Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [37]
A further complication here was the proximity of native women who seemed entirely lacking in sexual restraint—“utterly unchaste and shamefully promiscuous,” in the words of Adriaen van der Donck. They “are exceedingly addicted to whoring,” agreed Dominie Johannes Megapolensis, who arrived in 1642 to serve as the minister to Rensselaerswyck. “They will lie with a man for the value of one, two or three schillings, and our Dutchmen run after them very much.” The dominie’s point was clear: not until this sexual carnival had been brought under control (by way of law as well as the immigration of respectable women from Europe) could New Amsterdam be considered a properly settled colony, much less a stable community.
DEVELOPMENT
It seemed for a while that Kieft might succeed in taming New Amsterdam. He forbade the sale of liquor except at the company store. He promulgated ordinances to prevent “adulterous intercourse with heathens, blacks, or other persons; mutiny, theft, false testimony, slanderous language and other irregularities.” He prohibited householders from harboring “fugitive servants” from other colonies (a frequent source of trouble) and forbade sailors from vessels in the harbor from staying ashore overnight. He told company craftsmen and laborers to go to work punctually “when the bell rings” and to keep working “until the bell rings again to break off.” He ordered the construction of a two-story stone inn on the East River called the Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern, later designated as the site for public auctions and the posting of official notices. Inside Fort Amsterdam, Kieft saw to the erection of “a pretty large stone church” as well as a new residence for himself “quite neatly built of brick” (and decreed “that no one shall make water within the Fort”). Although the church was built by contractors from the English colony of New Haven, and the Stadts Herbergh provided food and lodging for many visiting New England traders, Kieft served notice on the English that the West India Company would defend New Netherland’s borders. He also vigorously protested when former director Minuit planted a colony of Swedes on the lower Delaware in 1638 and began diverting the local fur trade away from the Dutch.
That same year, moving to implement the company’s decision to promote largescale settlement, Kieft began to buy extensive tracts of land from the Lenapes in what are now Kings, Queens, and Bronx counties, as well as Jersey City on the western side of the Hudson. He obtained the area between Wallabout and Newtown Creek, as far inland as “the Swamps of Mespaetches”—later known as Bushwick—for “eight fathoms of duffels [cloth], eight fathoms of wampum, twelve kettels, eight chip-axes [adzes] and eight hatchets and some knives, beads, and awls.” At the same time, in a major step toward the institution of private property in New Netherland, Kieft also authorized the first “ground-briefs” or deeds for “free people” who took up land in the colony.
Thus the same Andries Hudde who began farming Achtervelt in 1636 received, in 1638, a patent giving him the right “peaceably to possess, inhabit, cultivate, occupy and use, and also therewith and there of to do, bargain and dispose” of a tract of land lying north of New Amsterdam in what is now Harlem. In return, Hudde agreed that after ten years he would pay the company “the just tenth of the products with which God may bless the soil, and from this time forth annually for the House and Lot, deliver a pair of capons to the Director for the Holidays.” That stipulation resembles what would have been called a quitrent in English law, not rent in the ordinary sense. Hudde now “owned” the land and could do with it as he pleased, but he (as well as his heirs or anyone who bought the land from him) would be required to acknowledge the sovereignty of the West India Company with a yearly payment that “quit” or absolved him of any other obligations to the company.
Soon enough the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were buying, selling, and leasing land among themselves,