A close reading of the letter that recorded the purchase of Manhattan from Native peoples
Four hundred years ago this week, word reached Amsterdam that the Dutch had bought Manhattan for 60 guilders. This was the news from New Amsterdam recorded by Peter Schagen, a Dutch official who oversaw the West India Company, in Old Amsterdam on Nov. 5, 1626. This one brief record of the event, what has come to be known as the Schagen Letter, has been interpreted in many ways. For some, it marks the first moments of the city that would become New York, the city’s first real estate deal. What had for millennia been the lands of the Lenape, Lenapehoking, was now, at least as Dutch authorities saw it, no longer theirs. After 1626, the Dutch thought Manhattan was wholly their possession and therefore fought against those who “trespassed.” The unidentified “Indians” in the letter, almost certainly the Lenape, generally did not think about land this way. Against notions of private property, they seemed to believe that all people had the right to benefit from the products of the land and to live on and from it. The Lenape therefore saw arrangements like the one expressed in the Schagen Letter more as invitations to begin ongoing relationships of reciprocity and sharing than as the effective end of their presence on the land.
The letter also records the exploitation of New York Harbor’s resources. The heart of the document is a list of the thousands of beaver, otter, mink, muskrat and lynx skins imported into Amsterdam to be sold for high returns. The price of pelts fluctuated, of course, but on the conservative end, a single beaver pelt could fetch five guilders. The profits from just this one shipment of skins could have bought, therefore, a few hundred Manhattans.
Many trees were felled too, the letter tells us, and samples of the region’s various grains were sent back to Europe as well.
The official seal of the City of New York, settled upon in the early 20th century, in many ways took its direction from the letter. We see the encounter between an obvious Dutchman and a romanticized Indian man. Two beavers make clear what the colony at first was all about. And the windmill and barrels reference both the harvesting of Manhattan’s trees and its grains ground down by the mill and stored for transport. 1625 was later chosen as the year to emboss on the seal to mark the arrival of the first director of the colony and the start of designs for Fort Amsterdam, but 1624 — when the first Walloon settlers arrived — or 1626, the purchase date, each make a case for themselves, perhaps even a better case than 1625.
While many have fixated on the Schagen Letter as a marker of New York’s origin, we have lost sight of the letter’s most important element — the passing reference to women giving birth to “some children.”
Dutch New York always had a people problem. It was hard to get people to come and then to stay. In the year of the Schagen Letter, only a couple hundred Europeans lived on the island of Manhattan — a motley crew of Dutch, German, French, English and Scandinavian settlers. Across its 40-year history, New Amsterdam’s population peaked at its end in 1664 at only 2,300 people. By contrast, in the first part of the 17th century, at least 15,000 Lenape, including members of the Canarsie and Hackensack communities, lived in and around New York Harbor for some part of the year.
We might blame the beavers for the lack of European settlers. They were the reason colonists were interested in New Amsterdam in the first place, but also the reason so few of them stayed. So ubiquitous were the animals that most saw New Amsterdam as a beaver outpost, not a place to make a home. Like a gold rush town, it was a chance to cross the ocean for a few years to try to turn a quick profit. People came to New York harbor to collect as many skins as possible — soft gold, as it was known — to take back to sell in Europe. They did not come to build a life.
Thus, mothers having children in the colony was a noteworthy event. It was a rare moment suggesting permanence for the colony — that families were beginning to put down some roots in this new place, that they might construct homes that could anchor the Dutch settlement. Whether or not the unnamed women and children in the letter actually stayed in the colony, only long-term settlement, the permanent colonization of Lenape land, could make New Amsterdam. This — not the oft-noted piddly cost of this supposed land deal — is the most crucial thing about the Schagen Letter.
Those non-Natives who lived the longest in the colony, who shaped it, who put down deeper roots than most, who cast their futures here, who built the place, are not generally the names we associate with Dutch New York. Its most famous resident, Peter Stuyvesant, served as director of the colony for 17 years and then lived another eight years after its fall to the English in 1664. Some settlers lived in New Amsterdam for nearly its entire existence, decades longer than Stuyvesant. A French Walloon woman named Catalina Trico arrived in 1624 and likely died in 1689. She gave birth to 11 children, today representing thousands of descendants. A man known as Anthony the Turk, who was rumored to be a Muslim, but almost certainly was not, arrived with his German barmaid wife Grietje in the early 1630s and survived the colony’s end (when the English took over) as well. They were among the first non-Native settlers of Long Island, building an enormous farm that was referenced on maps of Brooklyn even hundreds of years later. Their descendants include the Vanderbilts and President Warren G. Harding. All of these colonists remained a minority population among the thousands of Native New Yorkers who remained.
It was the enslaved, the rejected, the religiously othered, the hustlers, the rabble-rousers — they were the true founders of the colony that would become New York.
There were, of course, also those who were forced to the colony against their will. The first enslaved persons were brought to what would become New York from Angola, Kongo and São Tomé in 1627, less than a year after the Schagen Letter. One of them was a woman named Mayken van Angola, an enslaved woman who performed domestic labor on Stuyvesant’s estate. Mayken had been kept a slave from 1627 through 1664 — over 90% of the colony’s existence and 37 years of her life, much of it seemingly spent injured — only to be set free in her frail old age a few months before the colony’s demise. An enslaved man known as Anthony the Portuguese also came in 1627; he remained in the colony past 1664, too.
None of these individuals were Dutch, and all of them laid deeper roots in New York than nearly any other non-Native inhabitant of Manhattan. These people, not the fur traders hinted at in the Schagen Letter, not even someone like Stuyvesant, served as the demographic ballast of what would become New York. They lived here longer and shaped the colony and its legacy more than most. They were racially, ethnically and religiously diverse. Thrown across the ocean to a very basic life in a fledgling colony, they lived hard lives of bondage, exile and violence. But Dutch New York became their home. Among those who colonized Lenapehoking, they were, we might say, the most important.
Thus, whether we take 1626 or 1625 or any other year as the beginning of the City of New York, we should train our attention on the stories of its most durable human inhabitants, those most committed to it, either through choice or because they had no choice. These were not the Dutchman on the seal. Rather, it was the enslaved, the rejected, the religiously othered, the hustlers, the rabble-rousers — they were the true founders of the colony that would become New York.
From the Dutch beginnings of New York, there was a divide between those immigrants, slaves, refugees, workers and countless others who arrived here for complicated reasons often beyond their control and those who sought quick riches and not much else. The class divide goes all the way back. And the lesson is that the city’s true story is about those who came, stayed and made it all happen.
In this year in which we commemorate America’s founding, New York’s birth as a Dutch colonial outpost helps us to see a fuller and more teeming story of American origins, one not just about land and economic resources but about the individuals who, through the dispossession of Native peoples, built it all.
