In the Company of Pirates: New Amsterdam and the Atlantic World
By Timo McGregor
Preserved in an unassuming folder of Dutch colonial correspondence at the New York State Archives lies a vivid first-hand account of deceit, avarice, and violence in the seventeenth century Atlantic world.[1] The scene, surprisingly, is not New Amsterdam or the Hudson Valley but the coast of modern-day Senegal. Here, in the winter of 1659, Abraham Velthuijsen witnessed a small but swashbuckling episode in the rise of Atlantic piracy and privateering. While Velthuijsen’s account is striking for its dramatic detail, his narrative and the story of how it ended up in a New Netherland archive also points to important connections between the Dutch colony on the Hudson and a wider Atlantic economy of maritime violence. The story of New Netherland is most often told as one of agrarian settlement or commercial enterprise. But neither colonization nor commerce could be disentangled from practices of raiding, piracy, and privateering that sustained colonial economies, shaped political alliances, and steered the development of legal institutions. In the early 17th century, Dutch fleets were at the forefront of a rapid militarization of Atlantic waters. As the tide of Dutch expansion began to ebb and large admiralty fleets gave way to individual privateers, New Netherland remained part of an evolving economy of seaborne violence that connected West Africa and the Caribbean to Manhattan.
Aldus verthoont Hem Het Eijlandt Goeree geleegen an Cabo verde, circa 1665. Johannes Vingboons. Nationaal Archief, VELH0619.55.
A warm November sun hung low in the sky as Abraham Velthuijsen watched a ship flying French colors round the Cape Verde peninsula and slip into the roadstead off the island of Gorée. From the walls of Fort Nassau, the thirty-seven-year-old could survey the entire island on which he had been stationed for three years working as a surgeon for the Dutch West India Company (WIC). His posting placed Velthuijsen near the economic center of the WIC’s Atlantic empire. Despite its small size, Gorée was a significant hub in the Company’s transatlantic trade in gold, ivory, hides, and enslaved people. As dusk closed in, Velthuijsen saw a boat carry a small delegation from the French ship to the fort. Led by an officer named Beaulieu, the visitors requested the Dutch commander’s permission to gather water and firewood before continuing their journey from Brittany to the East Indies. Though ostensibly a meeting between merchants and representatives of a trading company, Velthuijsen knew such encounters always held the potential for violence. The fluctuations of European geopolitics significantly affected the chances of conflict and, in this case, the auguries were good. Beaulieu could appeal for assistance on the grounds of the “friendship” between France and the Dutch Republic, while Velthuijsen and his companions were no doubt relieved to learn from their visitors of a peace treaty with Sweden, putting an end to a war that had spread to West Africa. But the most significant political authorities for the inhabitants of Gorée were not European. For water and firewood, Beaulieu would have to get permission and pay a fee to the “Alcairo” of the local Lebu village, though the Dutch agreed to spare a pilot to show him the way.[2]
Affidavit of Abraham Velthuysen and William Cool, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 13 fol. 72.
Two days later, Beaulieu returned with the Dutch navigator, bringing along a fine dinner of fowl and four bottles of French wine as thanks for the assistance. As the WIC officers and their visitors sat down to their feast, Velthuijsen heard a commotion outside. Running to the window, he saw men streaming out of the French boat with pistols drawn, while an advance party had already overwhelmed the guards at the fort’s gate. Realizing they had been betrayed, Velthuijsen and the Dutch commander launched themselves at Beaulieu but were soon overwhelmed and taken prisoner. Velthuijsen was shot in the back four times. Fearing a massacre, the remaining Dutchmen soon surrendered in exchange for the promise of quarter. Their assailants quickly secured the fort and raised a new flag, but to Velthuijsen’s surprise it was not the Bourbon fleur-de-lis but a Swedish flag. Though the entire assault had been carried out under French colors, Beaulieu now claimed the conquest was authorized by a commission from the King of Sweden who, it turned out, was still at war with the Dutch Republic.
Whatever their claimed or actual commissions, it was clear to Velthuijsen that his captors were themselves from France, as they carefully inventoried their booty in French. Beaulieu’s raid was clearly well timed as his ship could not carry all the thousands of hides and “elephants teeth” stored at Gorée. A solution presented itself in the form of several other Dutch merchant ships, which the privateers promptly captured and appropriated as transports. Several weeks later, Velthuijsen found himself a prisoner on a small flotilla heading back to Brittany along with some of the other Dutch officers and “fourteen or fifteen of the Company’s slaves.” Two “free Indians who lived on the Island” were also among the captives — perhaps survivors of the Potiguar regiment that joined the WIC attack on Luanda from Brazil in 1641. Hoping to find more ships to capture and send back for the remaining plunder on Gorée, the little fleet sailed for the Cape Verde Islands. Finding no promising victims, the French privateers decided to leave fourteen of their Dutch captives on the island of Santiago. Perhaps his skills as a surgeon spared Velthuijsen from the fate of his compatriots, who he feared would be killed by the Portuguese as they were “enemies of this state and especially the West India Company.”[3]
Het Fort Nassou van Binnen, met Oranje, op 't Eiland Goeree, 1668. From Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge Der Afrikaensche Eylanden (Jacob Van Meurs, 1668)
Though the situation looked grim for Velthuijsen, the tide was about to turn on his captors. On New Year’s Day, a storm scattered the privateering fleet and as they neared the Azores they encountered a frigate sailing with a privateering commission from the Dutch Republic. Following a lengthy naval engagement, the Dutch frigate managed to recapture Velthuijsen’s ship and drive off Beaulieu. By the end of February, the surgeon was back in the Dutch Republic, ready to recount his adventures to a notary and the WIC directors.
