The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

3. Good Friends and Doubtful Neighbors

64 3 GoodFriendsandDoubtfulNeighbors At the end of April 1623 the tulips were blooming, and Willem Usselincx was at The Hague trying to take credit, and receive payment, for his contributions to the Dutch West India Company. Holland’s bloemisten had reason to be excited—a bulb called “Semper Augustus” had just sold for one thousand guilders. “No tulip was ever more esteemed,” Nicolaes van Wassenaer wrote of the flower, whose scalloped white petals, emerging from a deep blue base, were streaked red as though they were aflame.1 Usselincx’s esteem for himself led to expectations of an even greater reward. Rejecting the offer by the States General of a salary of four thousand guilders per year, he demanded “two per cent of all the subscriptions he got beyond five millions, one fifteenth of all the profits the state should derive from the company, and one fourth of the brokerage.”2 The West India Company was his prized bloom, bearing the marks of his cultivation, and he wanted the recognition that was his due. Six months later he was on his way to Sweden. As Usselincx petitioned for his pay, a fleet of eleven ships was preparing to depart from the Goeree Gat, an outlet of the Maas River about thirty miles south of The Hague. A great parade of worthies from the capital came to inspect the vessels. Among them were the stadholder Prince Maurits of Nassau; his brother Prince Frederik Hendrik; the deposed king and queen of Bohemia; the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; along with “many other Barons, Captains, Officers, and Nobles, as well as noble ladies,” borne by thirty car- good friendS And douBtful neighBorS 65 riages and eight coaches.3 The maritime might on display mirrored the quality of the spectators on shore. The flagship Het Wapen van Amsterdam carried forty-two cannon and 237 men, and its partner, Het Wapen van Delft, matched it with forty cannon and 242 men. Each of these “leviathans ” weighed eight hundred tons, ranking them among the largest ships in Dutch service.4 The other ships—the Arend, the Eendracht, the Griffioen, the Hollandia, the Hoop, the Koning David, the Mauritius, the Oranje, and the Windhond—were comparably armed and manned. The fleet went to sea on April 29 with nearly three hundred cannon and over 1,600 men in all, including 600 soldiers.5 It was the “greatest force ever sent to the South Seas,” a contemporary declared.6 The “Nassau Fleet,” named for Prince Maurits’s role in sponsoring the expedition, was inspired in part by the voyage of Joris van Spilbergen, who had led a series of naval attacks along the Pacific coast of South America in 1615. The Nassau Fleet was twice as large as van Spilbergen’s expedition, and its goals were grander: to capture Spain’s treasure fleet and to foster an uprising among Spain’s indigenous and enslaved African subjects.7 Van Spilbergen’s voyage offered an example for the Nassau Fleet to follow, but Usselincx’s ideas, and those of men like him, brought these fantasies of liberation to life. Since the beginning of the Dutch Revolt in the late sixteenth century, Netherlanders had identified their own struggle against Spain with the plight of the natives of the Americas. In his efforts to promote the Dutch West India Company and then its Swedish counterpart, Usselincx had taken this older patriotic tradition and translated it into the commercial language of the seventeenth century.8 Commerce with America’s indigenous peoples, he argued, would forge alliances, promote conversions, and earn profits. Indians would offer their own goods in a free and fair exchange, resulting in a “very big trade.” Eventually, the natives would acquire “civility” and Christianity as well. Through “patronage and friendship with so many different peoples” Christian traders would bring “peoples and nations who up to now lived in blindness, idolatry, and godlessness . . . to the light of truth and eternal bliss.” Various Protestant nations would participate in these efforts. In time, Usselincx predicted, these partners in commerce and faith would challenge Spanish power on both sides of the ocean.9 Samuel Blommaert and Peter Minuit, alumni of the actual West India Company, showed little interest in a transatlantic anti-Iberian alliance. Yet their own conception of New Sweden, modeled after the WIC’s New Netherland , retained several core precepts from Usselincx’s original vision: the na- 66 the conteSt for...