The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page A

on the oysterless upper Hudson to receive a shipment from a friend or relative in New Amsterdam. Maria van Rensselaer, born van Cortlandt on July 20, 1645, was one of the first native New Yorkers of European stock—Catalina Trico’s daughter Sarah is believed to be the first. When she was only sixteen, Maria married Jeremias van Rensselaer, director of the colony of Rensselaerwyk near Albany, a colony within the colony whose fur and wheat trade made it more prosperous than New Amsterdam. An extraordinary seventeenth-century woman, she ran Rensselaerwyk herself after her husband died. In the letters she left behind are numerous thank-you notes for oysters. She would ship apples from upstate to her brother in New Amsterdam and he would ship New York oysters back to her.

    The People, the Lenape,
continued to enjoy and trade oysters. They made knives from the shells, probably using them to scrape hides in their fur trade with the Salty People. Hudson had noted that the Indians had “killed a fat dog and skinned it in great haste with shells that they had got out of the water.” But the few Dutch records on the subject showed other uses for oyster-shell knives. There was a complaint against a Dutchman who gave alcohol to the Indians, one of whom, inebriated, cut someone with an oyster-shell knife. In another incident, a Lenape tortured a captured Dutchman by cutting off several fingers with an oyster-shell knife.
    Relations were not going well between the People and the Salty People. In truth, despite all the reports of friendliness and easy trading, from the start it had been a difficult relationship. On Hudson’s third day on Staten Island, after a prosperous second day of trade, a dispute broke out in which a petty officer, John Coleman, commanding a shore party, was killed from an arrow wound in the throat. Hudson retreated, most authorities believe, to Sandy Hook, but the Brooklyn legend is that he crossed the harbor to a safe anchorage in a narrow inlet, a place now called Gravesend Bay. The hilly strip of land along the bay was about five miles long and a half mile at its widest and it was overrun with wild rabbits or conies. The land may have been named Coney Island after the rabbits, or possibly after Coleman. A third theory is that it was named after a Dutchman named Cnyn who settled there. At the time the Dutch arrived, Coney Island was the Canarsee tribe’s principal site for making wampum.
    Aside from a love of oysters and a proclivity for trade, the Lenape and the Salty People had little in common. The Lenape never fully understood that Salty People operated under completely different rules. This inability to understand the intruder, not even completely grasping their desire to take power, would soon prove the end of the People.
    Nothing better illustrates the lack of understanding between the two groups than the famous “selling” of Manhattan. Perhaps because nothing more quickly seizes the imagination of the New York mind than a story of a real-estate bargain, the most widely known event of the little-known history of New Netherlands is that in 1626 Peter Minuit, the newly arrived director general of New Netherlands, bought Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four dollars. The figure of twenty-four dollars, which has remained the same through centuries of fluctuation in the value of a dollar, seems an uncertain calculation. An assortment of cloth, wampum, fishhooks, hatchets, and other goods, according to some later versions, was handed over to Lenape chiefs of a group known as the Wappinger Confederation. But there is no certain documentation of what goods were involved in the trade. The goods are often described as “beads and trinkets,” but some beads were currency, and objects made of metal or glass were very valuable to a society that didn’t make them. One Dutchman in 1626 estimated the value of the goods handed over to “the wildmen” to be sixty 1626