[Illustration: Figure 13. MARQUETRY CHAIRS.]
The Dutch kitchen utensils seem numerous and varied. Possets, pans, jack-spits, strainers and skillets were seen in inventories as well as the more familiar pots and kettles. The prosperous Dutch at home had sent out and brought back many a rich argosy, and silks and tissues, porcelains and lacquers, carved ivory and fantastic carved wood, spices and plants had been brought to Holland and found their way to America. There were many ships unloaded at New York filled with spoils from the East, which were eagerly bought up. There was a variety of moneys current,--beaver-skins; wampum; Spanish pistoles, worth 17_s._ 6_d._; Arabian chequins at 10_s._; "pieces of eight" (as the Spanish reals were called), which, if they weighed 16 pennyweight (except those of Peru) passed for 5_s._; and French crowns worth 5_s._ Peruvian pieces of eight and Dutch dollars were valued at 4_s._, and all English coin passed "as it goes in England." These were the values in 1705, but they varied somewhat, the currency being inflated by one governor, though his act created such a disturbance that he was obliged to withdraw it. The Long Island Dutch seem to have had less rich belongings than those up the Hudson and about Albany. Around Jamaica and Hempstead were stout clapboard and shingle houses, but the inventories are not lavish. Daniel Denton, writing in 1670 "A Brief Description of New York," says this about his dearly loved Hempstead.
"May you should see the woods and Fields so curiously bedeckt with Roses and an innumerable multitude of delightful Flowers not only pleasing to the eye but smell. That you may behold Nature contending with Art and striving to equal if not excel many gardens in England."
But he has little to say about the way of living, except that it is "godly."
The records of New Amsterdam, which are so wonderfully complete, show what a valuable assistant to these first settlers was the powerful West India Company. By 1633 there were five stone houses containing the Company's workshops; and as the land near at hand was poor,--"scrubby" the Dutch farmers called it,--they spread out to the neighbouring New Jersey, Long Island, Gowanus, and East River shores and from 1636 to 1640 were busy with their settlements.
