Contiguous Cloth: Textiles and the Slave Trade in New Netherland
By Carrie Anderson
Fig. 1. Inventory of accompanying papers sent to Pieter Stuyvesant. New York State Archives. New York (Colony). Council. Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 71.
Sometime in the fall of 1661 the Nieuw Nederlantse Indiaen docked in the harbor of New Amsterdam carrying documents and cargo from Curaçao, the Dutch colony that served as a central hub of the slave trade for both Dutch and Spanish colonies in the Americas. The skipper of the ship, Dirck Jansz van Oldenburg, carried with him a list of documents that were to be delivered to Pieter Stuyvesant (1612-1672), the director-general of New Netherland between 1647 and 1664 (fig. 1). The list reads as follows:[1]
1. A letter dated 21 July 1661.
2. Receipt of the Negros loaded in the aforesaid ship.
3. Bond of a female Negro sold to the aforesaid skipper.
4. A letter from the honorable lords superiors in Holland.
5. Manifest of the cloth loaded in the aforesaid ship.
6. Receipt of the skipper concerning the same.
7. Account of that which was bought and received here from the skipper.
The modern reader is immediately struck by the callousness of this list, the itemization of which creates an equivalence between letters, receipts, cloths, and enslaved human beings.
Fig. 2. Fabric samples from the Vrouwe Maria Geertruida, 1788. Nationaal Archief, West India Company Archive, nr. 179.
This list also demonstrates how closely intertwined were the trades in humans and textiles. The Dutch West India Company (WIC) played a key role in this trade, using the same ships to facilitate the transportation of enslaved people and textiles between Africa, South America, and North America. The types of textiles carried on these ships came in a variety of colors and patterns and ranged from coarse to fine, each serving a different purpose along the trans-Atlantic trade routes. For example, Dutch merchants traded platillios — a sample of which is included on the bottom right of this 1786 swatchbook from De Vrouwe Maria Geertruida — for enslaved people on the African coast, to name just one of many types of textiles used in the slave trade (fig. 2).[2] European linens, on the other hand, were frequently presented as diplomatic gifts to various indigenous groups in Dutch Brazil.[3] Beyond their value as commodities in the service of global trade and diplomacy, however, textiles were also made into clothing to be worn by inhabitants of the colonies, including the enslaved people who were forcibly brought there.[4]
In New Netherland, textiles were as critical as they were on the African coast or in Dutch Brazil. They were necessary for survival in the colder temperatures, and — as in other parts of the world — they were also essential for New Amsterdam merchants seeking to do business with indigenous traders in the region. In the areas around New Amsterdam, these traders demanded a woolen cloth called duffel — in addition to wampum — in exchange for the beaver pelts they hunted and processed.[5] According to WIC secretary Isaack Rasière (1595-after 1654), who arrived in New Netherland in 1626, indigenous traders valued duffel because it could be used as clothing during the day and a blanket at night. It was with seeming frustration, then, that Rasière wrote to the Amsterdam Chamber of the WIC to complain about his perennial short supply of duffel cloth, which — he pressed — must be sent to him post haste, but only in the proper colors. Dark blues and grays were preferred, he wrote, whereas reds were refused by indigenous hunters because the bright color was a hindrance to hunting — a situation that was also undesirable for Dutch traders, who relied on indigenous hunters for beaver pelts.[6] Rasière’s frustration becomes evident in his claim that — without the proper cloth — indigenous traders would retort, “Why should we go hunting? Half the time you have no cloth” — an ultimatum that makes clear the connection between duffel and beaver pelts.
While access to duffel cloth facilitated successful local trade, cloth and clothing were also essential for protecting colonists from the harsh North American winters. Pieces of uncut cloth in a limited range of colors — largely browns, blacks and, blues — were sent to New Netherland to be made into clothing by those living in the Dutch colony.[7] A 1655 list of merchandise arriving on board the ship De Pietas catalogues a number of brown, gray, black, and blue laken (cloth), as well as assorted colors of sayen (wool cloth). Probate inventories and cargo lists suggest that those who could afford it also had sewn garments and other personal adornments, like stockings, sent from Europe, although this was rarer due to its greater expense.[8]
But proper clothing was not just a concern for European colonists. Colonial administrators also recognized the need to clothe the enslaved people they forcibly shipped from the warmer climates of the so-called Guinea Coast and Curaçao to the much colder climes of New Netherland. In the Americas the cloth designated for enslaved people was relatively consistent over time — usually inexpensive and coarse woolens or linens, depending on the climate. These fabrics would be made into two garments — a loose-fitting jacket and breeches or a skirt — which were expected to be supplied by the enslaver.[9] In a colony like New Netherland, where it might prove difficult to acquire cheap cloth on spec, enslavers had to find a way of ensuring that the people they enslaved would be properly attired.
