author

Isaack de Rasieres

b. 1595

A Dutch colonial official whose surviving letter offers one of the clearest firsthand glimpses of early Plymouth and New Netherland. His career moved from administration in seventeenth-century North America to later service in Dutch Brazil, leaving behind a small but valuable historical record.

1 Audiobook

Three Visitors to Early Plymouth Letters about the Pilgrim settlement in New England during its first seven years

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 sailed to New Netherland after the Dutch West India Company appointed him secretary of the colony in 1626. According to the Historical Society of the New York Courts, he quickly became involved in the colony’s administration and argued that the secretary should serve as a neutral recorder in judicial matters while taking a more active role in legislation and government.

In 1627, he was sent on official business to the English settlement at Plymouth. The account he later wrote about that visit survived and became an important source for historians because it preserves a rare eyewitness description of early colonial life in New England.

Not long after the Plymouth visit, political disputes in New Netherland led to his return to Holland. The same source says he was later appointed to Dutch Brazil in 1637 and may eventually have moved to Barbados after the Portuguese retook Brazil. His death date is not clearly confirmed in the sources I found.