Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/78

 intimacy between him and Nicholas. Yet the one person other than his wife who seems to have exerted more influence on his life was Anna Hack. Regardless of the fact whether she was his own sister or only the sister of his wife, she was always ready and willing to aid him and to offer advice and suggestions; and if necessary to come to blows with Peter Stuyvesant himself in Herrman’s behalf. If she were indeed his real sister she would have been his only relation in America and it was quite natural that he would have turned to her.

Yet probably there was still another reason, more effective than the foregoing, why Herrman decided to cast his future fortunes with the English rather than with the Dutch. His remarkable intellect and his logical mind could hardly have failed to tell him that the Dutch empire in America was doomed. In order to understand that he needed to know only the history of that province and compare it with the history of the English colonies. New Netherland had been established mainly for trading purposes; and as the colony grew this objective had never been lost sight of in place of a purpose more vital to the life of an empire. With only a few exceptions the people remained clustered around New Amsterdam and Manhattan Island, quite content to cultivate their tiny fields of vegetables when but for the asking they might have had large plantations to develop. The great patroons along the Hudson were independent in many respects from the regulations of the Director Generals, and it probably mattered little to them whether the Dutch or the English ruled in New Amsterdam. On the other hand, though the English colonies had been founded as trading companies, the settlers and the local authorities had soon lost sight of that objective as the raison d’être of colonial expansion. Soon they had begun to scatter, to hew new fields out of the virgin wilderness. Little by little these