Contemporary correspondence suggests that clothing slaves was indeed a great concern for WIC officials in New Amsterdam — not because they were compassionate, but because they wanted to protect their investment. For example, in a 1659 letter from Matthias Beck, vice director of the WIC in Curaçao, to Stuyvesant, the former assures the latter of his efforts to provide warm clothing for “two boys and a girl,” who were being sent to New Netherland. Beck writes, “We have outfitted them as much as possible against the cold.” In the same letter, Beck responds to an earlier request by the WIC directors in Holland to send “15 or 16” slaves to Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam. Beck writes, “They would have been able to come over now, but because we lack groff (coarse/heavy) cloth here with which to clothe them, we were afraid that they would not be able to survive during the winter.” He continues by promising he will send slaves (and presumably the “coarse cloth” as well) in the spring and requests that Stuyvesant let him know in the meantime if he “will require any more… and what ages and quantity your honor desires sent.”[10]
Fig. 3. Invoice of sundry cases of cloth shipped from Curaçao to New Netherland with bill of lading, 20 July 1661. New York State Archives. New York (Colony). Council. Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 77.
As the 1661 document list carried on the Nieuw Nederlantse Indiaen shows, it was about two years later that Beck seems to have made good on his promise to send a significant number of enslaved people and sufficient coarse fabric to Stuyvesant in New Netherland (fig. 1). The extant documents on this list shed further light on the ways in which the buying and selling of human beings was inextricably bound to the textile trade. The receipt listed as item two, for example, verifies that forty “healthy” slaves — fifteen men, fourteen women, six boys, and five girls — were sent by Matthias Beck to Pieter Stuyvesant.[11] Item five on the same list — the cloth manifest — also survives and its contents are telling: the first item listed is one chest containing forty pieces of pijlaken, a coarse white woolen cloth (fig. 3).[12] This striking, exact correspondence between the number of pijlaken in chest thirty-five and the number of enslaved people on the ship was surely no coincidence. On the Cape Colony, for instance — where winters could be cold — pijlaken were typically used to construct the outer fabric for doublets made specifically for enslaved people, so it comes as no surprise to see it imported into New Netherland as well.[13] Since enslavers were required to clothe the people they enslaved, these forty pieces of pijlaken were probably offered to Stuyvesant for purchase. The additional pijlaken (in chests thirty-six – thirty-nine) would likely have been made available to other enslavers, who might have needed to replace old or worn garments.
Enslaved people living in Dutch colonies were consistently the target of a number of sumptuary practices aimed at signaling their lower status and also differentiating them from European colonizers.[14] New Amsterdam was no different. The textiles contained in chests forty and fifty-four differ significantly in quality and color from those in chests thirty-five to thirty-nine, suggesting they were intended for colonizers, not enslaved people. Rather than the plain white pijlaken associated with slave clothing, for example, there are a range of colors, including gray, brown, blue, and black. The textiles in chests forty and fifty-four are also considerably more expensive. Whereas pijlaken are uniformly listed at four stuivers per ell, which is very inexpensive, the average price per ell of the textiles in chests forty and fifty-four is about fifty-five stuivers per ell — reaching as high as five guilders per ell.[15] Thus, it was both the cost of the cloths in addition to their appearance that created and reinforced social and cultural differences in the minds of enslavers, creating hierarchies that existed in the colonies, including New Amsterdam, as well as in the archive.
