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Hidden Literacies

Indian Account of the First Arrival of the Dutch at New York Island

Heckewelder, History, 71–73; Sandra M. Gustafson, ed, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 9th ed., vol. A (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) 103-106.

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The Accounts According to the tradition, on a return trip, the colonists made their first request for land: “You first requested your Munsee children to grant you as much land, what a Bullock Skin would cover; and which was cut into small cords, which was laid in the form of a circle on the land which you desired to have, and we your Munsee Children directly complied to your request for land.” This detail, the description of a colonial ruse employing the hide of a bullock or ox-hide, isn’t at all a rhetorical emphasis of the petition, but it has significance for the way that “hidden literacies” convey historical knowledge, and for that reason it will be the subject of the remainder of this introductory essay.

Like other written records of oral traditions, the Munsees’ account of the arrival of the Dutch brings questions about authenticity and reliability. To what extent might the written version be attributed to the writer, rather than the teller? Is it indeed a Munsee tradition? If it does date from first contact, how might it have changed, over the course of its existence, and through the Indians’ continuing experience of settler-colonialism? Is it an authentic oral tradition, now represented in writing by Newsom, or has it been “contaminated” by colonial contact?

If so, the primary evidence of such contamination would be the story of the bullock’s hide, and even the use of the word “bullock,” and the source would be the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, who wrote down and translated the earliest extant written version of the “Indian Tradition of the First Arrival of the Dutch at Manhattan Island” in the late eighteenth century. In that version, the colonists asked the Indians for “only so much land as the hide of a bullock would cover (or encompass,) which hide was brought forward and spread on the ground before them. That they readily granted this request; whereupon the whites took a knife and beginning at one place on this hide, cut it up into a rope not thicker than the finger of a little child, so that by the time this hide was cut up there was a great heap.”8

As Heckewelder himself recognized, the Indian account about the bullock’s or ox hide parallels the classical story of the Phoenician Queen Dido’s founding of Carthage in North Africa, an episode referred to in Virgil’s Aeneid and detailed in Livy’s Roman History and other sources. [Figure 1] Heckewelder astutely proposed an explanation for this parallel: that the Dutch colonists, imitating Dido, “put their classical knowledge to good account.”9 However, with one exception, colonialist scholars have not taken Heckewelder’s proposition seriously.

Washington Irving, who read Heckewelder’s version in the New-York Historical Society, made it material for parody. In an 1850 revision of his History of New York, the fictional author Diedrich Knickerbocker asserts that the story of the bullock’s hide was “an old fable” which Heckewelder “may have borrowed from antiquity. The true version is, that Oloffe Van Kortlandt bargained for just so much land as a man could cover with his nether garments.” They then brought out Mynheer Tenbroeck, or “Ten Breeches,” a “bulbous-bottomed burgher” whose layers of underwear covered the whole site of New Amsterdam. [Figure 2].

Irving’s contemporary Schoolcraft, who commented directly on the Munsee memorial, was similarly dismissive of its traditional content. He declared it “a mere reproduction of old Delaware and Mohegan traditions, which are recorded in various ways, & may be seen at large in the [blank] volume of the transactions of the American Philosophical Society.” He may have intended to go back and verify the volume, but as far as I can determine the APS didn’t publish a version of the tradition; Schoolcraft may have had in mind the one published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1819 as part of Heckewelder’s History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, a book based on Heckewelder’s decades as a missionary among the Lenapes and related peoples that has been an indispensable resource for scholars. The chapter containing the “Indian Account of the First Arrival of the Dutch at New York Island” has recently reached a wide readership, as a selection in the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.10 In it, Heckewelder designates the Lenni Lenape or Delawares and the Mahicans as the first Indians to greet the Dutch colonists, and he attributes his account of the tradition to “an intelligent Delaware Indian.”11 So he leaves the Munsees out.

Schoolcraft explains that Munsees are “relatives of the Delaware” and the Mahicans who in “early days” lived “in the western parts of New Jersey, extending to the banks of the Hudson above the Highlands, where the Dutch found them in 1609 & onwards.” He states: “They never lived on Manhattan island, according to any testimony left by the colonial writers. The traditions mentioned by the memorialists, are therefore to be viewed as the common traditions of the kindred tribes of the Delaware & Hudson rivers.”

Schoolcraft’s dismissal makes little sense, however, insofar as the indigenous peoples who first met Henry Hudson wouldn’t have identified as Delawares, Munsees or Mahicans – ethnonyms that came to identify Indian nations during the colonial era. The place called “Minisink,” the “Stony Country,” was in the area of the Delaware Water Gap, but Manhattan was well within the region of Minisink or Munsee dialect-speakers. And in the first version of Heckewelder’s record of the tradition, he presents it as “verbatim as was related to me by Aged & respected Delawares; Monseys & Mahicanni.”12 So the Munsee memorialists had good reason to claim the tradition, including the story of the bullock’s hide, as their own, and to claim it reports events in which their ancestors participated. And their version contains many details, such as the premonition and the turtle drum, that don’t appear in Heckewelder’s version, and omits some, such as the story of the first taste of alcohol, that do.

Moreover, what Schoolcraft, Heckewelder, Irving and the editors of the Norton didn’t know is that New Amsterdam isn’t the only site of early modern maritime imperialism, according to recorded oral traditions and non-western histories, where Dutch colonists brought out an ox hide and asked for as much land as the hide could cover. They performed the same ruse in Cambodia, Java, Taiwan and South Africa. Parallels attribute the hide trick to Portuguese colonists in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Burma and Cambodia, and to Spaniards in the founding of Manilla. So the Munsee and Lenape traditions share this element with accounts from across the Indian and Pacific Oceans.13