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| The colony of New Amsterdam (1664 map). |
The earliest report of a commercial whiskey distillery in what is now the United States places it on Staten Island, in the colony of New Netherland, in 1640. It says they distilled using “Indian corn” and rye.
The event is not documented beyond a single reference, but the claim is plausible. The Dutch colony’s largest town, New Amsterdam (today’s New York City), was nearly 20 years old by that time and had a population of about 4,000 people.
Although he authorized the distillery, the colonial governor complained about the town’s dependence on businesses that sold brandy, beer, and tobacco. He claimed fully 25 percent of New Amsterdam’s commercial enterprises were so engaged.
Some liquor was imported from Europe, as New Amsterdam was primarily a port, but most was locally made. There were European immigrants all over the area by 1640, in what is now New Jersey as well as New York. The Dutch colony shared Long Island with a British colony of several thousand additional people.
Most colonists in the surrounding countryside were farmers who grew as much grain as they could. Their surplus was traded in New Amsterdam in either solid or liquid form. Indigenous people living in the area grew grain too and traded it alongside the newcomers, but mostly they were in the more profitable fur business.
Whether or not the product of that Staten Island distillery was whiskey as we know it is not important. If it was spirit distilled from a fermented mash of grain, as reported, it was whiskey for our purposes. If they distilled Indian corn (maize), it was proto-bourbon.
The population of New Netherland was diverse. The first settlers were French-speaking Walloons. The first enslaved Black African workers arrived two years later. A significant number of the inhabitants were Germans, Swedes, and Finns. Local Indians were also diverse, representing many different tribes. Everyone tried to get along, more or less, but there were always conflicts between and among the various communities.
Everyone had a reason to drink.
Willem Kieft was the governor who commissioned that Staten Island distillery and complained about the proliferation of vice shops.
Calling Kieft ‘governor,’ as all histories do, gives a misleading impression. He was primarily a businessman, a merchant, not a politician or soldier. The colony was a business of which he had a piece. He ran it for the financial gain of himself and other shareholders, directed by a headquarters thousands of miles away.
Kieft’s skills were not political, nor was his mission. He was there to move product and make a profit. His status vis a vis the colonists was vague. He certainly was not their leader; they didn’t choose him. He was more like their landlord. His limited legitimate authority was fortified by the small army he employed.
The business that was New Netherland began as a series of trading posts seeking beaver pelts. Rodent fur was the first American product Europeans went crazy for. Rodent fur, then tobacco. Further south, coffee and sugar.
Europeans have only recently grown fond of American whiskey.
Technically, New Netherland began in 1615 when a Dutch company set up shop where Albany, New York, is today. Its purpose was to barter with local Indians for pelts. The site was selected because Indians already went there to trade with each other. By Kieft’s time the business had diversified, but animal fur was still its most profitable part. What Europeans most often exchanged for furs was alcohol, typically rum.
After Albany, additional posts were established up and down the Hudson River, but New Netherland wasn’t a true colony until those Walloons arrived a decade later.
Then the trouble started.
The first crisis was a skirmish between some Mohawks and Mohicans that didn’t involve the Walloons, but scared them and sent them running back to the coast. Peter Minuit, the ‘governor’ then and a Walloon himself, made a deal with some of the local Indian leaders that allowed construction and settlement of New Amsterdam, a town for Europeans at the foot of Manhattan Island.
Much has been made of Minuit’s ‘purchase’ of the site for $25 worth of trinkets, but what he really did was establish terms for an extensive and generally equitable trading relationship between Indians and Europeans that led to a period of peace. Both sides understood the value of the goods exchanged was in their symbolic sealing of that mutually-beneficial agreement. That was how Indians did business and Minuit was smart enough to do it the Indian way. Only in later years was their transaction portrayed as superior Europeans fleecing gullible savages.
For the Indians, it wasn’t so much that the Europeans got Manhattan, but that they agreed to stay there. In a pattern repeated for the next two centuries, Indians welcomed trade with the newcomers but did not want them moving in next door.
Peace was good for business, but didn’t last. When Kieft’s tenure began a decade later, everyone was fighting with everyone else. The colonial administration was trying to run an increasingly complex political entity like a private business, and it wasn’t working. The colony was ceded to Great Britain in 1664.
Although the New World and its lucrative fur trade was abandoned by the Netherlands, French and British traders quickly filled the gap. Most Dutch traders already on the ground simply signed up with the new administration. The trade was still mostly furs for alcohol.
