The Island at the Center of the World (7 page)

A newly formed council of settlers met. They put Verhulst on trial and voted to banish him and his wife from the province. Verhulst did not go gently; he was furious and vindictive. He vowed to return someday at the head of a foreign army and make use of his knowledge of the territory and its fortifications—an interesting threat in light of what not he but Minuit would do twelve years later.

The colonists then voted Minuit their new commander. Minuit acted quickly once his role had changed from private scout to officer of the province. The first decision he seems to have made is the one that would have the most profound consequences. The leaders in Amsterdam had tried to supervise the settlement from afar, which was awkward and ineffective, and Verhulst, their man on the scene, hadn't been able to see the obvious problems. Too few settlers were spread out across the hundreds of miles of territory; the news from Fort Orange convinced Minuit that safety was a major concern. Nut Island (today Governor's Island) may have been useful as an initial staging area, but it was too small for a settlement of any size. The South River did not live up to its tropical billing. To anyone with a practical and logistical mind it was clear that the island of Manhattan, separated from Nut Island by a channel “a gunshot wide,” answered every need. It was large enough to support a population, small enough that a fort located on its southernmost tip could be defended. Its forests were rich in game; it had flatlands that could be farmed and freshwater streams. It was situated at the mouth of the river to which Indian fur-traders came from hundreds of miles around, and which connected to other waterways that penetrated deep into the interior. It was also at the entrance to the bay, located in a wide and inviting harbor that seemed not to freeze over in winter. It was, in short, a natural fulcrum between the densely civilized continent of Europe and the tantalizingly wild continent of North America. It was the perfect island.

S
O HE BOUGHT
it. Everyone knows that. Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from a group of local Indians for sixty guilders worth of goods, or as the nineteenth-century historian Edmund O'Callaghan calculated it, twenty-four dollars. From the seventeenth through the early twentieth century thousands of real estate transactions occurred in which native Americans sold parcels—ranging in size from a town lot to a midwestern state—to English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and other European settlers. But only one sale is legend; only one is known by everyone. Only one has had the durability to be riffed on in Broadway song (“Give It Back to the Indians,” from the 1939 Rodgers and Hart musical
Too Many Girls
), and, at the end of the twentieth century, to do service as a punchline in a column by humorist Dave Barry (“. . . which the Dutch settler Peter Minuit purchased from the Manhattan Indians for $24, plus $167,000 a month in maintenance fees”).

It's pretty clear why this particular sale lodged in the cultural memory, why it became legend: the extreme incongruity, the exquisitely absurd price. It is the most dramatic illustration of the whole long process of stripping the natives of their land. The idea that the center of world commerce, an island packed with trillions of dollars' worth of real estate, was once bought from supposedly hapless Stone Age innocents for twenty-four dollars' worth of household goods is too delicious to let slip. It speaks to our sense of early American history as the history of savvy, ruthless Europeans conniving, tricking, enslaving, and bludgeoning innocent and guileless natives out of their land and their lives. It's a neatly packed symbol of the entire conquest of the continent that was to come.

Beyond that, the purchase snippet is notable because it is virtually the only thing about the Manhattan colony that
has
become a part of history. For this reason, too, it deserves exploring.

So, who were the Indians who agreed to this transaction, and what did they think it meant? The ancestors of the people whom European settlers took to calling Indians (after Columbus, who at first thought he had arrived at the outer reaches of India) traveled the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska that existed during the last ice age, more than twelve thousand years ago, then spread slowly through the Americas. They came from Asia; their genetic makeup is a close match with Siberians and Mongolians. They spread out thinly across the incomprehensible vastness of the American continents to create a linguistic richness unparalleled in human history: it has been estimated that at the moment Columbus arrived in the New World twenty-five percent of all human languages were North American Indian.

