It will admit of but very little dispute that Verrazano in 1524, and
Gomez in 1525, anticipated Henry Hudson by several decades in the
discovery of New York Bay and the Hudson River. There is also a claim
for previous discovery however, put forward in behalf of the Dutch.
One confident historian of the Metropolis starts out bravely and
unhesitatingly with the assertion that the Dutch were here as early
as 1598; but he gives no authorities from whence he had gathered this
startling piece of information, yet before one has read thirty pages
of such a well-known work as Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan’s, “History of New
Netherland,” the source of the statement is plainly indicated, and
fortunately, also the opportunity for a careful weighing of the testimony
supporting it.
[Illustration: MANHATTAN ISLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.]
Dr. O’Callaghan refers his readers to a Dutch document in the State
Archives at Albany, discovered by Mr. Brodhead at the Hague, copied by
him for his collection of documents and translated and published in that
invaluable store-house of historical material, the “Documents relating
to the Colonial History of the State of New York,” vol. I, pp. 149, _et
seq._ Here we read: “New Netherland ... was first frequented [explored]
by the inhabitants of this country [Holland] in the year 1598, and
especially by those of the Greenland Company, but without making any
fixed settlements, only as a shelter [resort] in the winter. For which
purpose they erected on the North [Hudson] and South [Delaware] Rivers
there, two little forts against the incursions of the Indians. A charter
was afterwards, on the 11th of October, 1614, granted by their High
Mightinesses to trade exclusively to the newly discovered countries.”
Without discussing the nature or merits of this document itself just
now, we will first weigh the value of its statement. The Hollanders who
“frequented” Manhattan Island in 1598, were in the employ of a Dutch
“Greenland Company.” Now it would seem to be of some importance for the
establishment of the interesting fact under discussion, that there be
brought forward some evidence of the existence of such an association as
this Greenland Company. For certainly if no trace of its existence can be
found, this would cast serious doubt upon the exploits of its servants in
these waters.
We have to begin with announcing the lamentable fact that after a
thorough search of every imaginable source of information, we have been
unable to discover the existence of a Dutch Greenland Company prior to
the year 1600. The works of Dutch historians, both ancient and modern,
were carefully scanned, but all in vain. We began with a modern writer,
N. G. Van Kampen, sometimes called by his fond and admiring countrymen,
the Dutch Macaulay. He wrote an elaborate and extensive work of four or
five octavo volumes on “De Nederlanders buiten Europa” (The Netherlanders
outside of Europe), giving an eloquent as well as exhaustive review of
those splendid achievements in various portions of the globe, which
resulted in the establishment of the great Colonial Empire of the Dutch,
even at this day second only to that of the English.
But there is found no mention of a Dutch Greenland Company or its doings
either in these volumes or in Wagenaar, who lived in the eighteenth
century and issued more than one monumental publication, or in Bor or
Van Meteren of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These older
writers let no event or transaction or institution of any importance
escape them. They were not afraid of multiplying their volumes and
therefore not at all deterred from noting even the minutest affairs that
came within their ken, as they laboriously proceeded from year to year.
But they are all strangely silent about this apocryphal company whose
mariners were in the habit of sheltering themselves on Manhattan Island
before 1600.
But now it is only fair to indicate how the tradition may have originated
that there ever was such an organization as the Greenland Company. An
appreciation of any reasonable grounds for its origin, will help us
understand better how the mistaken statement came to be made, and to see
that it was a mistake. There did exist in Holland a “Noordsche Compagnie”
or Northern Company and there exists the most abundant and indubitable
evidence that the terms “Northern Company” and “Greenland Company” were
used interchangeably, and were both applied to the former association.
This company was at first confined to the merchants of the Province of
Holland, who had received their charter from the States-General, after
the approval and endorsement of such a measure by the States of Holland.
In 1617, the charter was renewed, but the merchants of Zeeland wished
for the same privileges and the States-General granted a charter to
a Zeeland “Northern Company” in May 28, 1622. Turning to the “Groot
Placcaet Book,” Vol. I, Cols. 673, 674, we discover the two names in
question in curious but instructive juxtaposition. The title of the
act has Noortsche Compagnie, while in the body of the act we read
Groenlandtsche Compagnie. In this same year (Dec., 1622), the Zeeland and
Holland Companies were combined into one general or national “Northern
Company,” but the act granting a larger charter mentions only the above
name both in the title and in the body of it. It is to this Company that
Moulton refers in his “History of New York” (p. 362) when he makes the
assertion that “the Greenland Company was created in 1622.” He places
this association on an exact level with the East and West India Companies.
