CHAPTER TWO
The Bivalvent Dung Hill
No sooner was the colony once planted, than like a luxuriant vine, it took root and throve amazingly; for it would seem, that this thrice favored island is like a munificent dung hill, where everything finds kindly nourishment, and soon shoots up and expands to greatness.
—WASHINGTON IRVING,
A History of New York from the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, 1809
The Dutch who came to New Netherlands fell in love with the lower Hudson and especially the island of Manhattan. Beginning with those first few days in the harbor on the three-masted Halve Maen, ecstatic descriptions began to flow. One of the officers, Robert Juet, wrote of the “pleasant” grass and flowers, the “goodly Trees,” and the “very sweet smell.” On the first day they rounded Sandy Hook and entered New York Harbor, he wrote in his journal, “This is a very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to see.” The poet Jacob Steendam, who lived in New Netherlands from 1650 to 1660, called the area Eden. He wrote of “the purity of the air.” Several other Dutch and English made similar comments about Manhattan’s air, noting that as soon as a ship rounded Sandy Hook, a wind would blow a fresh breeze consistently described as sweet. There was considerable discussion of what could be the cause of this extraordinarily pleasant air.
Fort New Amsterdam published in 1651 shows the fort’s location on the tip of Manhattan with both Lenape and European vessels in the harbor.
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
The Dutch described the fine, tall-grassed meadows, the woodlands, fields of wildflowers, the streams, the variety of the cooing and clattering birds, the deliciousness of the native nuts, wild cherries, currants, gooseberries, hazelnuts, apples and pears, and especially strawberries. Adriaen van der Donck wrote in his midseventeenth-century Description of the New Netherlands that people who lived by the water could not sleep at night because of the clattering of swans and other waterfowl. He noted that the wild turkeys were so large and numerous “that they shut out the sunshine.” Nicolaes van Wassenaer wrote, “Birds fill also the woods so that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise and the chattering.”
The rivers and streams had so many fish—striped bass, sturgeon, shad, drum fish, carp, perch, pike, and trout—that they could be yanked out of the water by hand. The Dutch delighted in examining every fish caught to see if it was a new, unknown species. They identified ten familiar species in the Hudson and named each new one numerically. They dubbed shad elft for eleventh, striped bass was called twalft, twelfth, and drums were dertienen, thirteen. Like oysters and numerous other much-valued foods, the striped bass was credited with powers of sexual stimulation. Thus the Hudson was a river with a choice of aphrodisiacs. Isaack de Rasière, a New Amsterdam commercial agent, wrote of the striped bass in 1620, “It seems that this fish makes them [Indians] lascivious, for it is often observed that those who have caught any when they have gone fishing, have given them, on return, to the women, who look for them anxiously. Our people also confirm this.”
The harbor was crowded with bass, cod, weakfish, herring, mackerel, blackfish, as well as frolicking, diving mammals—whales, porpoises, and seals. Bears, wolves, beavers, foxes, raccoons, otters, elk, deer, and even a few “lion,” which may have been panthers or mountain lions, lived in the area. The Catskills, originally called Katzbergs by the Dutch, were named for their abundance of bobcats and lynx.
Jasper Danckaerts, a Dutchman who traveled the New York City area from 1679 to 1680, wrote, “It is not possible to describe how this bay swarms with fish, both large and small, whales, tunnies, and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish, which the eagles and other birds of prey swiftly seize in their talons when the fish comes to the surface.”
Sizes were enormous. Juet reported the first morning of fishing—it is not clear if his ship landed to the port on Sandy Hook or starboard at Coney Island—netting “ten great Mullets, of a foot and a halfe long a peece and a Ray as great as foure men could hale into the ship.” According to van der Donck, the pears were larger than a fist, the wild turkeys weighed forty pounds, the lobsters were six feet long, and the oysters measured twelve inches. Van der Donck assured the Dutch, “There are some persons who imagine the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”
Most of the early European descriptions of North America share this enthusiasm and also, no doubt, a tendency toward hyperbole. Washington Irving pointed out that there were also reports of unicorns, and the missionary Hans Megapolensis reported on four-foot tortoises with two heads. Despite repeated Dutch claims of Hudson River salmon, these sightings are most likely mistaken, since such a fish has never been seen in the Hudson. Some of these claims may have resulted from a mistranslation of the Dutch words salm and salmpie, which could refer to trout. But even Robert Juet, an Englishman, reported seeing salmon in the harbor, possibly misidentified striped bass. Most of the exuberant seventeenth-century accounts of fecund nature in North America were probably true, including the enraptured descriptions of the island of Manhattan, its streams, meadows, and marshes. Any contemporary New Yorker who has ever watched nature consume an empty New York City lot might suspect as much. Lower Manhattan was a teaming wetland of grassy marshes, which the Mohawk called Gänóno, reedy place, filled with birds and marine life. A salty wetland extended to what is today Rivington Street. About where Center Street intersects White today, a stream left the Kalck Pond and turned northwest, flowing along what is today Canal Street across a grassy meadow and into the Hudson. A second stream flowed from the pond to the East River. In times of heavy rains these streams swelled and cut the island of Manhattan in two. Another little trout stream ran past what is now Times Square west into the Hudson. Minetta Brook, from the Dutch word meaning “little one,” in what is now Greenwich Village, was also known for its trout. Teawater Spring, which fed the Kalck Pond, was known for its exquisite drinking water. The marsh where Washington Square now stands was known for its ducks. The early Europeans always praised the natural richness of the place and in their rhapsodic descriptions almost always included some mention of oysters.
