The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth
Published: New York, Farrar & Rhinehart, 1939

CHAPTER 4

The Hard Blond Traders

Most of the first white settlers of the high-walled valley which Henry Hudson had claimed for the Dutch spoke French as their natural language. Fifteen years after the explorer’s voyage on the stream he called "Great River of the Mountains" these people came to build their homes on its banks.

Meanwhile a few Dutch ships had visited the river and returned to Holland loaded with skins of beaver, mink, otter, and wildcat. The New Netherland Company, organized in 1614, obtained a monopoly on the river trade and sent out fur expeditions so successful that two years later its sponsors asked for continuance of its charter. But the Dutch government decided to leave the river open to competition for a few years while it planned a powerful monopolistic stock company to handle the American trade--the West India Company.

The West India Company
That organization was founded in 1621, and in April of 1624 thirty families of Walloons embarked on the ship New Netherland , under Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, bound for the Hudson’s mouth. They were mostly Protestant refugees, farmers from the South Netherlands where they had felt the pressure of Roman Catholic Spain. On the deck of the New Netherland, as she rocked in the harbor of Amsterdam on March thirtieth, 1624, they listened politely as two magistrates publicly read to them the "Provisional Order" of the West India Company.

They must obey orders, be loyal Reformed Calvinists, convert the heathen wild men. They must live where they are told for at least six years, lending a hand in all communal enterprises, selling all materials for export to the company, recognizing the company’s rights to all mining properties and pearl fisheries. They must not sell for profit the products of their handicraft (this to protect Holland industry). They must plant only what they are ordered to sow. They must be careful not to trade with outsiders or tell them about the business or profits of the company, and they must be honest and respectful in their dealings with the natives.

Through the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay was the route, and then the Canary Isles rose in fresh bright colors from the sea. The Savage Islands lay beyond, and white sand shores beneath Virginia’s tufted pines. Soft breezes and the moon of May performed their spell upon the pioneer Walloons, for Caterina Trico long years later said she saw four weddings on the deck below the wind-filled sails.

Two Towns along the River
The "River of the Mountains" was now officially the "River of the Prince Mauritius," named to honor that remarkable Dutch soldier and strategist, Maurice of Orange. At its mouth the New Netherland and paused to disembark her passengers. Some of them set out for the big river to the south, the Delaware. Others sought the "Fresh River," the Connecticut. Eight men stayed where they were to begin the permanent settlement of Manhattan Island. Then Captain May, with about eighteen families of Walloons, sailed up the river to the foot of the long hill on which Albany now stands. There on the west bank, about opposite where a Dutch fort and trading center, Fort Nassau, had been built and abandoned, he and the men of the new community set up a quadrangular stockade of logs new cut from the near-by woods, and called it Fort Orange.

Now the two towns, one at the mouth of the river and one a hundred and fifty miles north, began to grow and develop. While the Fort Orange Walloons were trying to learn enough Dutch words and Indian words to carry on the business of an upriver trading post, the Manhattan group, having built small hutlike dwellings of sod and bark, were asking the West India Company to send them a preacher--at least someone with the proper authority to baptize babies. At once the bearer of the message, Bastiaen Jansen Crol, a layman who had qualified for the position of Comforter of the Sick on ships going to and from the new colony, was authorized to perform not only baptisms but marriages as well.

Crol arrived at Manhattan on the River of the Prince Mauritius at about the same time as Willem Verhulst, who took over governorship of the colony from Captain May. They had not more than begun their work when their responsibilities were increased by the arrival of three ships--Horse, Cow, and Sheep--each containing the cargo indicated by the name, and a swift yacht, the Mackerel, which held few fish but brought forty-five new colonists. The cattle were soon peacefully grazing in meadows upriver from the little settlement at the foot of Manhattan, and farming on the Hudson had begun.

But agriculture did not thrive along the big river. Though the West India Company was committed to efforts at colonizing, it had found the profits of fur cargoes absorbing most of its interest. It found, too, that, while it was easy to encourage "petty traders who swarm hither with great industry, reap immense profit and exhaust the country without adding anything to its population or security," it was difficult to get worthy farmers and craftsmen to leave a prosperous, safe, free Holland for the wild and precarious shores of a little known river.

The Patroon System
In order to allay criticism of its failure in this respect and to satisfy the desires of major stockholders who wanted to participate as individuals in the benefits of the rich new land, the directors of the company established in 1629, by a "Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions," the Patroon System. The charter permitted grants of great river estates to members of the company who would, within four years after accepting the terms of a contract, establish on the lands proffered them settlements of at least fifty persons.