Most colonists stayed too. Day-to-day life changed little but the ancient, now global competition between France and Great Britain meant crucial decisions affecting North Americans, immigrant and native, were now being made on the other side of the ocean.
2 comments:
‘Maybe’ is the apt word.
A study of the primary records, circa 1640, reveals no evidence William Hendricks distilled grain for whisky. In all probability, it was cider for applejack.
A Dutch privateer, Adriaen Block, allegedly operated the first brew house on Manhattan Island. In the winter of 1613, he built a log cabin on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. It was not until 1632 that the Dutch West Indies Company occupied this dwelling, installing a brewery on what became known as Brouwers Straet (now Stone Street) to make ale from oats. On December 12th, 1658, the first street in Manhattan was cobblestoned due to dust problems from traffic; hence, it was renamed Stone Street.
The first commercial distillery in New York is attributable to 1640. In a 1649 declaration to the notary Cornelius Toun, William Hendricks stated, under instructions from William Kieft, Governor-General of the New Netherlands Company on Staten Island, that he operated the first still in the New York area. ‘That he, witness, accordingly in the beginning of December of the aforesaid year 1640, did begin to distil brandy, at the requirant’s house, but having continued therein six or seven months, he the witness must give up that work, as the aforesaid Kieft and the requirant found it expedient to let the Brandy be’ (Colonial History of the State of New York, John Brodhead, 1856, New York).
Hendrick’s probably distilled apple cider or fruit brandy. In 1640, a grain shortage from the farming district on New Amsterdam, Van Rensselaers Island, yielded only 323 schepels (242 bushels), 40% down on 1639. Cereals would have been given priority for baking, and if there were damaged grains, they might have been malted for brewing beer. This document's English translation (below) describes the distilled spirit as Brandy. The original document Dutch used brandywjin, brandy wine, or distilled spirits. Brandywjin was the generic Dutch word for all spirits during the first half of the 17th century. It is unlikely that a proto-whisky or malt spirit was distilled due to the limited cultivation and acute shortage of grain.
The English translation from New York Colonial Manuscript (No 16, page 358/9); ‘This day the 10 December Anno 1649 before me Cornelis Toun, resident of Amsterdam and admitted Notary public by the Court of Holland, in presence of the undersigned witnesses, appeared William Hendricks, aged 42 years, residing at Weesp, who, at the request of Cornelis Melyn residing in New Netherland, on Staten Island, testifies, declares and attests by true words, in place and under offer, of solemn oath, that it is true that he, the witness, being in the latter part of the year 1640, on the island called the Manhatans, also situated in New Netherland, was engaged by the month, by William Kieft, Commander of New Netherland, to distil Brandy, and at the house of the requirant in this case’.
The most likely source of the mash for the Brandy was apples, fermented from cider in the late autumn. Apples had also been cultivated in New England since 1623. William Blackstone established an orchard on Boston Common. John Endicott planted pears in Salem in 1628. William Wood, who visited Boston in 1633, described orchards in Roxbury, Dorchester and vineyards planted on Conant Island, known as Governor’s Garden New England Prospect, 1634.
Emmanuel Downing, in Massachusetts, established the first commercial grain distillery in North America. Downing was the brother-in-law to Governor John Winthrop and was given consent to set up a still to manufacture ‘strong waters’ at a house near a tavern on Old Ipswich Road Salem. Distilling began in the autumn of 1648 using an Old German rye recipe, ‘strong water with rye meal without maulting of the Corne’. His first attempt appears to have been less than successful judging by the Governor’s comment on December 16th 1648, to his son, ‘many were ill and grew rapidly worse from that moment.’
The English had little or no knowledge of mashing and distilling rye grain, unlike the Dutch, who combined barley malt and rye in the Netherlands to distil spirit to compound genever. Downing, with no practical distilling experience with rye or barley, for that matter (undertook no malting to convert the starches to sugars to make wort), procured Barbados molasses, successfully distilling cane spirit, if held in casks, young rum.
The ‘maybe’ for the first distiller of grain spirit in North America was likely Lawrence Bohun, or perhaps one of the unknown first colonists with a household still in Jamestown before he arrived in the Virginia colony in 1610.
https://whiskymag.com/articles/mythbusters-the-case-against-george-thorpe/
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