Dutch Colonial Forts in New Netherland 139 DUTCH COLONIAL
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
dutch colonial forts in new netherland 139 DUTCH COLONIAL FORTS IN NEW NETHERLAND Paul R. Huey When Henry Hudson established Dutch claim to New Netherland with his 1609 voyage, the Netherlands was in a brief twelve-year period of peace in their long war with Spain. During years of bloody strife, the Dutch and Spanish erected many fortifications, large and small, in the Netherlands. Both sides in that war used the ‘Italian system’ of fortifi- cation in building small forts, modified, however so that the flanks of the bastions met the curtain walls at right angles instead of projecting lobe-like.1 Such forts continued to be built in the seventeenth century in the Netherlands (see Figure 8.1). Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, ven- tured far up the Hudson River and anchored his ship adjacent to an island on the west shore about 150 miles (241 km) above its mouth. Indians crowded on board Hudson’s ship to trade food and valuable furs for European knives, beads, and hatchets.2 Learning of the poten- tial trade for furs at this location, merchants in the Netherlands imme- diately became interested in the area. Other ships came, and traders quickly focused on the island as a key location in the fur trade.3 1 Horst de la Croix, Military Considerations in City Planning: Fortifications (New York: George Braziller,1972), 44, figs.62–63; Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (New York: Barnes & Noble,1979), 29–31, 70, 90–91; Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Penguin Books,1990), 157–58. 2 Paul R. Huey, ‘Aspects of Continuity and Change in Colonial Dutch Material Culture at Fort Orange, 1624–1664ʹ, Ph.D. dissertation in American Civilization: Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, 1988, 7; J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Nether- land, 1609–1664 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 7, 22. 3 Edward Hagaman Hall, ‘The New York Commercial Tercentenary, 1614–1914ʹ, Appendix D, 441–500 in 19th Annual Report, 1914, of the American Scenic and His- toric Preservation Society (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1914), 464–65; Simon Hart, The Prehis- tory of the New Netherland Company: Amsterdam Notarial Records of the First Dutch Voyages to the Hudson (Amsterdam: City of Amsterdam Press, 1959), 20–21; Jameson, Narratives, 38; E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol.1 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1856), 51. 140 Paul R. Huey Figure 8.1. The crop outline of the Franse Schans, built in 1627 by Prince Frederik Hendrik during the siege of Groenlo in the Netherlands. Photo by Martin Grevers, Eibergen, with permission and courtesy of www.circumvallatielinie.nl. Fort Nassau on the Hudson Conflict developed when more than one Dutch ship arrived indepen- dently to trade. Early in 1614, Hendrick Christiaensen began build- ing Fort Nassau on the island, later called Castle Island. The ‘fort was built in the form of a redoubt surrounded by a moat eighteen feet wide; it was mounted with two pieces of cannon and eleven peder- eros, and the garrison consisted or ten or twelve men’. A map of 1614 or 1616 explains that ‘within the walls [the fort] is 58 feet wide. The moat is 18 feet wide. The house inside the fort is 36 feet long and 26 wide’. This map indicates the fort either as an enclosure in the middle of Castle Island or by a mark on the west side, toward the mainland and away from the river.4 Several Dutch documents give 1615 as the 4 Shirley Dunn ‘Settlement Patterns in Rensselaerswijk: Farms and Farmers on Castle Island’, De Halve Maen 70.1 (1997): 7–9; Hall, ‘Tercentenary’, 485; Hart, New .