Voyages to New Amsterdam and Curacao

Here are voyages (and related events) to and from New Amsterdam and Curacao from Sept 1646 to Dec 1648. Note that Kath is also spelled de Kath, Kat, Kadt, Cath, or Cat in the various accounts:
14 Sep 1646, Curaçao: Ship Wapen van Nieu Nederlandt arrives in Curaçao and will depart for New Amsterdam.

1647, Amsterdam: Ship Witte Doffer sails to New Amsterdam.
11 May 1647, New Amsterdam: With a fleet of 4 ships, new Director-General Peter Stuyvesant arrives in New Amsterdam by way of the Caribbean island Curaçao (also a part of New Netherland and which he formerly commanded). The Princess Amelia (also called Princess) sailed from Texel (near Amsterdam) on 25 Dec 1646. The Groote Gerrit [Great Crow] under command of Paulus Leendertzen van der Grift likely accompanied the Princess Amelia. Kath [Cat] and Swol [Swallow] probably sailed later and rendezvoused at Curaçao.
1647 May 31. Bill of sale of the ship Amandare, by Peter Stuyvesant, director of
New Netherland, to Thomas Broughton, and charter of the same,
to go to Boston, Isaac Allerton of New Amsterdam and Thomas
Willett of New Plymouth, being securities

5 Jun 1647, New Amsterdam: Ship Wapen van Nieu Nederlandt is in port and will sail for Amsterdam. June 6. Power of attorney. William de Key, merchant, and Jan Claesen
Snial, skipper of the Arms of New Netherland, to Isaac Allerton,
to sell horses on their account in Virginia.

6 Jun 1647, New Amsterdam: The council orders the  West India Company ships Groote Gerrit, De Kath and De Liefde [Love] to be made ready to go to sea as privateers against the Spanish.
Unknown dates, New Amsterdam. Groote Gerrit sails to “…Boston in the English Virginia with a load of salt…”. A frigate from Medenblick arrives. Hercules, with skipper Cornelis Claessen Snoo, arrives. Ship Tamarande is sold.

24 Jun 1647, New Amsterdam: ship de Princes is in port. [probably Pincess Amelia]

5 Jul 1647, New Amsterdam: Thomas Broughton buys ship ‘T Amandaree (“arrived here from Brazil”) from the West India Company and will sail to Boston. He borrows some crew and will return them to Groote Gerrit in Boston.

26 Jul 1647, New Amsterdam: Liefde is in port.

2 Aug 1647, New Amsterdam: Prins Willem is in port.

10 Aug, 1647, New Amsterdam: The ship St. Beninjo, under master Cornelis Claessen Snoo, is charged with smuggling.

14 Aug 1647, New Amsterdam: Valckenier is in port.

16 Aug 1647, New Amsterdam:  Princess Amelia departs New Amsterdam and sinks in the Bristol Channel on 27 Sep 1647.

21 Sept 1647: Stuyvesant sells Swol to the vice-governor of New Haven. 

Before 6 Oct 1647: Valckenier [Falconer] leaves for Amsterdam.

1647: The yacht Siruen when seized by the Swedes on the South River in 1647 was carrying six guns and 60 lbs. of powder.

Oct 1648: When the Dutch crew delivers Swol to New Haven on a Sunday, they execute a plan to seize the disputed Dutch ship St. Beninjo and sail it back to New Amsterdam to answer the charge of smuggling.

19 Feb 1648, Curaçao: Vice_Director Roodenborch writes Stuyvesant that Groote Gerrit was damaged by a storm and sickness has rendered the crews of Cath and Liefde unfit for duty. The letter goes by way of Boston [presumably on an English ship].

7 Apr 1648, Amsterdam: The company officials in Amsterdam write a letter to Stuyvesant . Included are these passages: “The bearer hereof, Wm. Thomassen, skipper of the ‘Valckenier’ [Falconer] and Peter Cornelissen, master of the ‘Pynappel’ [or Pijnappel, Pineapple], who takes out the duplicate of this letter… We send you a list of all the free men, whom we have given permission to go over on each ship…”

14 Apr 1648, New Amsterdam: The council receives Rodenborch’s  letter of 19 Feb.
15 Apr 1648: Kath captures a Spanish ship in the Caribbean.

