Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/73

 ton and with Governor Bennet they established a “free trade and commerce” treaty between Virginia and New Netherland.

Herrman spent the winter of 1659–60 in the southern colonies and it appears, too, that he made a trip to the West Indies, as we find him asking permission to make a voyage to the Dutch and French Islands and for letters of recommendation to the governors. The report of the Maryland mission is dated at St. Mary’s, 21 October, 1659, so we can judge that after that date his time was free. It was most likely during this time that he turned over in his mind the thought to leave New Amsterdam and to settle permanently in either Maryland or Virginia. In the late autumn of 1659 he met his wife, who came down from New Amsterdam on a ship to Jamestown, and both passed the winter with their sister Anna Hack, who was still living in Northampton County, Va. That winter may have been particularly gay for the Herrmans, used to for so many years the rigorous winters and the more or less drab social life of the Dutch in New Amsterdam. No doubt they enjoyed the mild climate of the Eastern Shore and the life of ease and gaiety that just about this time was beginning to be popular with the southern planters, especially after the influx of the scions of the nobility and gentry of England who had fled the homeland after the advent of Oliver Cromwell. The social life that Herrman lived in Virginia during this winter probably reminded him of his youthful years at Prague, then at the height of her brilliant career, just before the era of religious persecution. Always a man who liked people, Herrman