de Halve Maen, Vol. 93, No. 3

de Halve Maen

Journal of The Holland Society of New York Vol. 93, No. 3 2020

Records of The Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Flatbush, Kings County, New York Volume I 1677-1720 Volume II Deacons' Accounts 1654–1709 Translated by David William Voorhees Published under the auspices of The Holland Society of New York, these two volumes translate the records of the consistory minutes, baptismal and marriage records, and membership lists of the Dutch Reformed congregations located in the present-day New York City borough of Brooklyn. Special features include transliterated Dutch text and English line-for-line translation.

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de Halve Maen

The Holland Society of New York 1345 SIXTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10105 President Col. Adrian T. Bogart III Vice President Richard Van Deusen Treasurer David Conklin

Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America Secretary James J. Middaugh Domine Rev. Paul D. Lent

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Trustees Emeriti Adrian T. Bogart Kent L. Stratt John O. Delamater David William Voorhees Robert Gardiner Goelet Ferdinand L. Wyckoff Jr. David M. Riker Stephen S. Wyckoff Rev. Everett Zabriskie Burgher Guard Captain Sarah Bogart Vice-Presidents Connecticut-Westchester R. Dean Vanderwarker III Dutchess and Ulster County D. David Conklin Florida James S. Lansing International Lt. Col. Robert W. Banta Jr. (Ret) Jersey Shore Stuart W. Van Winkle Long Island Eric E. DeLamarter Mid-West David Ditmars New Amsterdam Eric E. DeLamarter New England Niagara David S. Quackenbush Old Bergen-Central New Jersey Gregory M. Outwater Old South Pacific Northwest Edwin Outwater III Pacific Southwest (North) Kenneth G. Winans Pacific Southwest (South) Paul H. Davis Patroons Robert E. Van Vranken Potomac Christopher M. Cortright Rocky Mountain Adrian T. Bogart IV South River Walton Van Winkle III Texas James J. Middaugh Virginia and the Carolinas James R. Van Blarcom United States Air Force United States Army Col. Adrian T. Bogart III United States Coast Guard Capt. Louis K. Bragaw Jr. (Ret) United States Marines Lt. Col. Robert W. Banta Jr., USMC (Ret) United States Navy LCDR James N. Vandenberg, CEC, USN Editor David William Voorhees Production Manager Sarah Bogart Editorial Committee Peter Van Dyke, Chair Christopher Cortright John Lansing

Copy Editor Rudy VanVeghten

VOL. XCIII

Fall 2020

NUMBER 3

IN THIS ISSUE: 50

Editor’s Corner

51

Trade and Diplomacy on the North River: Contextualizing Early Dutch-Mohawk Relations

61

“Surrounded by Enemies”: Albany’s Perilous Location

71

Here and There in New Netherland Studies

71

In Memoriam

by James O’Grady

by Rudy VanVeghten

The Holland Society of New York was organized in 1885 to collect and preserve information respecting the history and settlement of New Netherland by the Dutch, to perpetuate the memory, foster and promote the principles and virtues of the Dutch ancestors of its members, to maintain a library relating to the Dutch in America, and to prepare papers, essays, books, etc., in regard to the history and genealogy of the Dutch in America. The Society is principally organized of descendants in the direct male line of residents of the Dutch colonies in the present-day United States prior to or during the year 1675. Inquiries respecting the several criteria for membership are invited.

De Halve Maen (ISSN 0017-6834) is published quarterly by The Holland Society.

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David M. Riker Rudy VanVeghten

Cover: Ship of the Dutch East India Company (photo Thom Quine) Wikimedia Commons.

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Editor’s Corner

A

S A RESULT of this spring and summer’s violent social unrest, it is obvious that our interpretation of the American narrative is composed of not just a single thread but rather a rich tapestry composed of many strands trying to be heard. Indeed it was only a generation ago that the Dutch contribution to the American narrative began its emergence from obscurity. Now we are recognizing that diversity existed with the various peoples who inhabited New Netherland before the Dutch arrived. This issue of de Halve Maen opens a small window into this complex world with two essays relating to early Dutch-Mohawk relations in the Hudson River Valley: James O’Grady’s “Trade and Diplomacy on the North River: Contextualizing Early Dutch-Mohawk Relations” and Rudy VanVeghten’s “ʻSurrounded by Enemies’: Albany’s Perilous Location.”

James O’Grady examines how the Dutch and various Native peoples perceived their interaction in the early contact period.

“For many situations,” O’Grady notes, “we have the Dutch testimonials, in other words, one side of the story.” He believes that through scrutinizing these interactions, “some recorded and countless unrecorded,” we may be able to “extrapolate the trajectory of the relationship by connecting the dots between disparate stories and encounters.” As an example, O’Grady reviews the historiography of the Iroquoian concept of kaswentha. In Iroquoian culture, he writes, kaswentha is a symbol of mutual respect between peoples. For Iroquoians, the “promise of friendship was vital to commerce.” The Dutch, who viewed commerce solely in terms of wealth acquisition, fell short of Iroquoian expectations. Through this lens we can perceive how the Iroquois viewed certain Dutch actions and hence put their interpretations into context. For the peoples of the American Northeast the economic worldviews of Europeans and American Indians were fundamentally different.

In his essay, Rudy VanVeghten reviews the reasons for Albany’s “constant state of alarm” from the time of the establishment of Fort Nassau in 1614 to the onset of King Philip’s War in the mid-1670s. Established in the midst of Native American territory to facilitate the acquisition of Indian-supplied furs, the settlement had from the beginning “tenuous relations with its nearest aboriginal neighbors—the Algonquian Mahicans to the east, and the Iroquoian Mohawks to the west.” As things evolved, the Dutch, and later English, found themselves at the center of ongoing conflicts that extended far beyond Beverwijck/Albany’s immediate vicinity, “stretching from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, and from Labrador to Chesapeake Bay.” As wars between rival Indian cultures waxed and waned over the decades, competing Dutch, English, and French interests aligned with different Indian nations. As a result, VanVeghten writes, “nervous Hudson Valley colonists often times didn’t know which shoulder to look over.”

Both O’Grady and VanVeghten emphasize that European relations with American Indian nations dated well before European colonization. Stories and rumors about New World peoples were part of the European consciousness by the time of settlement, as were stories and perceptions about Europeans

among the Indians. Whatever their previous interactions, each people interpreted the other within their own well-established understanding of the world.

The Mohawks must have seen the Dutch useful to their imperial designs less than ten years after settlement commenced.

Iroquoian Mohawks in addition to the nearby Mahicans, VanVeghten writes, brought furs to exchange for European goods.

For the next decade, they competed for favored trade status as the Dutch presence increased until a devastating smallpox epidemic hit. The epidemic’s mortality on the immunity-lacking tribes ranged from 65 to as much as 75 percent, reducing the Mohawk population from an estimated 8,000 to about 3,000 or less. One outcome of this epidemic, VanVeghten notes, was an effort to repopulate through warfare and the adoption of captured individuals from other tribes. When in 1628 the Mohawks prevailed in their war with the Mahicans, large-scale abandonment of indigenous villages in the area of the Hudson/ Mohawk River confluence provided a vacuum into which Kiliaen van Rensselaer registered a patroonship in 1629.

Likewise, competing European hopes for capitalizing on the New World fur trade caused English and French to leverage the close trade relationship Albany had with the Iroquois. New Yorkers’ concerns over the Iroquois-Algonquian flareups grew steadily during the long administration of King Louis XIV of France, who sought to eradicate the Iroquois in order to divert beaver pelt dominance to French Quebec. With neighboring English colonies to the east and south, the ambitious FrenchIndian alliance to the north, and the hard-to-read Mohawks and Iroquois to the west, the Dutch felt penned in. It would be the same theme heard consistently in the Fort OrangeBeverwijck-Albany area throughout the seventeenth century.

Late in the century, however, Native peoples of the Northeast had a greater concern than competition for the beaver trade, as VanVeghten writes, it would be “the loss of their ancestral homeland, which would color their relations with Europeans thereafter.”

Present-day fears among many Americans of European descent that by integrating the diverse other narratives of the past to their own interpretation will cancel out their culture are simply misplaced. To truly understand ourselves today we need to include all the elements that created us. Likewise, attempts by some to “rewrite” the past by denying elements of the old narrative only lessens their story. “By dissecting the interactions between the Native peoples of New York and Henry Hudson’s crew,” O’Grady notes, “we find that while the story may raise more questions than answers, it offers us a relatable tale about humanity, two distinct groups coming into physical contact for the first time.” May the whole story be heard.

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David William Voorhees Editor

de Halve Maen

Trade and Diplomacy on the North River: Contextualizing Early Dutch-Mohawk Relations

by James O’Grady The People of the countrey cam aboord of us, making shew of love, and gave us tobacco and Indian wheat, and departed for that night; but we durst not trust them.1

I

—Robert Juet, officer on the Halve Maen

N 1620, a Dutch trader named Willem Hontom and his crew landed their ship on the shores of Long Island, eager to exchange fresh European goods for the most sought-after good at that time: beaver pelts.2 Their initial expedition to the Virginias had yielded them virtually nothing, and so they were eager to make some sort of exchange, so as to not come home broken and empty-handed. Sure enough, James O’Grady graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in history, with specialization in early modern European and American studies. He was a Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History intern in 2018.

He thanks Dr. Lou Roper and the staff at Historic Huguenot Street for continued support throughout the research and writing of this essay.

some Algonquians boarded their craft to begin conducting trade, and according to the crew, each party treated the other with good faith and a hope for a friendship to develop.3 The Algonquians told Hontom that they were interested in trade, but would need a few days to bring their trade goods from inland. Anxiously, they waited. After about four days, patience wearing thin, the Dutch welcomed a single man aboard, bearing no more than twelve pelts. Forthwith, Hontom’s crew presented him with a chest of wares. With the acuity of someone who had dealt with Europeans before, the Algonquian “let it be known that he had no desire for the goods therein, demanding that someone should fetch other axes and wares out of the hold.”4 As the crew went down to the stores, a large contingent of Algonquians allegedly boarded the ship. To the remaining crew

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still on board, they were initially friendly in their interactions. Soon, however, these newcomers began to demand that the crew open all the chests in the hold for them. To this request, the crew must have refused, as well as felt a cold chill of recognition that something was seriously wrong. In panic, they ran to the top deck, shouting to Hontom and the rest of the crew about what was transpiring, worried that the Natives were attempting to reach the axes and knives.

The crew convened to violently eject all but four of their trading partners from the ship.

In order to escape with their lives, these four men offered wampum to the enraged, shaken-up Dutchmen. Hontom’s crew let them leave in peace, seemingly appeased.

Robert Juet, September 11, 1609, “Extract from the Journal of the Voyage of the Half Moon . . .” Collections of the New York Historical Society, second series, vol.1 (New York, 1841), 325.

1

Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014), 133. In exchange for these pelts, the hot European commodities in the 1620s were axes, knives, copper kettles, glass beads, and other commonplace items. For a comprehensive archaeological analysis, see James Bradley, Before Albany (Albany, NY, 2007).

2

3

Romney, 132.

4

Ibid., 134.

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The sailors went back to Amsterdam, apart from these curious beads, empty-handed.5 Susanah Shaw Romney, who focuses on this event in her monograph, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America, points out the problem of interpretation regarding this instance. On one hand, there were a handful of Dutch sailors who agree that it happened just like this. On the other, it is not totally feasible that the Algonquian traders were really reaching for the weapons in the trunks. They no doubt had weapons of their own, which, if murder was on the itinerary, they would have been far more comfortable using. Also, if they allowed themselves to be ejected from the boat without casualties when only a portion of the crew was in the hold with them, it does not seem their intent was to steal or murder. Given the suspicious disposition of the first Native trader, it is more reasonable to assume that the Algonquians were concerned, possibly from other dealings they had had with the Dutch, about being cheated out of quality goods.6 Myriad other questions could be asked. Could it be that the sailors ejected all but four so that they could continue trade with the remaining men? Did the Natives see this as a ransom situation? In many such situations, we only have the Dutch testimonials—in other words, one side of the story.

Although this interaction was violent and unfortunate, there are no mentions of any casualties, which, if this is to be believed, is about as good as one could hope these private trade-missions would go. This snippet

of Willem Hontom’s experience as skipper is only one example of some recorded, and countless unrecorded, interactions that the indigenous peoples of New York would remember about the Dutch.

These brief and sometimes violent encounters formed the bases of the opinions that Natives held about the Dutch. Since the substance of these cross-cultural meetings have been lost to time, we can only extrapolate the trajectory of the relationship by connecting the dots between disparate stories and encounters.7 Maybe we will never come to a satisfactory answer when all we have are half stories depicting an unknown proportion of all interactions that ever took place.

Although there is a paucity of written material we can use to understand the opinions of those who received the Dutch on their shores since Hudson’s arrival in the river valley in 1609, historians such as Paul Otto, Alan Trelease, William Starna, and Jon Parmenter posit frameworks that offer insights into how Native, specifically Iroquoian, cultural practices and perspectives shaped this relationship. Their analyses of Iroquoian and indigenous Northeast social life, norms, and communication, help explain experiences like Willem Hontom’s anthropologically by studying what Europeans once interpreted as bizarre or rude behavior.

Historians cite the concept of kaswentha as a prime example of the Dutch’s inability to understand their Iroquoian “brothers.”

The Dutch were confounded by the seemingly overbearing expectations natives

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placed on something as transactional and simple as a trade agreement. According to Jon Parmenter kaswentha is an Iroquoian notion of allegiance or friendship that has risen from the mists of history even though literary sources do not support its existence as strongly as he would hope.8 Kaswentha is a symbol of mutual respect and non-interference between two nations or peoples. Modern day Haudenosaunee oral tradition maintains that as a physical object, kaswentha was represented by tworow wampum, with three long segments of white beads, separated by two stripe-like segments of black beads. The black, or dark purple, beads represent the two distinct parties’ paths, just as two rivers flowing parallel to each other, never interfering in each other’s paths; only working in mutual benevolence and in each other’s interest.9 This conflation between the wampum and kaswentha, however, is historically questionable because there is no evidence of two-row wampum carrying this meaning 5

Ibid.

6

Ibid., 135.

Further complicating this process is the fact that most times early traders landed, they were encountering different ethnic groups or tribes, and it is hard to say how these stories fit together. How much did tribes of the Hudson Valley communicate over the course of a few years? Did they tell each other everything about these interactions?

Can the historian assume that interaction with one group necessarily means that news of it will always spread? If so, how far?

