The link provided was a book describing the narratives surrounding the New Netherlands and featured parts of the actual narratives. This was not a relation like the Cabeza de Vaca book we read earlier in class but a collection of bits and pieces of narratives written in succession from 1609-1665. What I have concluded below is from 1609-1626.
The Dutch were rising to the top of the world in terms of trade, urban development and exploration in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s. Their peak of exploration in the new world and pre-colonial America was with the establishment of the New Netherlands colony in present day New York. Documented in detail by Emanuel van Meteren and mapped by Abraham Ortelius, the New Netherlands was a strictly business colony set up for the purpose of trade in the name of the East India Company based out of Holland. Emanuel van Meteren was a Dutch consul for 20 years and wrote the book on Dutch history “History of the Netherlanders” published in 1599 and re-released in a second edition in 1605. Abraham Ortelius was cousin to van Meteren and a famed English geographer. Meteren and Ortelius, traveled with Captain Henry Hutson and 18 men from England. They were all employed to find a passage from England to China.
They left on April 6, 1609 from the Cape of Norway and sailed to present day Nova Scotia (off the coast of Canada) arriving on May 18, 1609. Initially they found Nova Scotia to be a decent place for settlement because of its populous coastal area as well as cheap goods they could aquire and trade for higher prices through the East India Company but the Hutson’s crewmen quickly angered the locals by stealing goods and taking property by force. In Nova Scotia during this time were French fur traders and indigenous populations, whom had been living amiably with each other. Hutson, van Meteren, Ortelius and company were essentially kicked out of Nova Scotia and sent sailing in a matter of months. October 4, 1609 while being at sea for the sake of not being welcome on the nearest piece of land, it was suggested that the men go to Newfoundland for the winter and set back out during the spring. They all ended up returning to England on November 7th. A meeting with the directors of the East India Company had Hutson, van Meteren and Ortelius financed for another trip with a new crew, starting January 1610.
There is a gap in the narrative for whatever reason and the second voyage of Hutson (now named Hudson; I believe this is an Anglicized version of his name as it only appears in English translations of his work) is unaccounted for. There is not account because van Meteren dies in 1609 leaving his relation unpublished and lost. The second voyage has a mystery ending where we know Hutson returned to Ireland first then England and left for a third voyage in the same year with Robert Juet who is credited with the full account of the New Netherlands settlement. Juet’s account is the archived and the more widely read account even though it is not the first and is more of a follow up report of how New Netherlands is doing rather than how it came to be. It reads like a diary or journal without the passages being addressed to a King or Queen or in this to the directors of the East India Company.
The narratives features by van Meteren and Juet I would call a combination of the descriptive and the promotional as they are on a voyage for business purposes. While both of the narratives followed descriptive and promotional styles neither of them were written as letters with flowery language or religious overtone but there is a lot of talk about the access to the land via ships, the building of ports, what the trade scene is currently like and how receptive and willing the local populations are to newcomers with money on their minds. Geographical descriptions were key in capturing the essence of this new place. Land and sea details were vital in planning and mapping trade routes for goods.
In 1625-1626 when Peter Minuit acquired the land that is present day Manhattan and later Staten Island and Brooklyn the narrative written by Juet took a turn into a blended genre of the historical and the epic. Now that New Netherlands was an official settlement (1625-26) the audience of the directors of the East India Company didn’t need any convincing they just needed documented happenings of their place in history.
Even though the objective of the New Netherlands colony was not to colonize land and the people on it but rather to have a trade post in a new place there was not violent interactions with the Indians. Peter Minuit, who later became leader of the New Netherlands, traded some of his goods (cloth, beads, small decorative items, Dutch silver coins) for the entire island of Manhattan and later did the same for Staten Island and Brooklyn too. I thought that this story was a myth or a misconstrued historical story, because as I had heard it Minuit traded what was only $24 of goods and got the keep the island without Indian interference. This was actually true, Minuit did trade goods to the Indians in turn to manage and control the land in the name of New Netherlands but this was not land that was residential to the Indians anyways. It was land they used during certain times of the year to trade with other tribes; so they let Minuit and the settlers that followed him into the land for good because it was unfit to live on during all four seasons, the winters were too cold and too long. Manhattan was also not a prize piece of land for agriculture either and the Indians knew this as they did not cultivate the land, but this didn’t matter because the Dutch quickly (in 35 years) urbanized their colony in a similar way to how Holland was set up. Thus the budding business capital of the new world was created. For me reading about the New Netherlands was about getting to the bottom of that colonial story, that Manhattan was bought with a few strands of beads. I was very interested in what the story of Dutch exploration in the New World was because it lead to the creation of one of the worlds greatest and largest cities.
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