Born in Holland, Isaack de Rasieres was sent to America by the Dutch
West India Company in 1626 to be chief trading agent (_Opper Koopman_)
for the Company and Secretary to the new Director-General of New
Netherland, Peter Minuit. While duties in government and commerce
impeded each other so much that he wanted to drop his Secretaryship, De
Rasieres dealt with the Plymouth Colony in his dual capacity. After an
encouraging exchange of letters, he went to visit Governor Bradford in
October, 1627, to reach an agreement on trade between the two colonies.
De Rasieres, a man who liked order and futilely tried to impose it on
the fur trade under his control, saw in the Pilgrim colony much that he
strove for in New Netherland.
Among the wares which De Rasieres took to start business was a large
quantity of sewan (i.e., wampum or “wampumpeag”), the belts of beads
made from parts of the shells of the quahog, whelk, or periwinkle, which
served as a kind of money among Indians who traded with the Dutch. De
Rasieres hoped to spread the use of this medium of exchange among the
New England natives, and with the fifty fathoms purchased from him in
1627, the Pilgrims accomplished this aim in two years. But instead of
taking a big portion of their profit to New Netherland to buy wampum, as
De Rasieres had planned, the Plymouth traders found other sources of
supply and quickly rose to first place in the fur trade in New England.
Sewan was easy to get from coastal tribes; the supply could not be
controlled by anyone, as the shell-fish which make the raw material are
very numerous. So De Rasieres merely helped turn the trading ambitions
of the Plymouth Colony from fish to fur, the means by which the province
ultimately paid its debts to the last of the Adventurers.
Some time after his return to Fort Amsterdam, De Rasieres lost his
position as a result of factional disputes among the employees of his
Company, and returned to Holland. He married a niece of one of the
directors of the West India Company in 1633 and went to Brazil with her
four years later, in the Company’s employ. Later information about him
indicates only that he was still in Brazil in 1651, raised a family, and
was thought to be in Barbados in 1669, after the Portuguese had ousted
the Dutch from Brazil.
The text of De Rasieres’ letter to Samuel Blommaert which follows is
substantially that by William I. Hull (from the original in the National
Archives at the Hague) in J. F. Jameson (ed.), _Narratives of New
Netherlands 1609-1664_ (“Original Narratives of Early American History”;
1909), 102-115. The fragment translated by J. A. C. Fagginger Auer in H.
R. Shurtleff, _The Log Cabin Myth_ (edited and with introduction by S.
E. Morison; 1939), 106-107, has been incorporated in the Hull version,
and the editor has changed the punctuation in spots and standardized
proper nouns when possible. One sentence, partly omitted in other
English versions, appears here thanks to translation by Prof. Rosalie
Colie of Wesleyan University, who has kindly checked the rest of the
English text against the Dutch. Notes by Jameson retained here have been
marked, “J.F.J.”
An earlier translation by J. Romeyn Brodhead, from a transcript of the
Dutch original, appears in New York Hist. Soc., _Collections_, second
series, II, 343-354. The Dutch text, edited by A. Eekhof, has been
printed in _Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis_, new series, XV
(1919), 249-280.
De Rasieres’ letter bears no date. Statements in it indicate that it was
written after his return to Holland probably in 1628 or 1629. Several
pages are missing in the middle.