The patroonships might extend sixteen miles along one shore of the river or eight miles along both shores, "and as far inland as the situation of the occupants will permit." The patroon had to purchase the title to his lands from the Indians but, once having obtained it, he might hold the land as a "perpetual fief of inheritance." He need not pay duties for eight years and his tenants did not have to pay the taxes of the province for a decade. Six patroonships were immediately signed for by eager investors--two on the Delaware River, two on the Connecticut, two on the Hudson. Six years later only one remained.

Kiliaen Van Rensselaer
A prosperous jeweler of Amsterdam, Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, registered himself for a patroonship on the Hudson in the late autumn of 1629. By the beginning of the new year he had obtained the services as agent of Comforter of the Sick Crol, who had risen to high office in the community at Fort Orange. Completely disregarding the limitations set by the charter to which he had agreed two months before, Van Rensselaer ordered Crol to secure for him on both sides of the river near Fort Orange as much land as possible even if the claim extended north and south of the fort for twenty miles or more. Crol made three purchases of land so vaguely defined that for many years the Van Rensselaers felt justified in claiming all lands on both sides of the river from Barren Island, eleven miles below Fort Orange, to the mouth of the Mohawk, nine miles above it. The inland limit on either side was left indefinite.

The story of the greed of the Van Rensselaer patroons is not a pretty one. They made use of the West India Company whenever it could serve them, and they fought the company relentlessly whenever this was to their advantage. The first patroon never set foot on the great Hudson River estate which be named Rensselaerswyck, but he gave much of his time to figuring out unethical ways by which his pocketbook might be made fat by traffic on his distant acres. He even ordered a fortified castle to be built on Barren Island at the southern end of his claimed dominion and attempted to enforce by arms a monopolistic edict prohibiting any trader not under contract to him from sailing into the waters of his patroonship.

As for his tenants, he treated them with hostile suspicion as stupid peasants and, claiming as excuse that they deceived him, bulldozed and cheated them. In the spring of 1639 he wrote to William Kieft, director of New Netherland: "I would not like to have my people get too wise and figure out their master’s profit, especially in matters in which they themselves are somewhat interested . . . these I would rather keep a secret between the company and myself. . . . I shall then be better able to trade with my people and to satisfy them." He set up a commissary at which he sold supplies to his tenants at outrageous profit to himself.

Most evil of all his machinations, if Maria, wife of his son Jeremias, is to be believed, he conceived the idea that he had founded Rensselaerswyck "in order that his children, with God’s mercy, might live off it and that they should not alienate it." Whether or not she told the truth, Maria affirmed this policy after the death of her husband (who dissented) and, though she and her progeny owned a property so vast they could hardly compute its extent, they thereafter refused to sell any of it. Thus was established a feudal sort of tenant system which was to torment the farmers of the Hudson valley into sporadic armed warfare over a period of two hundred years.

Perpetual Leaseholds
The perpetual leasehold by which a farmer might live in a house and till fields for his lifetime, provided that he agreed to give each year a share of his crops and his increase of livestock to the owner of the land, became the greatest single instrument of injustice in the whole history of the Hudson valley. Scornfully in 1650 Cornelis Van Tienhoven, secretary to the director general (then Pieter Stuyvesant), wrote to the High and Mighty Lords of the Dutch States-General that in Rensselaerswyck "no one down to the present time can possess a foot of land of his own but is obliged to take upon rent all the land which he cultivates."

Winning the war against the rents was to be more important to the tenants of the river farms during the two centuries of oppression that followed than winning the War of the Revolution, because unfair rents were an immediate local disaster that touched their daily lives. Many a rent-distressed countryman fought against the British in the earliest of America’s wars for democracy believing that, once the Revolution was won, the feudal system initiated by the first Van Rensselaer patroon would be abolished by a new republican government and the Tory-owned estates would be confiscated and divided up into small farms for independent and democratic farmers.

At the end of the long war, however, such idealists were to find that while the new government abolished the right of entail, by which the eldest son inherited the estate in its entirety on the death of his father, the rich river families who had supported General Washington were united in preserving their vast acres to their own uses and even adding to their holdings by absorbing the confiscated lands of the Tories. The tenant farmers were then forced to submit to the perpetuation of the unfair practices of the landlords, who made aristocratic pretensions in the democratic state, or fight. Again and again they chose to fight, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the special privileges of the holders of the Hudson estates were abolished.

The antirent struggle was a long war fought by successive generations and throughout two centuries it vitally affected the life of a large portion of the people who lived along the Hudson. It was a war between two ways of life, and the fundamental ideas of both had been brought to the river shores from the Old World. One was the way of the aristocrat, based on belief in the superiority of the few. It was Europe’s old way, destined to periodic revival. The other was the way of democracy, based on belief in the dignity and deserving of honest persons. The people, dreaming of a new land where men might have equal rights, fought for their river, claiming it as their own. The landholders, assuming aristocratic privilege, denied them.

