Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [31]
PATROONS AND PURITANS
New Amsterdam’s future brightened temporarily when Admiral Piet Heyn, commanding a flotilla of thirty-one company vessels and three thousand men, captured the Spanish treasure fleet outside Havana in 1628. Heyn returned to Amsterdam with two hundred thousand pounds of silver, 135 pounds of gold, and a mountain of sugar, pearls, spices, hides, and other merchandise—worth, all told, a whopping fifteen million guilders. This triumph of organized banditry enabled the company to pay a fat 50 percent dividend and made Heyn a national hero. Over the next half-dozen years, largely financed by Heyn’s coup, company forces would drive the Portuguese from their lucrative sugar plantations in Brazil and seize Curasao, which commanded the vast salt pans on nearby Aruba and Bonaire.
In the general euphoria that followed Heyn’s coup, the prosettlement faction led by Kiliaen van Rensselaer persuaded the West India Company to give New Netherland a second chance. In the Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629 (also known as the Charter of Liberties) the company agreed to give large chunks of New Netherland to “patroons” who would promise to buy the land from the Indians and import fifty or more settlers at their own expense. It also agreed to supply the colonists with slaves and to build a better fort on Manhattan. The reward for these concessions would be continued control of New Netherland’s trade: all goods coming into and out of the colony, furs included, would have to travel in company vessels at company rates and pay specified duties to company agents at New Amsterdam.
Van Rensselaer promptly applied to the company for a “patroonship” called Rensselaerswyck, a seven-hundred-thousand-acre domain surrounding Fort Orange. A half-dozen other directors associated with Van Rensselaer followed with applications for their own patroonships. Michael Pauw set his sights on Pavonia, which included Staten Island and the west bank of the Hudson across from Manhattan. Most of the projects existed only on paper, however, quietly forgotten when the would-be patroons came to their senses or failed to overcome the skepticism of potential investors. Pauw did build a house on the site of present-day Jersey City but lost too much money, quarreled with the local Indians, and ultimately sold his rights to Pavonia to the company in 1637. Rensselaerswyck alone survived, a thorn in the company’s side for years.
The patroonship fiasco was compounded by the vigorous expansion of settlement in neighboring New England. In 1630 Puritan immigrants founded the town of Boston in a colony they called Massachusetts Bay; thousands more followed over the next decade. They were a doctrinaire and disputatious people, and dissidents soon began streaming out of Boston to plant a crop of new settlements elsewhere in Massachusetts as well as in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and eastern Long Island.
From the West India Company’s point of view, the Puritans couldn’t have showed up at a less opportune moment. As trappers and traders from Massachusetts joined those from Plymouth and fanned out across the dwindling peltries of northern New England, the company’s chances of turning a profit in the fur trade grew steadily slimmer. What was more, the arrival of actual settlers—besides undermining Dutch claims to the Connecticut River Valley and Long Island—threatened the wampummanufacturing Lenapes who lived along Long Island Sound. Their displacement or conquest by the English would strike directly at the company’s ability to obtain furs from the Mohawks at Fort Orange.
An all-out buildup of Dutch settlement along the New England frontier might still save the situation. The question was whether the West India Company, distracted by big-budget campaigns in the West Indies and Brazil, cared enough to work out an acceptable alternative to patroonships.
THE CASE FOR COLONIZATION
Back in New Amsterdam, it seemed that everyone had fixed