The Island at the Center of the World (8 page)

This information may have been the deed itself, which might thus have been among the West India Company records that were sold for scrap in 1821 and so vanished forever. Fortunately, however, Pieter Schaghen, a Dutch official who had just been appointed to represent the government on the company's board, was on the dock when the ship pulled into port. He wrote a letter to his superiors at The Hague giving a detailed description of the ship's contents and news of the province. It is one of the most famous historical documents in the Dutch language and one of the most important records of early American history. It is, in effect, New York City's birth certificate.

High and Mighty Lords
My Lords the States General
At The Hague

High and Mighty Lords:

Yesterday, arrived here the Ship the Arms of Amsterdam, which sailed from New Netherland, out of the River Mauritius, on the 23
^rd
September. They report that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the Women also have borne some children there. They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; it is 11,000 morgens in size. They had all their grain sowed by the middle of May, and reaped by the middle of August. They send thence samples of summer grain; such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, canary seed, beans and flax. The cargo of the aforesaid ship is

7246 Beaver skins

1781⁄2 Otter skins

675 Otter skins

48 Mink skins

36 Wildcat skins

33 Minks

34 Rat skins

Considerable Oak timber and Hickory.

Herewith,

High and Mighty Lords, be commended to the mercy of the Almighty.
In Amsterdam, The 5
^th
November Ao. 1626

Your High Mightinesses' obedient,
P. Schaghen

Two days later, in an office within the fortress-like Binnenhof at The Hague, a clerk of the States General picked up his pen and wrote a terse memo: “Received a letter from Mr. Schaghen, written at Amsterdam, the 5
^th
inst., containing advice of the arrival of a ship from New Netherland, which requires no action.”

It is this letter, then, that gives us the purchase price. While it may be a useful whip for belated self-flagellation over the white takeover of the continent from the Indians, being fair to those involved in the transaction means looking at it from their perspective. We can, first of all, dismiss the twenty-four-dollar figure because it dates to the mid-nineteenth century and has no relationship to buying power two hundred years earlier. Second, Minuit paid not sixty guilders, which the Indians would have found useless, but “the value of” sixty guilders—meaning goods. What amount of goods was worth sixty guilders in 1626? Calculating relative worth is hopelessly fraught. A steel knife might be of relatively little value in Amsterdam or London, of considerable worth to a Dutch settler living in primitive conditions along the North River in America, and of enormous worth to an Indian living what anthropologists today call a “Late Woodlands” existence.

One way of putting the sale in perspective is to compare the figure with other amounts paid for parcels of wilderness. In 1630, for example, Peter Minuit, on behalf of the West India Company, bought Staten Island from the Tappans for “Duffels, Kittles, Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jews Harps, and diverse other small wares.” In 1664 three Englishmen purchased a vast tract of farmland in New Jersey from Indians for two coats, two guns, two kettles, ten bars of lead, twenty handfuls of gunpowder, four hundred fathoms of wampum and twenty fathoms of cloth. We can also look at the Manhattan sale in the context of land transfers between Dutch residents. Three years after the Manhattan transfer, the West India Company granted a Dutchman two hundred acres of what would become Greenwich Village in exchange for one-tenth of whatever he produced from the land, plus the promise to “deliver yearly at Christmas to the director a brace of capons.” In 1638, Andries Hudde sold Gerrit Wolphertsen one hundred acres of land on Long Island for fifty-two guilders.

So the Manhattan purchase was roughly in line with other prices paid to Indians, and while it was considerably less, on a per-acre basis, than what the Dutch paid each other for land, it was in the same ballpark. As a reference point, a West India Company soldier earned about one hundred guilders per year—or nearly twice the price paid for Manhattan. The overriding fact was that in its wilderness state New World land was dirt cheap.

