The Sun King Casts His Rays
Louis XIV was born to Louis XIII and his queen, Anne of Austria, on September 5, 1638. Four years later, Louis XIII died, and his son ascended the throne under the regency of Cardinal Mazarin. Only on the death of Mazarin in 1661 did Louis XIV begin to rule in his own right, and thoughts of New France, while not uppermost in his mind, were at least in his mind. Unlike his father—and Cardinal Richelieu—Louis XIV did not want New France to be merely a source of quick trade profit. He understood that, in order to hold the colony, it had to be a genuine colony, populated not just by coureurs de bois, but by sturdy, stable yeoman farmers.
What happened in 1671, then, shouldn’t have been a surprise. Pierre-Spirit Radisson and Medart Chouart two coureurs, proposed to the emperor a scheme to create a company that would effectively monopolize the northern fur trade. But that wasn’t all. They promised also to find the Northwest Passage, which (they said) would become an exclusively French route for the transportation of fur directly to Asia. In Japan and China, a little fur would buy a lot of spice. But the king was not interested in sending his subjects on such errands. In response to the proposal, he sent women to New France in order to entice trappers like Radisson and Chouart to settle down; he also offered a bounty to be paid for those who sired large families in New France; and, finally, he urged the Church to excommunicate men who left their farms without the government’s permission. In turn, Radisson and Chouart made their own response: They went to the English and secured backing to create the Hudson’s Bay Company, which would be for many years the single most powerful mercantile force on the North American continent.
Two years later, the French intendant (chief administrator) in Canada, Jean Baptiste Talon, stuck his neck out and went against official policy by hiring a fur trader named Louis Joliet to follow up on something he had heard from the Indians-tales concerning a “father” of all the rivers. Perhaps this would prove to be the passage to the Pacific, Talon thought. The Indians called it the “Mesippi.” But Talon despaired of ever actually getting Joliet on the move, because a new governor was due to arrive from France, and surely he would nip the expedition in the bud.
To Talon’s surprise and delight, the governor, Le Comte de Frontenac, a crusty old man who nevertheless possessed a combination of shrewd practicality and vision for the future, approved the expedition. Even if Joliet failed to find a passage to the Pacific, Frontenac reasoned, pushing the claims of France westward was of great strategic importance in and of itself.
Joliet, with a Jesuit priest named Jacques Marquette, did not find a shortcut to the western ocean, but did find the Mississippi, thereby establishing France’s claim to a vast portion of what one day would be the United States. In honor of their monarch, they called the territory Louisiana, and it encompassed (as the French saw it) a vast expanse of land between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains.
Not that the French really knew what to do with all they had found. Louis XIV—called the “Sun King” because of the magnificence of his opulent court and his even more opulent dreams of greatness for a French empire—had visions of a vast agricultural kingdom to reflect in the New World the glories of the Old. But, by the end of Louis’s long reign and life, New France consisted of nothing more than a scattering of precarious settlements in Nova Scotia, along the St. Lawrence, and one or two isolated outposts in Louisiana.
The Dutch Invest $24 in Manhattan Real Estate
So, let’s see. The English set up Jamestown in 1607. Quebec was founded by France the next year. And, in 1609, Henry Hudson, sailing in the Dutch service, reached the site of present-day Albany. Like everybody and his brother, he was looking for the Northwest Passage. And like everyone who looked for it, he failed. However, his search did give the Netherlands a claim to the richest fur-bearing region of North America south of the St. Lawrence.
This did not bring a rush of colonization. A handful of Dutch sea captains traded for furs with the Indians—often bartering hard liquor—but a colonial movement did not get underway until the Dutch West India Company was founded in 1621. Although it strikes us today as culturally and geographically bizarre, Holland was once controlled by Spain. It was one of that nation’s seven Northern Provinces until 1581, when it declared independence. Unfortunately, Spain did not recognize this claim, and the Dutch West India Company was founded by the young Dutch Republic as part of a long, ongoing struggle to remain free.. The company was authorized to commission privateers to disrupt Spain’s trade with its American colonies and, a little later, to undertake colonization efforts in Brazil, Dutch Guiana (now Surinam), the Antilles, and in the North American region staked out by Henry Hudson, which, in 1623, was christened New Netherland. The following year, the company established a trading post at Fort Orange (present-day Albany), and in 1626 dispatched Peter Minuit (ca. 1580-1638) to serve as the colony’s first director-general.
The conquistadors of Spain, when they came to the Americas, simply took the Indians’ land. But most of the other European colonizers made attempts to buy the land. It seemed more legal that way. Minuit’s first step, then, was to legitimate Dutch claims to New Netherland by purchasing Manhattan Island from the Manhattan Indians, a band of the Delaware tribe, for trade goods valued in 1624 at 60 guilders. Now, that figure was computed by a 19th-century historian as being the equivalent of $24, but, with a hundred and more years’ worth of inflation, that computation hardly stands as an eternal truth. Still, it is interesting to contemplate the fact that, today, all $24 will buy you is a slot in a Manhattan parking garage near Radio City Music Hall for about 12 hours, and generations of self-satisfied readers of history have chuckled over what has been called the greatest real estate bargain in history. Few have stopped to think, however, that the joke was not on the Indians. After all, they never claimed to own Manhattan Island. The concept of land ownership was foreign to most Native American cultures. For them, land was part of the natural world, and you could no more own the land you walked on than you could own, say, the air you breathed. If Minuit wanted to part with a load of trade goods just because an island was named after them, the Manhattan Indians were not about explain to him the error of his ways. In any case, Minuit built a fort at the tip of the island and called it New Amsterdam.
A Tale of Two Governors
The Dutch established a profitable trade with the Indians of New Netherland during the 1620s and 1630s—a period (as we shall see in the next chapter) during which New England settlers were locked in bloody war with their Native American neighbors. It wasn’t that the Dutch were kinder and gentler than the English, but that, at first, they were interested in trading rather than settling down on farms. Once the local supply of beavers (whose pelts were the principal trade commodity) became depleted due to overhunting, the Dutch also started to stake out farms, thereby displacing the Indians.
By 1638, when Willem Kieft (1597-1647) arrived in New Netherland as the colony’s fifth governor, two intimately related truths were operative: Violence between the Dutch and Indians was frequent, and aggressive territorial expansion had become a prime Dutch objective. Kieft was appalled by the condition of New Amsterdam. Its defenses were practically nonexistent, and its capacious harbor boasted only one seaworthy vessel. Assuming dictatorial powers, he made sweeping reforms in civil and military administration. Among these was a heavy tax imposed on the local Indians in return for defending them against “hostiles”—mainly the Mohawks. In truth, the Mohawks had become important trading partners with the Dutch and were now allies—henchmen, really—whom Kieft deliberately used to terrorize other tribes. The “defense” tax was actually protection money, and Kieft was behaving no better than a gangster.