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By Root 7378 0

and “well roasted” a fourth, the company’s managers lost confidence in the Mahicans and cast their lot with the Iroquois. Realizing that New Netherland’s far-flung trading posts couldn’t be defended if they were caught up in the fighting, the company also resolved to abandon those on the Connecticut and Delaware rivers and move the women and children from Fort Orange to an encampment on the southern tip of Manhattan. This was an attractive site because company agents stationed there could still supervise the flow of commerce out of the Hudson Valley and Long Island Sound. It was big enough for the company to maintain its own farms and herds for provisioning the camp. Apparently, too, many of the island’s original inhabitants had recently succumbed to epidemic disease or been driven away by rival groups. (De Rasieres, writing c. 1628, noted that only about two or three hundred of “the old Manhatans” still lived on the island. Along the East River, he added, “is a little good land, where formerly many people have dwelt, but who for the most part have died or have been driven away by the Wappenos [Wappingers].”)

In May or June of 1626, shortly after taking over from Verhulst, Director Minuit began to implement the new policy by “purchasing” Manhattan from the Lenapes for sixty guilders’ worth of trade goods. It’s impossible to say which Lenapes, or what kind of trade goods, because no deed or bill of sale has survived—if indeed there ever was one. However, when he and five other colonists also “bought” Staten Island on August 10, 1626, they paid the local sachems “Some Dimes [duffle cloth], Kittles [kettles], Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jew’s Harps, and diverse other other wares”—probably the same kind of trade goods with which they had obtained Manhattan. (Probably, too, those “drilling awls” were the very kind used by coastal Algonkians to manufacture wampum.)

New Amsterdam, c. 1626. Perhaps drawn by Cryn Fredericks, the company’s engineer, this view greatly exaggerates the size of the fort but accurately depicts the mill and cabins that huddled outside its walls. Engraved and published by Joost Hartgers in 1651. (© Museum of the City of New York)

Engineer Fredericks and his workers meanwhile scaled back their plans for a real fortress and threw up a simple blockhouse surrounded by a palisade of wood and sod. Other workmen hurriedly erected a sawmill on Noten (Governors) Island, then heavily wooded, and used the lumber to build thirty cabins. These were followed by a stone countinghouse “thatched with reed” and “a horse-mill, over which shall be constructed a spacious room sufficient to accommodate a larger congregation.” The mill was to have a tower where bells captured the year before at the sack of San Juan would be hung. The new settlement was dubbed New Amsterdam. It had about 270 inhabitants, including a handful of newborn infants.

Was it a settlement, though? Many of those 270 inhabitants, undoubtedly the Walloons and perhaps Minuit as well, wouldn’t have objected to the term. They saw themselves as settlers and thought—not without reason, considering the terms of the Provisional Orders—that the West India Company did too.

A majority of the company’s shareholders saw things differently. Continuing to favor trade over colonization, they viewed New Amsterdam as a commercial “factory” or trading post indistinguishable from dozens of other such installations scattered along the coasts of Africa, India, Malaysia, and China. It wasn’t a beachhead of imperial conquest or a citadel to overawe a subject population. It wasn’t a seedbed for transplanting Dutch culture in the New World. It wasn’t a workshop or plantation for the production of commodities. It was, purely and simply, a place where cheap European manufactured goods (knives, axes, blankets, iron pots, nails) would be exchanged for those items of local origin (dressed and cured pelts) that would fetch a good price back home.

From this perspective, the company would actually do itself more harm than good by promoting a proper colony in New Amsterdam.