in the West India Company sold briskly, and the company geared up for business. In 1623 it launched a campaign to seize the Portuguese sugar plantations in Brazil. In 1624 it sent out some seventy ships to prey on Spanish commerce. In 1625 it attacked and sacked San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over the next dozen years it would dispatch some seven hundred additional ships manned by sixty-seven thousand men. They took over five hundred prizes worth almost forty million guilders. Counting damages as well as booty, they are said to have cost Spain alone nearly 120 million guilders. Oranje boven!
NEW NETHERLAND
Nor did the company neglect its interests in North America. As early as 1622, according to a contemporary English account, its agents had appeared along “the river Manahata and made plantation there, fortifying themselves in two several places” where “they did persist to plant and trade.” One of the company’s ships spent the winter of 1623-24 trading in the Hudson and Long Island Sound. She was still anchored in the East River in the early summer of 1624 when Captain Cornelis May brought in the Nieu Neder-landt with thirty families, mostly Walloons from Leyden who had previously tried without success to get permission to settle in Virginia. May immediately sent eighteen families north to establish a base along the west bank of the Hudson, not far from the site of Fort Nassau (now fallen into disrepair), which they called Fort Orange. Some sixty years later a female survivor recalled that “as soon as they had built themselves some hutts of Bark,” the people there were doing a good business in furs with the local Mahicans, who were “all as quiet as Lambs.”
The remaining families of colonists were sent to establish outposts along the Delaware and Connecticut rivers—the western and eastern boundaries, respectively, of New Netherland. (Perhaps because no one could think of a better name, the Delaware site, like its North River counterpart, was also called Fort Nassau.) A small party also occupied Noten (now Governors) Island and were soon at work clearing and planting at least one farm on nearby Manhattan.
By December of that same year, the company’s ships had returned to Amsterdam with pelts worth fifty thousand guilders and the cheerful news that New Netherland had begun “to advance bravely and to live in friendship with the natives.” And such was the region’s astounding abundance and fertility, according to one report, that the colonists