17 Apr 1648, New Amsterdam: Nieu Swol [New Swallow] arrives from Amsterdam.

20 Apr 1648, New Amsterdam: The council dispatches Nieu Swol to Curaçao.
23 Apr 1648, New Amsterdam: Kath arrives in New Amsterdam with captured Spanish ship.

10 May 1648, Boston: John Winthrop’s Journal records that three ships arrived from London in a single day.

22 May 1648, Boston: John Winthrop’s Journal: “This year corn was very scarce, and so it was in all Europe. Our scarcity came by occasion of our transporting much to the West Indies, and the Portugal and Spanish islands.” Implies frequent trade with the Caribbean.
4 Jun 1648, Boston: John Winthrop’s Journal: “At this court one Margaret Jones of Charlestown was indicted and found guilty of witchcraft, and hanged for it....The same day and hour she was executed, there was a very great tempest at Connecticut, which blew down many tress, etc....A vessel [under command of Master Bull] of Connecticut being the last winter at Quorasoe [Curacao]...”
23 Jun 1648, New Amsterdam: “…they detained Verbrugge’s ship ‘den Valckenier’ (The Falconer) as it arrived from the Netherlands and searched it for contraband or smuggled goods.”
2 Jul 1648, New Amsterdam: The council gives 30-day public notice of the auction of the Spanish bark Nostra Singnora (Sic) Rosario, “…laden with hides, captured in the Caribbean by Hans Wyer, the honorable company’s captain on the yacht de Cat…”

2 Jul 1648, New Amsterdam: Fiscaal  [sheriff] Hendrick van Dyck charges the “…crew of Kat who captured the prize below Margarita…” with finding some pieces of eight and pearls and dividing them among themselves instead of reporting the discovery to the company. Because of the scarcity of crew and the immediate need for salt, the company pardoned the crew yet confiscated their share of the prize money if they would sail to the West Indies.
Before 18 Jul 1648, New Amsterdam: Pijnappel [Pynappel, Pineapple] arrives from Amsterdam.

20 Jul 1648, New Amsterdam: Council orders the captured ship to be made ready to sail to Curaçao for a load of salt.

Before 5 Aug 1648, New Amsterdam: Prins Willem arrives from Amsterdam. [Editor’s Note: A plausible scenario is that Penelope sailed from Amsterdam to Curaçao on either Valckenier, Pijnappel or Prins Willem and then changed ships at Curaçao. Perhaps her husband was sick.]

After 31 Aug 1648, New Amsterdam: Valckenier departs for Amsterdam.
12 Sep 1648, Gravesend, Long Island: Penelloppey Prince testifies in a slander trial.
After 23 Sep 1648, New Amsterdam: Pijnappel departs for Amsterdam.

9 Nov 1648, New Amsterdam: Council receives a report, “Whereas the yacht De Cath, of which Jeuryaen Andries was master, arrived here from Curaçao with a cargo inside Sandy Hook, otherwise called Godyn Point, in a safe port and, the wind being contrary, tried to tack to before Fort Amsterdam, said yacht, in tacking, stranded on a sand bank with such force that notwithstanding all effort it could not be brought off, except the effects which were in and on her, inclusive of the masts; only, by the splitting of the ship, a quantity of salt was dissolved.” The council notes that the value of the salvage was sufficient to pay the crew. [Editor’s note: How long does it take to salvage the wreck and account for the money? The council minutes often report on things that happened much earlier.]
in 1648 the ship de Liefde of something just over 100 tons burden carried [a crew of ]16 on a
voyage to Barbados. 

The point I'm trying to make is that there was a lot of shipping other than just direct routes between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam. Not to mention ships to and from Virginia and New England.

Conjecture #5: Penelope sailed from Amsterdam in the spring of 1648 with a stopover in Curacao.

In the previous post I conjectured that de Kath picked up Penelope and her first husband in Curaçao. How could they get to Curaçao?

