Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [30]
As a factory, New Amsterdam seemed a far sounder proposition. Because the laborintensive drudgery of preparing furs for market could be done by the native inhabitants, the colony would be able to get along very nicely with a skeleton staff of salaried officials plus a small number of hired artisans, soldiers, and laborers. A few husbandmen and farmers could keep it supplied with fresh food (just as, for example, the company maintained cattle herds on Bonaire to feed Curacao). Employees wouldn’t expect the company to provide much in the way of amenities, either. They would sleep in company barracks, work with company tools and equipment, and eat in the company mess. Nor would the company have to be particular about who they were: they needn’t be Dutch, and they surely didn’t need to be respectable. It wasn’t even essential for the company to have all of them on the payroll: anyone, strictly speaking, could go to New Amsterdam and deal in furs—as long as they sold them to the company, at the company’s price, and bought their trade goods at the company’s stores.
Thus the little community that gathered on Manhattan in 1626 was a hybrid—something more than what a majority of West India Company directors intended yet something less than what many of its inhabitants must have hoped, a confused mix of private and public aspirations, of commerce and colonization, of employees and settlers. It wasn’t the most solid of foundations.
3
Company Town
According to Nicolaes van Wassenaer, the Dutch physician-journalist who published a semiannual compilation of intelligence from America, New Amsterdam’s first year had gone remarkably well. “Men work there as in Holland,” he rejoiced. “One trades, upwards, southwards and northwards; another builds houses, the third farms. Each farmer has his farmstead on the land purchased by the Company, which also owns the cows; but the milk remains to the profit of the farmer; he sells it to those of the people who received their wages for work every week. The houses of the Hollanders now stand outside the fort, but when that is completed, they will all repair within, so as to garrison it and be secure from sudden attack.”
People with firsthand knowledge of conditions on Manhattan were less sanguine. Isaack de Rasieres worried that few colonists had come prepared to establish anything more than a grubby little trading post. Some, not having contracted to perform manual labor, expected the company to provide them with food and shelter while they got rich in the fur trade. The rest, de Rasieres wrote in a letter home, were a “rough lot who have to be kept at work by force.” “I cannot sufficiently wonder at the lazy unconcern of many persons, both farmers and others, who are willing enough to draw their rations and pay in return for doing almost nothing,” he added.
De Rasieres’s criticism paled alongside the fulminations of Dominie Johannes Michaelius, New Amsterdam’s first regular minister of the gospel. Fresh provisions were scarce and overpriced, Michaelius wrote angrily to friends back in the Netherlands; it was impossible to get a horse or a cow, rations distributed by the company were disgusting—“hard stale food, such as men are used to on board ship”—and there were no decent houses, only “hovels and holes” where the colonists “huddled rather than dwelt.” Nobody seemed really interested in improving things, either. Some of the Walloons had already given up and gone home. A few years later, the dominie himself followed.
Criticism of New Amsterdam flared at company headquarters as well. Expenses were running well ahead of initial projections, and income from the fur trade hadn’t lived up to expectations. After two or three profitless years, investors as well as directors were