7

8 Jon Parmenter, “Separate Vessels: Iroquois Engagements with the Dutch of New-Netherland, c. 1613–1664,” in L. H. Roper and Jaap Jacobs, eds., The Worlds of the 17th Century Hudson Valley (Albany, 2014), 103–133, esp. 108 [hereafter WSCHV].

9

Ibid., 107.

de Halve Maen

until 1872. While similar wampum belts, called “road belts,” are known to have existed in the eighteenth century, there is no evidence for their existence in the early seventeenth century.10 Manifested in practice, kaswentha is the expression of Iroquois trade philosophy, which underlined their expectations of “brotherly” behavior from the Dutch—or any trade partner.

Dutch acceptance of kaswentha, and subsequently their good behavior, would have been a non-negotiable precedent to healthy, acceptable trade relations in the Iroquoian context.11 Although there is no proof of an early Dutch-Iroquois kaswentha-style agreement, patterns of extortion and behavior exhibited by the Mohawk show that there must have been a similar expectation placed on the Dutch, whether there was agreement or not.12 Since the Dutch time and again fell short of these expectations, the understanding of kaswentha presents us with one reason that the Iroquoian and Dutch cultures were remarkably incommensurable. It explains the disappointment the Iroquois so frequently felt in their Dutch “brothers” for not meeting a standard of friendship that they felt they had already expressed and would renew again and again.13 For most, if not all, of the Dutch the specific rules of friendship and trade with the Mohawk were never fully grasped, and they attempted to approach this relationship with the same tact and commercial strategy that they would with other European trade partners. They were confounded by the seemingly overbearing expectations natives placed on something as transactional and mundane as a trade agreement, having no similar precedent in their own culture, but this is because it was no mere trade agreement. It was closer to a promise to protect each other’s interests. Even if they did have a decent understanding of what the Mohawks were proposing, the XIX Heren who directed the West India Company [WIC] had no interest in tying in their lot with these indigenous people who were less technologically advanced and were viewed as squandering valuable and coveted land.

For their Iroquoian partners though, this promise of friendship was vital to commerce. Through this lens we can see how the Iroquois viewed certain Dutch actions, which I discuss later, as not only rude, but as disregarding the Natives’ entire paradigm of accepted social and political behaviors.

Mainstream historians and Iroquoian scholars have spent decades arguing about

kaswentha, and the truth behind the modern Haudenosaunee claim that in 1613 Dutch trader Jacob Eelkens and the Iroquois made an agreement of monumental importance: an exchange of this special wampum denoting a kaswentha-style accord. William Starna, William Fenton, and Charles Gehring made it quite clear in 1987 that the manuscript of this “Tawagonshi Treaty” of 1613 was a wanton forgery by Lawrence Gwyn van Loon, and should be discarded.

Over the years, some have still sought to use it as genuine history.14 Paul Otto and Jaap Jacobs in 2013 again concluded, after consulting various authorities, that the alleged 1613 treaty was a forgery and the evidentiary two-row wampum belt dated to much later .15 Jacobs and Otto demonstrated that any treaty between Eelkens or a similar Dutch trader “could not be construed, at least in European terms, as diplomatic treaties between sovereign nations.”16 Thus there could not have been a knowing acceptance to a kaswentha-style agreement.

We can imagine that the Dutch traders making this deal could have seen this exchange as an overly ceremonial trade agreement, only concerning themselves and the native peoples with whom they were personally dealing, and not conceiving of themselves by any means as ambassadors or diplomats. Iroquois traders, however, considered themselves diplomats and emissaries, and assumed that any agreement made with an individual was an agreement made with the nation. Men like Eelkens, however,

had no right to speak for the Dutch Republic or even the New Netherland Company [NNC], which was not founded until a year later in 1614.17 Though the possibility of a meaningful political exchange occurring during the 1613 meeting was shot down, Otto, Jacobs, and Parmenter agree that kaswentha would become a guiding principle in the later exchanges between Dutch and Iroquois starting in 1621.18 While the treaty 10 Starna, William. “A Fake Treaty, the Two Row Wampum, Oral Traditions, and Shared Histories in New Netherland and Colonial New York the View from 1614,” de Halve Maen 88, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 47–50.

William Starna, “Seventeenth-Century Dutch-Indian Trade: A Perspective from Iroquoia,” de Halve Maen 59, no. 3 (March 1986), 5–8, 21.

11

William Starna, “Indian-Dutch Frontiers,” de Halve Maen 64, no 2 (Summer 1991), 25. Here, Starna references Slichtenhorst court proceedings translated by Charles Gehring in Nieu Nederlanse Marcurius 6 (1990): 2–3, which illustrate an incredible instance of how time and again Mohawks placed enormous expectations upon the Dutch to provide them with provisions, most burdensome of which were the requests or demands for firearms, lead, and powder.

12

For example, Van Crieckenbeeck’s actions in 1626, and Mohawk frustrations with Dutch unwillingness to fix their guns for free in near Albany. Both will be discussed later.

13

William Fenton, Charles Gehring, and William Starna, “The Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613: The Final Chapter,” New York History 68, no. 4 (1987): 373–93.

14

Paul Otto and Jaap Jacobs, “Introduction: Historians and the Public Debate About the Past,” Journal of Early American History 3 (2013), 1–8.

15

16

Ibid., 6.

Starna’s explanation of indigenous trade custom on the next page posits this.

17

18

Otto and Jacobs, 7.

Photostatic copy of the alleged Tawagonshi treaty. The whereabouts of the original is not known and reportedly the only person known to have seen it was Dr. Van Loon. Lawrence Gwyn Van Loon Collection, SC16677, New York State Archives, Albany.

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holds no water today, and there is no surviving Dutch agreement to a kaswentha-style agreement, Iroquois interactions with the Dutch show that high standards of Dutch behavior and friendship were critical to their cooperation.

William Starna reminds us that the new world the Dutch entered in the seventeenth century was one in which cultural, societal, and economic norms had been solidified over long periods of time. As newcomers, their interactions with the Natives would be subject to these very well-established norms. The concept makes sense—any visitor to a culture, especially with hope of trading with the host culture, will have to conform to some extent. Not only were the Dutch not in a place to impose their own norms on Mohawks and other tribes; just as with kaswentha, the indigenous peoples were imposing their frameworks onto the Dutch. To give us a sense of scale, Starna begins by stating that the indigenous peoples of the Northeast had been engaged in long-distance and local trade for a very long time, proven by archaeological evidence of trade goods from as far away as Illinois. Though it must be obvious to anthropologists, he states that, because of this, “prehistoric trade had long been part of indigenous cultural systems prior to [European explorations.] As such, it had its own forms of protocol and customs, and functioned as an important social and cultural institution for American Indian populations.”19 The indigenous people of America were no strangers to long-distance and complex trade; the culture and expectations surrounding it were simply different from those surrounding European trade.

The most important cultural protocol that Starna mentions is how their societal makeup dictated the nature of their interactions with the Dutch. Citing a paper published fifteen years previously by Conrad Heidenreich, Starna explains that “only handfuls of individuals actually took part in trading ventures.”20 As Iroquoians lived in a ranked society with customs deciding who may trade and who may not, those conducting these commercial-cum-diplomatic missions must also have held political power, and could speak for their “constituents,” unlike Eelckens. While Heidenreich talks about Hurons, Starna makes it clear that the following was a local practice: “Once trading had been established with another group, not all Huron could take advantage of these relations. Trade was in the hands of the person who pioneered the route and

established the first contacts.”21 Often, Iroquois chiefs would act as the entrepreneurs in trade systems in which they would be the sole actors, allowing them the ability to conduct diplomatic as well as economic relations.22 Given this context, it makes sense of situations where the Iroquoians might have thought they were interacting with trader-diplomats such as in the purported case of Jacob Eelkens in 1613.

Although we know this particular treaty is of no substance, the point stands that such codes and cultural backdrops did dictate the countless treaties and innumerable interactions between those peoples who met for the first time on the banks of the Hudson River.

On Hudson’s journey and just about every commercial and diplomatic mission conducted by 1630, the Dutch make mention of small, polished, and valuable beads.

These beads, which the Dutch started referring to as sewant in the 1610s, were highly valued by the peoples of American Northeast. Today, we refer to them as wampum, from the Narragansett or Massachusett wampumpeag. Wampum was manufactured from shells found along the shores of Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the southern New York-New Jersey area.

Although the Iroquois, who were settled to the north and west of these peoples, did not manufacture wampum, it became very quickly apparent to the Dutch that they valued this material just as highly as the Algonquian producers. In fact, there was a long-standing history of trade between the coastal wampum producers and various inland peoples.23 Though there was clearly an economic value bound to wampum that the Dutch

were fast to notice, there was a subtler, more important meaning implied by giving or receiving wampum: it was in some ways a thing of commerce, but it was also the physical manifestation of good faith, and proof of these native trade agreements.

While coastal Algonquian people used wampum for ceremonial purposes such as self-adornment, marriage proposals, and delineating social rank, Iroquoians probably valued it even more, as it was likely harder to come by.24 The meaning behind wampum was well understood between northeastern tribe, as it was exchanged between peoples to make good intentions known, end wars, make promises, and punctuate trade deals.

The exchange of wampum, an item monetarily valuable to Europeans but also saturated with meaning, was far different, therefore, than exchanging guilders for goods and services. Trading with wampum was part of a larger demonstration of friendship and the establishment of mutual interest that was already implicit in the Native conception of trade. Wampum was given within this context to other groups that interpreted it not in a European sense of amassing wealth, but in a uniquely Native way. The economic worlds of the Europeans and the Americans were fundamentally 19

Starna, “Seventeenth Century Dutch-Indian Trade,” 5.

20

Ibid, 6.

We may assume that as this is a long-standing Huron cultural tradition, the other members of the Iroquois nation, with whom they were confederated, had shared similar cultural practices.

21

22

Heidenreich quoted by Starna, 6.

Paul Otto, “Henry Hudson, the Munsees, and the Wampum Revolution,” WSCHV, 86.

23

24

Ibid, 88.

Wampum belt, Quahog clam shell beads (purple wampum), whelk shell beads (white wampum), imitation sinew. Lydia Wallace-Chavez, Unkechaug (2005), based on the "Warrior's belt" presented by the Unkechaug to Governor Edmund Andros (1637–1714) of New York in 1675; purchased by National Museum of the American Indian from Wampum Magic (the artist's family company) in 2019.

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different in that most indigenous peoples understood trade in a diplomatic context, in which gift-giving and proving good-will was essential.25 The Dutch perception of the value of wampum was constantly evolving. Paul Otto postulates that the first wave of traders, figures such as Eelkens, Block, Mossel, and Hontom, probably understood its monetary value before 1620, at least enough to capitalize on it.26 Hans Hontom’s infamous story proves that by 1622 Dutch traders were aware of how valuable wampum was. Hontom’s appearance in the historical record begins in 1613, when he appears on Thijs Mossel’s ship, the Nachtegael.27 Hans seems to have been a violent and hard-headed character. Hontom was born into a world scarred by violence: as a child, he and his family had to flee Antwerp to escape the wrath of imperial power during one of Spain’s countless attempts to secure their claim over the Netherlands in the Eighty-Years’ War.28 Since Hontom’s father was a fur trader, we might assume that this accrued him some knowledge that qualified him as the ship’s supercargo.29 Although not much is written about Hans for nearly two decades, a clash between himself and the neighboring Mohawks resulted in his name suddenly reappearing in an unfavorable light in 1633 when he became commis of Fort Orange.

According to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, who never actually visited New Netherland or met Hontom,30 the new commis of Fort Orange was not only a scoundrel who took every opportunity to slander the WIC and smuggle goods out of the country, but was also vehemently hated by the natives because in the past, he had “treated them cruelly.”31 Being hated by the Mohawk, as the Dutch then realized, was very bad for business. Published just a year later, an interrogation of Sebastian Krol, former director of New Netherland, paints a more vivid, and unfortunate, picture of what happened between Hontom and the Natives. Not only had Hontom ransomed an important Iroquois sachem for an enormous sum of wampum on a trade mission back in 1622, but upon receiving his demands, castrated and murdered the sachem so that the other Mohawks could see.32 Once the Dutch began to see the immense purchasing power of wampum, figures like Eelkens in the early 1620s began to position themselves as middlemen in the wampum trade.

Knowing that the coastal tribes required various European goods in exchange for

The Landing of Henrick Hudson, based on a painting by Robert Weir, published by Martin, Johnson & Co., New York, 1857. their wampum, and that the inland Iroquoian tribes would take this wampum for their precious furs, it seemed like the Dutch had a perfect, if precarious, position on the river to facilitate both trades.33 Since the Halve Maen’s voyage in 1609, Dutch trade encounters with the indigenous peoples along the Hudson River Valley and on Long Island were characterized by extremes: violence and wonder; profit and disaster. By dissecting the interactions between the Natives and Henry Hudson’s crew through our framework, we find that while the story may raise more questions than answers, it offers us a relatable tale about humanity, two distinct groups coming into physical contact for the first time, and simultaneously feeling hope, terror, joy, and dread. During their time sailing up the river, Hudson and his crew were met in some cases with astonishment at their appearance and truly unforgettable acts of kindness. In others, they were met with scenes of peril, their reactions to which would inform the Natives’ opinions and oral traditions of the Dutch for years to come. Specifically, their inability to understand the aggression shown by the Munsee and Lenape peoples near the southern reaches of the Hudson River points to the incommensurability of the Dutch and North American Indian cultures.

At times, the imagery described in the narratives of Hudson’s third voyage reads like the watered-down script for an action movie.34 The most reliable and oft cited recollection of events is that of crewmem-

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ber Robert Juet, an officer under Hudson’s command, which was published in 1610.35 25

This will be discussed later in Haefeli’s paper as well.

26

Otto, WSCHV, 87.

Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, “Dutch and Indians on the Hudson Valley: The Early Period,” The Hudson Valley Regional Review. http://www.hudsonrivervalley. org/review/pdfs/hvrr_9pt2_gehringandstarna.pdf, 14.

27

28

Ibid.; Eighty-Years’ War, 1568–1648.

The crewmember of a trade-bound vessel that will engage with the other party involved, usually knows something about the economy, politics of the trade, or a trade language to facilitate exchange.

29

30 Kiliaen van Rensselaer bought a sizeable chunk of land surrounding Ft. Orange in 1629. He has given us much information about New Netherland, like this great description of Hans Hontom, though he never actually went there. In his attempt to micromanage his colony, he left an enormous paper trail of correspondence with individuals that he seldom trusted and found hard to manage. In order to receive as much information as possible, he would play employees off each other, for example, hiring Dominie Johannes Megapolensis to report on Arent van Curler’s behavior, Van Curler being Van Rensselaer’s nephew and secretary. In turn, others were hired to examine and tattle on Megapolensis. See Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: the Dutch and English Experiences (New York, 1990), 57.

