Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/119



Before the publication of the early colonial records of the American Atlantic states, the seventeenth century was the dark age of American history. It was an age of half-legendary heroes about whom tradition and family hearsay wove many a fanciful and highly colored tale. And there were few men living in those times about whom legend has woven more fancy than Augustine Herrman; reconstructing him in keeping with his romantic birthplace, Prague, in his still more romantic country, Bohemia. Tradition has speculated for more than two hundred years about his historic quarrel with Peter Stuyvesant. Some believe that it arose because the two were in love with a certain Jannetje or Jane Verlett, the fair daughter of Casper and Judith Verlett, first of the Dutch colony of Good Hope, near Hartford, Connecticut and later of New Amsterdam. Whether she spurned the tempestuous old Dutch governor we do not know, but it is a matter of record that she married Augustine Herrman, December 10, 1651 at New Amsterdam. Others in a less romantic mood believe that Stuyvesant and Herrman quarreled over the map which Herrman made for Lord Baltimore, but obviously this assumption is untrue because the map was not even begun until at least eight years after the quarrel. We have in a former chapter gone into