Velthuijsen’s dramatic account certainly made for an exciting read, but why did the WIC directors feel the need for Stuyvesant, sitting in New Amsterdam an ocean away from Gorée, to read it? The letter to which Velthuijsen’s testimony was attached reveals that the directors in Amsterdam saw several connections between the events in West Africa and the Hudson Valley. Most strikingly, the directors believed that one of the key protagonists of the attack on Gorée was known to Stuyvesant and had previously enjoyed a friendly reception in Manhattan. In the summer of 1657, a privateer named Augustin Beaulieu had weighed anchor at Nooten Eiland (today’s Governor’s Island) with a captured Spanish ship in tow. Stuyvesant allowed Beaulieu to divide and sell his prize in New Amsterdam, and the Spanish ship was converted into a merchant vessel to carry victuals from New Netherland to the Caribbean.[4] When a complaint was brought to the WIC’s council at New Amsterdam contesting the legality of Beaulieu’s sale, Stuyvesant denied that he had issued any judgement on the veracity of Beaulieu’s French commission or the legality of the prize. The director general and his council could not prohibit “allied friends from coming to their roadsteads, nor could they obstruct honest trade, the soul of our fatherland, the growth and advancement of this budding place.” What’s more, prohibiting Beaulieu from trading might “give thereby the neighboring French governor of Cristoffel, Guadeloupe and others, inducement and justifiable cause to apply the same standards to us and our nation, which would result in significant damage.”[5] Stuyvesant thus dodged the issue by claiming he could or would not politically interfere with the natural right to trade, while the provenance of the goods exchanged was not his problem.
Beaulieu either remained in or returned to New Netherland because a year later he was in the New Amsterdam courts again, this time for failing to pay his debts to several colonists.[6] Once again the Council got involved, determining to keep the privateer in custody until he settled his obligations, including a substantial sum owed to the WIC.[7] Beaulieu declared his intention to “pay everyone respectably and honestly” and proposed to square his account by giving the WIC a ship’s boat worth 440 guilders. The boat was then in Curaçao, where Beaulieu also claimed to have 7,000 pounds of tobacco that could underwrite his debt. This was a plausible claim as Beaulieu was apparently a regular in Curaçao between 1656 and 1659, trading in various household goods and racking up debts to the WIC for ship supplies and repairs.[8] When Stuyvesant wrote to the Curaçao governor Beck in May 1659, Beaulieu had just left the island with his goods. Beck declared he had not realized the privateer was “so deeply in debt” to the WIC, but that Beaulieu had f343 of credit in Curaçao that could be deducted from the 900 guilders he owed to the New Netherland magazine.[9]
Beaulieu’s short but eventful paper trail reminds us that maritime violence, trade, and agrarian settlement were interrelated and sometimes indistinguishable elements of Atlantic colonizing. Though the 1650s saw significant territorial expansion in New Netherland, the colony also grew its Atlantic connections. Agrarian production in the Hudson valley shipped through New Amsterdam supplied plantations and trade entrepots in the Caribbean, leading Stuyvesant to recognize the French islands of St Christopher and Guadeloupe as “neighbors” and important trading partners. This commerce did not preclude or supplant the raiding and privateering that characterized early Dutch Atlantic expansion. Privateers like Beaulieu switched easily between trade and violence, selling tobacco and “venetian pendants” one day and capturing undefended merchant ships the next. The boundaries between such privateering and piracy were murky at best, but the resulting plunder could provide an important boost to fragile colonies economies. Stuyvesant opted to dodge difficult questions of legality by claiming that he neither consented to or condoned Beaulieu’s capture of the Spanish ship but that “honest trade” between colonists and the privateer was a natural right that fell outside the scope of his political jurisdiction. The scope of Beaulieu’s debts to the WIC, however, suggest that Stuyvesant was far from a neutral bystander in this trade and the director general did not hesitate to take political action when debts to the company were in question. No roguish outsider, Beaulieu was clearly comfortably embedded in the political economy of the Dutch Atlantic colonies and a trading partner for a number of inhabitants of New Amsterdam.