Life in Colonies along the Hudson River
As the three units of organized living — Fort Amsterdam, Fort Orange, and Rensselaerswyck — began to grow, life on the Hudson River took on a character that has not been understood by the American people generally for a hundred years. Washington Irving’s charmingly written and immensely popular caricature, the Knickerbocker History of New York, has done more to create widespread misconception of the Dutch period than any other one agency.

Despite its author’s insistence that it was an effort at comic distortion of truth for the purpose of entertainment, American readers have found it so delightfully compelling that they have accepted its characterizations seriously. As a matter of fact, it is doubtful if Irving’s work, however pleasing, is a real caricature since by definition of that term it should present exaggerations of actual characteristics.

The Dutch were not the fatheaded, fat-bottomed, sleepy, sillily pompous folk of the Knickerbocker History. Nor were the two colonies at the foot and the head of the navigable Hudson so prevailingly Dutch as to be permeated by the characteristics of the people of the Netherland States.

Van Rensselaer’s advertising of the joys of life on his patroonship brought few of his countrymen to Rensselaerswyck. But the prospect of quick profits in various ways, including the counterfeiting of Indian Wampum, the accepted medium of exchange, brought to that colony and to the Walloon settlement at Fort Orange as opportunistic a lot of roistering adventurers as ever swarmed about a newly discovered gold field, a rough, tough, quarrelsome crew of Irishmen, Swedes, Germans, Danes, Englishmen, all with but one idea of conduct--every man for himself. Most of them were illiterate. Few were unintelligent. They were hard, shrewd, lawless, brave, and cruel.

On Manhattan an equally polyglot society was developing. Father Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit missionary rescued by the Dutch from slavery among the Mohawk Indians, recorded that in 1643 Director General Kieft told him "there were persons there of eighteen different languages." They were a hard-drinking and profane lot, exercising their creative imaginations by inventing oaths so fanciful as to approach poetry and by applying such picturesque names to their drinks as Kill Devil (the well earned title of Barbados rum), Little Mill, Ship’s Sails, Hans in the Cellar, The Abbot and His Monks, Great and Small Fisheries, Bride’s Tears.

The drunken and profane frontiersmen who made up the heterogeneous groups at New Amsterdam and Fort Orange were rough in their play and in their ideas of entertainment. In a favorite game, Clubbing the Cat, puss was imprisoned in a cask hung in the middle of a tightly stretched rope. Players stood a given distance away and hurled clubs at the cask. The winner was he who broke the cask and let the animal escape.

Another game, Pulling the Goose, consisted of riding a horse full gallop under a goose that hung with greased head down from a rope stretched across the road. The rider who yanked the bird free won the game. Variations of this pastime were played with a rabbit or an eel for the booty. Dutchmen have always loved to skate and their enjoyment of the smooth frozen surface of the Hudson during the long winter months, when a barrier of impenetrable forests and ice floes separated Fort Orange from New Amsterdam, soon brought most of their comrades to the river to try their skill.

As for humor along the Hudson in the early Dutch days, it consisted mostly of practical joking. The Dutch loved to serenade newlyweds with raucous horning and of ten planted at night a strangely decorated pole outside the door of the happy couple’s home to embarrass them when morning light had come. They loved to gallop their horses through town at top speed in the daytime and to disturb the night by firing their guns and shouting. A frightened Indian seemed always a funny sight until they discovered how dangerous he could be.

Trader David DeVries sailed his sloop stealthily in past Sandy Hook one evening and came quietly to anchor under Fort Amsterdam at about two o’clock in the morning without being observed. He waited until dawn began to break and then suddenly fired three guns that made a terrific clamor echoing against the walls of the fort and "caused the people to spring out of their beds all at once." At a tent party inside the fort two months later, Trumpeter Anthony Van Corlaer got himself into a fist fight with two of his associates by unexpectedly blowing his loud trumpet in their ears.

When the British took over the government of the Hudson valley they were frequently unable to see anything funny in such antics and were much less tolerant of them than the Dutch had been.

There was, for instance, the time Jan Conell and Dirck Bradt brought a common soldier into Willem Gysbertse’s tavern near Fort Orange and gravely introduced him as Captain Mosely, a commander of three hundred men who had come up the Hudson to drive away the River Indians. This so impressed the credulous landlord that he served free drinks to the three conspirators all that evening just as they had planned. But the next morning after their host had very importantly told the mission of his distinguished soldier guest the Indians began taking to the deep woods. Jan Conell and Dirck Bradt soon thereafter found themselves seated in uncomfortable positions in the stocks and condemned to pay Willem Gysbertse a tavern bill which they regarded as exorbitant.