The settlers wrote of how good the oysters were for stewing and frying and how “as each one fills a spoon they make a good bite.” They often referred to their large size and one settler added that they found them “occasionally containing a small pearl,” which is difficult to believe, since Crassostrea virginica is not a pearl-producing species.
Back in Holland, for all the lyrical depictions, New Amsterdam was mostly seen as a business proposition. Soon after Henry Hudson returned, Dutch traders visited the coast near the mouth of the Hudson, which led to formation of the New Netherlands Company in 1614. The charter granted rights to certain merchants to the exclusion of all others. This included the exclusive right to make four voyages within three years, beginning January 1615, to the new lands between the fortieth and forty-fifth latitudes, which, for the first time, were designated as “New Netherlands.”
The purpose was trade, not settlement, which explains the short term of the contract. But voyages continued after the charter’s 1618 expiration, and on June 3, 1621, the West India Company, an idea first proposed by Willem Usselinx in 1592, was established. It was given a trade monopoly for twenty-four years on the coasts of North and South America, the west coast of Africa from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope, and to all places and islands westward to the eastern end of New Guinea. Within these borders the company had the right to negotiate alliances with local leaders, establish colonies, appoint and discharge governors and other officers, administer its own justice, and promote colonization. But the governor was not a colonial ruler in the British or French sense. He was an officer of the company who made decisions based on the needs of the company. There was no actual government. Anyone who wished to settle in New Netherlands placed himself under the absolute authority of the company.
&nbs
p; The interests of the company were in making a profit, but beyond that, the Dutch government that chartered the company had a political objective. In 1562, the Dutch had begun a fight for independence from the Spanish, who had ruled them for a century. In 1618, the year the contracts of the New Netherlands Company had been set to expire, the Dutch began the final phase of their independence struggle, what was called the Thirty Years War, which lasted, as the name implies, until 1648.
In 1621, when the Dutch granted a charter for the West India Company, the fundamental idea was to attack Spain, Spanish colonies, and as many Spanish ships as possible. This failed to attract investors. So the charter was amended to include the saltworks in Punto del Rey, which attracted merchants who had interests in the Dutch herring trade. But in general, the company still failed to attract large-scale investment.
New Netherlands, located far from the Spanish Main—the Spanish land holdings in the Americas, which were principally the coastline from Panama to the Orinoco River, the Caribbean coast of South America—had limited impact on the war with Spain. But this water-laden Eden seemed to have wealth, and the mission of the company in New Netherlands was to exploit resources. It was remembered that Verrazano had speculated that the area “must contain great riches, as the hills showed many indications of minerals.”
Most of the records of the Dutch West India Company, including Hudson’s log, vanished in a series of fires and other calamities, culminating in an 1821 public auction of what remained in the hands of the Dutch government. New Yorkers did not even learn of this loss until twenty years later, when the legislature sent for records to refute Washington Irving’s disparaging portraits of Dutch settlers as both lazy and incompetent administrators. “As most of the council were but little skilled in the mystery of combining pot hooks and hangers,” Irving wrote, “they determined most judiciously not to puzzle either themselves or posterity, with voluminous records.”
The few records and correspondence that remained made clear that above all, the Dutch interests in New Netherlands were beaver and otter pelts. The fur of beavers, the second largest rodent on earth next to the capybara, was from about 1550 to 1850, the more valuable. It was used primarily for hats, and the Russians, who had been the chief suppliers, had so greedily pursued this industry that by the dawn of New Netherlands, these rodents were nearly extinct in Russia and Scandinavia. Western Europeans, trying to compete with the Russians, had driven their beavers to complete extinction. The beaver hat industry was able to continue only because of North American pelts. The French had moved into the hat business with Canadian pelts, but now the Dutch had a chance to compete. Van der Donck estimated in midcentury that eighty thousand beavers were being killed annually.
Only the Russians knew how to remove the longer “guard hairs” from the fur. Alternatively, these hairs would wear off the pelt after about a year of use and therefore the beaver pelt of choice, known as a coat beaver, had been worn by an Indian for a year. Unused pelts, parchment beavers, could be sold only to the Russians until Westerners learned the technique of plucking the hairs with a thumb and a knife blade at the end of the seventeenth century, after the fall of New Netherlands.