“Thus the Northern Seas, Asia, Africa and America, were partitioned to
three armed associations, possessing powers nearly co-extensive with
those of the Republic.” The company chartered in 1622, (as we have seen),
can not properly be classed as equal in importance or influence or power
with the two great commercial associations named in one breath with it
by Mr. Moulton. And we have seen also, that it did not officially bear
the name he gives it, although that name might be interchangeable with
the true one in the case of subordinate companies. Yet even this is not
the case with the charter creating the original company confined to
Holland Province alone, where there is no mention of the name “Greenland”
in either the title or the body of the document. Lastly there is this
significant circumstance about that earliest charter of any “Northern
Company;” it bears date January 1614, and distinctly states “that no such
company had ever been chartered before.”[12] This therefore settles the
question as to whether it could possibly have been men in the employ of
this company, miscalled the “Greenland Company,” who habitually sought
relief from the rigors of an Arctic winter on the shores of the Hudson
River in the year 1598. This could hardly have been when it was not
erected or chartered until January 1614.
In the second place, if frequent or habitual visits to Manhattan Island
were made by the Dutch in and after the year 1598, we are at a loss to
comprehend the entire lack of recollection of such visits on the part
of the Indians thereabouts. It is insisted on more than once in various
accounts that both the vessel and the persons of its crew, were objects
of boundless wonder to the natives, as they beheld the “Half-Moon”
resting upon the waters of the bay or gliding up the river. De Laet, one
of the earliest to write on Hudson’s discovery, publishing his “Nieuwe
Wereld,” (New World) in 1625 and basing his statements on those of
Hudson’s own journal, perhaps citing his very words, speaks as follows:
“So far as they could judge and find out, there had never been any ships
or Christians in this region before, so that they were the first who
discovered this river and sailed up so far.” Such a declaration might
need to be received with some suspicion, if the author had intended to
maintain a claim of the first discovery for the Dutch as against other
nations. But he could have had no reason to suppress the circumstance of
the visits of the Dutch themselves to our river, in 1598. If that had
been patent to De Laet he would have been only too glad to mention it,
as only increasing the validity of the Dutch claims to those regions by
the right of first discovery. He could have had no particular object in
glorifying the Englishman Hudson’s exploit at the expense of the sailors
of an exclusively and undoubtedly Dutch Greenland Company. But returning
to the Indians, we notice in Vander Donck’s celebrated “Vertoogh,”
written at New Amsterdam and published at the Hague in 1650, another
arraignment of their poor memories. “Even at the present day those
natives of the country who are so old as to recollect when the Dutch
ships first came here, declare that when they saw them, they did not know
what to make of them. Some among them when the first one arrived, even
imagined it to be a fish or some monster of the sea.” Now the Indians
might indeed have forgotten a visit made so long ago as 1524 or 1525, if
Verrazano and Gomez really did discover the Hudson then, making but a
brief stay and a rapid examination of its banks at best, but an habitual
resort to its shores, or even one winter spent on the island at its
mouth, in forts built to repel their attacks, only eleven years before
Hudson came among them, the Indians could not possibly, it would seem,
have so utterly forgotten in 1609.
But we will now give our attention more particularly to the document
which asserts that the Dutch were on Manhattan Island as early as 1598.
What was the nature of it, and to what degree of credence is it entitled?
Mr. Brodhead in the explanatory heading which he usually prefixes to
the documents in his collection states that it is a report made in 1644
by the Chairman of a Committee or Board of Accounts, appointed by the
directors of the West India Company. Several documents were placed in
his (the chairman’s) hands for the purpose of enabling him to furnish to
the company a succinct review of events connected with the origin of the
settlement on Manhattan Island, and with its progress up to that date.
The writer begins with the story of the Dutch and their forts in 1598.
Immediately after this the official historian glides easily into what
he evidently either considers himself, or wishes others to believe, is
the next stage in the history of the Manhattan Colony; namely this: “a
charter was afterwards on the 11th of October 1614, granted by their High
Mightinesses.” As if nothing of importance had happened between 1598 and
1614!