The tendency to regard a charge against them as exorbitant and all their own prices as reasonable was thoroughly typical of the majority of early Hudson River settlers. Indeed, they were loyal to nothing save profits. They did not care who ruled over them so long as they were acquiring wealth.

They complained of the West India Company’s monopoly of the fur trade and frequently smuggled beaver pelts into New England where they got more money for them. They were very jealous of their opportunities for trade. In the spring of 1655 the New Amsterdam preacher Megapolensis complained bitterly to the authorities in Holland of the influx of Jewish immigrants. In a violent denunciation that foreshadowed more recent vilification of unoffending Hebrews, he declared: "These people have no other God than the Mammon of unrighteousness, and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property, and to overcome all other merchants by drawing all trade to themselves. Therefore, we request . . . that the godless rascals, who are of no benefit to the country, but look at everything for their own profit, may be sent away from here."

The traders of the Hudson shore even mistrusted each other and made rules to govern the general conduct that would make cheating difficult. At Fort Orange it was forbidden to run up the hill to meet Indians coming in to trade, to entertain Indians overnight in a white man’s house, to send children to play (and incidentally to trade) with Indians. When the English invaders arrived at the mouth of the Hudson, the traders gladly disregarded all questions of loyalty to the Dutch lords overseas and submitted to the new rule because they thought the English governors would ask a smaller share of their earnings than the Dutch had demanded.

Most unfortunate of all the characteristics of the queerly mixed collection of early settlers on the Hudson was their quarrelsome bumptiousness. They squabbled with the Swedes to the south of them on the Delaware, with the English in the Yankee settlements to the north, with the neighboring savages. They complained against their directors and the patroons, and they fought against each other.

These men and women were actually quick to anger, peppery, captious, nervously active. Though they have often been praised for maintaining friendly relations with the Indians, they treated them very badly. They kept peace only with the powerful Iroquois who lived to the northwest along the Mohawk and Genesee rivers and whom they heartily feared.

The first war of the Dutch with the Hudson River Indians was begun by fussy, incompetent Director Kieft who "to break their mouths" ordered the midnight massacre of a tribe of pitiful fugitives who were fleeing a war party of Iroquoian Mohawks and had sought Dutch protection. Another was caused by the murder of an Indian girl by a farmer who saw her stealing his apples. An upriver conflict started when a band of settlers fired a volley into a group of Indians who had been hired by whites to husk corn and had got drunk on their pay. A more serious uprising occurred when the natives discovered that the Dutch had been sending Indian captives into slavery in Curacao.

The Dutch were also constantly quarreling among themselves and their spats were not confined to ordinary Citizens but involved distinguished burghers as well, including the many directors general, most of whom held office for a short time only. Wordy warfare between representatives of the church and government officials were far from unusual. The colony preacher and its director were frequently thrown together and almost as frequently at odds. The first fully ordained minister at New Amsterdam found his habitual avoidance of profanity no bar to forceful expression when he wrote to his patron in Holland that Director Pieter Minuit was "a slippery fellow, who under the painted mask of honesty, is a compound of all iniquity and wickedness. For he is accustomed to the telling of lies, in which he abounds, and to the use of horrible oaths and execrations."

Dominic Bogardus, in particular, was the terror of successive leaders. He opened up on the fourth director, Van Twiller, by calling him a "child of Satan" and promising to preach a sermon against him on the next Sunday that would make him shake in his shoes. Yet a short while after, lured by a case of excellent claret that had been brought to the west bank of the Hudson by Cornelis Van Voorst, he joined Van Twiller in an evening row across the river to try a bottle or two. After disposing of several samples he became quarrelsome and argued hotly with his host and the director over the circumstances of a recent murder. Later all the group became merry and friendly and Van Voorst, to celebrate the reconciliation and salute his guests as they put out on the river, fired an old cannon which stood on the palisade before his home. This proved a more spectacular gesture than he had intended, for the blast set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, making his friends’ progress across the river as light as day.

A few years later, in 1646, Dominie Bogardus seized the opportunity at a gay wedding to attack Director Kieft and his associates: "In Africa which has a climate of intense heat different species of animals come together by which various monsters are generated. But I know not from whence, in such a temperate climate as this, such monsters of men are produced." Hotheaded Kieft answered with a formal written protest, pointing out the differences between certain rites which the dominie had conducted when "dead drunk" as contrasted with ceremonies he had performed when only "pretty drunk." Then, knowing what thunders against him would issue from the house of God on the following Sunday, he ordered the Fort Amsterdam drum corps to beat a loud tattoo just outside the church door during the morning services. He made doubly sure that the good man’s shouts would not be heard, by having the fort cannon fired frequently in the course of the sermon "as if he had ordered it out a-Maying."

