 In 1621 the Dutch West
India Company (WIC) was chartered as a trading monopoly similar in organization
to the Dutch East India Company. The WIC's area of operations extended from the
west coast of Africa westward across the Atlantic and Pacific to the
eastern-most reaches of the Indonesian archipelago. New Netherland was one of
its many interests, which included the gold coast of Africa, Brazil with its
wealth of sugar and dyewood, and the salt-rich Caribbean islands. Although the
WIC was founded in June of 1621 it took almost two years for it to raise enough
capital to finance its first attempt to take possession of its holdings in
North America.
The initial plan was to distribute
colonists among the remote trading posts on the three major river systems--the
Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware--in order to serve as agricultural support
communities. Nut Island (now Governor's Island) off the tip of Manhattan was to
serve as a point of assembly for transferring cargo from coastal-trading
vessels to large ocean-going ships; a similar role played by the island of
Texel in the Netherlands.(1)
In 1625 Willem Verhulst arrived as director of New Netherland
with instructions to strengthen the satellite trading posts and their related
settlements, but he was ordered to strengthen the post on High Island the most
and to make it the center of the colony.(2)It is unclear
why the directors were drawn to this island in the Delaware River (present-day
Burlington Island, near Burlington, NJ). It is possible that
they had been looking for a major trading center deep in Indian country but,
unlike Fort Orange, ice free the year around. The directors had apparently been
misinformed that the Delaware was a tropical paradise.(3)In fact, one winter it was reported that Indians coming
from the west had been able to cross over the river on the ice to the Dutch
trading post on the eastern shore (Gloucester, NJ). In the end it was not the
decision of poorly informed directors but an incident at Fort Orange on the
upper Hudson that determined the location of the center of New Netherland.
In the spring of 1626 the local commander, Daniel van Crieckenbeeck,
became involved in a war between the Mohawks and Mahicans. When he and six of
his soldiers accompanied a Mahican war party for an attack on the Mohawks, they
were ambushed a short distance from the fort and thoroughly defeated.
Crieckenbeeck and three of his soldiers were killed together with many
Mahicans. The Mohawks were outraged that the Dutch, who had instructions to
remain neutral in such conflicts, would betray them in this manner. Fortunately
Crieckenbeeck's indiscretion coincided with the arrival of Peter Minuit as the
new director of the colony. A trader by the name of Pieter Barentsz
(conversant in several Indian languages and trusted by the natives) was
immediately dispatched to Mohawk country to discuss the unfortunate incident at
Fort Orange. He was able to convince the Mohawks that it had been an
unauthorized initiative on Crieckenbeeck's part and assured them that it would
not happen again. Upon hearing the news of the disaster Minuit sailed
immediately to Fort Orange. He had been in the colony the previous year as a
volunteer with the assignment of exploring New Netherland from one end to the
other for precious metals and other marketable resources. Minuit knew the land
and the various native American peoples better than anyone else in the colony
at that time. He saw the dangers in the situation and realized that the
outlying support communities were in peril of destruction. Minuit resolved the
problem by purchasing Manhattan Island and moving all the outlying families
from the satellite posts to this central location. Apparently the Mohawks
agreed with Barentsz to allow trading personnel to remain at Fort Orange but
insisted that the families be removed; or they may have indicated that they
could no longer guarantee the settlers' safety. At this time even the families
from the Connecticut River and High Island were withdrawn. Instead of retaining
a presence at the post on High Island, it was moved to a new location on the
eastern shore of the Delaware River (present-day Gloucester, NJ). The new
trading post was christened Fort Nassau.
Footnotes
(1) Block Island off the coast of
Connecticut and Rhode Island served the same function during the early years
after Hudson's explorations.
[Back]
(2) See
Documents Relating to New Netherland, 1624-1626, San Marino, California, 1924,
for the instructions to Verhulst as director of New Netherland. [Back]
(3) The Dutch chronicler, Wassenaer, offered the
following description of the South River region, which may have been a common
notion of the climate there, and may have been known to the WIC directors: "In
the South Bay, some miles closer to Florida, it is a more temperate land. There
is no winter there except in January--then only for a few days." Wassenaer,
2:146 verso. [Back]
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