The charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines, build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels. Although the company was chartered in 1621, it did not commence operations until 1623. But then, during the next six or seven years, its success was phenomenal in the matter of profits--from waging war against Spain. So much so, that by 1629 its directors in Amsterdam were prone to speak slightingly of New Netherland, their trading colony in North America. “The trade carried on there in peltries is right advantageous but, one year with another, we can at most bring home fifty thousand guilders,” they complained. For a plantation which at the time numbered no more than 300 inhabitants this would seem to be most productive, especially when compared to what the English had done in either Virginia or in New England. It was paltry enough, however, when compared with the loot of Spanish colonial strongholds that fell to the conquering Dutch merchants, or when weighed against the spoils of Spain’s silver fleet that Admiral Peter Heyn had captured in the name of the West India Company. In one fell swoop he took seventeen galleons laden with bullion and merchandise to the value of fourteen millions of guilders! From that operation alone the investors received a dividend amounting to well over half of the company’s paid-up capital. Experienced Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, who had been appointed the first managing director of the West India Company’s colony in America, acted primarily as a chief fur factor for the company. During 1624, the first and only year of his governorship, he sent home pelts which brought 27,000 guilders. The next year his successor did even better. In 1626, the year that Peter Minuit received the formal title of Director General of New Netherland and purchased Manhattan from the Indians, one ship for Amsterdam was cargoed with “7246 beaver skins, 178¹⁄₂ otter skins, 675 otter skins, 48 minck skins, 36 wild cat skins, 33 mincks, 34 rat skins.” It also carried some oak and hickory to timber-hungry Holland. This, incidentally, is the earliest known true manifest of a ship clearing from the present port of New York. In terms of today’s money the skins brought well over one hundred thousand American dollars. A right advantageous trade indeed!