go Singing Valleys 



shall refuse to accept Indian corn at 2 s. 6 d. the bushel for 

 any contract, whether of labor or of cattle." 



So, in a sense, corn built the ships of New England, as 

 corn filled their holds when they went fur-trading. 



The Dutch had taken from ten to fifteen thousand pounds 

 of beaver annually from New England. Dutch ships traded 

 in and out of all the ports of the Atlantic, fetching and carry- 

 ing every sort of cargo. In the same year that Plymouth was 

 settled, the indomitable Reynier Pauw organized the Com- 

 pany of the West Indies to capture Spain's American posses- 

 sions, as the East India Company had already appropriated 

 Spanish and Portuguese power in the Orient. The great busi- 

 ness empire of the Netherlands was nearing its height. Of 

 Europe's entire fleet of twenty thousand sizable vessels, 16,000 

 sailed under Dutch command. John Smith had tried to drive 

 home to London merchants the fact that with no products of 

 their own to sell, the Dutch, by making themselves carriers 

 of the world's goods, had become the richest nation on the 

 continent. During the first part of the seventeenth century it 

 seemed as though you could not move anything, anywhere, 

 without a Dutchman's help. 



Their settlements on the Hudson were primarily for the 

 purpose of cornering the American beaver trade as they had 

 already captured the Russian fur market. The first ship to sail 

 from New Amsterdam with a cargo carried more than seven 

 thousand beaver skins, and nearly as many otters. In 1656 

 Andrjes van der Donck, the patroon of Yonkers, estimated 

 that 80,000 beaver were taken that year from that quarter of 

 the present Westchester County. 



It was not likely the mynheers would suffer the competition 

 of the New Englanders without resentment and increased 

 efforts of their own. The traders at Fort Orange and the scouts 

 who went into the St. Lawrence country and to the villages 

 along the Great Lakes held out tempting offers of rum and 

 gunpowder and muskets as against the corn prices paid by 

 the Yankees. After the poor harvest of 1630, when beaver went 