The question therefore arises, if this was meant for history in 1644, why
was it written so imperfectly? It could not be that the fact of Hudson’s
discovery, so vitally connected with the origin of Manhattan Colony, had
been completely forgotten at that time, much less that after a careful
examination of all the papers available to directors of the West India
Company, the chairman of their committee should not have come across the
record of that discovery. How then did he happen to pass it over in utter
silence in his official report? Was it purposely suppressed? If so, what
could have been the motive for this singular proceeding?
We think we can readily divine what the motive was, when we read in
more than one English writer what use that nation contrived to make
of the fact that the discovery of the Hudson River was achieved by
an Englishman. Peter Heylin, who wrote before the surrender of New
Netherland in 1664, remarks: “With him [i. e. Hudson] the Hollanders,
in 1609, compounded for his charts and maps; but they were hardly warm
in their new Habitations,” when Argall, Governor of Virginia, disputed
their title to this region, which was looked upon as part of Virginia
territory. The latter advanced this ingenious argument in support of
his claim; “that Hudson, under whose sale they claimed that country,
being an Englishman and licensed to discover those northern parts by the
King of England, could not alienate or dismember it (being but a part or
province of Virginia) from the Crown thereof.” This matter of a “sale” by
Hudson, which was illegal, and the subsequent “right” of the English to
New Netherland, is brought out again in a book written nearly a century
later, or long after the problem which was unsolved in Heylin’s time—how
to get the Dutch out and the English in—had been solved by Colonel
Nicolls in 1664. In this book, William Smith’s “History of New York”
(1757), we read, scarcely without a smile: “Henry Hudson, an Englishman,
_according to our authors_[13] in the year 1608 [sic], under a commission
from the King, his master, discovered Long Island, New York, and the
river which still bears his name; and afterwards sold the country, or
rather his Right to the Dutch. Their writers contend that Hudson was sent
out by the East India Company in 1609 to discover a northwest passage to
China. It is said however, that there was a sale; and that the English
objected to it, though they for some time neglected to oppose the Dutch
settlement of the country.”
Now we can readily appreciate why the Dutch West India Company might have
a distinct and deliberate object in not being too exact in their history
of Manhattan Colony. They would naturally be very shy of giving occasion
or encouragement to a rival nation on the alert to press a claim avowedly
made, however unjust, to territories entrusted to the Company’s care and
government. It would to say the least have been very impolitic to give
countenance to it in one of their own official papers. About twelve years
later the directors, writing to Stuyvesant, while commending him for
the reduction of New Sweden, at the same time remonstrated with him for
having made a written agreement with the Swedish Commander. And they then
put into so many words the shrewd policy which we suggest they followed
in the present instance, saying; “What is written is too long preserved
and may be produced when not desired, whereas words not recorded are in
the lapse of time forgotten, or may be explained away” (O’Callaghan’s
“New Netherland,” vol. II. p. 327). If Argall on the spot, and only a few
years after the settlement; if Heylin in a book written and published
before 1664, could make so much of Hudson’s nationality in the matter
of his discovery, so that more than a hundred years after that event,
sober historians could still cooly repeat the story of England’s supreme
right, and quite cast aside the claims of the Dutch, then it may well
have been considered in 1644 that it would be a dangerous concession to
have even made an allusion to Hudson in a committee report. Under these
circumstances, finding at home a possibly prevalent and convenient
rumor about the Greenland Company and its vessels in New York bay and
river, without any intention to deliberately falsify, the chairman of
the committee simply incorporated the statement under discussion in
his report. For business purposes, on a paper prepared by business men
and not by historians, this may have been good enough history; but
being preserved in this documentary form, and read in an age eager for
documentary evidence and too ready to give undue weight to unpublished
and original matter, the assertion derived an importance which it does
not really deserve, and was not intended to possess. And so entirely
unsupported is it by other proofs, or by the facts of history, that even
the documentary character of this evidence has not prevailed to deceive
wise and judicious investigators. It is clear that it did not commend
itself as quite trustworthy for historical purposes to Dr. O’Callaghan.
In quoting it, though it own assertion is entirely positive, he
introduces its language by the cautious phrase, “it is said.” Brodhead,
whose researches brought the paper to light, also deals very gingerly
with it, holding it off at arms length, so to speak, and saying: “it
needs confirmation”—and indeed, it certainly does.