Rodrigues, Jan

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Rodrigues, Jan

(fl. 1613–1640),
pilot and settler.

Rodrigues was the first-known nonindigenous resident of Manhattan Island. His arrival in 1613 stemmed from the proprietary practices of early explorers of the New World. In June 1613 Captain Thijs Volchertz Mossell, an experienced Dutch explorer, and the crew of his vessel, the Jonge Tobias, began a journey from the West Indies along the eastern coastline of North America. Mossell and his crew ventured up the Hudson River—charted only four years before—and sailed along the island of Montanges (Manhattan). After a brief sojourn on the island, Mossell sailed away with all his crew but one: Jan Rodrigues, a Creole pilot. Rodrigues may have stayed behind because of a wage dispute, but it is just as likely that Mossell's leaving the pilot on the island was an example of a practice common among explorers as a means of claiming ownership of a coveted spot. Rodrigues was given about eighty hatchets, some knives, a musket, and a sword.

Roughly a month after Mossell's departure for Amsterdam, a second Dutch vessel visited the island. When the Fortuyn landed in August 1613, Rodrigues met its captain, Hendrick Christiansen, and identified himself as a “free man”—an unusual term when nearly all laborers were bonded in some fashion. Already acculturated to local knowledge, Rodrigues served as an interpreter for Christiansen with the local Rockaway tribe and facilitated a trade agreement between the Dutch and the Native Americans. These arrangements angered Mossell when he returned to Montanges the following April; upset with what he perceived as disloyalty on the part of Rodrigues, Mossell called him a “black rascal” and rallied his crew to fight the Creole and the newer explorers. In the conflict Rodrigues was wounded, but Christiansen's forces saved him. When the two competitive ships sailed away to argue their claims in Amsterdam, Rodrigues stayed behind. He subsequently intermarried with the Rockaway and fathered several children.

Rodrigues typified the cosmopolitan black seamen working around the Atlantic basin during the Age of Discovery. Adept in several languages and aware of the entitlements and dangers of the political and religious codes of the nations involved in the emerging Atlantic culture—including Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England—Creoles such as Rodrigues were part of what the historian Ira Berlin calls the “charter generation” of African Americans. Members of this generation possessed impressive survival skills and proved critical as cultural go-betweens around the Atlantic basin. Rodrigues earned distinction by assimilating himself into the Rockaway tribe and becoming part of the new America.

Little is known of Rodrigues's later life, but his variant of his name might appear on the list of the half-free Creole workers who were first employed by the Dutch West Indies Company when it settled New Amsterdam in 1624: among the names on the list is Jan de Fort Orange, which could be a name Rodrigues adopted if he lived at the early Hudson River fort. Jan de Fort Orange stayed in New Amsterdam, became fully free in the 1640s, and owned land along the Bowery amid a small colony of free blacks.

See also Black Seafarers; Free African Americans to 1828; Maritime Trades; Marriage, Mixed; and Native Americans and African Americans.

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