31 A. J. F. Van Laer, Nicolaas de Roever, and Alan H. Strong, Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (Albany, 1908), 243 [hereafter VRBM].

32

Ibid, 303.

33

Otto, WSCHV, 90.

This is Hudson’s third and best known attempt to reach the East Indies without taking the enormous and dangerous trip around Africa. The Muscovy Company had sent him on the previous two, where he tred to find a passage to the east by sailing over the northern icecap, and then by sailing over the northern reaches of Russia. See Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York, 2004), 19–24.

34

35 “From ‘The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson,’ by Robert Juet, 1610,” in John Franklin Jameson, Original Narratives of Early American History (New York, 1909), 18.

55

The first stops that Juet records, on September fourth and fifth, depict agreeable encounters with the indigenous peoples. On that first day, “the people of the Countrey came aboord of us, seeming very glad of our comming, and [offered] greene Tobacco . . . for Knives and Beads.”36 On various occasions Juet would note how they were “very glad of our comming,” and “very sorrowfull for our departure.”37 Many of the interactions played out similarly, where some Natives would board via canoes, and sell tobacco or pelts for European “trinkets,” knives, or beads.38 What is interesting is how prepared the crew was for this journey in 1609. Not only did they have an inkling of the value of beads among the indigenous peoples in this land, but also notice that Juet mentions his trepidation toward the Natives even in the wake of such pleasant interactions. No doubt, preconceptions formed by accounts of European voyagers of the previous century would have colored the crew’s outlook.

Just as stories and rumors about New World Natives had become part of the cultural consciousness in Europe by this time, so too were stories and perceptions about the Europeans shared among these first New Yorkers.

“We durst not trust them,” Juet wrote twice in the log.39 The first time, written even before any blood had been shed, reads as an ominous foreshadowing. On the sixth of September, Hudson sent five men led by a John Coleman to explore a river that

reached about twelve miles into the interior.

They made their way far down the narrow estuary, and began their trip back to the main ship as it grew dark. In the chaos of poor light and rain, an engagement occurred between these five and a retinue of twentysix native men on canoes. Two Dutchmen were injured, and Coleman came back with an arrow in his throat.40 Although we do not know the exact reason this happened, just as Europeans came with preconceived notions about the dangers of the Natives, the indigenous oral tradition would certainly have colored the Natives expectations of these seafaring Europeans among specific groups, causing them to hold animosity towards Coleman and his crew. Of course, all throughout the course of the sixteenth century there had been various, interspersed European visits to North America since John Cabot’s exploratory voyage in 1497.41 These Natives could have confused Coleman and his crew with previous explorers, conflating these Dutchmen with visitors of some other European provenance. There are seemingly infinite reasons why some contemporary Natives could have wanted Dutch explorers to make themselves scarce.

The indigenous peoples that received Hudson’s crew may or may not have had previous interactions with Europeans.

Whether or not they had previous encounters with Europeans, they would have interpreted the earliest visitors within their own well-established understanding of

the world. Therefore, the arrival of hairy Europeans in their enormous boat certainly came to them as a shock, but it was not incompatible with their worldview. In other words, this was not a cataclysmic or unbelievable event for them. In fact, many oral and contemporary histories refer to how the Natives saw the Europeans as manitou, at least in the early-contact period.42 Western conceptual frameworks and European translators have unsatisfactorily related manitou to God, or someone of immense supernatural power. Though being praised as gods may fit snugly within the New Englander’s conception of their place as a godly people in the New World, Evan Haefeli challenged this concept by researching the historiography of the term as well as the oral tradition. He posits that manitou does not mean god but refers to a power of supernatural origin which can be 36

Ibid., 18.

37

Ibid., 18–28.

38

Ibid., 18.

39

Ibid., 18, 20.

40

Ibid., 19.

Though Hudson’s voyage set off the thriving Dutch fur trade and coincides with other nations’ early colonization efforts, his was far from being the first European to visit North America. While I do not cover the sixteenth century here, we need to bear in mind the vastness of the previous 100-year period during which indigenous coastal peoples were shaping their views of Europeans and Europeans were developing their views of Natives.

41

Evan Haefeli, “On First Contact and Apotheosis: Manitou and Men in North America,” Ethnohistory 54 (2007), 3: 407–28, esp. 410.

42

Len Tantillo, “Curiosity of the Magua.”

Tantillo’s painting provides a scene that could apply to the encounters Henry Hudson and Robert Juet experienced on their 1609 voyage, though this image depicts a scene which unfolded forty-one years later, and farther north on the river. Image courtesy of the artist.

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imbued in people or objects.43 Manitou is best described with the example of thunder, which is a tangible, common, and terrestrial event, yet it also inspires fear, is hardly comparable to anything else, and cannot be harnessed or explained. Like thunder, this power had great consequences, but could be understood as part of a natural, not supernatural world.44 When the Europeans came to this land, the Natives were immediately aware of, and suspicious of, their immense power. They knew that the supernatural power of Manitou could be beneficial, but it could also be immensely disastrous. In this framework, viewing European arrival as manitou would have led them to a pragmatic and ultimately correct answer: these visitors are simply men, but we should be cautious of their unknown power.

The murder of Coleman and the other two men clearly steeled Juet and his fellow crew members against other acts of trickery that might cost them their lives. A few times on their way up the river Hudson refused to trade with large envoys of canoes filled with possible traders, either because there were too many of them or they exhibited signs of malice beforehand. Adding to frustrations, Juet mentions how some Natives were inclined to steal various items around the ship while they were aboard. This would lead to further problems.

On October first, the crew gave some more “trifles” away for animal skins.

After the trade had concluded peacefully, one Native continued to cling to the ship’s stern with his canoe for some time. Then, climbing up the Halve Maen’s rudder, he entered Juet’s private room and stole two shirts, a pillow, and two bandoliers. The first mate spared little time priming and firing his musket at the thief; the round “strooke him on the brest and killed him,” and many of the trading indigenous people, who were still in the vicinity on canoes, fled. As Hudson with several others manned a smaller boat to retrieve the lost goods, they realized that some Natives had jumped into the water to avenge their fallen brother by rocking the boat, trying to capsize it.

One Native had his hand sliced off in the emotional struggle and drowned as his comrades withdrew.

Although Hudson’s crew were nine leagues away when they made anchor the next day, it was apparent that they were followed. They continued onward as two large canoes beckoned proposing to do trade. Luckily, someone recognized one of these “traders” from the previous day’s

scuffle and realized that they had followed them up the river to gain retribution. This assumption proved right: not long after, arrows began spewing from the canoes at the sailors. In the heat of the onslaught, six crewmembers fired muskets, killing two or three Natives. The Halve Maen must have been in a particularly narrow bend in the river, because Juet and his mates were shocked to see “above an hundred of them” waiting to fire upon them from land. Firing upon them with a falcon, presumably a swivel gun, Juet managed to kill two and dispersed the rest. When another canoe descended upon the ship, the rest of the crew was prepared and killed another four with a crippling volley.45 To make sense of this instance of theft, we return to Haefeli’s theory, which provides us with a possible explanation for this being another instance of cultural miscommunication ending in violence.

Using Richard White’s framework from his book The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1681, Haefeli posits that as long as Natives had a semblance of power or control over the economy of the fur trade, this commerce would be conducted according to their rules of gift exchange, and not European rules concerning market economy. Given the power dynamic at a given moment, they might even coerce the Europeans into giving gifts, or as one might see it, coerce Europeans into abiding indigenous cultural norms. It is possible that the “thief” was enforcing gift-giving after being slighted in one way or another

by Hudson’s crew. The theft in this case, “helped balance out the uneven level of exchange Juet and the crew exulted in.”46 If the European perception is that this was lawless requisition of Juet’s property, the Native perception might have been that this was an acceptable practice to take part in after an imbalanced exchange had happened. It is important to distinguish giftexchange economy and market economy here because “stealing,” then, changes its meaning, and any negative moral implication falls to the wayside. Within the context of a gift-giving economy, for example, theft could be a way of telling the other party that they were too stingy, and next time they should consider being more generous.

Another source, Johan de Laet’s Nieuwe Wereldt, was published long after Hudson’s third voyage. Importantly, we learn that despite the heart-pounding carnage that he witnessed as captain of the Halve

Maen, Hudson expressed high hopes and positive opinion regarding the indigenous people he encountered. He found that not only was the land ideal for cultivation, but that “the natives are well disposed, if they are only well treated . . . they are very revengeful and suspicious . . . . But with mild and proper treatment, and especially by intercourse with Christians, this people might be civilized and brought under better regulation.”47 Hudson further shared that it was not long into his journey that he and his men were treated to a large, ceremonious dinner. Upon arrival, the Natives immediately slaughtered and prepared a fattened dog, and hunted down pigeons to feed them.

When they set off to go back to the ship for the evening, their hosts were saddened, and pleaded that they stay for the night. They must have recognized suspicion in Hudson and his men, for they broke up their arrows and threw them in the fire to suggest their commitment to their security; to say that no harm would befall them. Though Hudson could not be convinced, the gravity of their gesture was not lost on him, as he reported to de Laet, “the Natives are a very good people [because of this.]”48 This sentiment speaks to Hudson’s ability to appreciate the complexity of intercultural communication, and to not color the Natives poorly based on some interactions that he could not hope to understand the other side of.

Perhaps some like Hudson recognized that there might have been too many unknowns concerning this brand-new intercultural exchange to fault the Natives for anything. This empathy was probably not mirrored by enough of Hudson’s contemporaries and successors in New Netherland.

Learning to appropriately interact between the Dutch and Native populations was a slow process that, despite the successes of

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43 It is important to also note that “supernatural” is also an imperfect term that Haefeli uses. Though the Indians believed the power of manitou was in a way supernatural, that does not mean that it was a power bestowed from another realm. It was a part of the natural existing world, possibly any real-world power that was beyond their capacity to utilize. Manitou was part of life, not above it. For example, thunder and lightning would be manifestations of manitou. Haefeli, 420.

Haefeli, 421. Haefeli also says that Natives might have immediately considered Hudson’s men to be ordinary people, like themselves, except they were endowed or stumbled upon manitou—for example, their boat or their rifles.

44

45

Jamison, Narratives, 25 26.

46

Haefeli, 433.

G. M. Asher, Henry Hudson the Navigator: The Original Documents in Which His Career is Recorded (London, 1860), 162.

47

48

Ibid.

great ambassadors like Arent van Curler, never led to any diplomatic breakthroughs sufficient to save the relationship.

Hudson was primarily an explorer, looking for a passage to the Far East, and not a trader. The most problematic part of all the sources regarding this seminal interaction is that there is no indication that his crew understood that those with whom they engaged were fully distinct peoples, and not just one group of wilden. There is no real indication given to readers of which cultural groups the crew interacted with, besides location. Most of the violent interactions seem to have taken place between Noten Island, and just north of modern-day Yonkers, if we place the given longitudes on a map. The night the Natives broke their arrows to show trust to Hudson and his men, they had landed in latitude 42° 18’, somewhere just north of the City of Hudson, New York.49 Their hosts would likely have been Mahicans or Mohawks.

While Hudson’s crew explored the area of present-day Albany looking for the passage, Juet did not record a violent incident.

It seems that while the Dutch relations with the indigenous people of the lower Hudson Valley suffered because of misunderstanding and resulting violence, they had mostly pleasant encounters in the north. This could have been caused by lasting negative impressions left by previous navigators who never sailed up the Hudson, such as those left by Giovanni da Verrazano, who arrived in the New York Harbor area in 1524.

While Hudson failed in his main objective to find the northern passage, he succeeded in finding an entirely new and bursting market and chartering about 150 miles of waterway in order to reach that market. This soon after led to an explosion of Dutch traders leaving for this new place of opportunity. Between the years 1611 and 1614, a trader named Adriaen Block made three separate journeys to this land. Each year the competition between him and other Dutch traders increased. Though initially traveling to the shores of the island that would later bear his name, Block found his way trading on the Hudson River in 1612. Sailing under the Tweenhuysen trade syndicate, he and his crew would soon have to compete against rivals such as Thijs Mossel and Hendrick Christiaensz.50 This competition resulted in Mossel routinely undercutting the prices that Block had regularly offered the Natives by offering more goods for pelts, and in the end, these competing syndicates would realize that

each of them would only suffer by competing so viciously.

In late 1614, the competing interest groups conglomerated, and became thereafter known as the New Netherland Company [NNC]. The States General of the Netherlands granted the NNC a four-year monopoly over the fur trade from roughly New Jersey to Maine.51 While they had free reign over this area, the establishment of Fort Nassau adjacent to modern-day Albany

by Hendrick Christiaensz in 1614 assured its centrality to the fur trade. Though the fort was extremely modest in size and never manned by more than ten or twelve soldiers, it became the primary trading post in New Netherland at this time. The NNC’s establishment marked a four-year period of general stability for those trading and staying in New Netherland.

After the end of NNC’s 1618 monopoly and before the establishment of the West India Company in 1624, the official force which set rules of conduct for the Dutch and kept the fur trade under a reliable monopoly, was a dangerous time for both Dutch and indigenous peoples involved in trade.52 As William Starna and Charles Gehring put it: The prospect of adventure, power, and wealth gained through exploitation of technologically disadvantaged peoples often brought out the dark side of human personality. That . . . no-man’s land, or “frontier” where two cultures came into contact was frequently visited and inhabited by the most unpleasant representatives of both cultures. Consider Hernando Cortez, John Underhill, Kit Carson, [etc.]53 Unfortunately, in the first few years of Dutch exploration and establishment of trade connections after Hudson returned to the Netherlands, there is no real documentation of the germinal interactions that took place.54 Within the few short years that followed Hudson’s voyage and preceded the establishment of the WIC, we might imagine that the missing stories of these voyages were as eventful, vibrant, and meaningful as Hudson’s.

