in, the settlers would
buy very few; and even the company's grant of great patroonship estates
failed to promote a plantation regime. Devoting their energies more to the
Indian trade than to agriculture, the people had little use for farm hands,
while in domestic service, if the opinion of the Reverend Jonas Michaelius
be a true index, the negroes were found "thievish, lazy and useless trash."
It might perhaps be surmised that the Dutch were too easy-going for success
in slave management, were it not that those who settled in Guiana became
reputed the severest of all plantation masters. The bulk of the slaves in
New Netherland, left on the company's hands, were employed now in building
fortifications, now in tillage. But the company, having no adequate means
of supervising them in routine, changed the status of some of the older
ones in 1644 from slavery to tribute-paying. That is to say, it gave eleven
of them their freedom on condition that each pay the company every year
some twenty-two bushels of grain and a hog of a certain value. At the same
time it provided, curiously, that their children already born or yet to be
born were to be the company's slaves. It was proposed at one time by some
of the inhabitants, and again by Governor Stuyvesant, that negroes be armed
with tomahawks and sent in punitive expeditions against the Indians, but
nothing seems to have come of that.

The Dutch settlers were few, and the Dutch farmers fewer. But as years went
on a slender stream of immigration entered the province from New England,
settling mainly on Long Island and in Westchester; and these came to be
among the company's best customers for slaves. The villagers of Gravesend,
indeed, petitioned in 1651 that the slave supply might be increased. Soon
afterward the company opened the trade to private ships, and then sent
additional supplies on its own account to be sold at auction. It developed
hopes, even, that New Amsterdam might be made a slave market for the
neighboring English colonies. A parcel sold at public outcry in 1661
brought an average price of 440 florins,[30] which so encouraged the
authorities that larger shipments were ordered. Of a parcel arriving in
the spring of 1664 and described by Stuyvesant as on the average old and
inferior, six men were reserved for the company's use in cutting timber,
five women were set aside as unsalable, and the remaining twenty-nine, of
both sexes, were sold at auction at prices ranging