Mijnheer Minuit and the Indians
It’s a serious loss to historians that no Dutch or American archive contains any kind of
contract, receipt, or deed of transfer to serve as proof of the so-called “purchase” of Manhattan.
Apart from anything else, such a document would have put a stop to much of the endless
theorizing and half-baked legend-making associated with this event.
by Peter A. Douglas
Frustrating in its vagueness about the Dutch acquisition of Manhattan, Peter Schaghen’s 1626 letter to the Dutch West IndiaCompany is the only direct evidence we have about this. Even this bare-bones information is brief and second-hand for Schaghen was only reporting what the crew and passengers of the ship Wapen van Amsterdam told him.
One of the many things we don’t know is who participated in the deal. It’s generally accepted that it was Peter Minuit, the third Director-General of New Netherland, who arranged it, but we don’t know if he was present at the meeting. Perhaps he sent representatives, though it seems very likely that he would have chosen to be present himself because the natives might well have taken the absence of the Dutch leader as a slight.
It’s often stated that Minuit’s treaty was with the Lenape, but it’s unclear exactly which group he made the pact with. In the absence of facts, just about every native tribe in the neighborhood has been drafted at one time or another to have been among those present. Who the Dutch dealt with could have been any of several tribes known to have lived in the vicinity, from New Jersey to western Long Island, but a consensus is elusive.
Some writers make much of their claim that Minuit met with the “wrong” tribe, the Canarsee. As this tribe lived on the western part of Long Island they had no claim to Manhattan and would have used the island only for hunting and as a neutral trading area, and thus they would have had no business “selling” Manhattan in the first place. Therefore, the Canarsee Theory goes, the Dutch were tricked, this clever tribe having taken advantage of Minuit’s desire for peace and his unfamiliarity with the region.
As with so many legends and the embroidered tales that create them, it’s hard to say when and how this idea of the Canarsees’ deception got started, though it seems a popular one,no doubt because it allows the Indians to come out on top for a change, having supposedly pulled a fast one on Minuit. The tables are thus reversed, for the Dutch have so often been unjustly accused of sharp practice in their Manhattan deal because of the notorious fiction that the Dutchswapped Manhattan’s 22,000 acres for mere “beads and trinkets” worth “$24.”
This persistent nonsense has ensured that the story of the Canarsee scamming the Dutch has been seized upon and welcomed in politically correct circles to “prove” that the Indians were not primitive suckers but were really quite astute after all. In this scenario it’s impossible for the Dutch to win; the Canarsee myth allows them to avoid the customary unwarranted charge of swindling the natives, but the price is that they are regarded as dupes themselves.
Trying to twist some aspect of the unknown past into quasi-propaganda is an unacceptable deflection that results in the unhelpful adulteration of history. Once something appears in print there’s a strong inclination for it to be taken as truth, which is then repeated and too often widely believed, while the source, usually beyond identification and interrogation, grows murkier and more distant. Apart from the tantalizing scraps in Schaghen’s letter, everything about this Manhattan transaction is just conjecture, and one has to distinguish between the serious research of legitimate and knowledgeable historians and those writers who just follow the mob or who prefer a neat story that suits their theory. We know so little about what happened on that day in 1626, but we do know that History, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.