There are two rival, hardened stereotypes that get in the way of understanding these people: the one that arose from the long cultural dismissing of American Indians as “primitive,” and the modern dogma that sees them as Noble and Defenseless. Both are cartoon images. Recent work in genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics makes plain what should be obvious: that the Mahican, Mohawk, Lenape, Montauk, Housatonic, and other peoples occupying the lands that for a time were called New Netherland, as well as the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Sokoki, Pennacook, Abenaki, Oneida, Onondaga, Susquehannock, Nanticoke, and others who inhabited other parts of what became the states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, were biologically, genetically, intellectually, all but identical to the Dutch, English, French, Swedish, and others who came into contact with them in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Indians were as skilled, as duplicitous, as capable of theological rumination and technological cunning, as smart and as pig-headed, and as curious and as cruel as the Europeans who met them. The members of the Manhattan-based colony who knew them—who spent time among them in their villages, hunted and traded with them, learned their languages—knew this perfectly well. It was later, after the two had separated into rival camps, that the stereotypes set. The early seventeenth century was a much more interesting time than the Wild West era, a time when Indians and Europeans were something like equal participants, dealing with one another as allies, competitors, partners.

But if the Indians were so smart and in a strong position, why would they sell their land, the most precious thing they owned? Putting the question that way raises a point familiar to every middle school student: the Indians had a different idea of land ownership from the Europeans. With no concept of permanent property transfer, Indians of the Northeast saw a real estate deal as a combination of a rental agreement and a treaty or alliance between two groups. Indian nations were divided and subdivided into tribes, villages, and other communities. They were often at war or in fear of attack from other groups, and often entered into defensive alliances with one another, which involved sharing certain tribal lands in exchange for the strength of numbers. This colored the way the Indians saw their land deals with the Dutch and English. They would give the newcomers use of some of their land, and in exchange they would get blankets, knives, kettles, and other extremely useful goods, and also a military ally. That this was how they viewed land deals is illustrated neatly by several cases—such as one in South Carolina in the 1750s between the colonial governor and Cherokee leaders—in which the Indians refused any payment at all for the land. As they saw it, the protective alliance was payment enough.

This was probably what the Mahican Monemin had in mind when he approached the unfortunate Daniel van Crieckenbeeck: he was asking the Dutch to fulfill what he understood to be part of the bargain in the land deal at Fort Orange, to help him in a battle with his enemies. Van Crieckenbeeck may have understood this was a part of the Mahican notion of property transfer and tried to do what was expected of him, in defiance of his orders.

Thus the situation of the Indians. As to the Dutch, the neatness and compactness of the legend of Manhattan's purchase has to do with the lack of attention paid to the Dutch colony by historians and with what they perceived to be a shortage of information about the settlement. For those hoping to understand the history of the Manhattan-based colony, the great disaster took place in 1821, when the government of the Netherlands, in a truly unfortunate fit of housekeeping (the Dutch have always been fastidious cleaners), sold for scrap paper what remained of the archives of the Dutch East and West India Companies prior to 1700. Eighteen years later, an American agent named John Romeyn Brodhead, working on behalf of New York State, went to the Netherlands in search of documentary material on the Dutch colony, and found to his “surprise, mortification, and regret” that all of it—eighty thousand pounds of records—had vanished.

Fortunately, we have another great mass of relevant documents: the official records of the province, twelve thousand pages strong. As outlined at the beginning of this book, the bulk of these records are only now, after centuries of neglect, being translated by Dr. Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Project, and it is upon these that much of this book relies. These records miraculously survived wars, fires, mold, and rodents. But they begin in 1638. None of the province's records prior to that year have survived, possibly because when, like Verhulst, the early governors of the province were dismissed from service, they likely took the records of their administration back to Amsterdam with them to aid in their defense. We are left then with a gaping hole at the earliest period of New York's prehistory, which nineteenth-century historians filled in as best they could. They knew the name Peter Minuit, knew that he was an early director of the province, and they had a tantalizing scrap of paper suggesting that the island had been purchased from the
“Wilden”
(Indians) for “the value of 60 guilders.”

