A More Richly Freighted Ship: The Luck and Labors of John Romeyn Brodhead

The appointed agent would visit archives in three countries: England, the Netherlands, and France. He would locate and transcribe important documents relevant to the colonial period, with a view to their eventual study and publication. A sum of $4,000 was appropriated for this purpose.

Almost two years would pass before this agent was identified and appointed in January 1841. The man chosen was Philadelphia-born John Romeyn Brodhead (1814-73), a name that would become familiar in the following centuries to scholars with any connection to New Netherland studies. Their debt to him is immeasurable. Brodhead had good credentials for the job. He had an interest in history and had served at the legation in The Hague, thus he had a familiarity with Dutch culture and language.

Brodhead sailed for London on May 1, 1841 and arrived safely two weeks later. He immediately set upon a course of exhausting mental and manual toil and spent more than three years fossicking in the archives in London, Amsterdam, and Paris in search of documents relating to New York’s colonial past. He’d estimated that he would spend two years on this work, but in the end he was in Europe for more than three years.

From London he sailed to The Hague, where he received a cordial reception, especially from Harmanus Bleecker (1779-1849), both being from old Dutch families. In 1837 President Martin van Buren had appointed Bleecker as chargé d’affaires to the Netherlands, and he was well-positioned to present Brodhead to King William II. The King took a lively interest in his mission and aided his research. As Brodhead later reported in May 1845 on his Dutch reception: “It seems to have been regarded in that country as a gratifying circumstance that the descendants of Dutch ancestors who had left the father-land two centuries ago, should so far cherish the remembrance of their ancient lineage, as to dispatch one of their number across the wide ocean to seek memorials of the olden time.”

One of Brodhead’s problems was that he was twenty years too late. It was unfortunate that the passage of time had not been kind to so many of the documents he sought, and it was frustrating that much of the West India Company archives no longer existed. Brodhead wrote about this in a letter from Amsterdam to Harmanus Bleecker on August 30, 1841. Brodhead wrote: “I found to my deep sorrow that all the old documents of that Company previously to 1700 had been sold for some 3 or 4000 gulden, to paper mills in 1818 under an order from The Hague. I cannot tell you how much I have been dispirited by this intelligence. It is indeed a terrible blow to my prospects.” Nevertheless he was able to transcribe a lot of material relating to New Netherland that had been kept in other archives, such as the minutes of the States General.

Because of the large number of documents discovered, Brodhead found that the Legislature’s original appropriation was insufficient. As a result, following Brodhead’s reports to the Governor and the Legislature, further sums of $3,000 in 1842, and $5,000 in 1843, were voted to defray the additional expenses he incurred. In 1845 another appropriation was approved, bringing the total expense for the collection of the documents to $13,390.98, the equivalent of around half a million dollars today. Brodhead embarked for his return voyage to the US on July 7, 1844. He spent the rest of the year and the following winter arranging and indexing the documents he had procured, before depositing them in the office of the Secretary of State. He submitted his 374-page Final Report in early 1845.

The final tally of documents—unseen till then by American historians—showed that Brodhead had made about 5,000 transcriptions contained in 80 volumes, comprising 16 volumes of Dutch transcriptions (some 4,000 pages), 17 French, and 47 English. Historian and statesman George Bancroft (1800-91) was impressed and delighted, writing to the New-York Historical Society on November 18, 1844: “The ship in which he returned was more richly freighted with new materials for American History than any that ever crossed the Atlantic.” He hoped too that “Mr. Brodhead’s most successful research will awaken general attention, and … will not fail to stimulate inquiry.”

Notable among the Dutch documents he transcribed from the Rijksarchief was the now famous Peter Schagen letter. Schagen was the Amsterdam representative of the States General in the Assembly of the Nineteen of the West India Company. In November 1626 he reported to the States General in The Hague about the arrival of the ship Wapen van Amsterdam from New Netherland. In his report he gave news of the colonists’ welfare, crops sown and reaped, and details of the ship’s cargo of skins and timber. Of particular interest to historians ever since is Schagen’s announcement of the “purchase” of the island of Manhattan from the Indians for goods at the value of 60 guilders—the only direct evidence we have of this event. In his Final Report, delivered to Governor Silas Wright on February 12, 1845, Brodhead justifiably blew his own horn by writing that he had been “rescuing from obscurity and long neglect, the scattered memorials of [the State of New York’s] existence.”

