Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [28]
WAR AND WAMPUM
Complicating the company’s confusion about its purposes in New Netherland were momentous changes in the organization of the fur trade. Intensive trapping had severely depleted the Lenape peltries of the lower Hudson Valley by the mid-1620s, with the result that more and more of the furs exported from New Netherland were now coming from Mahicans who lived on the west bank of the Hudson around Fort Orange. The Dutch were not alone in appreciating the significance of this development. Iroquois-speaking Mohawks, recently repulsed from the St. Lawrence by the French and Hurons, saw a chance to recoup their losses by wresting control of the fur trade away from the Algonkian-speaking Mahicans. War between the Mohawks and Mahicans broke out in 1624 and escalated rapidly.
Concurrently, both Dutch and English discovered the value of “sewan” or “wampum.” True wampum consisted of long strings of tiny purple and white beads sewn together into belts; a large belt, six feet or so in length, would have contained six or seven thousand beads (“loose” or unstrung wampum was never considered the genuine article). The beads themselves were made from certain clam and whelk shells that could be found only along the shores of Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound—Sewan-hacky was in fact the Lenape name for Long Island—and the peoples native to those regions had long been accustomed to collecting, drilling, and stringing the shells for trade with groups far into the interior of the continent. With the introduction of European metal awls or drills, perhaps as early as the final quarter of the sixteenth century, it became possible for them to manufacture wampum in significantly greater quantity.
In 1609 Hudson’s men received “stropes of Beades” from some upriver Indians, but it was a crafty Dutch fur trader named Jacob Eelkes (or Eelckens) who became the first European to grasp the significance of wampum. In 1622 Eelkes seized a Pequot sachem on Long Island and threatened to cut off his head unless he received “a heavy ransom.” The sachem gave him over 140 fathoms of wampum, which Eelkes then discovered would fetch more furs than conventional European trade goods. Before long West India Company agents were buying up all the wampum they could get from the coastal Algonkians and trekking it north to Fort Orange to buy furs from the Mahicans—which made the Mahicans all the more inviting a target for the Iroquois, who relied heavily on wampum for ceremonial and diplomatic purposes. Isaack de Rasieres, a Walloon serving as the company’s chief commercial agent and the colony’s official secretary, took the news of wampum up to Governor William Bradford of Plymouth, a settlement of English Separatists founded in 1620. Bradford spread the word, and almost overnight, as he put it, “a great alteration” was wrought in the affairs of the entire region.4
Suddenly the fur trade was no longer a simple matter of direct barter between assorted Europeans and assorted native American peoples. Henceforth it would also involve a pair of transactions in which wampum functioned rather like money. In the first, European traders and coastal Algonkians exchanged manufactured goods for wampum; in the second, European traders used wampum (as well as manufactured goods) to obtain furs at Fort Orange. Not too many years later, wampum would become legal tender throughout both New England and New Netherland.
NEW AMSTERDAM
As the Mohawk-Mahican war intensified, the West India Company weighed the idea of an alliance with the Mahicans. But after Mohawk warriors killed three soldiers from the Fort Orange garrison