Another wedding, that of the dominie’s daughter, found this same director and preacher reconciled and plotting against the guests. The two conspirators had agreed that a new church was necessary to the colony and planned to do something about it. By the time the usual drinking had reached the fourth or fifth round of Bride’s Tears the scheming officials brought forth a subscription sheet and in no time at all had the merry guests competing with each other as to who should pledge most to so worthy a cause. Many a burgher groaned the next morning as he remembered signing away more guilders than he could afford in a moment of alcoholic and religious exaltation. Their bitter complaining got all the way to the authorities in Holland before they were satisfied.

Most illuminating example of the way in which Washington Irving divested the touchy, rough-and-ready characters of the Hudson River settlements of their natural vehemence and drive is in his relation of the exciting brush between Govert Loockermans, captain of the sloop Good Hope, and Nicolas Coorn, in command of Van Rensselaer’s fortifications at the foot of Barren Island. According to court records, Loockermans, who was generally considered a bold fellow by his associates, a smuggler of powder and ball to the Indians yet not above killing one if occasion seemed to demand it, was sailing down river past Barren with a crew of nine, seven of whom were under twenty-eight years of age, when Coorn demanded that he lower his colors in salute with the single word:

"Strike!"
"For whom?" said Captain Loockermans.
"For the right of Rensselaerswyck," shouted Coorn.
"I’ll strike for no one," answered Loockermans, "except the Prince of Orange and the man I work for."

At that Nicolas Coorn fired a cannon and the ball whistled through the mainsail of the Good Hope and cut one of the shrouds, a halyard, and a gasket.

Govert Loockermans held the staff of the flag of the Prince of Orange in his hand as he shouted his answer to this insult:

"Fire, you dogs; and the devil take you."

Coorn fired again but the ball went wild. Thereupon an Indian standing beside him, and quite possibly out of patience with his marksmanship, let fly with his gun and the charge went through the colors of the Prince of Orange just about a foot above Govert Loockermans’s head. Before more damage could be done the sloop was out of range down the river.

Irving tells this story very amusingly. The changes he makes in it to give it his typical flavor, however, are interesting. He says that Govert Loockermans "of few words but great bottom, was seated on the high poop, quietly smoking his pipe," when he was called upon to lower his colors, that he took his pipe out of his mouth only when he answered Coorn, that he never left his chair or stopped puffing, "maintained a smothered, though swelling silence" until the sloop had got down river among the Highlands where he swore so mightily that the echoes of his oaths still "give particular effect to the thunderstorms in that neighborhood."

Thus for purposes of caricature Irving changes the overcholeric Govert Loockermans from a bold, active, shrewd smuggler and Indian fighter, the captain of a crew of hot-blooded young sailors, into one of his typical wide-rear, slow-wit Dutch fatheads. A reader of the actual contemporary records would know that, the Dutch being what they were, the air immediately below Barren. Island was suddenly charged with a series of profound, fanciful, and defiant oaths as the Good Hope dropped down river, and that the leader of the chorus, striding about in his rage and waving the tattered ensign of the Prince of Orange, was her very articulate captain.

Beverwyck
Years after that ludicrous incident, the patroon and the West India Company were still carrying on fierce quarrels. Brant Van Slichtenhorst, director of Rensselaerswyck and the "old gray thief" to most of the dwellers at Fort Orange, built a number of houses beneath the guns of the fort during the years between 1648 and 1651. They would be in the line of fire in case of an Indian raid. The soldier inhabitants complained to Director Pieter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam. That honest official ordered the building stopped. Van Slichtenhorst answered by putting up a house within pistol shot of the fort. The quarrel dragged on for months, was dormant through the winter of 1651.

As soon as the river was free of ice in the spring Stuyvesant, realizing that the "gray thief" was scheming to claim the land on which the fort stood for his employers, took passage upriver. In a towering rage he strode up the hill at Fort Orange on his famous silver-studded wooden leg, and ordered the soldiers to march to Van Slichtenhorst’s house and take down the patroon’s flag. The soldiers fired a volley and took down the colors. Then Old Silver Peg laid out the boundaries of the land he claimed for the West India Company and announced that the land which they enclosed would henceforth be known as Beverwyck. He set up a court with three magistrates to hear all criminal and civil cases in Fort Orange and Beverwyck. Law and order were about to descend on the fur traders.