A MINT ON THE SHORE OF LONG ISLAND. 237 



the European colonies in North America, that the different governments 

 found it necessary to make regulations on the subject." 



It was during the administration of "William Kieft that wampum cur- 

 rency became of this importance in New York. Washington Irving, in 

 his "Knickerbocker" History, Chapter VI., gives a humorous account of 

 it, and the troubles to which it gave rise. Kieft began by endeavoring to 

 flood the colony with this Indian money, which, as I have shown, the 

 Indians were content to take in exchange for their peltries, but which of 

 course had no intrinsic value. Says the veritable Diedrich, than whom 

 we could wish no better authority : 



"He began by paying all the servants of the Company 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 shell-fish. 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 tra- 

 ders 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 tinware and wooden bowls the case was altered; nothing 

 would do but Dutch guilders and such-like ' metallic currency.' What 

 was worse, the Yankees introduced an inferior kind of wampum made of 

 oyster-shells, with which they deluged the province, carrying off in ex- 

 change all the silver and gold, the Dutch herrings and Dutch cheeses. 

 Thus early did the knowing men of the East manifest their skill in bargain- 

 ing the New Amsterdamers out of the 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 neighbors; 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 making a vital attack upon the province in a double 

 6ense, financial and gastronomical. Ever since the council dinner of 

 Oloffe the Dreamer, at the founding of New Amsterdam, at which ban- 

 quet the oysters figured so conspicuously, this divine shell-fish had been 

 held in a kind of superstitious 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. 



