Dutch trading post, and had secured a cargo of skins with which he was about to return to Holland, when a fire consumed both his vessel and her cargo, and obliged him to pass the winter with his crew on the island. They built them log huts on the site of the present Beaver street, the first houses erected in New York, and during the winter constructed a yacht of sixteen tons, which Block called the Onrust—the “Restless.” In this yacht Block made many voyages of discovery, exploring the coasts of Long Island Sound, and giving his name to the island near the eastern end of the sound. He soon after went back to Europe.
Meanwhile, a small settlement had clustered about the trading post and the huts built by Block’s shipwrecked crew, and had taken the name of New Amsterdam. The inhabitants were well suited to become the ancestors of a great nation. They were mainly Dutch citizens of a European Republic, “composed of seven free, sovereign States”—made so by a struggle with despotism for forty years, and occupying a territory which their ancestors had reclaimed from the ocean and morass by indomitable labor. It was a republic where freedom of conscience, speech, and the press were complete and universal. The effect of this freedom had been the internal development of social beauty and strength, and vast increment of substantial wealth and power by immigration. Wars and despotisms in other parts of Europe sent thousands of intelligent exiles thither, and those free provinces were crowded with ingenious mechanics, and artists, and learned men, because conscience was there undisturbed, and the hand and brain were free to win and use the rewards of their industry and skill. Beautiful cities, towns, and villages were strewn over the whole country, and nowhere in Europe did society present an aspect half as pleasing as that of Holland. Every religious sect there found an asylum from persecution and encouragement to manly effort, by the kind respect of all. And at the very time when the charter of the West India Company was under consideration, that band of English Puritans who afterward set up the ensign of free institutions on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, were being nurtured in the bosom of that republic, and instructed in those principles of civil liberty that became a salutary leaven in the bigotry which they brought with them.
“Such were the people who laid the foundations of the Commonwealth of New York. They were men of expanded views, liberal feelings, and never dreamed of questioning any man’s inalienable right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ among them, whether he first inspired the common air in Holland, England, Abyssinia, or Kamtschatka. And as the population increased and became heterogeneous, that very toleration became a reproach; and their Puritan neighbors on the east, and Churchmen and Romanists on the south, called New Amsterdam ‘a cage of unclean birds.’ ”
The English, now awake to the importance of Hudson’s discoveries, warned the Dutch Government to refrain from making further settlements on “Hudson’s River,” as they called the Mauritius; but the latter, relying upon the justice of their claim, which was based upon Hudson’s discovery, paid no attention to these warnings, and in the spring of 1623 the Dutch West India Company sent over thirty families of Walloons, or 110 persons in all, to found a permanent colony at New Amsterdam, which, until now, had been inhabited only by fur traders. These Walloons were Protestants, from the frontier between France and Flanders, and had fled to Amsterdam to escape religious persecution in France. They were sound, healthy, vigorous, and pious people, and could be relied upon to make homes in the New World. The majority of them settled in New Amsterdam. Others went to Long Island, where Sarah de Rapelje, the first white child born in the province of New Netherlands, saw the light.
In 1626, Peter Minuit, the first regular Governor, was sent over from Holland. He brought with him a Koopman or general commissary, who was also secretary of the province, and a Schout, or sheriff, to assist him in his government. The only laws to which he was subject were the instructions of the West India Company. The colonists, on their part, were to regard his will as their law. He set to work with great vigor to lay the foundations of the colony. He called a council of the Indian chiefs, and purchased the Island of Manhattan from them for presents valued at about twenty dollars, United States coin. He thus secured an equitable title to the island, and won the friendship of the Indians. Under his vigorous administration, the colony prospered; houses were built, farms laid off; the population was largely increased by new arrivals from Europe; and New Amsterdam fairly entered upon its career as one of the most important places in America. It was a happy settlement, as well; the rights of the people were respected, and they were as free as they had been in Holland. Troubles with the Indians marked the close of Minuit’s administration. The latter were provoked by the murder of some of their number by the whites, and by the aid rendered by the commander at Fort Orange (Albany) to the Mohegans, in one of their forays upon the Mohawks. Many of the families at Fort Orange, and from the region between the Hudson and the Delaware, abandoned their settlements, and came to New Amsterdam for safety, thus adding to the population of that place. Minuit was recalled in 1632, and he left the province in a highly prosperous condition. During the last year of his government New Amsterdam sent over $60,000 worth of furs to Holland.
His successor was the redoubtable Wouter Van Twiller, a clerk in the company’s warehouse at Amsterdam, who owed his appointment to his being the husband of the niece of Killian Van Rensselaer, the patroon of Albany. Irving has given us the following admirable portrait of him:
“He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions, that dame Nature, with all her sex’s ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his back bone, just between the shoulders. His body was oblong, and particularly capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordered by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to the idle labor of walking. His legs were very short, but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain: so that, when erect, he had not a little the appearance of a beer barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament; and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a Spitzenberg apple. His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty.”
Van Twiller ruled the province seven years, and, in spite of his stupidity, it prospered. In 1633, Adam Roelantsen, the first school-master, arrived—for the fruitful Walloons had opened the way by this time for his labors—and in the same year a wooden church was built in the present Bridge street, and placed in charge of the famous Dominie Everardus Bogardus. In 1635, the fort, which marked the site of the present Bowling Green, and which had been begun in 1614, was finished, and in the same year the first English settlers at New Amsterdam came into the town. The English in New England also began to give the Dutch trouble during this administration, and even sent a ship into “Hudson’s River” to trade with the Indians. Influenced by De Vries, the commander of the fort, the Governor sent an expedition up the river after the audacious English vessel, seized her, brought her back to New York, and sent her to sea with a warning not to repeat her attempt. The disputes between the English and the Dutch about the Connecticut settlements, also began to make trouble for New Amsterdam. Van Twiller possessed no influence in the colony, was laughed at and snubbed on every side, and was at length recalled by the company in 1638. The only memorial of Van Twiller left to us is the Isle of Nuts, which lies in the bay between New York and Brooklyn, and which he purchased as his private domain. It is still called the “Governor’s Island.”
Van Twiller’s successor in the government of the province was William Kieft. He was as energetic as he was spiteful, and as spiteful as he was rapacious. His chief pleasure lay in quarrelling. He and his council made some useful reforms, but as a rule they greatly oppressed