We know more now and are able to paint a more detailed picture of what went on in the spring of 1626. In Amsterdam in the year 1910, a sheaf of papers showed up at a rare books and manuscripts auction. A curator had labeled item No. 1795 “Documents sur la Nouvelle-Néerlande, 1624–1626.” The owner was a man with the formidable name of Alexander Carel Paul George Ridder van Rappard. The antique sheets he put up for sale may have been part of the collection of his grandfather, Frans Alexander Ridder van Rappard, a noted collector. It was years before the papers were bought by another collector (the American railroad tycoon Henry E. Huntington), were translated, published, and made available to scholars.
*2
The documents—which had once been a part of the West India Company archives and had somehow escaped the wholesale destruction—comprised five letters and sets of instructions dating from the colony's beginnings. Much of the information in this chapter comes from these papers, which have provided a new perspective on what the Dutch thought they were doing with their New World colony. One long-held belief, for example, was that the colony from the beginning was an unorganized, ad hoc settlement, not so much mismanaged as allowed to grow in a state of near anarchy, that was generally a mess until the English came in and began to make it function. The so-called Van Rappard documents prove this wrong. They show that a great deal of care was devoted to the colony and to the welfare of the inhabitants. It is from these documents that we know that there was a leader before Minuit, the hapless Willem Verhulst. Before he left the Dutch Republic, Verhulst was given explicit instructions to “carefully note all places where there is any appearance of tillable or pasture land, timber of any kind, minerals, or other things,” to do test drillings of the soil, to denote every waterfall, stream, and place for sawmills, to note “inlets, depths, shallows, rocks, and width of the rivers,” and indicate the best places for forts, “keeping in mind that the fittest place is where the river is narrow, where it cannot be fired upon from higher ground, where large ships cannot come too close, where there is a distant view unobstructed by trees or hills, where it is possible to have water in the moat, and where there is no sand, but clay or other firm earth.” The instructions note elaborate preparations for farming: “. . . divers trees, vines, and all sorts of seeds are being sent over . . . and of each sort of fruit he shall successively send us samples. . . . And with regard to the aniseed and cuminseed which is sent over to make a trial with, he shall sow the same at different times and places, observing at what time and in which place it grows best and yields most.”

Thanks to this cache of documents, we have a revised picture: of a well-organized Dutch effort and of Minuit as a competent leader wrapping his mind around the problem of establishing a colony. Another figure emerges from these documents. In July of 1626, Isaack de Rasière, a thirty-year-old merchant's son with a taste for adventure, stepped off the
Arms of Amsterdam
and onto the Manhattan shore, ready to begin his duties as secretary of the province. The Van Rappard documents include letters that de Rasière wrote to his bosses in Holland. In one, he reported that the island was home to a small group of natives whom he called the Manhatesen: “they are about 200 to 300 strong, women and men, under different chiefs, whom they call
Sackimas.”
It was presumably this small band—probably a northern branch of the Lenni Lenape Indians—with whom Peter Minuit consummated a real estate transaction.

It's true no deed is on file anywhere to prove that the sale took place, but many other important records of the period have failed to survive the centuries. We also have an account from the 1670s that makes reference to the deed to Manhattan, so it existed at that time. Most interestingly, we have an excellent, evocative account of the purchase, by someone who had no interest in deceiving. When the
Arms of Amsterdam,
which had brought Isaack de Rasière to New Netherland, left Manhattan on its return voyage, it carried a neat collection of items and individuals associated with this pivotal moment in history: first, the banished Verhulst himself, along with his wife, returning in disgrace and anger (but mollified somewhat by some of the spoils of their adventure—back in Amsterdam, he had a tabard, or cape, made of sixteen beaver pelts, while his wife had a tailor fashion a fur coat out of thirty-two otter skins); second, a chest containing the personal effects of the unfortunate Daniel van Crieckenbeeck, including an otterskin coat and a ring, which were being sent to his wife; third, a letter from de Rasière to the West India Company directors, in which he detailed the council's decision to oust Verhulst, as well as information about the purchase of Manhattan.