On the other side, given their idea of land ownership, the Indians who “sold” Manhattan fully intended to continue to use the land, and they did. Thanks to the comparative recentness of serious study about the Manhattan colony, new information is liable to turn up at any time and from the most unlikely places. As historians in the United States have become interested in the colony, some in the Netherlands have as well. Thus, a court case that ended in 1663, which has been slumbering since that date in the archives of the Dutch town of Arnhem but was unearthed and written about by Dutch historian Janny Venema in 2000, gives focus to the fuzzy notion of how American Indians saw real estate transactions in the seventeenth century. In 1648, Brant van Slichtenhorst was hired by the Van Rensselaers, the largest landowners in the province, to manage their vast estate. Years later, back in the Dutch Republic, he filed suit for expenses owed, and the seven-year case is packed with details about life among the Mohawks and Mahicans. On behalf of his patrons, Van Slichtenhorst bought several estates from the Indians during his time in the Dutch colony, and none of these transactions was remotely straightforward. Beginning days before the sale and continuing for years after, Van Slichtenhorst had to host as many as fifty Indians at a time, feeding them and providing a steady supply of beer and brandy for the sachems. In addition to the sellers and their retinue, in one case there was actually an Indian real estate broker who also demanded, as part of his commission, to stay “8 or 10 times” at Van Slichtenhorst's home, along with several women. There was always “great trouble and quarrels with all the Indian people,” Van Slichtenhorst complained, “and great filth and stench, and everything within reach was stolen . . .”

This continued not for days or weeks but for
years
after the sale. Van Slichtenhorst would be out surveying the property and come across an encamped party of Indians. Rather than be indignant at the “trespassers,” he was obliged, in accordance with their custom, to give them further presents and hospitality. “I can honestly say that the first three years we have, not even for half a day, been free from Indians,” he wrote. In the long run, of course, the Europeans got their way. But the Indians were far from guileless dupes, and in the short term, which was what mattered at the time, they got considerably more out of a simple land transaction than the amount of the purchase indicates.

We can assume something similar happened with the sale of Manhattan. When Isaack de Rasière wrote to Amsterdam in 1628, two years after the purchase of the island, he used the present tense, reporting that Manhattan
is
inhabited by Manhatesen Indians, indicating that they had not gone anywhere. The Indians are a constant presence in the Dutch records of the colony. The settlers relied on them. And there was plenty of room; the island was, for the life of the colony, mostly wilderness. It is not until 1680 that the Manhattan Indians are referred to in the past tense, by which time they had, by some accounts, moved north into the Bronx.

We can only imagine, then, the scene that must have taken place somewhere on lower Manhattan in early summer 1626: Minuit, his aides, soldiers, and settlers, the Indian sachems and their retainers, the formal ceremony with the making of marks on parchment, and surrounding it, for weeks or months on end, the visits, drinking, eating, and bestowing of presents, in a deal that would satisfy both sides, each of which had its ideas about how it would pan out. And in some sort of follow-up ceremony forgotten by history, accompanied by a document subsequently lost, Minuit would have dedicated his city-in-the-making, and named it, appropriately, after its Dutch parent, some of whose culture and way of being—its openness and its swagger—the grubby little island village would inherit.

That piece of work completed, Minuit would then have boarded a company sloop and sailed upriver to deal with the crisis at Fort Orange. He ordered Catalina Trico, Joris Rapalje, and the other settlers to vacate the area; a message was sent to the South River settlers as well. Minuit was regrouping. Manhattan—New Amsterdam—would be the center of things from now on.

He then sailed back to Manhattan, arriving in port on a Friday evening, the last day of July. The next morning, he met the man who would become his valued assistant, Isaack de Rasière, whose ship had arrived while Minuit was away. De Rasière handed him letters from the directors; the two then fell to discussing who they should send north to replace Van Criekenbeeck, Minuit having decided to retain a contingent of soldiers at the fort. They decided to promote Bastiaen Krol, the Frisian lay minister who had come with Rapalje and Trico. Krol had also been at Fort Orange for two years, and he had become particularly close to the Indians, for de Rasière wrote that they chose him “because he is well acquainted with the language” of the tribe. So the man whose desire on arrival was to serve the church in the new province would instead be given a musket and a military command. No one knows with how much fear he accepted the job; he had seen what became of his predecessor.