The NNC ushered in a short period of relatively reliable and peaceful trade, as well as maximized profits for Dutch traders. In this approximately ten-year period before the WIC established its monopoly and imperial expectations upon the colony, figures such as Juet note that the Natives

58

they met were content with trading their pelts, tobacco, and “pompions” for mere “trinkets” and “baubles.”55 In an attempt to explain the cultural context for the Natives’ buying trends, Starna cites George Hamell’s argument from the eighties, which seeks to dismantle the misguided conception of Natives in this early-contact period as being irrational or naïve. Shell, crystal, and copper were objects associated with success, ceremony, and long life, and therefore not as useless as the Europeans would have deemed them to be. According to Hamell, data has shown that at least some of the early European trade goods that reflect these qualities were purchased for such reasons.56 The earliest indigenous groups that took part in contact with the Europeans, therefore, were understanding the meaning of foreign goods within their own context by transplanting these understandings of similar native goods onto foreign goods.57 After the NNC had run its course, and the Hontoms and Eelckenses of the day had spent a decade trading with and sometimes brutalizing trade partners, the WIC established itself. A joint stock company ran by nineteen core shareholders, the WIC was made up of the upper crust of society.

The highest prerogative and priority of the WIC in New Netherland was to collect taxes on the fur trade, especially from New Amsterdam and Fort Orange; the latter they established in 1624. The WIC was much more interested, even during its fur monopoly lasting until 1639, in privateering Spanish wealth from South America, and keeping their colony in Brazil well maintained. The company’s designs were not simply economic, as their letters to New Netherland director Verhulst in 1625 make clear about their intention to Christianize 49

Jameson, 25.

Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (New Haven, 2005), 51.

50

51 Charles Gehring, Annals of New Netherland: The Dutch Among the People of the Long River (New York, 2001), 9 [hereafter DPLR].

52 About 1615–1618. According to many scholars, trade was a fiercely competitive and bloodthirsty business in the years between 1611–1614 and 1618–1621, years which correspond to a general lack of oversight.

53 Gehring and Starna, “Dutch and Indians on the Hudson Valley: The Early Period,” 16.

54

Ibid., 14.

55

Juet in Jameson, 13–28.

56

Starna, 244.

Bradley, Before Albany, 24, shows how the highly requested copper kettle was appropriated to suit Native needs and expectations—they used this easily worked metal to create arrowheads and other objects that were formerly made of stone.

57

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Adriaen Block’s map of his 1614 expedition to North America.

This is the first map to show Long Island as an island. It is also the first appearance of the term New Netherland to describe the region.

Wikimedia Commons.

Natives. Author Danny Noorlander posits that the WIC exerted extreme religious and even colonial power.58 The WIC instated directors and commissaries, set taxes, made sure that they received their share of the fur trade, and showed some interest in converting the indigenous population in New Netherland.

The colonists’ disinterest in evangelizing was a benefit to their relationships with allies such as the Mohawks, who exhibited very little interest in the Christian faith in these early-contact years. Missionary work was especially hard where the evangelizers’ home country lacks the monopoly on violence. New Netherland lacked this monopoly, and, as the WIC documents, chronically lacked religious officials.59

Lack of WIC funding and oversight were the major reasons not only for the failure to evangelize natives, but also in its inability to hold on to the Mohawk people, as well as other tribes, as political allies.

The colony would continue to focus more on trade than on settlement during the WIC period, though some officials went to great pains to populate the Hudson River Valley. This was partially to make trade with Native populations easier to facilitate, and part of a larger effort to claim ownership over the lands which the French, and especially English, had designs upon. Try as they did, the population of settled colonists in New Netherland was chronically too small up until the point of the first English takeover. Petrus Stuyvesant, when serving

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as the director of the colony in the 1650s recognized the dangerous encroachments of the English in Connecticut and the necessity for locally produced foodstuffs, and begged the WIC to scoop up some “homeless Polish, Lithuanian, Prussian, Jutlandish or Flemish farmers . . .easily to be found during this Eastern and Northern war” to give some substance to Dutch holdings.60 Furthermore, there is evidence that those who had committed to living on the land would sometimes give up their duties in cultivating the infrastructure of the colony to engage in the lucrative fur trade with the Mohawks and other local tribes.

In 1634, for example, a wheelwright named Lubbert Gysbertsz, who Van Rensselaer had contracted to produce wagon wheels on his land, would disappear and neglect to fulfill his end of the bargain once he became privy to how much money one could make buying and selling beaver pelts.61 There is no way that such an overwhelmingly transient and fortune-seeking populace would have viewed Natives as neighbors and allies. These early New Netherlanders were not connected to the land, or interested in a lifetime of farming.

Not only did the WIC lack the centralization to make proper allies out of the increasingly powerful Mohawk, but the case may be made that culturally most Dutch colonists were not willing to put in the same work to make amends and alliances with Natives, whom they apparently viewed as little more than a way to make money.

The murder of Hendrick Christiaensz by Natives in 1619, and Hontom’s and Eelckens’ ransoming of Natives in 1620–1622 portray a violent and mercurial relationship developing in New Netherland after the washing away of Fort Nassau and the NNC in 1618. Trade, however, began to fall into a rhythm in 1624 with the first permanent settlement in the northern valley, at Fort 58 It is my belief that Calvinism, though it did not encourage evangelization, benefitted colonial society by providing a normative force for the acceptance of “what is,” rather than questioning status quo. Though tangential to this essay, the WIC exerted the colonial will of the Dutch Republic. Though it could rarely control the Dutch colonists as it wished to, its immense power legitimized and funded Dutch efforts to populate and control the land.

59 See D. L. Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2019).

60 Shaun Sayres, “’A Daingerous Liberty’: Mohawk-Dutch Relations and the Colonial Gunpowder Trade, 1534–1665” (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 2018), 121.

Stuyvesant is referring here to the Second Northern War between Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its allies in 1655–1660.

61

Merwick, 38.

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Orange. The WIC’s monopoly at the site, enforced by soldiers and newly installed governors, established a degree of stability for the Dutch, Mohawk, and Mohican traders that frequented the site. Until about 1633, when the Dutch-Mohawk relationship faced a serious roadblock, it would continue as the main site where traders congregated to exchange wampum and Europeans goods for furs.62 At the same time the Dutch established themselves at the far edge of their dominion, their partners on either side of the valley, the Mohawks and Mohicans, went to war with each other from 1624–1628. The outbreak of this war points to the expansionist and trade-oriented agenda that the Iroquois were pursuing in 1624; taking out their trade competition for European goods in this crucial border zone was important for various reasons. The Iroquois were not only attempting to secure a reliable alternative to the French market in Canada, but were also attempting to exert power over another tribe’s ability to trade with a local European power.63 If they were successful in this, the precedent would have enormous implications for their trade role in the Northeast.

In 1626, a Mohican war-party arrived at Fort Orange, requesting Dutch support after they had experienced some military success, having burnt down the Mohawk’s easternmost settlement months prior.64 In an act that would defy regulations set out by the WIC, and promises made to the Iroquois, commis of Fort Orange Daniel van Crieckenbeeck and a few of his soldiers joined the party. Shortly after, the Mohicans with their small entourage of Dutch riflemen were ambushed and badly beaten

by Iroquois fighters.65 In an act which was likely lost on Europeans except as an act of depravity, the Iroquois victors cannibalized the fallen Dutch and brought home bits of them to feed to their families.66 Though we cannot know what caused Daniel Van Crieckenbeeck to act, it is likely that he saw what the Dutch would lose if the Mohawks were their primary buyers in Fort Orange.

By having a monopsony on the acquisition of European goods, the Iroquoians would be able to drive harder bargains, and without the Mohawk’s rivals so close at hand, there would be no local force to protect the Dutch from the looming Mohawk monopoly. By 1628/29, the Mohawks were successful in driving out most of their Mohican trade rivals, probably to the chagrin of Dutch traders.67 The WIC was quick to send a diplomat,

likely both out of concern that their commis acted out of order with their demands, and out of general compliance with the new political and economic reality with the Mohawk. Director Pieter Minuit sent Pieter Barensz to the Iroquois as a cultural ambassador, because his years of experience trading was thought to have given him unique insights into Mohawk culture and language.68 Barensz was successful in convincing the Mohawks that Van Crieckenbeeck’s actions were roguish, and by no means reflected the interests of the WIC or the settlers.

However, because Mohawk leaders would not promise the safety of Dutch families at Fort Orange, Minuit relocated many families from the land surrounding Fort Orange and the Connecticut River to more secure regions like Manhattan island and Delaware leaving the land even more barren by the end of 1626.69 The issue of population in 1628 was as dire as ever, after years of ineffective leadership left the colony indebted, low in number, and rather at the whim of the increasingly powerful Iroquois, with whom they lacked the foresight or ability to forge legitimate ties.

In 1629, wealthy diamond merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer began investing his capital in the struggling colony. He had pitched the concept of patroonship to the WIC for years, under which wealthy investors would purchase and develop large tracts of land in New Netherland. Eyes on the horizon and the fur trade, Van Rensselaer bought and began to develop most of modern-day Albany and Rensselaer counties. His investment had a hard time as there were never enough people to farm and make the soil productive. The problem was not the usefulness of the land; rather the economic opportunity of trade in the northern Hudson River Valley was far too tempting for the Dutch to reasonably be expected to settle down and cultivate land, especially land they did not own. This issue is illustrated in the previous example of Lubbert Gyszbertz’ failure to manufacture wagon wheels in Rensselaerswijck.70 As it turns out, while Van Rensselaer had his sights set on making an agricultural powerhouse, the reality of the New Netherland economy was probably the greatest obstacle. People were not choosing to pursue the beaver trade with the Mohawks and Mahicans to become rich, but rather to subsist.71 Europeans were not travelling 2,000 miles because they were interested in becoming New World serfs, and in fact, the immense instability and fighting

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with the Natives made such an investment in the land a pipedream. The colony would never live up to Van Rensselaer’s vision of it becoming a steady source of foodstuffs for the colony; the colonists would continue to go hungry.

As late as 1643, French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues noted how widely dispersed the Dutch settled along the river at Rensselaerswijck.73 The disparate settlement of this area made trade with the Mohawks far more profitable.The remoteness of neighbors helped to make it easier for individuals to strike a bargain without vying competitors, as well as being far from the WIC’s watchful stewards at Fort Orange, who would not allow such unlicensed enterprise. The WIC fort housed as many as twenty-five free traders, those who were licensed to trade furs by the company, and hardly as many soldiers to protect it. Merwick describes Rensselaer’s colony as one that “would have shown only twenty-five or thirty houses—probably including the shops of the two free colonists, two carpenters, one blacksmith, and a shoemaker.”74 The reliance on trade and interaction with their Mohawk neighbors had directly contributed to the weak spatial and societal makeup of New Netherland.

Contributing to a particularly bleak situation in northern New Netherland, were the ever-growing Iroquois nations to the north and west, whose ongoing battles against the French, Huron, and Montagnais were going especially well. The Iroquois nations had been time and again on the offensive against France since early in the seventeenth century, locked in a war for primacy in the north of modern-day New York State.

62

See page 55 about Hans Hontom.

63

Parmenter, “Separate Vessels,” WSCHV, 110.

64

Ibid., 113.

65

Sayres, 34.

66

Ibid., 35.

67

Ibid., 37.

68

Ibid., 38.

This event precipitated the purchase of Manhattan Island.

69

70

Merwick, 38.

Merwick, 71. Merwick’s discussion of Handelstijd and the monetary hardships many Dutch colonists felt emphasizes how essential the fur trade was to survival.

The sale of a single beaver skin afforded one adult male his subsistence for half a year.

71

72 Charlotte Wilcoxen and Nina Fleishman, Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century (Albany, NY, 2010), 13.

73

Jameson, Narratives, 262.

74

Merwick, 11.

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Map of Rensselaerswijck (c. 1632), New York State Library.

Historian William Eccles suggests that this conflict had mostly economic aims; while antagonism between French and Iroquois would always threaten the existence of the unstable New France, peace between them would have allowed trade to divert away from New France and into Dutch hands, which they could not allow.75 The precarious position of the French became even more so when David Kirke led the peaceful English takeover of Quebec city at the very end of the Anglo-French war in 1629. The Iroquois had also held the upper hand in fighting the Montagnais. In 1633, French Jesuits living amongst Montagnais reported that they found rumors of nearby bands of Iroquois very disturbing, as they “All… trembled with fear.”76 Although Dutch trade continued to be successful in Fort Orange and Rensselaerswijck, the Dutch were soon to understand how precarious their situation was in the north. It was in 1633 when a Mohawk head chief, Saggodryochta, recognized the murderous and violent Hans Hontom as the new commis of Fort Orange, the place where they primarily traded and were assumed relatively safe treatment for nearly a decade. When the Iroquois discovered this, the consequences were far reaching: the Iroquois furiously burned and slaughtered livestock and farms on Rensselaer’s land, which, ironically, was not connected to Fort Orange, Hontom, or the WIC. This seems to explain why Hans Hontom’s name shows up in Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s correspondence in 1633, where the patroon furiously interrogated the WIC, having wondered why they would ever put such a problematic figure in charge of Fort Orange.77 This situation illustrates that those settlers of northern New Netherland, as well as the physically absent Van Rensselaer, were not only at the whim of the “structural

monstrosity” that was the WIC, but they also lacked the organization and resources to resist the Mohawks’ growing power in the area.78 Since the Dutch were left to trade primarily with the Iroquois, a considerable amount of Dutch trade goods would have flown into the lands of the Mohawks, which would give them a distinct economic and military edge over their neighbors. Because of this development, which precipitated Iroquoian growth in power and size, the New Netherlanders’ positions in the local balance of power continually fell. This balance would only begin to change throughout the 1650s when an incredible surge in population turned what historian Jaap Jacobs has termed an “overgrown trading post” into a “settlement colony with recognizably Dutch features.”79 In 1659, the Iroquois’ numerous enemies began to turn the tables, because they had finally obtained enough powder and guns to match the Iroquois.80 At the expense of Van Rensselaer’s land, the Mohawk sent the clear message that the Dutch were not to sully kaswentha, but also that they would not differentiate between the WIC and the patroonship; all the Dutch would be held equally responsible for the perceived enormity of Hontom’s transgression. Concerned about trade, the WIC was quick to respond, the same as they were years before when Van Crieckenbeeck had directly violated kaswentha. If the French managed to strike a peace with the Iroquois, they would have been able to set up a trading post in Iroquois land, effectively erasing Fort Orange from the map.81 Instead of Pieter Barensz, this time they sent a surgeon from Fort Orange, Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, as well as two other WIC employees, into “Mohawk country.” In the dead of the icy winter of 1634/35, the three made their way through various Iroquoian villages and “castles” on their way

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westwards, in order to make amends with major chiefs who controlled the trade. Van den Bogaert’s diary illustrates, among many interesting points about Iroquois lifestyle, the difficult and insecure position the Dutch were in at that time.82 Understanding the enmity the Iroquois might have felt about him, and the insecurity of his position in this foreign land, he wrote, “Had they had any malicious intentions, they could have easily grabbed us with their hands and killed us without much trouble.”83 His paranoia was no doubt shared by his fellow employees.