Dutch West India Company

The Dutch West India Company had responsibility for the trade and protection of all Dutch colonies along the Atlantic, such as Pernambuco in Brazil, west Africa, and New Netherland (which included the Manhattan region plus the Caribbean islands of Curaçaoand nearby Bonaire with its salt pans). In 1647 Peter Stuyvesant, the new Director-General of New Netherland, sailed to New Amsterdam by way of Curaçao, partly because Curaçao was part of his domain, and partly because it made sense.

Sailing Ship Routes

The route of a sailing ship was determined largely by sailing conditions and profit opportunities. As the Pilgrims learned when sailing directly west across the North Atlantic from England to Plymouth, the prevailing westerly winds made that a dangerous voyage of 66 days. John Winthrop’s fleet sailed from Yarmouth, England (51° N lattitude) to Massachusetts Bay (42° N) in 1630 via the Azores (40° N), a more southerly route, in 6 weeks yet the winds were still often from the west. In later years his Journal recorded the length of many voyages to New England, the fastest being 5 to 6 weeks, the longest being 12 to 20 weeks.

However, the more typical sailing route to the Caribbean is by way of the Canary Islands at 28° N. Even Columbus stopped here on his first voyage in 1492. The trade winds generally deliver ships to the Windward (literally, facing the wind) Islands of the Lesser Antilles, a long arc of small islands that mark the eastern edge of the Caribbean and stretch from Puerto Rico to Venezuela. While the Spanish concentrated on the Greater Antilles (that is, the big islands of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica), the English and French were able to colonize Windward Islands such as Barbados, St. Lucia, and Martinique before 1650. The Dutch settled further west in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.

Barbados

According to Wikipedia, in 1644, before the workforce began to shift to African slaves, the Caribbean island of Barbados had a population of 30,000 (compared to about 23,000 in New England and maybe 1000 in New Netherland), mostly English indentured servants working the sugar fields. By 1660, when the population was 27,000 black and 26,000 white, this one island generated more trade than the rest of the North American English colonies combined. At first, Dutch traders supplied the financing and African slaves and transported most of the sugar to Europe. This information is pertinent because 1) it shows that Curaçao (about 500 miles away from Barbados) was near the trade routes in the 1640s and 2) Conjecture #3 mentioned that the New Jersey Concessions retained much of the language of the Carolina Concessions that were intended to lure small Barbados farmers who couldn’t compete with the neighboring big slave-driven plantations by 1665.

Four ships that sailed from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam in 1648

Since I published my novel, I learned from Olive Tree Genealogy (which I think took its data from Jaap Jacobs’s master’s thesis in Dutch) the names of three ships with passengers that left Holland for New Amsterdam in the spring or summer of 1648 and one that probably sailed later in the year . Those were

1. den Valckenier (The Falconer owned by the trading family Verbrugge, whose son Seth Verbrugge appears in the novel as a merchant) was detained on 23 Jun 1648 upon its arrival in New Amsterdam and searched for smuggled goods. No record on what was found. It departed for Holland after 31 Aug 1648.

2. Pijnappel (also spelled Pynappel, which translates to Pineapple and was owned by Hardenbergh) arrived in New Amsterdam before 18 Jul 1648 and departed after 23 Sept 1648.

3. Prins Willem (which translates to Prince William and was owned by the West India Company) arrived in New Amsterdam before 5 Aug 1648.

4. Jonge Prins van Deenemarcken (translates to Young Prince of Denmark, possibly a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) arrived in New Amsterdam after 21 Dec 1648.

Summary

The above discussion is intended to show that there was considerable ship traffic between Holland, the Caribbean islands, and the New Amsterdam/New England area and thus it is plausible that Penelope sailed from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam by way of Curaçao.

Privateering in 1654

I just came across a detailed treatise entitled Ships and Workboats of New Netherland 1609-1674 that contained an interesting tidbit:“In June 1654 the yacht de Huen (Cock) left New Amsterdam for Curacao, her official orders being to bring back a cargo of salt. She had, however, been‘equipped with such munitions of war as she requires.’ In spite of this generous armament, she was taken by the Spanish on her homeward voyage.”

Comments

Again the comments section awaits you. Does anyone know any good reference books on the 17th century sailing routes in the Atlantic?