ad no more intrinsic value than those rags which form the
paper currency of modern days. This consideration, however, had no weight
with William Kieft. He began by paying all the servants of the company and
all the debts of government, in strings of wampum. He sent emissaries to
sweep the shores of Long Island, which was the Ophir of this modern
Solomon, and abounded in shell-fish. These were transported in loads to
New Amsterdam, coined into Indian money, and launched into circulation.

And now for a time affairs went on swimmingly; money became as plentiful
as in the modern days of paper currency, and, to use the popular phrase,
"a wonderful impulse was given to public prosperity." Yankee traders
poured into the province, buying everything they could lay their hands on,
and paying the worthy Dutchmen their own price--in Indian money. If the
latter, however, attempted to pay the Yankees in the same coin for their
tinware and wooden bowls the case was altered; nothing would do but Dutch
guilders, and such-like "metallic currency." What was worse, the Yankees
introduced an inferior kind of wampum, made of oyster shells, with which
they deluged the province, carrying off all the silver and gold, the Dutch
herrings and Dutch cheeses: thus early did the knowing men of the East
manifest their skill in bargaining the New Amsterdammers out of the
oyster, and leaving them the shell.[36]

It was a long time before William the Testy was made sensible how
completely his grand project of finance was turned against him by his
eastern neighbors; nor would he probably have ever found it out had not
tidings been brought him that the Yankees had made a descent upon Long
Island, and had established a kind of mint at Oyster Bay, where they were
coining up all the oyster banks.

Now this was making a vital attack upon the province in a double sense,
financial and gastronomical. Ever since the council dinner of Oloffe the
Dreamer, at the founding of New Amsterdam, at which banquet the oyster
figured so conspicuously, this divine shell-fish has been held in a kind
of superstitious reverence at the Manhattoes; as witness the temples
erected to its cult in every street and lane and alley. In fact, it is the
standard luxury of the place, as is the terrapin at Philadelphia, the soft
crab at Baltimore, or the canvas-back at Washington.

The seizure of Oyster Bay, therefore, was an outrage not merely on the
pockets, but on the larders of the New