The Natives they encountered in each village goaded them with “allese rondade!” or “shoot!” Though initially Van den Bogaert and company did not want to be surrounded

by Iroquois with unloaded rifles, they eventually gave into these requests, with great fanfare.

Furthermore, the leaders that Van den Bogaert spoke with reminded them of the Dutch’s precarious position, past transgressions against the Iroquois, and that the Iroquois could easily take their trade to the New France numbered only several hundred people before 1630. William Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albuquerque, NM, 1983), 31.

75

76 Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, vol. 5 (Cleveland, 1898), 107.

77 VRBM, 243. This would be one of many quarrels that Van Rensselaer would take up with the WIC. 78

Merwick, 31.

Jaap Jacobs, “In Such a Far Distant Land, Separated from All the Friends,” Worlds of the Seventeenth Century Hudson Valley, 154. Between 1650 and 1664, New Netherland experienced a population surge of at least 350 percent, at most, 533 percent.

79

80

Sayres, 105.

Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634–1635, Charles Gehring, William Starna, eds., (Syracuse, 1988), xix.

81

82

Sayres, 53.

83

Bogaert et al., 17.

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Len Tantillo, “The Trading House.” Another of Tantillo's inspiring works, depicts Mohawk men making their way to Fort Nassau, Castle Island, now Albany.

Image courtesy the artist.

French if the Dutch did not offer them better prices and goods. Since Sayres mentions the immense price gouging involved in the early Dutch-Mohawk firearm-powder trade, one might imagine that they were referring, in part, to gun prices.84 It was around this time in the early 1630s that Iroquoians became aware of the far superior flintlock and became interested in accumulating as many guns as they could.

By the mid-1630s, the Dutch gun trade with the Iroquois had taken off. They were initially unphased by the introduction of the clunky and time-consuming matchlock, which was surely terrifying, but gave up one’s position with the stinky odor of burning saltpeter and could not be effectively wielded to produce enough casualties.85 The flintlock mechanism was much safer, more reliable, and supported the guerilla tactics that the Mohawks were already very fond of.

Flintlocks so suited the Iroquoian warfare style that by the mid-1640s, they became a staple of the Iroquoian warrior’s loadout; some reports suggest that they had come to handle the guns even more deftly than the “Christians” themselves. It is also possible that when the Iroquois shouted at the Dutch to “shoot!” they wanted to witness a demonstration of how the Dutch reloaded the muskets, or, that they wished to learn to steel themselves against the unthinkably loud sound produced therefrom. 86 The Mohawks must have seen the Dutch’s usefulness to their imperial designs less than ten years after the establishment of Fort Orange. The timing could not have been

better either, because the Iroquois were then strong enough to close off much of Dutch connection to other neighboring tribes, thereby becoming the main recipient of Dutch guns.87 While the Iroquois were frustrated and often wronged by the Dutch, they nonetheless retained the upper hand in most of their dealings in their early relationship, even as they realized how instrumental the Dutch were to their military success.

Individuals representing the Netherlands, whether knowingly or not, gave New Netherland’s natives a mixed bag: there are enough examples of Dutch exploitation of the natives early on to explain why it was difficult for their relationship to blossom, yet clearly enough cooperation to create trust, in the forms of language sharing, miscegenation, and trade, at least with some key individuals. Individuals, not a governing body, initially dictated the relationship between the Dutch and the Mohawk, while to some extent coloring the eastern NativeAmerican perception of them. In the earliest days of consistent interactions before monopolization, 1609–1614, accounts like Juet’s describe the Dutch and Natives as suspicious of each other at best.

The WIC’s shortcoming was in its inabilities to manifest its will in the colony and control these individual actors, likely owing to financial shortcomings rather than gross negligence. While keeping good relations with native neighbors benefitted landed colonists and settlers, some representatives of the Dutch, such as the transient and opportunistic Hans Hontom, found it profitable to abuse natives, because he would not

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stick around to see the consequences of it, or so he thought. The WIC’s appointment of Hans Hontom to commis of Fort Orange years later shows their lack of policing their own rule of law, and even ignorance of Hontom’s heinous acts. A stronger will to act politically and invest financially into the colony of New Netherland would have resulted in a far less tenuous and strained relationship, which the relationship continued to be until the colony’s takeover in 1664. Echoing points made in Van der Donck’s Remonstrance of New Netherland, this investment and attention would have at least helped colonists avoid the pain of being woefully misrepresented by leaders, one of whom chose to damn the settlers by committing to the overwhelmingly unpopular “Kieft’s War.”88 The Mohawk-Dutch relationship until the mid-1640s was tainted by the colonists’ reliance on trade with local Natives, which resulted in a colony unable to become economically self-sufficient until the second half of the seventeenth century. This reliance on native trade was a direct result of the WIC’s lack of investment in societybuilding and peoples’ resulting inability to set up permanent residence in such an unstable world.

84 Sayres, 54. In the 1630s, the Dutch could fetch about twenty beaver pelts for one musket.

85 Roger Carpenter, “Making War More Lethal: Iroquois vs. Huron in the Great Lakes Region, 1609 to 1650,” in Michigan Historical Review 27 (2001), 2: 42.

86

Ibid, 46, 47.

In the latter half of Sayres’ paper, he describes how while this was extremely profitable for Dutch merchants and figures like Arent van Curler, increasing Mohawk demands for powder, guns, and free repairs would prove detrimental to the upkeep of this relationship.

87

88 Adriaen van der Donck and Cornelis van Tienhoven, Remonstrance of New Netherland, and the Occurrences There. Addressed to the High and Mighty States General of the United Netherlands, on the 28th July, 1649. With Secretary Van Tienhoven’s answer, E. B. O’Callaghan, trans. (Albany, NY, 1856).

de Halve Maen

“Surrounded by Enemies”:

Albany’s Perilous Location

by Rudy VanVeghten

A

LBANY, NEW YORK, dates its history to 1614, when the Dutch fur traders built Fort Nassau on Castle Island. Perched in the midst of Native American territory, the intent was to facilitate the acquisition of Indian-supplied furs. Fort Nassau was replaced a decade later by the Dutch West India Company’s Fort Orange, located on the west bank of the Hudson River near the eastern end of the Dunn Memorial Bridge. Permanent settlement of the area was put in motion five years later when Kiliaen van Rensselaer registered a patroonship there on November 19, 1629.1 From its earliest days, the embryonic community had tenuous relations with its nearest aboriginal neighbors—the Algonquian Mahicans to the east, and the Iroquoian Mohawks to the west. As things evolved, the insurgent Dutch (and later English) found themselves at the center of ongoing conflicts that extended far beyond the immediate vicinity, stretching from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, and from Labrador to Chesapeake Bay. Wars between rival Indian cultures waxed and waned over the decades, and as competing European interests aligned with different Indian nations, nervous Hudson Valley colonists often times didn’t know which shoulder to look over.

This essay will look at the evolution of Albany’s “constant state of alarm” from the time of first contact up to the onset of King Philip’s War in the mid-1670s.

Back Story. European relations with native Indian tribes date back well before permanent colonization of New Netherland, New Rudy VanVeghten, copy editor of de Halve Maen, has focused his recent research on the relationships between colonial Albany and Native Americans to their west, north, and east. This essay will lead into a study of how these relationships spurred the formation of the so-called Albany Convention during the years of Leisler’s Rebellion at the outset of King William’s War.

Commemorative Stamp – Canada in 1908 honored its two early explorers Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain with this postage stamp.

England, and New France. Among the earliest documented encounters with indigenous peoples of Northeastern North America were those of French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534 and 1535, just four decades after Columbus first landed in the New World.

During his exploration of the St. Lawrence River, Cartier encountered Natives of both Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures.2 By the time Samuel de Champlain undertook his explorations of Canada six decades later, something had happened to the St. Lawrence Iroquois. Archeologists and ethnohistorians have yet to settle on a reason this band virtually disappeared, with the most common theories speculating they were absorbed as refugees among their closely related Wendat (Huron) Iroquois nation north of the Great Lakes, and/or as captives among the warring Mohawks and possibly other Iroquois nations in presentday upstate New York.3 It is commonly believed the Mohawks pushed out the Laurentian Iroquois in order to facilitate trade with French ships. But instead of Mohawks winning a trade advantage, the vacuum was filled by means of a treaty between the French and the Montagnais, Algonquins, and Abenakis, all tribes of the larger Algonquian culture.4 Champlain noted in a journal of his voyages that when Cartier navigated upriver as far as present-day Montreal, he had

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described the Native inhabitants of that time. “It was inhabited by savages who were sedentary and cultivated the soil,” he wrote.“This they no longer do, because of the wars that have made them withdraw into the interior.”5 Wars among the Indians were also noted in Champlain’s account of his own first voyage up the river. The Native Algonquians, he said, “are very timid and in great dread of their enemies, scarcely ever sleeping.”6 Champlain identifies these enemies as Iroquois.

In June 1609, as he set out from Quebec to explore south into the lands of these enemies, he met up with bands of Hurons and Algonquins wanting “to assist us in exploration of the countries of the Iroquois, against 1 A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (Albany, 1908), 157 [hereafter VRBM].

James Phinney Baxter, A Memoir of Jacques Cartier (New York, 1909), 109, 109n.

2

William Starna and Jose Antonio Brandao, “From the Mohawk-Mahican War to the Beaver Wars: Questioning the Pattern” in Ethnohistory 51:4 (fall 2004), 726; Shaun Sayres, “ ‘A Dangerous Liberty’: Mohawk-Dutch Relations and the Colonial Gunpowder Trade, 1534–1665,” master’s thesis and capstone (Durham, 2018), https://scholars.unh. edu/thesis/1174, retrieved 8/30/2020, 20.

3

4

Sayres, 20–21.

Edward Gaylord Bourne, ed., The Voyages and Explorations of Samuel de Champlain (1604–1616), Narrated by Himself, two volumes (Toronto, 1911), 1:13.

5

W. L. Grant, ed., “Voyages of Samuel de Champlain 16041618” in J. Franklin Jameson, gen. ed., Original Narratives of Early American History (New York, 1907), 143.

6

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whom they carry on mortal combat.” As Champlain recounts it, the chiefs explained to their amassed warriors that French explorer “desired to assist them against their enemies, with whom they had for a long time been at warfare, on account of many cruel acts committed by them against their tribe, under color of friendship.”7 Proceeding upstream, the combined French and Indian army reached the mouth of the Richelieu River, or what the Natives called “the River of the Iroquois.”

Entering the lake now named for him, Champlain wondered at a series of large islands “which formerly had been inhabited by savages, like the River of the Iroquois; but they have been abandoned since the wars of the savages with one another prevail.”8 Pointing out the lands west of the lake, the Indians told Champlain they “were thickly settled,” and “it was there that we were to find their enemies.”9 Finally on July 29, 1609, they encountered the Iroquois “about ten o’clock at evening, at the extremity of a cape which extends into the lake on the western bank.

They had come to fight.”10 Waiting for dawn the next day, the Iroquois were naturally expecting a traditional battle fought with bows and arrows. Champlain, however, altered the course of the battle when he fired his arquebus musket, dropping two of the three leading Iroquois chiefs with one shot. “Seeing their chiefs dead,” recorded Champlain, “they lost courage, and took to flight, abandoning their camp and fort, and fleeing into the woods.”11 It was a culture-changing event in North American history. “Historians have tradi-

Dutch-sponsored explorer Henry Hudson encountered several Indian tribes during his September 1609 exploration. An influx of Dutch traders followed his route, leading to the building of the Fort Orange trading post at present-day Albany in 1624. (Google Images) tionally used this moment to describe two related, but distinct trajectories,” writes Sayres: “the beginnings of a long and bitter rivalry between the French and the Five Nations and the deadly impact of European firearms on technologically inferior Native American peoples.”12 Although Champlain’s journals indicate the rivalry between the Algonquian tribes of Canada and the Iroquois was already in place, the battle succeeded in aligning the French with both the Wendat (Huron) Iroquois and the cultural Algonquians of the Northeast, leaving the Iroquois nations below the Great Lakes without a comparable European ally.

That is, until Henry Hudson sailed his ship up the river named for him only a couple months after Champlain’s incursion from the other direction.

Hudson’s exploration of the river in September 1609 resulted in encounters with several Algonquian-speaking tribes including the Mahicans of the upper Hudson.

Dutch traders in 1614 followed Hudson’s route up the river and built Fort Nassau on Castle Island. Iroquoian Mohawks, in addition to the nearby Mahicans, were soon bringing furs to exchange for European goods. One of the Dutch traders, Jacob

Jacobse Eelckens, known to the Natives as Jacques, reportedly negotiated a trade covenant with the Mohawks about the middle of the 1620s.13 For the next decade, Mahicans and Mohawks competed for favored status in the trade with the increasing Dutch presence. When war broke out again between the two Native cultures in the 1620s, the Dutch initially sided with the Mahicans resulting in the death of then Fort Orange commander Daniel van Crieckenbeck in 1626.14 According to Champlain, who heard about the conflict up in Quebec, the Dutch requested that Montagnais and Algonquin warriors from the St. Lawrence River Valley assist the Mahicans in their war against the Mohawks.

Champlain indicated the conflict arose because the Mahicans were “not willing to allow them [the Mohawks] free passage to go and make war on a nation called the Loups, with whom the Iroquois were at enmity.” The French word loups, or wolves, is often used in describing the Mahican and other Hudson “River Indians” but also extends to other Algonquian tribes. “The French sometimes referred to both Pennacooks and Sokokis as Loups,” notes Dartmouth Professor of Native American Studies Colin Calloway, “a name they originally applied to the Mahicans and to other, more distant peoples on the south and west.”15 Both Starna and Sayres 7

Ibid., 151.

8

Ibid., 161.

9

Ibid., 162.

Ibid., 163. This cape is thought variously to be either present-day Crown Point or the site of Fort Ticonderoga.

10

11

Ibid., 165.

12

Sayres, 23.

William Starna, “Retrospecting the Origins of the League of the Iroquois” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152:3 (September 2008), 302; Sayres, 24. A document claiming to be a treaty was later proved to be a forgery, although Mohawks in later years claimed their socalled Covenant Chain agreement began at this time.

