Juan Rodriguez (trader)
Juan Rodriguez[1][2][3] (Dutch: Jan Rodrigues, Portuguese: João Rodrigues) was the first documented non-indigenous inhabitant to live on Manhattan Island.[4] As such, he is considered the first non-native resident of what would eventually become New York City.
As he was born in the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, the first colony of Spain, to a Portuguese sailor and a West African woman, he is considered by many to be the first person of European and/or West African origin to settle on the island of Manhattan.
Biography[edit]
Rodriguez was born in the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) to an African woman and a Portuguese sailor,[5] in an era in which a tenth of the Dominican population was born in Portugal,[6] which at that time was in dynastic union with the Spanish Crown (see Iberian Union).
Raised in a cultural environment in the Spanish settlement of Santo Domingo, Rodrigues was known for his linguistic talents and was hired by the Dutch captain Thijs Volckenz Mossel of the Jonge Tobias to serve as the translator on a trading voyage to the Lenape island of Mannahattan.
Arriving in 1613, Rodrigues soon came to learn the Algonquian language of the Lenape people and married into the local community. When Mossel's ship returned to the Netherlands, Rodrigues stayed behind with his Lenape family and set up his own trading post with goods given to him by Mossel, consisting of eighty hatchets, some knives, a musket and a sword.[7]
He spent the winter without the support of anchored ship, at a Dutch fur trading post on Lower Manhattan that had been set up by Hendrick Christiaensen in 1613. This small settlement and others along the North River, such as Fort Nassau (Albany), were part of a private enterprise. In 1621 the Dutch Republic firmly established its claim to New Netherland and offered a patent for a trade monopoly in the region. In 1624, a group of settlers established a small colony on Governors Island. Together with a contingent of coming from the Netherlands that same year, the traders established in the settlement of New Amsterdam.
Fiction[edit]
Writer John Keene published a brief, fictional version of Juan Rodríguez's (Jan Rodrigues's) story, entitled "Mannahatta", focusing on the trader's decision to flee the Dutch, in the Winter/Spring 2014 issue of the literary journal TriQuarterly.[11] A revised version of the story appears in his 2015 collection Counternarratives, published by New Directions.[12][13]