Returning again to the inventory of documents with which we began, we are again struck by its emotionless, secretarial precision, especially the way it juxtaposes human bodies and the cloth meant to protect them (fig. 1). This callous form of accounting — justified, or so it seems, by the semantic structures of the document — treats all commodities equally. But the harsh contiguousness of this inventory was not relegated to a page in an account book. Company ships regularly carried enslaved people and supplies — including cloth and food provisions — in discrete sections of the same ship. Cloth or clothing — even if intended to be worn by the enslaved people carried on the ship if/once they reached the destination — would be withheld from them until purchased by their future enslavers. In fact, traders would purposefully strip enslaved people of their clothing before they boarded Company ships, a practice attested to by many contemporary witnesses. For instance, Willem Bosman, WIC employee and author of Nauwkeurige beschrijving van de Goud- Tand- en Slavekust (An accurate description of the Guinean Gold, Ivory and Slave Coast), reported that before WIC employees forced enslaved people to board the ships that would take them across the Atlantic “their masters [would] strip them of all they have on their backs; so that they come aboard stark naked, as well women as men.” [16] The stripping of clothing, Robert DuPlessis has argued, was a “symbolic measure” intended to signal their new status as enslaved people before they crossed the Atlantic, a visual signifier that would be reinforced by the way in which their nudity differentiated them from and subjugated them to their enslavers.[17] Similarly, the “re-dressing” of enslaved people in garments like pijlaken constituted an additional symbolic act meant to underline their low status in the colony.[18]
These acts of violence and racism are brutal reminders of the fraught entanglements between the products of human creation — textiles — and the gross cruelty of human practices — the Atlantic slave trade. As the above has shown, the documents carried on the Nieuw Nederlantse Indiaen demonstrate unequivocally that the textiles arriving in New Amsterdam traveled next to — but were withheld from — the enslaved people with whom they shared contiguous spaces in the hold, evidence of the process through which WIC traders and New Amsterdam colonists commodified human beings. When the textiles carried on the Nieuw Nederlantse Indiaen were made into garments upon their arrival in the Dutch colony, they became highly charged sartorial signifiers intended to distinguish European colonists from the people they enslaved — persistent reminders of the continued inequity and cruelty experienced by enslaved people living in New Amsterdam.
Carrie Anderson is associate professor of art history at Middlebury College. Her first book, The Art of Diplomacy in the Early Modern Netherlands: Gift-giving at Home & Abroad (under contract with Amsterdam University Press) recontextualizes the practice of Dutch inter- and intracultural diplomatic negotiation by repositioning it within the array of texts, images, and objects that it engendered. Carrie is also the co-PI (with Marsely Kehoe, Hope College) of the in-progress digital art history project, Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795.
[1] Translation from Charles T. Gehring. New York State Archives, Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 71. Of the documents listed, items 1 and 4 are now lost.
[2] Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 364.
[3] Carrie Anderson, “Mapping Colonial Interdependencies in Dutch Brazil: European Linen & Brasilianen Identity,” Artl@s Bulletin 7, no. 2 (2018): 56-70.
[4] For more on the Dutch textile trade, see the in-progress digital art history project co-led by Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe, Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795 (http://dutchtextiletrade.org/).
[5] On Dutch-Indigenous trade in New Netherland, see Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland. A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Cornell University Press), especially chapter 4.
[6] DOCUMENT F: Letter from Isaack Rasière to the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company, September 23, 1626. Translated in Documents related to New Netherlands 1624-1626 in the Henry E. Huntington Library, trans. and edited AJF Van Laer (San Marino, Ca, 1924), 224-231.
[7] New York State Archives, Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 21 and 77.
[8]For probate inventories, see Jacobs, 219-220.
[9] DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic. Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 130-146.
[10] New York State Archives, Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 41.
[11] This receipt remains: New York State Archives. Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 73.
[12] New York State Archives. Curaçao records, 1640-1665. Volume 17, document 77.
[13] Miki Sugiura, “Garments in Circulation. The Economies of slave clothing in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony,” in Dressing Global Bodies. The Political Power of Dress in World History, eds. Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 115.
[14] Robert DuPlessis, “Sartorial Sorting in the Colonial Caribbean and North America” in The Right to Dress. Sumtuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 365.
[15] An ell is twenty-seven inches.
[16] Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. Divided into the Gold, The Slave, and The Ivory Coasts (London, 1705), 364a.
[17] Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic, 130.
[18] Ibid., 128-135.