Historical Inquiry: Questions, Sources & Evidence — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · One letter, eleven words of substance

The Schagen letter sits in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague and runs to a single page. The part everyone quotes is eleven words long in the original Dutch. The rest of the letter is about cargo: 7,246 beaver skins, 853 otter skins, and assorted mink and wildcat, which tells you plainly what the Dutch West India Company actually cared about. Manhattan is mentioned almost in passing, as one line of news among the shipping returns.

Notice what the document is. It is not a deed, a contract or a treaty; no such paper has ever been found. It is not an eyewitness account, because Schagen was more than three thousand miles away. It is a secondhand summary, written by an administrator, of what a ship's crew said when they docked. A historian would call it a secondary source for the purchase itself, even though it is a primary source for 1626 Dutch administration.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A document can be genuine, old and completely reliable about one thing while being weak evidence for another. The Schagen letter is excellent evidence that the Dutch believed, in November 1626, that a transaction had happened and that 60 guilders was the figure in circulation. It is poor evidence for what was handed over or what the Lenape agreed to.

Part 2 · Where the twenty-four dollars came from

The letter says 60 guilders. It does not say dollars, and it does not say beads. The famous figure was produced in 1846, when the New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead converted 60 Dutch guilders of 1626 into contemporary American money and arrived at about twenty-four dollars. That number was then repeated for the next century and a half until it stopped sounding like a conversion and started sounding like a fact.

It is a bad conversion, for a reason that has nothing to do with arithmetic. Comparing money across 220 years using a simple exchange rate ignores what the money could buy. Sixty guilders in 1626 was roughly several months of a labourer's wages — estimates vary, and historians disagree, which is itself worth noticing. It was not a fortune, but the picture of a continent traded for pocket change is an artefact of the 1846 calculation, not of 1626.

The beads are not in the letter at all. Dutch trade goods of the period typically included duffel cloth, iron axes, hoes, kettles, knives and wampum — the shell beads made along Long Island Sound that carried real value in regional exchange. Later deeds from the Hudson Valley list such goods item by item. The beads entered the Manhattan story through retelling, because they made the bargain sound more lopsided and the story better. A detail that improves a story is exactly the detail to check.

Part 3 · What the other side thought it was doing

The hardest problem with this story is that one side left no document. The Lenape, who lived across what is now New York City, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, kept records in speech, wampum and memory rather than in writing, and no Lenape account of 1626 survives. Everything written at the time was written by the people on the other side of the exchange.

What historians can reconstruct from later Lenape and Haudenosaunee dealings is that land in this region was generally understood as something a group held and used, not something an individual could sell outright and permanently. Agreements of this kind were often understood as granting rights to share, use or pass through, renewed through continuing gifts and relationship. The Dutch, working from European property law, recorded a sale.

So the two sides may have come away from the same afternoon believing two different things had happened, and the only surviving record is in the language of one of them. This is not a detail about 1626. It is the central difficulty of the next three hundred years of this course, and it starts here.

It also explains something that will otherwise look like bad faith later. When colonists and Native nations fell out over land they had both signed for — as happened repeatedly through the 1600s and 1700s — the quarrel was often not that someone had lied, but that two legal traditions had been written down as one agreement, in one language, by one side. Recognising that is different from excusing it: the Dutch and later the English acted on their reading and took the ground.

Part 4 · Four questions to ask any source

From here on you will meet hundreds of documents, and the same four questions open all of them. Who made this, and were they present? When was it made — at the time, or long afterwards? Why was it made, and for whom? And what would this person have no way of knowing, even in good faith?

Run the Schagen letter through them and the answers come fast. A company administrator; not present; three weeks or so after the ship sailed, which is prompt for the news but still secondhand; written to report cargo to superiors; and he could not know what was said on the island or what the Lenape understood. None of that makes the letter worthless. It makes it precise — you now know exactly what weight it bears.

The same four questions will do real work on a 1776 pamphlet, an 1857 court ruling and an 1863 army return. They are also why historians change their minds, which is a feature of the subject rather than a failure of it: new documents turn up, old ones are reread, and a claim everyone repeated for 150 years turns out to rest on an eleven-word aside about beaver skins. When you meet a confident sentence about the past in this course, the useful reflex is not to doubt it but to ask which document it came from.