Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/45

 dependence in his judgment than that of their brother, Nicholas.

So versatile were Herrman’s intellectual accomplishments that he even set up a rude kind of bank at his house on Pearl Street, a scheme that proved successful for the financial arrangements of the little town; and in a sense we might even regard him as the prototype of that great profession that later made the lower end of Manhattan Island so renowned.

Although the most amicable relations existed between the southern planters and the Dutch traders and merchants, the feeling between the English skippers and the Dutch were by no means so friendly. Perhaps it was quite natural that they should not be, particularly when we recall that the English traders could not offer as cheap rates for carriage as the Dutch; seeing, too, that their kinsmen, the southern tobacco planters, themselves were trying all kinds of methods—lawful or illegal—to get their produce shipped abroad in Dutch bottoms. Certainly the English skippers had deep cause to regard the Dutch traders with enmity. Although England and Holland were at war at various times during the seventeenth century, a real enmity between the people of the two nations had never been actually created; for certainly the English and the Dutch were bound together by many ties, economic, political and religious, ever to become real enemies. The pusillanimity of James I and the obstinate and undiplomatic mind of Charles I had given back to Spain the supremacy of the high seas which the English had won so spectacularly during the reign of Elizabeth. Although Spain and England were temporarily at peace, and the British at war with Holland, all statesmen, knowing the history of the three peoples, knew that such a