The product of Brodhead’s work was later published in fifteen volumes, 1853-87, as Documents Relative to the Colonial History of he State of New York, edited by Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow. Neither O’Callaghan, who died in 1880, nor Brodhead would live to see the completed project, though Brodhead contributed to the introduction. The valuable and painstaking work of all three scholars produced what has been referred to as “the single most important collection of primary documents on New York’s colonial period,” (Milton M. Klein, The Empire State: A History of New York, Cornell University Press, 2005).

With so much at stake, as we now know, it’s disconcerting to realize how close we came to Brodhead’s important scholarly contribution not happening at all. He had a truly narrow escape. When planning his trip, Brodhead was looking forward to sailing on the three-masted steamship SS President, which was to leave New York for Liverpool on March 11, 1841. This was a new British ship, built the previous year, and owned by the British and American Steam Navigation Company. She had sailed on her maiden voyage only a few months before, in August 1840. She was a side-wheel steamer with sails, and was the largest in the world at the time, being 243 feet long with a beam of 41 feet.

As it happened, unforeseen circumstances delayed Brodhead, and he didn’t embark on this ship. It’s just as well he missed the sailing, as the President, which was too lightly built for the Atlantic, as well as top heavy, overloaded, and seriously under-powered, encountered a gale on her second day out, and was last seen fighting heavy seas between Nantucket Sound and Georges Bank. She was never seen again, lost with all 136 passengers and crew. Following the loss of the President, the shipping company went out of business.

Initially “much disappointed” not to sail in the President, later Brodhead must have felt incredibly lucky—and so are we, who have benefited from all the demanding labor and research that he was saved to accomplish. Had he been among the lost passengers, who can say if the New York State Legislature would have commissioned and funded a replacement to explore the European archives? Who can say what documents might have been lost before another scholar could have been found and financed to pursue the search? Without Brodhead’s work, no doubt, over the years, the records that he failed to unearth (if they survived), would doubtless have eventually come to light, but who can say for sure, or when?

It’s chilling to reflect that this “single most important collection” might not ever have seen the light of day, and in the world of counterfactual “what if” history, it could so very easily have happened differently. It’s not clear what prevented Brodhead from boarding the President, but the outcome of commonplace decisions and random occurrences surely come into play here, and the shifting stream of choices and eventualities that surrounded and influenced his innocent actions on that New York spring day of 1841 all aligned well, saved his life, and allowed him to accomplish his significant work. If things had been just slightly otherwise, Brodhead would have drowned, failed to reach Europe, and his name would have been a footnote to us today. In this event we might have had no collection of European Dutch documents to further American colonial studies, or, at best, a much delayed attention to these influential, fragile, and vulnerable resources.

It is not certain whether the ship that Brodhead came back on in July 1844, with his valuable cargo, was a steamship, but, given Brodhead’s thoughts on such matters, it was more than likely a sailing ship. Without doubt part of his letter to Harmanus Bleecker from London dated April 26, 1842, suggests this lack of confidence in powered ships: “In every position, I think sailing vessels are far safer, if they are not as rapid, as steamers.” In the same letter he mentions another steamer, “which left Halifax in a crippled condition and made the voyage across the Atlantic with only one paddle wheel, a most venturous attempt,” adding “After all, the experience of the last winter is rather against ocean steamers in stormy weather. It is not common to hear of accidents to good and staunch sailing vessels, when at sea.” This is not mere conservatism or an empty aversion to innovation and progress, this is once bitten twice shy. While sailing ships are by no means exempt from maritime calamities, after his near-death experience with the President, Brodhead is clearly only too aware of the perils of steamship travel, and didn’t want to push his luck.

None can see if tragedy or triumph hangs from all the tangled consequences of the trivial acts and chancy casual determinations that make up our lives. An article in Scribner’s Monthly for November 1876 suggests that Brodhead himself “could not but recognize a kind Providence in the enforced delay which prevented him from being one of the ill-fated passengers.”

Any who acknowledge the hand of “kind Providence” here might also see its benign influence in the ultimate survival and preservation of the fruits of Brodhead’s labors. He returned from Europe with a great wealth of primary evidence concerning New Netherland aboard his “more richly freighted ship,” but the documents themselves were destined to be short-lived. It was fortunate indeed that they were published for the benefit of future scholars, for they were victims of the disastrous 1911 fire in the New York State Capitol.