13

14 J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 (New York, 1909), 89, 89.

Champlain Battles Mohawks– Accompanied by a contingent of Canadian Hurons and Algonquins, Samuel de Champlain battled a Mohawk war party during his 1609 exploration of the lake named for him. (Wikimedia Commons)

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15 Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont 1600–1800 (Norman, Okla., 1990), 15. Sokokis lived along the Connecticut River near the present Massachusetts-New Hampshire-Vermont border. Penacooks inhabited the Merrimack River valley from Lake Winnipesaukee south to the confluence with the Concord River.

de Halve Maen

Sokoki Territory–Although not precise, this map of Western Abenaki territories shows the relative locations of the Penacook and Sokoki tribes along the Merrimack and Connecticut Rivers.

(Wikimedia Commons)

the biblical Goliath:

interpret Champlain’s use of loups here to indicate the Sokoki tribe who inhabited the middle Connecticut River Valley near the present-day New Hampshire-VermontMassachusetts border.16 Mohawks prevailed in their war with the Mahicans, resulting in large-scale abandonment of indigenous villages in the area of the Hudson/Mohawk River confluence, It was into this vacuum that Kiliaen van Rensselaer registered a patroonship in 1629, which in conjunction with the West India Company’s Fort Orange, evolved over time into the city of Albany and the neighboring villages of early Albany County.17 As they slowly set up homesteads, farms, and shops in the area, little did the settlers know they were locating in a buffer zone not only between two rival Indian tribes, but between two rival aboriginal cultures—the Iroquois and the Algonquians.

Enemies of the Mohawks. From here, we need to shift focus from New York’s Native American history to look at tribes of that other culture over in neighboring New England—particularly a subgroup of Algonquians known as the Abenaki, with whom the Mohawks were frequently at war. Passaconaway, sachem of the Penacook nation of Abenakis, was among those involved in the wars with the Mohawks and Iroquois. Described as a “physical and intellectual giant,” Passaconaway was by his own account a fierce champion in battles against other Native tribes invading from the west, comparable to Homer’s Ajax or

When young and sturdy, when my bow—no young man of the Pennacooks could bend it—when my arrow would pierce a deer at an hundred yards—and I could bury my hatchet in a sapling to the eye—no wigwam had so many furs—no pole so many scalps as Passaconaway’s! Then I delighted in war.

The whoop of the Pennacooks was heard upon the Mohawk—and no voice so loud as Passaconaway’s. The scalps upon the pole of my wigwam told the story of Mohawk suffering.18 Collating the early references from the Fort Orange trading post with the words of Passaconaway, it seems likely the battles he fought against the Mohawks occurred either during the 1624–1628 Mohawk-Mahican War or somewhat earlier. Concord, New Hampshire, historian Charles Beals speculates it took place up to twenty years before the Pilgrims landed.19 Another important consideration is the close relationship between the Penacook and Sokoki tribes.

“These two tribes appear to have been friendly and were possibly related,” writes Gordon Day.20 He also explains that the name Sokoki derives from the Algonquian word sohkwahkiak, which means “the people who separated, broke apart.”21 This leads to the question: from what or from whom did the Sokokis break away? Unfortunately, Day offers no speculation as to an answer. Based on their close relationship to the Penacooks, it is a reasonable possibility that the Sokokis broke off from the Penacook tribe.

Animosities Spill Over. Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s agents in his new patroonship succeeded in establishing a few farms in the early 1630s. It was a difficult task finding not only farm workers, but also farm animals to populate these frontier endeavors. Meanwhile, traders and West India Company officials at Fort Orange were trying to figure out whether the remaining Mahican Indians or the rival Mohawks would make the best trading partners. When in the summer of 1633 Mohawks identified trader Hans Jorison Hantom as one who had earlier captured, executed, and mutilated one of their chiefs during the 1624–1628 war, they reportedly exacted revenge, whereupon “all the cattle in the neighborhood of Fort Orange had been killed.”22 Van Rensselaer, when he heard

16 Starna/Brandao, 731, 734; Sayres, 37. Archeologist James Bradley notes that the two cultures were not always enemies before the Dutch arrived. He indicates that the Mohawk victory in the 1624–1628 war gave them control of the fur trade with the Dutch (Bradley, 17-18, 58). Starna, however, notes the Mohawks had battled Northeast Algonquian tribes over land control for some 50 years or more before the Dutch arrival in 1609. “The Iroquois had been fighting long before there ever was a fur trade” (Starna, “Mohawk-Mahican War,” 734, 741). Sayres suggests the Mohawks were more interested in cornering the trade market in wampum than in furs (Sayres, 42).

17 Janny Venema, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 1586–1943: Designing a New World (Albany, 2010 ), 246.

Charles Edward Beals Jr., Passaconaway in the White Mountains (Boston, 1916), 40.

18

19

Ibid., 14.

Gordon Day, “The Identity of the Sokokis,” in Ethnohistory 12:3 (summer 1965), 245.

20

21

Ibid., 241.

22

VRBM, 304.

Warrior Champion–Penacook Chief Passaconaway claimed he was a major combatant in early seventeenthcentury wars against the Mohawks.

(Image from Charles E. Beals Jr., Passaconaway in the White Mountains).

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the news, became alarmed. “Many believe that everything in that country is entirely destroyed, people as well as cattle,” he wrote to his nephew Wouter van Twiller, then governor of New Netherland.23 To his colony director Jacob Planck, he naively wrote, “The indemnity from the Maquaas ought also some day to be collected without getting thereby into contention or war. It must be done in the name of the director below [van Twiller] in order that the Maquaas may have less feeling against the people of Fort Orange and also against my people.”24 As this incident demonstrates, security of the Dutch settlers in the north Hudson Valley was already compromised even before the area had coalesced into a village. This resulted not only from the WIC’s initial support of Mahicans in the 1624–1628 war, but also from the ongoing battles and shifting alliances between the various Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes throughout the Northeast.

As noted above, the Mohawks launched the war during the 1620s because the Mahicans would not allow them access to a tribe of Loups to the east, possibly the Sokokis.

This is difficult to pinpoint as the Sokokis are not specifically identified in European historic records until 1643. There is no official record of the tribe between the war and this reference, but two developments during those years have pertinence.

During the mid-1630s, a repeated wave of smallpox broke out among the Mohawks.

When Harmen Meyndertse van den Bogaert journeyed into Mohawk villages in the winter of 1634–1635, he found a population recently depleted. “A good many savages here in the castle died of smallbox,” he recorded on December 13.25 Three days later at the Mohawks’ second village or castle, he reported, “I did not see much but a good many graves.”26 And on January 16, he witnessed a group of Mohawks dividing up a cache of wampum beads that had belonged “to savages that died of the smallpox.”27 Estimates of this epidemic’s mortality on the immunity-lacking tribe range from 65 to as much as 75 percent, reducing the Mohawk population from an estimated 8,000 down to about 3,000 or less.28 One outcome of this epidemic was an effort to repopulate by means of warfare and adopting captured individuals from other tribes. “The design of the Iroquois,” wrote one contemporary observer, “is to take all the Hurons, if they can, put to death the most eminent, and a good part of the rest, and make of the two one people and one land.”29

Another development involves a new personality who arrived a few years later.

Eighteen-year-old Arent van Curler first came to New Netherland in 1638 as an employee of his great uncle, Patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer. More than any other individual of the growing Dutch community, Van Curler became an accepted presence among the Mohawks. Ignoring the instructions of his kinsman the patroon and religious leaders, Van Curler early on fraternized with young Mohawk women, fathering a child possibly as early as the 1640s.30 It was Van Curler who was largely responsible for securing a firm trade relationship with the Mohawks and other tribes of the Five Nations of Iroquois. “By the early 1640s,” notes archeologist James Bradley, “Arent van Curler was emerging as the anchoring personality on the Dutch side.”31 Beyond the Mohawk smallpox epidemic and the importance of Arent van Curler, there is another important development that, although without definitive records, can be inferred. Following the Mohawks’ defeat of the Mahicans in the 1624–1628 war, they apparently proceeded to conquer the other indigenous band further east—the tribe identified by Champlain as Loups and assumed to be the Sokokis of the Connecticut River Valley.32 According to Barthelemy Vimont, father superior at the Jesuit Mission at Sillery, near Quebec, Canada, a Sokoki warrior had been captured by Algonquins, brutally tortured, and about to be immolated when a messenger from Governor Charles de Montmagny ransomed him. Brought to the hospital at Sillery, the Indian was healed and well treated by the nuns there before Montmagny returned him to his native Western Abenaki homeland.33 What is odd about this episode is that the Algonquins of the St. Lawrence Valley are identified at this time as enemies of the Sokoki, even though they were both part of the broader Algonquian culture. Even stranger is what happened later that year.

Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues, while on assignment with the Huron nation, had been captured in 1642 by a warring band of Mohawks. Somehow surviving months of ritual torture inflicted by his captors, Jogues was nearly ransomed by Dutchman Arent van Curler. On September 7, 1642, Jogues reported, “One of the principal Hollanders, who have a settlement not more than twenty leagues from these Indians, came with two others to effect our liberation. He remained there several days, offered much, promised more, obtained nothing.”34 A second oppor-

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tunity for rescue came from an unsuspected source. “An Indian of the country of the Sokokois, allies of the Iroquois, having been taken by the upper Algonquins and brought to Three Rivers or Quebec as a prisoner, was delivered and set at liberty by the intervention of the Governor of New France,” Jogues recorded in a later letter. “The good Indian, seeing that the French had saved his life, sent beautiful presents in the month of April to deliver at least one of the French.”

As with Van Curler’s earlier attempt, this one also failed in securing Jogues’ release.

The inference to be gathered from all of this comes from the statement of Father Jogues that the Sokokis in 1643 were “allies of the Iroquois.” Two decades earlier, the Mohawks were described as “at enmity” with the Loups—assumed to be this same Sokoki tribe—and willing to fight Hudson River Mahicans for passage through their territory to wage war against the Connecticut River tribe. It appears, then, that following their victory over the Mahicans, the Mohawks were subsequently successful in conquering the Sokokis and forcefully converting them into Mohawk allies against other Algonquian tribes such as the Montagnais and Algonquins of the St. Lawrence Valley.

In August 1643, Jogues again encountered Van Curler while the priest and his Mohawk captors were passing through the Fort Orange area. Van Curler concocted a plan to rescue the priest by hiding him in 23

Ibid., 316.

24

Ibid., 330.

25

NNN, 141.

26

Ibid., 142

27

Ibid., 156,

28

Sayres, 49.

Isaac Jogues, Narrative of a Captivity among the Mohawk Indians (New-York Historical Society, 1856), 47.

29

30 Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithica, NY, 2009), 210.

James Bradley, “Visualizing Arent van Curler,” de Halve Maen 78:1 (Spring 2005), 5.

31

32 Starna/Brando, 731; Sayres 37n; Gordon Day, Identity of the Saint Francis Indians (Ottawa, 1981), 15.

33 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791 (Cleveland, 1899), vol. 24: 57–61, 181, 191 [hereafter JR]. Although Thwaites identifies the warrior’s native area as the Saco River in present-day New Hampshire and Maine, Gordon Day has shown that the Sokokis actually were centered at the Indian village of Squakheag in present-day Northfield, Massachsetts. The English settlement which the Jesuit emissary visited after delivering the warrior most likely would have been Springfield, Massachusetts, founded a few years earlier by Englishman William Pynchon.

34

Jogues, 29, 29n.

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Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues escaped after months of Mohawk captivity and torture in 1643 with the assistance of Dutchman Arent van Curler. This depiction was created when the priest was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1630.

(Wikimedia Commons)

a small boat and lodging him secretly in the home of a lye maker near Fort Orange until he could be transported safely down to Manhattan.35 When Van Curler broached his getaway plan, the priest objected “that the Iroquois, probably suspecting that some one had favored my retreat, might cause some damage to his people.”36 While Jogues was hiding temporarily in the belly of a Dutch ship, Domine Johanes Megapolensis visited him and told him “the Iroquois had indeed made some disturbance, and that the Dutch inhabitants of the country were afraid that they would set fire to their houses or kill their cattle.”37 Doubling their cause for worry was knowledge that settlers downriver in Manhattan were at that time experiencing similar damage from Delaware Indians during the conflict known as Kieft’s War.38 Father Vimont in Canada next discusses the Sokoki Indians in 1645–1646 in a general assessment of Natives inhabiting regions south of the St. Lawrence River. In addition to the Mohawks, whom he calls Annierronnons, “there are other Nations, more to the North, who seem disposed to undertake war with our Savages,—as the Sokoquiois, whom our Savages call Assokwekik; and the Mahingans, or Mahinganok, with whom the Algonquins formerly had extensive alliances,—but, the Annierronnon Iroquois having subdued them, they have ranged themselves upon their side.”39 Vimont further relates that after the French had seemingly brokered a peace treaty with the Mohawks, a group of Sokokis interrupted to voice their displeasure. “For a long time I have heard you say that the Algonquins were your irreconcilable enemies, and that

you hated them even beyond the grave,” the Sokoki told the Iroquois negotiators.

Their impudence marked a crack in the relationship between the two nations. Affronted by this boldness on the part of their vassals, the Mohawks answered, “You cast shame on our faces; you make us pass as knaves.”40 In 1650, the Jesuits in Canada sent Father Gabriel Druilletes as a missionary into New England, including Sokoki country.

His goal was to recruit both English colonists and various Algonquian tribes to join forces with the French to counter ongoing attacks from the Iroquois. Although the English balked at the idea as it could turn Mohawk attacks against their settlements, the Sokokis, Penacooks and other tribes joined the alliance. Reporting back in 1651, Father Druilletes noted that on April 24 of the previous year, he had met with a Sokoki Indian representing three tribes in addition to his own, including the “Penagouc” (Penacook) and “Mahingans, situated on the river of manate” (Mahicans on the river of Manhattan, i.e., the Hudson).

The emissary reported these tribes “having held a Council during three months of the past winter, had resolved to take the risks against the Iroquois with Onontio and Noel, whether the English did or did not undertake the war against the Iroquois.” Reflecting on this opportunity to gain another Indian ally, Druilletes wrote, “It is certain that the Sokouckiois have been closely allied to the Algonquians, and are very glad to deliver themselves from the annual tribute of porcelain which the Iroquois exact, — nay, even, to revenge themselves for the death of many of their fellow-countrymen, killed by the Iroquois.”41 As Gordon Day explains it, “At his (Druilletes) request, four tribes—the Penacooks, Sokokis, Pacomtucks, and Mahicans—held councils during the winter of 1650 and 1651 to debate the question of taking up arms against the Iroquois, and in April 1651, it was the Sokokis who brought

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him word of their decision to do so.”42 Beaver War Escalation.This new bravado among the Sokoki, Penacooks, and other tribes was possibly due to an increasing balance in the new weapons of war—muskets, gunpowder, and lead—supplied by Europeans in exchange for furs. “The rise of the Mohawks in the 1640s and 1650s prompted many of their enemies to begin building arsenals of their own so that by 1660, the tables had turned,” notes Sayres. “Indians of the Upper Connecticut River Valley such as Pocumtucks, Pennacooks, and Sokokis most likely received guns from John Pynchon’s trade post in Springfield as well as from the French to the north.”43 Freshly armed with European firearms, the Sokokis were now looking to disengage from their forced alliance with the Mohawks.