WIC directors in Amsterdam were understandably concerned about the potential for such associations to backfire on the Company. They worried that the “infamous pirate villain captain Beaulieu” was “perhaps [held] in greater credit than he merits” in New Amsterdam. They also warned Stuyvesant that Beaulieu had attempted the same trick he applied in Gorée at Curaçao, but had been thwarted by a more attentive commander. The directors hoped that Velthuijsen’s account of the Gorée debacle would serve as an “example” for Stuyvesant to always be on his guard in dealing with “unfamiliar ships” and dubious privateers. Beaulieu’s easy switch from a French to a Swedish privateering commission demonstrated to the directors that nationality or state affiliation could not provide a stable foundation for a trustworthy relationship. “Do not trust your English neighbors too much either,” the directors warned Stuyvesant, “because you cannot rely on anyone.”[10]
In this uncertain world where no one could be trusted and pirates could obtain multiple state commissions to gain a veneer of legality, information was a highly valuable commodity. Velthuijsen’s detailed and notarized testimony gave Stuyvesant notice of transatlantic news that could affect him and those he governed in New Amsterdam. It was also likely part of WIC preparations for a legal case demanding reparations from the Swedish Crown. Though the general policy was plunder first and lawyers later, the privateering business was anything but lawless. Years of competing legal claims and counter suits often followed the capture of a ship or plundering of a settlement. Though such cases were rarely decided on legal merit alone, witness testimonies like Velthuijsen’s played an important role in building a case. There was another lesson here for Stuyvesant, as the directors wanted him to take action against a privateer that had been lurking in the Long Island Sound. Though it boasted no less than three official privateering commissions, the directors hoped the offending ship could be “trapped and punished as a pirate, as an example to others.” As well as intercepting the vessel, the directors instructed Stuyvesant to collect and send them all “pertinent information” from those on the ships that had fallen victim to the privateer.[11] If piracy was a matter of perspective, managing the flow of news and information was critical to ensuring profitable legal and political outcomes, and New Amsterdam was both a recipient and generator of such information. Accounts like Velthuijsen’s would help the WIC shape an emerging narrative that recast the reputation of pirates and privateers, from the heroic Sea Beggars of old to the classic villains of piracy’s golden age. In reality, as Beaulieu’s case suggests, piracy was both less glamorous and far more closely connected to the WIC’s colonies than the Company liked to admit.
Timo McGregor received his PhD in history from NYU in 2020. He is working on a book manuscript exploring vernacular conceptions of political community in the Dutch Atlantic.
[1] I am grateful to Janny Venema who first brought this document to my attention and very kindly shared her transcriptions with me. This research was made possible by the warm welcome and generous support extended to me by the New Netherland Institute.
[2] Affidavit of Abraham Velthuysen and William Cool, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 13 fol. 72.
[3] Affidavit of Abraham Velthuysen and William Cool, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 13 fol. 72.
[4] Permit to Capt. Beaulieu to come into port, June 3 1657, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 8 fol. 589b; Dingman Veersteeg, trans., and Martha Dickinson Shattuck, ed., New Netherland Papers, c. 1650-‐1660: From the Collected Papers of Hans Bontemantel (Albany: New Netherland Research Center, 2011), 49.
[5] Minute of proceedings in the case of Augustin Beaulieu, June 9 1657, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 8 fol. 622b; Charles T. Gehring and Janny Venema, eds. & trans., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Vol. 8, Council Minutes, 1656-1658 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2018) 327-329. It is not entirely clear who filed the complaint about Stuyvesant’s treatment of Beaulieu but it is possible the source was Juan Gallardo Ferrera, a Spaniard who had spent years in New Netherland unsuccessfully petitioning for the return of several enslaved people who had been seized by a Dutch privateer and sold into slavery again in New Netherland in 1652.
[6] For Beaulieu’s various legal altercations, see Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens of New Amsterdam, Jan. 4, 1658 - Sept. 20, 1658, fols. 290, 295-296, 304, 306-307, 309, 311, 314, 319, and 320.
[7] Minute of a claim presented by comptroller De Deckere against captain Beaulieu, September 23 1658, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 8 fol. 989; Gehring and Venema, Council Minutes, 1656-1658, 543-544.
[8] Charles T. Gehring, ed., Curaçao Papers, 1640-1665, trans. Charles T. Gehring (New Netherland Institute, 2011) 124-125.
[9] Gehring, Curaçao Papers, 130.
[10] “Wij hebben UE dit wel als een exempel willen voor oogen stellen, ten eijnde sij niet alleen in diergelijcke occasie en aencomen van alle vremde schepen op hun hoede sij, nemaer oock de Engelsche nabuijren niet te veel en vertrouwen, alsoo er doch op niemandt vasten staet te maecken en is,” Letter from the directors to Stuyvesant, March 9 1660, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 13 fol. 74.
[11] Letter from the directors to Stuyvesant, March 9 1660, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Vol. 13 fol. 74.