The small party of soldiers aside, the settlers, about two hundred of them, were all together now along the flattish southeastern flank of Manhattan, looking across the narrower of the two rivers that wrapped around the island to the bluffed shore five hundred yards across the water. Under Minuit they worked quickly to progress from the state of campers to settlers. Within a year or so they had thirty wooden houses constructed along “The Strand.” Minuit and de Rasière roomed together in one of these. The one stone building they erected, with a thatched roof made from river reeds, was the West India Company headquarters, where pelts brought from throughout the territory were stored until they were to be shipped home and where Isaack de Rasière made his office. At the southernmost tip, poised to catch the fullest gusts, a man named François, a millwright by profession, built two windmills: one for grinding grain, the other for sawing lumber.

Minuit also oversaw the construction of a fort. It occupied the southwestern point of the island, well positioned to defend against enemy vessels entering the harbor. The original plan was for a vast structure in which all the colonists would live, safe from the savages of the country. But the savages didn't seem so savage, and anyway it was clearly impossible, given the manpower, to do anything very grand. Minuit ordered a redesign. The man who had been sent over to lay out the town and build the fort was apparently uniquely unskilled for a Dutch engineer: the original structure was comprised mostly of heaped earth; it began to crumble even before it was finished. It would be torn down and rebuilt over the next several years; indeed, the ramshackle state of Fort Amsterdam would be an issue right up until the moment when Peter Stuyvesant, standing on its unsteady ramparts, would agree to surrender it to the English. The fort's general outlines are apparent today in the “footprint” of the old Customs House, which more or less occupies its former position, just opposite Battery Park. In one of history's ironies, this spot, which was originally intended to keep Indians out, is now the home of the Museum of the American Indian, arguably the only place on Manhattan in which signs of Indian civilization are apparent.

As the settlers explored their island, they found it wondrously varied: thick forest studded with great knuckles of protruding rock, grassy meadow, high hills rising in the center and to the north, charging and trickling streams, large reedy ponds. The Indians who traded with them doubled as guides. Wickquasgeck was the name of a tribe that inhabited portions of the mainland just to the north of the island, as well as some of the northern forests of Manhattan. The Manhattan Indians used the Wickquasgeck name for the path they took through the center of the island to these northern reaches. Coming south along it, Indians of various tribes reached the Dutch settlement at the southern end of the island. The Europeans could likewise follow it north—through stands of pin oak, chestnut, poplar, and pine, past open fields strewn with wild strawberries (“the ground in the flat land near the river is covered with strawberries,” one of them noted, “which grow so plentifully in the fields, that one can lie down and eat them”), crossing the fast-running brook that flowed southeast from the highlands in the area of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, more or less where the Plaza Hotel stands, to empty into a small bay on the East River—to hunt in the thick forest at the island's center and to fish the inlets that penetrated the eastern coast. As it was clearly destined to be the most prominent lane on the island, when the Dutch widened the path they referred to it as the Gentlemen's Street, or the High Street, or simply the Highway. The English, of course, called it Broadway.
*3

G
OING ON IN
this way, every muscle and every ounce of guile put into maintaining survival, the water's edge approaching and then inching away from their little community with every tide, the Manhattanites might scarcely have noticed what was happening over the next few years. The sails out in the harbor appeared more frequently, the skiffs ferrying in from anchored ships (there was no dock yet) bringing more faces, and more varied ones. Ebony faces from the central highlands of Angola. Arab faces creased from North African sandstorms. An Italian, a Pole, a Dane.

Something was happening that was quite unlike the unfolding of society at the two English colonies to their north, where the rigid Puritans, who arrived in 1630, and the even more rigid Pilgrims maintained, in their wide-brimmed piety, monocultures in the wild. This was a business settlement, a way station on the rising Atlantic trade circuit. News of its existence spread to places as far afield as the Amazonian thickets of Bahia and Pernambuco in Brazil, the newly founded Portuguese slave trading port of Luanda in Angola, and Stockholm, where an energetic monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, set his sights on making Sweden, long a frozen boondocks of Europe, a military and trading power to rival Spain and the rising nations of England and the Dutch Republic.