i74 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



AMERICAN SHELL-MONEY. 

 By Ernest Ingersoll. 



[Continued from p. 147.] 



SEEING that the profit and wealth lay in the pos- 

 session of wampum, the burghers, as the easiest 

 way of getting rich, began to make it. With their 

 tools of steel this could be done very rapidly ; but 

 with the loss of the painstaking care with which the 

 Indian wrought, came a loss of value, and the 

 wampum very soon began to depreciate. To widen 

 their market, it was carried to New England. Con- 

 sidering the many references to it, and the undoubted 

 fact that it was made there aboriginally, as well as 

 southward, I am at a loss to understand Gowan's 

 statement, that the use of wampum was not known 

 in New England until it was introduced there in 

 October, 1627, by Isaac de Razier, who was acting 

 as a sort of amity-treaty commissioner from the 

 Netherlands to Plymouth. He carried wampum 

 thither and bought corn. To this introduction the 

 pious Hubbard attributes all the wars which ensued 

 between the Puritans and the Indians. " Whatever 

 were the honey in the mouth of that beast of trade 

 [the Dutch] there was a deadly sting in the tail," he 

 wails out, with much more to the same purpose. It 

 was during the administration of William Keift that 

 the wampum currency was of greatest importance in 

 New York. Washington Irving, in his " Knicker- 

 bocker's History," chapter vi. gives a humorous 

 account of it and the troubles to which it gave rise. 

 Keift began by endeavouring to flood the colony 

 with this Indian money which the Indians were 

 content to take in exchange for their peltries, but 

 which of course had no intrinsic value. Says the 

 veritable Diedrich : 



" He began by paying all the servants of the com- 

 pany and all the debts of the Government in strings of 

 wampum. He sent emissaries to sweep the shores 

 of Long Island, which was the Ophir of this modern 

 Solomon, and abounded in shellfish. These were 

 transported in loads to New Amsterdam, coined into 

 Indian money and launched into circulation. 



" And now for a time affairs went on swimmingly 

 . . . Yankee traders poured into the province, 

 buying everything they could lay their hands on, 

 and paying the worthy Dutchmen their own price 

 in Indian money. If the latter, however, attempted 

 to pay'the Yankees in the same coin for their tin- 

 ware and wooden bowls, the case was altered ; 

 nothing would do but Dutch guilders and such like 

 ' metallic currency.' What was more, the Yankees 

 introduced an inferior kind of wampum, made of 

 oyster-shells, with which they deluged the province, 

 carrying off in exchange all the silver and gold ; the 

 Dutch herrings and Dutch cheeses ; thus early did 

 the knowing men of the East manifest their skill in 

 bargaining the New Amsterdamers out of their 

 oyster and leaving them the shell. 



"It was a long time before William the Testy 

 was made sensible how completely his grand project 

 of finance was turned against him by his eastern 

 neighbours ; nor would he probably have ever found 

 it out had not tidings been brought him that the 

 Yankees had made a descent upon Long Island, and 

 had established a kind of mint at Oyster Bay where 

 they were coining up all the oyster-banks. 



" Now this was a vital attack upon the province 

 in a double sense, financial and gastronomical. 

 Ever since the council dinner of Oloff the Dreamer, 

 at the founding of New Amsterdam, at which 

 banquet the oyster figured so conspicuously, this 

 divine shellfish has been held in a kind of super- 

 stitious reverence at the Manhattoes ; as witness 

 the temples erected to its cult in every street and 

 lane and alley. In fact it is the standard luxury of 

 the place, as is the terrapin at Philadelphia, the soft 

 crab at Baltimore, or the canvas-back at Washington. 



"The seizure of Oyster Bay, therefore, was an 

 outrage, not merely on the pockets, but the larders 

 of the New Amsterdamers ; the whole community 

 was aroused, and an oyster crusade was immedi- 

 ately set on foot against the Yankees. Every stout 

 trencherman hastened to the standard ; nay, some 

 of the most corpulent Burgomasters and schepens 

 joined the expedition as a corps de reserve only to be 

 called into action when the sacking commenced." 



A valiant army under Stoffel Brickerhoff having 

 marched to Oyster Bay, routed the English there, 

 " and would have driven the inhabitants into the sea 

 if they had not managed to escape across the Sound 

 to the main land by the Devil's stepping-stones, 

 which remain to this day monuments of this great 

 Dutch victory over the Yankees." This done : 



"Stoffel Brinckerhoff made great spoil of oysters 

 and clams, coined and uncoined, and then set out on 

 his return to the Manhattoes. A grand triumph, 

 after the manner of the ancients, was prepared for 

 him by William the Testy. He entered New 

 Amsterdam as a conqueror, mounted on a Narragan- 

 sett pacer. Five dried codfish on poles, standards 

 taken from the enemy, were borne before him, an 

 immense store of oysters and clams, Withersfield 

 onions and Yankee ' notions ' formed the spolia 

 opima; while several coiners of oyster-shells were 

 led captive to grace the hero's triumph. 



" The procession was accompanied by a full band 

 of boys and negroes performing on the popular- 

 instruments of rattle bones and clamshells, while 

 Antony Van Corlear sounded his trumpet from the 

 ramparts. 



" A great banquet was served in the Statehouse, 

 from the clams and oysters taken from the enemy ; 

 while the Governor sent the shells privately to the 

 mint and had them coined into Indian money, with 

 which he paid his troops." 



To check the evils of this " inflation " a law was 

 passed in the New Netherlands in 1641, prohibiting 



