Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/24

 Zittau; in consequence of which, many ancient books and manuscripts had been carried off to foreign lands”

Herein we see, then, that the above account resembles the one given by Rattermann only in that the elder Herrman was a member of the Hussite Church. In summing up the data so far found concerning the ancestry of Augustine Herrman, Mr. Čapek seems unprepared to accept either the Ratterman account or that Abraham Herman, the minister of Mšeno was the father of Augustine, the colonist. So for the time being we shall let the matter rest here.

We know for a certainty neither the names of the father and mother of Augustine Herrman, nor the precise date of his birth. Judging alone from an entry in his last will and Testament signed in 1684 in which is a notation, “Aetatis 63”, meaning, it would seem, that he was sixty-three years old when he executed his signature to the document, and would have been born, therefore, in 1621. Rattermann, on the other hand, places the date as 1605, again without stating his authority. However, there are indications that the earlier date is apt to be more nearly correct. We know from the so-called Schuylkill River treaty, to be discussed presently, that “Augustin Heermans” was a witness with four others to the signatures of the Indian chiefs. This treaty was signed in 1633; and had Herrman been born in 1621 he would have been only 12 years old; an incredibly early age for him to have been in America, no less than his being called to witness the signing of an important document.

This much, however, we can piece together from the dark labyrinth of uncertainty. With a fair degree of plausibility we can assume that his parents were well born and well educated