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5 S t a k i n g C l a i m Often during my summer walks on the shore, I come upon the desiccated shell of a female blue crab, recognizable by her bluish gray carapace and legs with reddish orange pincers. It’s just as savory to gulls as to the humans who go crabbing along the jetties here. Spying a glistening live crab just stranded by the receding wave, a gull swoops down to grab it, then flies off to an isolated spot to dine on the sweet flesh. It was this crab that Dutch colonist David de Vries noted as a propitious sign from the gods: “In the summertime crabs come on the flat shores, of very good taste. Their claws are of the color of the flag of our Prince, orange white and blue, so that the crabs show sufficiently that we ought to people the country, and that it belongs to us.”1 The land “discovered” and “possessed” by the Dutch in seventeenth-century New Netherland was a place of astonishing plenty, awaiting the arrival of the European to reap her bounty. The waters were teeming with fish, the air with birds, the land covered with a luxuriant growth of trees, fruiting vines, and grasses. To the European with an eye toward settlement, it was the proverbial Land of Plenty. Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, nosed his little ship The Half Moon into Lower New York Bay in 1609. Based on Hudson’s “discovery,” the Dutch staked their claim to the region they named New Netherland, which roughly corresponded with Lenapehoking. As described by Adriaen Van Der Donck, a lawyer who settled here in the 1600s, the colony was bounded by New England on its northeastern side, demarcated by the Connecticut River; Canada to the north, demarcated by the Saint Lawrence River; and Virginia to the south, past the Delaware River. The Dutch claimed control of both the Delaware and the Hudson rivers.2 By the time Hudson sailed into the river that would be named after him, the natives had grown used to seeing the strange sailing ships and bearded men. Explorers, traders, fishermen, and pirates had visited the shores of the Atlantic seaboard since the late 1400s, and possibly earlier. Word of the white man would have spread rapidly along trade routes, and the word was not always good. In many instances, Europeans—Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch—had dispossessed American Indians of their lands, abducting, enslaving, and killing them. Verrazano, for example, who explored the Lower New York Bay as far as the Narrows in 1524, had abducted a young Indian boy from Delaware to bring back to show the French king.3 It was in the interest of both Indian and European traders, however, to maintain friendly relations . The Indians desired the Europeans’ trade goods, and the Europeans desired access to the Indians’ vast trading network. The Dutch, specifically, sought to establish trading outposts on Manhattan and at Fort Orange (now Albany) as gateways to the Hudson trading corridor. Hudson’s voyages opened up the North American fur trade for Dutch merchants. The Dutch West India Company (DWIC), chartered in 1621, was given exclusive North American trade rights. The original intent of the Dutch was to secure control of fur trade routes—the Hudson River being key—and to that end they did not at first seek to establish permanent settlements . Fort Amsterdam was merely a tiny trading outpost, and the fur trade was far down the list of their priorities in the Americas, priorities dominated by the slave trade, sugar production, and imperial aims. As bluntly put by historian Daniel Friedenberg, “Sacking, slaving, and the conquest of Brazil relegated the tiny settlements of Fort Orange (Albany) and Manhattan to a position of little importance.”4 The fur trade may have been a low priority to the Dutch West India Company , but it was highly lucrative. Beaver was especially profitable. Not only was beaver fur highly esteemed in Russia and Germany, but beaver testicles were believed to have curative powers, and beaver oil was thought “good for dizziness, trembling, rheumatism, lameness, and pain in the stomach.”5 The high European demand for beaver pelts and by-products naturally led to the animal’s being overhunted. Beaver may once have numbered as high as 60 million; within decades of European colonization, the animals were extirpated from the Northeast.6 No...

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