New Netherlands included the entire land of the Lenape, Lenepehoking, from the South River—the Delaware—to the North River—the Hudson—north to Albany, where the Dutch established the settlements of Fort Orange and Rensselaer, to the Fresh River—the Connecticut—where they established a settlement in what is now Hartford. The capital, New Amsterdam, on the southern end of Manhattan, was a maritime people’s idea of choice real estate, along the sheltered and defendable inner harbor of an immense waterway, with 770 miles of waterfront. From New Amsterdam, all of New Netherlands was reachable by water. A vessel could sail through the Narrows, out the lower bay rounding Sandy Hook, and follow the coastline to the mouth of the Delaware and up to where Philadelphia now stands. Or it could have taken the Newark or Raritan River into present-day New Jersey. Or sailed east from the harbor along the southern shore of Long Island out to sea and across the Atlantic. Or sailed up the Hudson River to Albany or up the East River to Long Island Sound, and up the Connecticut River to Hartford or beyond through the center of New England.
In 1623, a shipload of settlers sailed to New Netherlands—two families and six men to the Connecticut River, two families and eight men to the Delaware River, eight men to New Amsterdam, and the rest were shipped up the river to Fort Orange, today Albany, which was considered the most important part of the territory because it was where the furs could be acquired from the Indians. Catelina Trico, one of the Fort Orange–bound settlers, wrote years later that the Indians were “as quiet as lambs and came and traded with unimaginable freedom.”
The 1624 Provisional Regulations of the West India Company stated that the colonists were free to pursue the inland trade as long as they sold the goods they collected to company agents. They were also free to carry on their own hunting, fowling, and fishing, but “all minerals, newly discovered or still-to-be-discovered mines of gold, silver, or any other metals, as well as precious stones, such as diamonds, rubies and the like, together with the pearl fishery, shall be allowed to be worked by the Company’s men only. But anyone who discovers any of the aforementioned will be granted to him and his heirs one tenth of the proceeds for the first six years.”
The colonists “shall not permit any strangers (whereupon are understood all persons who are outside the jurisdiction of the Company or its commissaries) coming to their shores to do any trading . . . .” They were also sworn to secrecy about anything they knew of the inner workings of the company and had to make a commitment to stay where they were sent for six years and plant what they were told. They were also required, under threat of “being rigorously punished,” to honor any agreement made with an Indian.
No wonder the company emphasized the fur trade. Though they were never able to ship enough pelts to realize the profits of which they had dreamed, at least the furs were there and were valuable. Gold, silver, diamonds, precious stones, were a fantasy. As for the “pearl industry,” it was a gross misunderstanding of biology that still exists today. Word had reached Holland of the tremendous oyster beds throughout the huge estuary. This was exciting news for the Dutch, whose pearl industries in Brazil and in Asia were so profitable that the word pearl was almost synonymous with wealth, which was why every Dutch town had a Pearl Street. Oysters abounded in the lower Hudson. And, as most everyone knows, pearls come from oysters.
The problem was that they don’t.
If an irritating foreign particle, something indigestible, is sucked in by an Ostreid, a true oyster, the animal will eject it. In a few cases, a coating is built up, but it is a dull gray substance, usually applied in an irregular sphere. Several chroniclers of the time complained of the “brown” pearls. Van der Donck wrote of the local oysters:
Some of these are like the Colchester oysters, and are fit to be eaten raw; others are very large, wherein pearls are frequently found, but as they are of a brownish color they are not valuable.
Lustrous, bright, valuable pearls are found in an animal popularly known as a pearl oyster but known in biology as Meleagrina or Pintada. While being a bivalve whose shell bears a physical resemblance to an oyster shell, the pearl oyster, which is most commonly found in tropical waters, belongs to the family Pteridae, and not the family Ostreidae. A number of animals in this family have the characteristic that if an indigestible food particle—not a grain of sand, as is commonly believed—gets trapped in the shell, the animal will build up a coating of a calcium-carbonate crystal called argonite and a protein, conchiolin, the two materials it uses to build its shell. These two ingredients, in surrounding the particle, become nacre or mother-of-pearl.
The pearl oyster and its relatives in the Pteridae family are more closely related to mussels than oysters. Pearl oysters attach to objects by extending threads, the way a mussel does, and not by secreting a substance from a foot, the way a true oyster doe
s.
So the famously mercantile Dutch were disappointed by this newfound trove of oysters. Hard-shelled clams were more valuable to them, even though most Dutchmen preferred to eat oysters. Clamshells were money. The Dutch had adopted the Lenape currency for trade with all the American tribes and with their metal awls and drills they could make wampum far more efficiently than the people who had invented it. It was a matter of picking up clamshells and fashioning them, which cost the Dutch very little in material or labor. Some wampum was made from conch shells. They used inmates of jails and poorhouses to make wampum or to string Indian-made beads, and in time it began to look suspiciously as though the company was taking people to these institutions to make sure there was a good supply of wampum makers. But the Indians of eastern Long Island were considered the best wampum makers. The Dutch showed their acumen for economics, regulating the value of wampum and the price of fur pelts. Though they were never able to control the “money supply”—the amount of wampum in circulation—they devaluated and reevaluated wampum to the Dutch guilder like a regulated currency and also fixed the price of fur pelts in wampum. In this way they could keep the price satisfactory to induce the Indians to supply the pelts but still keep the cost of buying pelts low while the cost of the furs in Europe continued to rise.
The Big Oyster Page 3