author
Isaack de Rasieres
b. 1595
A Dutch West India Company official in the early years of New Netherland, he left behind one of the clearest firsthand accounts of the colony and its neighbors. His surviving letters are still valued for what they reveal about Manhattan, trade, and early contact with Plymouth in the 1620s.
1 Audiobook
Three Visitors to Early Plymouth Letters about the Pilgrim settlement in New England during its first seven years
by Emmanuel Altham, John Pory, Isaack de Rasieres
About the author
Born in Middelburg in 1595, Isaack de Rasieres served the Dutch West India Company during the founding years of New Netherland. He was appointed secretary of the colony in 1626 and traveled to Manhattan, where he worked under Director-General Peter Minuit.
De Rasieres is remembered less as a literary author in the modern sense than as an important eyewitness writer. His reports and letters, especially his account written for Samuel Blommaert, describe daily life in New Netherland, the colony's trade, and a visit to Plymouth Colony. Because so few detailed records from that period survive, historians still rely on his writing to understand the Dutch and English settlements of the 1620s.
Some details of his later life are less certain, but his work remains a valuable window into the early Atlantic world. For readers interested in the beginnings of New York and colonial North America, his writing offers a rare voice from the scene itself.