Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [27]
Several more company ships arrived in the spring of 1625. Led by Willem Verhulst, who replaced May as director of New Netherland, this second expedition deposited over a hundred additional colonists (again, mostly Walloons) plus a wide variety of livestock (103 head in all) and a mountain of supplies—wagons, plows, tools, clothing, food, seeds, plant shoots, firearms, and cheap goods for the fur trade. The cattle were put to pasture on Manhattan (“a convenient place abounding with grass”), and Verhulst ordered more land there to be cleared for planting wheat, rye, and buckwheat.
Verhulst and Cryn Fredericks, an engineer, also chose Manhattan’s southern tip as the best location for a massive fortification whose masonry walls, bristling with cannon, would anchor West India Company operations throughout New Netherland (in light of the fact, it was said, that “the Spaniard, who claims all the country, will never allow any one to gain a possession there”). They called it Fort Amsterdam, and Fredericks had the site staked out before the end of the year.
Nobody liked Verhulst. He bullied the colonists, doctored the books, and managed to lose track of vast quantities of trade goods. In the spring of 1626 he was replaced as director by forty-year-old Peter Minuit, a Walloon whose family had lived in Wesel, Germany, until driven out by a Spanish army a couple of years earlier.
FARMS OR FACTORIES?
Verhulst was really the least of New Netherland’s problems, however. Far graver was a sharp division of opinion within the West India Company itself about its long-range expectations for the colony.
The original idea for the company had come from Willem Usselinx, a wealthy Flemish refugee who believed that its primary objective should be settlement, not the establishment of trading posts. To his way of thinking, Holland in particular and the Protestant cause in general would never throw off Spanish rule until Spain’s grip on the New World and its resources had been broken. The surest way to do that, he reasoned, was to establish extensive colonies where free European farmers and converted Indians could produce agricultural commodities for the markets of Europe. The company’s preoccupation with conventional trade and warfare left Usselinx bitterly disappointed, and he refused its repeated offers of employment. At least a few of its directors nonetheless thought he had been on the right track. Led by Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam diamond merchant, these dissidents fought for years to make something more out of the company’s American holdings than a collection of thinly populated trading posts.
From the very beginning, consequently, New Netherland’s status was anomalous. In 1624, just before the Walloons set out with Captain May on the Nieu Nederlandt, the West India Company promulgated a set of regulations for the colony known as the Provisional Orders. The Orders implied that it would be run as a collection of thoroughly typical factories in which the company’s interests came first, the company made the rules, and the company decided what was best. Prospective colonists were explicitly warned “to obey and to carry out without any contradiction the orders of the Company then or still to be given, as well as all regulations received from the said Company in regard to matters of administration and justice.” The company would tell them where to live. The company would tell them what to plant on their land. They would work on the construction of fortifications and public buildings at the direction of the company. Their able-bodied men would perform military service for the company as needed.
Yet the Provisional Orders also hinted that other intentions besides those of the company were to be served as well. Perhaps because the Walloons had driven a hard bargain, colonists bound for New Netherland were promised