Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [38]
Manhattan Lying on the North River, c. 1639, also known as the Manatus Map. Possibly drawn by Andries Hudde, a surveyor as well as farmer, it depicts the recent settlement of twenty-two bouweries and plantations in upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, and New Jersey. The presence of Lenape longhouses in Brooklyn was a pointed reminder that Europeans were still heavily outnumbered throughout the region. The house said to have been provided for company slaves can be seen on the Manhattan shore across from what is now Roosevelt Island. {© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Over the succeeding four or five years, free settlers did trickle into New Netherland, and the colony began to flesh out a bit. On western Long Island men named Ryker, Wyckoff, Stoothoff, Teunessen, and Francisco the Negro settled at places they called, informally, Amersfoort, Boswijk, Breuckelen, and Midwout (Vlachte Bos)—not the compact, open-field villages of New England, but isolated, fortified cabins and farmsteads. An initial motive for this dispersion was to trade with the Indians without paying required duties to nosy agents of the West India Company. But when a ferry began operating across the East River in the early 1640s, settlers began to furnish New Amsterdam with tobacco, corn, wheat, and cattle (Kieft opened New Amsterdam’s first annual cattle fair in 1641 on the Marktveldt, just outside the walls of the fort). Similar settlements sprang up on Staten Island under the leadership of David de Vries, a ship captain who had been involved in the ill-fated Swanendael patroonship, and Cornells Melyn, an Antwerp merchant and sometime director of the West India Company.
Outside the half-dozen Dutch settlements of Long Island, however, many of these colonists, perhaps as many as half of them, represented the same broad mixture of nationalities as New Amsterdam itself. Among them were Swedes, Germans, French, Belgians, Africans, and Danes (such as a certain Jonas Bronck who owned a five-hundred-acre farm on the mainland near what is now Morrisania, and who left his name on the Broncks or Bronx River—whence the modern borough of that same name). Their presence didn’t, in the long run, augur well for the company’s ability to preserve New Netherland as a Dutch colony.
Most serious were the mounting numbers of English dissidents seeking refuge in New Netherland from the Puritan regime of Massachusetts. In 1639 Kieft ordered all Englishmen in the colony to swear an oath of allegiance to the States-General. The next year a small group from Lynn, Massachusetts—eight men, one woman, and one child—tried to take up land at Schout’s Bay (now Manhasset) on the north shore of Long Island, but Kieft drove them away with troops.
For reasons that aren’t clear, and over the objections of powerful men like Kiliaen van Rensselaer, Kieft dealt more leniently with subsequent arrivals. In 1642 he allowed the Rev. Francis Doughty and his followers, fugitives from Plymouth, to settle a thirteen-thousand-acre tract at Mespat (Newtown). That same year he also permitted the Rev. John Throgmorton and thirty-five families, mostly Quakers, to take up land on Throg’s Neck, only twenty-five miles from New Amsterdam on the shore of Long Island Sound; shortly thereafter, Anne Hutchinson, perhaps Puritan New England’s most famous nonconformist, settled nearby on what is now Pelham Neck.
DISASTER
Despite the colony’s development, Kieft failed to win the hearts and minds of its inhabitants. Prominent colonists complained of his arrogance and his contempt for the council, which he reduced to a single member on the grounds that no