It is New York's birth certificale, the closest history comes to recording the indians' "sale" of Manhattan island for twenty-four dollars to the Dutch, who first settled on Governors Island and then uprooted themselves again to hop another half mile to what would become Lower Manhattan.The document is known as the "Schaghenbrief," a letter from Pieter Schaghen, a Dutch parliamentary representative of the West India Company, to his "High and Mighty Lords" in the Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. Dated November 5, 1626, the letter informs the Dutch Parliament of recent events related by the crew of the ship Arms of Amsterdam, which left the New World ("It sailed from New Netherland out of the River Mauritius") on September 23. 1626. and arrived in Amsterdam on November 4.Schaghen dutifully reports that some children were born, that summer grains were sown and reaped, and he catalogs the ship's cargo, including 7,246 beaver skins, 178½ otter skins, 48 mink skins, 36 lvnx skins. 33 minks. 34 muskrat skins,and oak timbers and nutwood and samples of summer grains. In between, he notes incidentally that the settlers "have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders"-signaling the beginning of European exploitation…..No actual deed or documentation has been found directly linking Peter Minuit, the director of the colony, to the sale, which was to have taken place that May. Nor does any document specify what the Indians received that was worth sixty guilders (the same price the Dutch would pay later that year, in tools, beads, and other goods, for Staten Island and, much later, famously estimated at twenty-four dollars in goods). The settlers figured the island's size at about 22,000 acres, which would be roughly 34 square miles. (Manhattan today, grown by landfill, is 23 square miles, so the Dutch may have overestimated--and perhaps overpaid- or were including additional territory; that would be cheaper per acre than the Louisiana Purchase, or the price the U.S. paid Russia for Alaska.) By comparison, though, the ship's cargo of nearly 8,000 animal skins was worth about 45,000 guilders.Fortune magazine has dubbed this “the best business deal ever made.” (The market value of Manhattan real estate today is well over $320 billion.) Still. while the Dutch settlers were instructed to negotiate a sale rather than seize the land, the Indians were largely unfamiliar with European concepts of property ownership. Moreover, some Indians were migratory, so their presence in Manhattan in the summer of 1626 did not necessarily mean they lived there full-time or "owned" it.Schaghen reported that "our people are in good spirit and live in peace." Peace did not last for long. In 1640, the Dutch launched an unprovoked attack on the Indians. The Indians never recovered.