As the 1650s neared their end and the 1660s their beginning, fears over the resumption of Indian hostilities were again on the rise among the residents of Beverwijck. Jeremias van Rensselaer and Arent van Curler were among a delegation sent to the Mohawks in September 1659. “They complain bitterly about the French,” the delegation reported to Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant, “because the French do not keep the peace made with them; for whenever they are out hunting, they are attacked by the French Indians.”44 A much different perspective had gelled among the French, who alleged it was the Mohawks, not they, who were violating a general peace agreement. “Of two thousand Iroquois, or thereabout, which is the total number, we see fifteen or sixteen hundred 35 “Narrative of Father Jogues, Reported by Father Buteux, 1645” in NNN, 251–52.

36

NNN, 244.

37

Ibid., 248.

38

Ibid., 260.

39

JR 28:273.

40

Ibid., 283.

JR 34:99–103. Onontio is the name given by the Indians to the governor of Canada. Noel refers to the Christianized Montagnais chief Negabamat, who adopted the name Noel Tekwerimat at his baptism in Sillery. Noel accompanied Father Druilletes on the mission to New England. By “porcelain,” Druilletes refers to wampum.

41

42

Day, “Sokokis,” 242.

Sayres, 105. Sayres cites David Silverman, Thurdersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 44.

43

44 Charles Gehring, trans. and ed., Fort Orange Court Minutes 1652–1660 (Syracuse, 1990), 453–54, 459–60.

E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, trans. and eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–1887), 13:185 [hereafter DRCNY].

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laying down their arms, either permanently or at least for a time,” reads one Jesuit report.

“Meanwhile, we have on our hands only four or five hundred, who themselves have to deal with three different nations, — the Abnaquiois, the Mahingans, and the so-called ‘I people of the East,’ — against whom they resume hostilities afresh, being so haughty that they do not think us worthy of reckoning in the number of their foes.”45 One of the nations identified in these developments was the Penacook confederacy, led for nearly half a century by the aging chief Passaconaway, who continued to seek colonial militia support against his nation’s indigenous enemies. In 1644, Passaconaway had petitioned the Massachusetts General Court in Boston “to come under this government.”46 One of the principal Penacook villages was at Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River, near present-day Lowell, Massachusetts. It was here that Passaconaway and his son and successor Wonalancet were reportedly influenced, and possibly Christianized, by the Puritan minister John Eliot in the late 1640s.47 They advised a peaceful coexistence with the colonists.

Peace with the Europeans, however, didn’t mean peace between Indian nations.

Mohawk ambassadors to Albany claimed on August 1, 1662, “that they had good ground to war with the Northern Indianes; who at two severall times had helped the Canida Indianes; that by theyr meanes they had lost 100 men.”48 A document translated by Gerrit van Slichtenhorst and Jan Thomasse Witbeck identifies which “Northern Indians” were involved. The Mohawks, they reported, plan “to make war against the Onejagese, also called Soquackjck, [Sokoki] and their adherents.” At the same time, the Mohawks offered to make peace with “the Onakonque, also called Kinnebeck,” whom they had attacked in the winter of 1660–1661.49 Saheda, a Mohawk sachem, advised the Dutch in 1663 that they had commenced this new war against the Sokoki “because the Sowquackick [Sokoki] Indians had killed and murdered some Maquaas.”

Springfield trader John Pynchon advised Fort Orange officials, “The Sowquackicks have indeed broken the friendship with the Maquaas and we will let the Maquaas act according to their pleasure.”50 “In 1663,” notes Day, “decades of intermittent warfare with the Mohawks culminated in a massive attack on Squakheag [present-day Northfield, Massachusetts]

by Mohawks, Onondagas and Senecas.

Both sides suffered heavily. Reinforced by

Sanson’s 1656 map of “Le Canada ou Nouvelle France” shows the extent of territory Louis XIV considered belonging to France, including the land west of the Hudson River inhabited by the Iroquois nations. (McGill University Library) Penacooks and probably by Cowassucks, the Sokwakis remained at their fort for a time, but this attack was probably the one which started a gradual Sokwaki exodus from Squakheag and their appearance in increasing numbers along the Saint Lawrence River.”51 This exodus, explains Day, led to the later formation of the Odanak village on the St. Francois River in Quebec Province.

The village, first settled by Sokokis about 1670, is commonly known to history as St. Francis and would play an increasingly important role as a refugee destination for New England tribes in the Indian conflicts to come.

These wars between Indian nations to their east and west, in addition to those to their south between Delaware Indians and settlers at Esopus, wore on the nervous Dutch residents of the upper Hudson River valley.

“One hears here daily nothing but [rumors] of war,” wrote Jeremias van Rensselaer to his brother Jan Baptist on September 14, 1663, “so that one must hold one meeting after another. [First] there are rumors that the Indians have news that the French are here, then that their territory is invaded by enemies, the Onekonques, who have already killed many of the Maquas here.”52 Not all the Sokokis migrated north after their 1663 defeat at Fort Hill. About three dozen of them found refuge at the Pocumtuk’s principal village near Springfield, Mass. In May 1664, Jan Dareth and Jacob Lookermans from Albany, along with a delegation of Mahicans and Mohawks, traveled over the Berkshires to the Connecticut River to negotiate a peace treaty between

68

the enemy Indian nations. “We have had no war for 36 years and have not troubled ourselves about our neighbors, the Soquackicks, when the Maquaes were at war with them last year,” said the Pocumtuk leaders, who then produced the refugee Sokokis.

“We talked long with them to induce them to make peace,” wrote the Dutchmen in their journal, “for the war had been brought on by them and they were now too weak, to have [a chance] against the Maquaes.”

Added the Mohawk delegates: “You have acted… like fools, the Onoganges, our real enemies, have [instigated] you.”53 45 JR 47:103–105. A footnote to the volume identifies the “I people of the East” possibly as Sokokis.

46 Nathaniel Bouton, ed., Provincial Papers. Documents and Records Relating to the Province of New Hampshire, from the Earliest Period of its Settlement, 1623–1686, Volume 1 (Concord, NH, 1867), 174.

47 48

Beals, 37. Calloway, 48.

DRCNY 13:225.

Ibid., 190, 298. Day explains, “Integrating the available linguistic and historical information makes it apparent that the Sokwakis were the North Indians and Squakeys or Squakheags of early English documents, the Soquachjck of the Dutch and the Onejagese of the Mohawks” (Day, “St. Francis,” 14–15).

49

50

DRCNY 13:308.

Day, “St. Francis,” 15. The Sokoki fort, known as Fort Hill, was built and occupied about 1663 at the confluence of the Ashuelot and Connecticut Rivers near present-day Hinsdale, New Hampshire (R. Duncan Mathewson III, “WesternAbenaki of the Upper Connecticut River Basin: Preliminary Notes on Native American Pre-Contact Culture in Northern New England” in The Journal of Vermont Archeology, 2011, 25.)

51

A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Correspondence of Jeremias van Rensselaer (Albany, 1932 ), 332 [hereafter CJVR]. Van Laer equates “Onekonques” generically with Algonquians, although as noted earlier, the Mohawks used that name specifically for the Kennebec tribe.

52

53

DRCNY 13: 380-381; Day “Sokokis,” 244; Calloway, 72.

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Hopes for peace diminished, however, after the Mohawk chief Saheda and other ambassadors were killed on their way to ratify the proposed treaty in June. They requested “that the English do not assist the three Nations of the Ondiakes, Pinnekooks and Pacamtekookes, who murdered one of the Princes of the Maques, when he brought ransomes & presents to them upon a treaty of peace.”54 Once again, war parties from the east and west were criss-crossing the Hudson Valley.

Mahicans and Sokokis invaded Mohawk territory in July 1664. Mohawks responded with destructive attacks against the Pocumtuks, the Sokokis, the Penacooks, and other villages further east. “Refugees from the abandoned villages,” writes Calloway, “fled south to Norwottuck and Agawam, sought asylum with the Pennacooks and other groups on the east, or began to migrate northward to Cowass, Lake Champlain, and Canada.”55 English Takeover. Further complicating the situation in the northern Hudson trading region was Charles II’s English takeover of New Netherland in 1664 and gifting the province to his brother James, the Duke of Albany and York. England was the centuries-old enemy of France, but this was somewhat mitigated by the kinship between Louis XIV and the Stuart brothers Charles and James. Although Louis and James were first cousins, they had competing hopes for capitalizing on the beaver trade in the New World—Louis through his administrators in Canada, and James through his new holdings in New York—by leveraging the close trade relationship between the Dutch and the Iroquois.

New York settlers’ concerns over the Iroquois-Algonquian flareups grew steadily during the long administration of Louis XIV in France. Only a few years after the boy-king took control of the nation from a regency in 1661, he began formulating a strategy for his holdings in North America. His appointment of Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy as viceroy (literally “substitute king”) of New France in 1664, with assistance from Intendent Jean Talon, launched a designed strategy to eradicate the Iroquois in order to divert beaver pelt dominance his way. The Sun King’s orders to these Canadian administrators in 1665 sought nothing less than genocide: The Iroquois, who are divided into divers nations, and who are all perpetual and irreconcilable enemies of the Colony, having by the massacre of

a number of French, and the inhumanity which they exercise towards those who fall into their power, prevented the country being more peopled than it is at present, and by their surprisals and unexpected forays always keeping the country in check, the King has resolved, with a view of applying a suitable remedy thereto, to carry war even to their firesides in order totally to exterminate them, having no guarantee in their words, for they violate their faith as often as they find the inhabitants of the Colony at their mercy.56 A failed attack by the French on the Mohawks in the winter of 1665 was followed by another the following year that kept Albany on edge. “More than a fortnight ago, the French Christians again came into the Maquaes country and burned all the houses in the three castles and nailed the arms of the king of France to a post,” was how Jeremias Van Rensselaer described the attack in an October 25, 1666, letter.

“They departed after having thrown all the maize into the water, or burned it, so that the Maquaes who had fled are again beginning to build houses. What the French further intend to do we do not know.”57 Concerns were not limited to New York.

Neighboring colonies in New England also feared any alliance between nearby Algonquian-speaking tribes and the French in Canada. “I had intelligence both from Capt Baker, commander at Fort Albany, and from divers cheife Indians, that it was designed & endeavoured by the French to draw those people into a confederacy wth them,” wrote Connecticut Governor John Winthrop Jr.

to New York Governor Richard Nichols in October 1666, “upon prtence wch the said French declared to them, that their intent was to make warre against the Mohaques and other nation[s] of the heathen.”58 Discussion regarding a possible peace treaty between the Iroquois and the Canadians took place over the winter of 1666–1667. Arent van Curler exchanged correspondence on several occasions with de Tracy over the following months. In 1667 van Curler agreed to travel personally to Quebec to continue the peace-seeking efforts. During the trip, however, he drowned when his boat encountered a severe storm on Lake Champlain and overturned.59 Despite these overtures of peace, raids between the Mohawks and various Algonquian tribes continued. Again it is Jeremias van Rensselaer who provides us with a barometer of Albany’s anxiety. “The war between the Maaquaes and the River Indians, which has lasted now for six years, is very detrimental to this place,” he reported in a May 1669 letter. And again two years later Jeremias wrote, “This summer we hardly knew what was going to become of us, owing to the various rumors from the Maquas country that the French from Canada, to the number of several thousands, were coming to attack us, yes, that they had already been seen on the lake.” His report later that year was more optimistic. “On the 8th of 54

DRCNY 3:68; Calloway, 72.

55

Calloway, 72–73.

56

DRCNY, 9:25.

57

CJVR, 388.

58

DRCNY 3:137.

59

Ibid.,146, 156, 156n; CJVR, 391, 391n.

Louis XIV (left) took over the French government in 1661, and his cousin James Stuart, the English Duke of Albany and York (right), gained control of New York province in 1664. The two spent the next couple of decades jockeying for primacy in the so-called Beaver Wars of the American Northeast. (Wikimedia Commons)

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Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy, French viceroy to Canada, made attempts to wipe out the New York’s Mohawk nation in 1665 and 1666, in compliance with Louis XIV’s suggestion “to exterminate them.”

When this failed, he sought to negotiate a treaty with them in 1667.

(Wikimedia Commons)

November 1671, last past, a firm peace was concluded by us here between the Maquas and the Mahikans in general and all those who carried on the war.”60 Any comfort this brief respite offered was upended in 1673 with the brief return to Dutch control over the New York/New Netherland province. New Netherland Dutch might have felt satisfaction in regaining control over the province in 1673, but it was counterbalanced by an uneasy realization: the English were no longer their protector, but once again their enemy. With neighboring English colonies to the east and south, the ambitious French-Indian alliance to the north, and the hard-to-read Mohawks and Iroquois to the west, the Dutch felt penned in. “We have now and then tidings that the French from Canada intend to attack us,” wrote Jeremias in November 1673. “We are surrounded by enemies, but hope that the Lord God will preserve us and that if any one comes to attack us we shall be able to resist him.”61 As the province once again reverted to English control in 1674, the question of who could offer assistance in the event of attack weighed heavily on the community.

“We shall up above be kept in a constant state of alarm in connection with the French, as we were last winter, just as now, since I have been here, I have been informed, as I had also understood before I left, that the French and their Indians were coming to attack us and that the Maquas were fleeing toward us,” wrote Jeremias while visiting Manhattan in July 1674. “If they come, may the Lord grant us unity and [strength]

to resist them and to defend the place.”62 Meanwhile, with his military efforts aimed at eradicating the Iroquois going nowhere, Louis had switched to a religious strategy.

