Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/113

 willing to brave the extremities of Nature as had been described by the messengers from Dutch Guiana.

They next turned their attention to New York, until lately the capital of the Dutch domains of North America and a town still essentially Dutch. Many of the Labadists assumed, probably not without good cause, that the English conquerors of New York would not look with favor upon their arrival nor countenance their communal way of living. Others contended that New York was unsuited because tobacco was raised on Manhattan Island and their tenets forbade the use of that commodity. Yet there seemed to be no other Dutch community in the New World to which they might emigrate. The head of the sect at Wiewerd deemed it advisable to send two of their members to New York to investigate conditions and if they found them suitable for a permanent residence to barter for land for the Labadist colony.

Peter Sluyter and Jasper Dankaerts were selected for the mission. From the day of their sailing from Amsterdam, June 8, 1679 to the day of their arrival back in Wiewerd, October 12, 1680, they kept a detailed journal of their trip. Although this journal was written by men who saw the country through half-fanatical eyes, it has many merits and is a most valuable document in giving us glimpse, distorted as it is, of early colonial life and customs of America. In places, on the other hand, it seems certain that the real facts were so twisted and distorted so as to meet the approval of semi-neurotic minds, as to render such sections of the journal worse than useless.

In the entry for Wednesday, October 18, 1679 this interesting note appears, the diarist little suspecting at the time that