During a 1673 expedition to a gathering of invited Iroquois chiefs at Lake Ontario, Canada Governor Louis de Baude de Frontenac addressed his guests with the following plea: Children! Onnontagues, Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas and Senecas. I cannot give you any advice more important or more profitable to you than to exhort you to become Christians, and to adore the same God that I adore… This God is called Jesus; and the Black Gowns here, who are his Ministers and Interpreters, will teach you to know Him whenever you are so disposed. I leave them among you and in your Villages only to teach you.63 Beginning as far back as the late 1660s, members of both New York Iroquois and New England Algonquins were lured by French Jesuit priests to relocate north to Canada. “The first Iroquois village in Canada was founded in 1669 by Father Pierre Raffeix,” writes Prof. Allen Trelease, “who chose as its site the Prarie de la Madeleine on the south bank of the St. Lawrence, opposite Montreal. To this mission,” he adds, “came a small but constant stream of adherents, attracted by the stories of the priests and

Governor General of New France– Christian Robert de Massy’s 2016 depiction of Louis de Baude, comte de Frontenac, who served as governor of Canada 1672–1682 and 1689–1698. (Wikipedia Commons)

previous emigrants and by the opportunity to practice the new religion in peace.”64 Several dozen members of the Mohawk “first castle” village known as Caughnawaga (present day Fonda, New York) defected to this new Catholic village. It later adopted the name Kanawaga after its predecessor. Frontenac referred to this mission in a general memoir from 1674: “You will find at the settlement of La Prairie de la Madelaine, belonging to the Jesuit Fathers, a considerable increase of Iroquois, who have come to settle there since last year, and are resolved to make a fixed and permanent abode there.”65 Leader of these Indians was a chief named Togouiroui, who came to be called Kryn by the English and Dutch, and as “The Great Mohawk” by the French.66 This new alliance between the Canadian colonial government and a faction of Mohawks did little to put the New York colonists at ease. In 1674, Jeremias van Rensselaer wrote to his family, “This winter we have now and then had alarms that the French were on their way.”67 It was the same theme heard consistently in the Fort Orange-Beverwijck-Albany area for half a century since the initial settlement in the 1620s and 1630s.

Conclusion. After New Netherland province once again became New York in 1674, the job of managing relations with the Indians fell to the new English Governor Edmund Andros at a time when Native Americans across the Northeast were becoming concerned over something more important than competition for the beaver trade. Especially over in the Puritan colonies of New England, Indian tribes were increasingly worried over the loss of their ancestral homeland. This concern erupted into what became known as King Philip’s War. That war in the mid1670s contributed in turn to King William’s War of the 1680s and 1690s and to the formation of a group of Albany-area leaders called the Albany Convention in 1689.

60

CJVR, 413, 440, 449.

61

Ibid., 453.

62

Ibid., 464.

DRCNY 9:106. “Black gowns” were how the Indians referred to the Jesuit priests.

63

64 Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1960), 252.

65

67

70

Ibid.; DRCNY 9:116.

Henri Béchard, “TOGOUIROUI, Joseph, Great Mohawk,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www. biographi.ca/en/bio/togouiroui_1E.html, retrieved October 29, 2016; DRCNY 3:431, 9:474, 474n.

66

CJVR, 454.

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Here and There in New Netherland Studies Voyages of New Netherland Database

O

N NOVEMBER 17, 2020, the New Netherland Institute launched its new online database, “Voyages of New Netherland,” with a Zoom presentation by project developer Julie van den Hout, followed by a discussion with Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Research Center and Stephen McErleane of the New Netherland Institute. A live question and answer followed the prerecorded presentation and conversation.

Voyages of New Netherland is a searchable, primary source-based directory of more than 300 ship voyages to New Netherland (1609–1664). Between 1609 and 1664, more than 150 ships undertook roughly 250 voyages between the Dutch Republic and the colony of New Netherland. These ships crucially connected colonial nodes across the North Atlantic Ocean, transporting

administrators and colonists, delivering provisions, supplies, and essentials, and conveying correspondence. Voyages of New Netherland aims to integrate the activities of these ships into the larger story of the colony. The database will continue to be updated and refined as new information comes to light.

This project is the result of a research grant from the late Holland Society Trustee Charles W. Wendell. For further information go to https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/history-and-heritage/digitalexhibitions/voyages-of-new-netherland/.

“New Amsterdam is a Dutch City”

T

HE NEW AMSTERDAM History Center aired on October 26, 2020, a prerecorded conversation between author Russell Shorto and architectural historian Barry Lewis and moderated by Manhat-

tan Borough historian Robert Snyder. In a lively discussion about the enduring Dutch founding and forty-year administration of New Amsterdam between 1624 and 1664, Shorto and Lewis traded observations about how our democratic institutions, rule of law, entrepreneurial spirit, multiculturalism, and vocabulary are indebted to our Dutch origins. A live question-and-answer session followed.

The video is available to view at the New Amsterdam History Center website at https://newamsterdamhistorycenter.org/ events/new-york-is-a-dutch-city-2/.

The New Amsterdam History Center’s mission is to encourage exploration of the Dutch history of New Amsterdam as it laid the foundational character for today’s New York City, with special reference to its ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, urban landscapes, economic vitality, and global legacy. For further information visit their website at https://newamsterdamhistorycenter.org/about/.

In Memoriam Thomas Lee Dusenberry

graduated from the University of Miami in 1960 with a BBA degree. He continued his education by earning an MBA cum laude in 1963 from Fairleigh Dickinson University, by attending night classes at the Madison, New Jersey, campus.

Mr. Dusenberry married Nancy Anderson on July 28, 1962, in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. The couple had three children: Thomas Baldwin Dusenberry, born in Madison , New Jersey, in February 1963, Anne Dusenberry born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1966, and Peter Dusenberry in Dunwoody, Georgia, in 1971. Mr. Dusenberry was preceded in death by his son Thomas.

Mr. Dusenberry worked as a CPA/CFP worked for Griffith Labs and Harry Camp Millinery in Manhattan. In 1963 the international CPA firm Arthur Anderson hired him for its Milwaukee office. After three years he went to work for Allsteel Equipment Company in Aurora, Illinois, a large office furniture manufacturer, as assistant group controller soon to be upgraded to group controller for HayesAlbion Corporation in

Albion, Michigan. He moved to Dunwoody, Georgia, in 1971, from where he commuted to Atlanta to work for Glassrock Products and All American Products Company. Mr. Dusenberry opened his own CPA practice in Dunwoody, Georgia, in 1985.

Mr. Dusenberry was an active member of The Holland Society. He never missed a gathering of his Old South Branch fellow members, and treasured his connection to the old Dutch world. His faith in God was quiet and steady. At age three, calling out to God to save him from drowning set him on a lifelong spiritual journey. He served at Saint Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Dunwoody beginning in 1972 in many ordinary and leadership roles.

Mr. Dusenberry loved jazz, and dancing with his wife. He enjoyed bringing light to peoples lives through laughter, love and friendship. He forgave and laughed easily, hated gossip, and loved dogs (anyone’s dog).

Mr. Dusenberry was a devoted faithful husband, father, grandfather, and uncle. While facing the end of his life his goodbye gift

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Holland Society of New York Member Thomas Lee Dusenberry passed away peacefully on Friday, June 12, 2020, of Alzheimerʼs, surrounded by family at his home in Sandy Springs, Georgia, at age eighty-two. Mr. Dusenberry was born on January 10, 1938, at New Jersey Presbyterian Hospital in Nutley, New Jersey, son of John B. Dusenberry and Elisabeth Vetter. He claimed descent from Hendrick Hendricks van Doesburg from Doesburg, Gelderland, Netherlands, who arrived in New Netherland by 1655. Mr. Dusenberry became a member of the Holland Society in 1994.

Mr. Dusenberry attended public schools in Madison, New Jersey. He said of himself, “First and second grade were troublesome, but not for the lack of trying. I was the last one picked for spelling bees, but the first one picked for ball games.” Mr. Dusenberry graduated from Madison High School in 1956 and entered the University of Miami, Florida, via a track scholarship. He

to many was a poignant customized joke.

His way of passing (and living), with a mirthful, light heart, was his parting gift to us all. Were he able, he would give each of us his last martini olive.

Mr. Dusenberry is survived by his wife, Nancy, of Sandy Springs, daughter AnneDavnes Elser of Decatur, Georgia, son Peter Dusenberry, and grandchildren Nathanael Volckening, Mia Dusenberry, and Anton Elser. Due to COVID-19 a private memorial service was held at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Dunwoody, Georgia, with the Rev. Dick Game officiating.

Donald Westervelt Holland Society of New York Life Member and Trustee Emeritus Donald Westervelt passed away of pulmonary fibrosis at his home in Kissimmee, Florida, on September 13, 2020, at the age of eighty-four.

Mr. Westervelt was born on June 24, 1936, in Manhattan, son of Charles Westervelt and Elizabeth. He claimed descent from Lubbert Lubbertszen from Meppel, Denthe, the Netherlands, 1662. Mr. Westervelt joined the Holland Society in June 2003.

Mr. Westervelt was raised in the Bronx, where his father was a building supervisor.

He attended New York City public schools and graduated from Amityville Memorial High School, Amityville, New York, in 1954. At age ten he worked as a shoeshine boy and at age seventeen a gas station attendant. Attending classes through their weekend program, Mr. Westervelt received a Bachelor of Science degree (magna cum laude) from the New York Institute of Technology, completed advanced management studies at Hofstra University, and earned a Juris Doctor degree from New York Law School in 1987.

Mr. Westervelt married Emily Toomey on February 11,1956, at Mitchel Field Air Force Base in Hempstead, New York. The couple adopted two sons: Donald Jay Westervelt Jr., born on April 20,1963, and Edward Thomas Westervelt, born on October 11, 1967. His son Donald predeceased him.

Mr. Westervelt was an attorney and a member of the New York State Bar and the New York County Lawyers Association. He was a veteran of the United States Air Force and a vice commander of American Legion Post 9 in Manhattan. He spent six years as a member for Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney’s committee to interview candidates for her congressional appointment to

any of the four military academies. He was active in the manufacturing industry and retired in 1978 to work in the not-for-profit sector. Working with the National Industries for the Severely Handicapped (NISH) and the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), he created employment opportunities in New York State for over 1,000 handicapped persons. He then joined the Federal Defense Contract Agency (DOD) with oversight authority for major defense contractors. During this period he participated in President Ronald Reagan’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Defense Management and received a Defense Department Commendation for his work with Loral Corporation.

Mr. Westervelt left government to reorganize the ATT-Bell Laboratories R7D property administration department. After bringing all nine of its United States research facilities in compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations, he returned to the federal government to work on tax compliance issues. He also authored and conducted New York State-accredited seminars. He retired from the federal government in January 2001.

Mr. Westervelt was a Trustee and subsequently Treasurer of the Holland Society of New York for three years, 2012–2014.

In 2014, Mr. Westervelt received the Holland Society Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement by a Member. In his acceptance address, he spoke about his charitable work and involvement with other historical societies and the importance of the pleasure one can derive from volunteering. In addition to his membership in the Holland Society, he was active with the Sons of the American Revolution in the State of New York, where he has served as treasurer for five years before being elected president in December 2010. He was also a member of the Saint Nicholas Society, The Society of Colonial Wars, and the Saint Andrews Society. He also was a member of several standing and ad hoc committees, most recently: the Solivita Landscape Committee; the ad hoc Solivita Irrigation Committee and the Solivita Violations Committee in Kissimmee, Florida.

Mr. Westervelt is survived by his wife, Emily, son Edward Thomas Westervelt of Flushing, Queens, New York, and two grandchildren, Alex and Susan Westervelt.

Lawrence Statius Schenck Lawrence Statius Schenck passed away

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peacefully at his home in Glastonbury, England, on September 10, 2020, at the age of eighty-one. Mr. Schenck was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 20, 1939, son of Teunis Schenck and Obdulia Emma Statius-Muller. He claimed descent from Jan Martenszen Schenck from Amersfoort, Utrecht, the Netherlands in 1650. Mr. Schenck was elected to membership in the Holland Society on January 1, 1977.

Mr. Schenck attended local primary and middle schools and Brooklyn Technical High School. He moved to Mount Kisco, New York, where he worked for radio station WVIP in 1959 and joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, in August 1964, as a bench technician. He transferred to IBM Kingston, New York, in June 1965, as a technical writer. and was promoted to department manager in May 1978 and to product planner in September 1980. He moved to Babylon, Long Island, New York, and worked for radio station WBAB. Mr. Schenck married Joan E. Dillon on June 25, 1960. The couple had a daughter Nanuet Marie Schenck, born August 30, 1961, in Mount Kisco, New York. The couple divorced on November 19, 1964. Mr. Schenck married second Arleen M. Faller on July 17, 1965. The couple had three sons, Peter Lawrence Schenck, born on February 23, 1970, Thomas Christopher Schenck, born on February 27, 1971, and James Johannes Schenck, born on August 28, 1975.

The couple divorced on October 23, 1984.

His son Thomas Christopher predeceased him in 2015. Mr. Schenck married third Doris Rosalie Seymour, on June 1, 1985.

The couple had no children.

Mr. Schenck transferred to IBM in August 1986 working in Brentford, England, as product manager, and transferring to Hursley, England, in September 1987. He joined the Methodist Church of Alresford, England, and qualified as a Methodist local preacher in 1990. In that year he transferred to Texas as an IBM product planner. Following retirement Mr. Schenck returned to Alresford, England, in December 1993. He moved to Glastonbury in September 2003.

He became a licensed reader in St. Johnʼs Church of England in October 2005.

Mr. Schenck is survived by his wife, Doris, daughter Nanuet Kuhn of Portland, Oregon, son, Peter Schenck of Saugerties, New York, and James Schenck of Jacksonville, Florida. Cremation was by invitation only.

Funeral arrangements were made by Forsey and Son Funeral Directors of Glastonbury.

de Halve Maen

The Holland Society of New York requests the pleasure of your company at the 135th Annual Dinner on Saturday, October 30th, 2021 at the Lotos Club 5 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065

Carolyn McCormick and Byron Jennings will receive the Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Cocktails 6:00 PM A Reading from Noel Coward's "Private Lives" 6:30 PM President's Address and Medal Presentation 7:00 PM with Dinner and Dancing to Follow $80 for Members and Fellows $190 for Friends and Guests Dress: Black tie optional

Please respond no later than October 21st, 2021; make check payable to: The Holland Society of New York.

Please mail your response and payment to 1345 Avenue of the Americas, 33rd Floor, New York, NY 10105, or visit our website at www.hollandsociety.org and pay via Paypal or credit card.

I will attend the Holland Society Annual Dinner on October 30th, 2021. Enclosed is my check for payment.

Name:___________________________________________________________________________ Address:_________________________________________________________________________ Tel:_________________________________Email:_______________________________________