1609
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Spain's Felipe III signs a truce with the Dutch April 9 after mediation by France's Henri IV (see 1604). He recognizes the independence of the Netherlands but does not seize the opportunity to reform a society that is rapidly decaying through the extravagance of the court and nobility. Shipments of silver from the Americas have diminished, sheep herding is replacing agriculture, and the country must import large quantities of food while exporting olive oil, wine, wool, and luxury goods, much of it to America. The truce with the Dutch will continue until 1619, giving Felipe's son-in-law Albrecht VII time to strengthen Catholicism in the 10 provinces that he and his wife, Isabella, control; they will also promote the arts.
Bavaria's Duke Maximilian organizes a Catholic League July 10 to oppose the Protestant Evangelical Union organized last year by the Palatine elector Friedrich IV.
Mare liberum by Hugo Grotius (Huigh de Groot) urges freedom of the seas to all nations. The work is premised on the assumption that the sea's major known resource—fish—exists in inexhaustible supply (see 1604; 1625).
A long period of hostility begins between America's Five Nations Iroquois and the French. Samuel de Champlain has precipitated the conflict by killing some Mohawks at the behest of the Hurons (see 1604). As lieutenant to the owner of the French fur trade monopoly, Champlain has gone west with a Huron and Algonquin war party, explored an area that will later be called Vermont, found a lake that he has named for himself, and ventured into the forests of the Adirondacks (possibly a corruption of the Iroquois word ratirontacks, meaning "those who eat bark," but the word Adirondack will not appear in print until 1837). Hostilities with the Iroquois will continue until 1763 (see Lake Huron, 1615).
Spanish authorities dismiss colonial official Hernando Arias de Saavedra in South America after 7 years as governor of the Rio de la Plata district; he has inadvertently hurt the area's economy by enforcing laws against smuggling, which has been tolerated by previous (and corruptible) governors and become institutionalized. Saavedra will be reappointed in 1614 and serve until 1618, encouraging the establishment of Jesuit and Franciscan missions and establishing closer ties with the Church.
Henry Hudson makes a third voyage to America, this time in the employ of Dutch interests (the 7-year-old United East India Company) (see 1608). Hudson's 80-ton ship Halve Maen (Half Moon) carries a mixed Dutch-English crew of 18 or 20 men. Now 59, Hudson explores the New England coast, the bay that next year will be called Delaware Bay, drops anchor September 2 in the lower bay of what will become New York Harbor, and finally, on September 3, enters a 154-mile tidal estuary that will be called the Hudson River (it will be found to arise in Lake Tear of the Clouds, 4,923 feet high in the Adirondack Mountains, and to be 315 miles long), sailing past steep cliffs that will come to be called the Palisades. Hudson sends five men in a small boat to explore the Narrows and Upper Bay September 6, two canoes filled with Delaware braves attack the men, one John Colman is killed by an arrow through the throat, and two of his companions are wounded. Some of Hudson's boats travel 25 miles upriver in search of a Northwest Passage, ascending as far as what will one day be called Albany (see Fort Nassau, 1614); the quest is fruitless, and Hudson sails off October 4 with nothing to show for his efforts (see 1610).
Henry Hudson's second mate Robert Juet writes the name Manhattan to denote the land that lies to the starboard as they ascend the estuary, but Hudson's maps will not show Manhattan to be an island, and historians will debate the origin of the word, some of them tracing it to the Munsee word manahactanienk ("place of general inebriation"), others to the Munsee word manahatouh ("place where timber may be procured for bows and arrows"), still others simply to the Munsee word menatay, meaning island.
English authorities detain Henry Hudson's ship after he lands at Dartmouth (Dutch seamen will return her to Amsterdam next year), but Hudson himself reaches Amsterdam and shows his Dutch employers some beaver pelts that he has obtained from the natives in return for beads, hatchets, and knives. Amsterdam merchants see the possibility of a new source of furs that they have been buying from Russia for sale to both men and women for wear indoors and out (see 1610).
The London Company chartered in 1606 obtains a new charter, receives additional land grants, and sends out a fleet of nine ships with 800 new settlers and supplies for the Virginia colony. Among the new colonists are John Rolfe, 24, and his young wife, but their ship the Sea Venture is wrecked with the rest of the fleet on reefs off one of the Bermuda islands whose beauty so delights George Somers, 54, one of the ship captains, that he will return to England and form a company to colonize Bermuda (see 1610).
English merchants try to establish a settlement on the Caribbean island of Grenada but are thwarted by its warlike Carib inhabitants (see 1498; 1650).
William Hawkins defies Portuguese authorities at Surat and travels overland to Agra, where he confers in Turkish with the emperor Jahangir (see 1608; 1612).
Dutch merchants establish a trading post at Hirado in western Japan at the invitation of the shōgun Ieyasu Tokugawa, who ends Portugal's monopoly in trade with Japan. The Dutch will operate the post until 1623 (see 1605; 1624).
The Bank of Amsterdam is founded with silver coined from South American ingots. Some 800 varieties of coins are in circulation, the new city-owned bank weighs coins to pioneer the principle of public regulation of money, and the bank soon finds that it can loan money at interest (see bourse, 1619; Bank of England, 1694).
Botanist Carolus Clusius dies at Leyden April 4 at age 83.
English scientist Thomas Harriot begins in July to make regular observations of the moon through a telescope. Now 49, he has enjoyed the patronage of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and has corresponded with Johann Kepler (see sunspots, 1610).
Astronomia Nova. . . de Motibus Stellas Martis et Observationibus Tychonis Brahe by Johann Kepler establishes two of the cardinal principles of astronomy (see 1604): planets travel round the sun in elliptical paths rather than in perfect circles, and they do not travel at uniform rates of speed. Now 38, Kepler has used data compiled by Brahe to arrive at the new astronomical laws (see 1619).
Galileo Galilei at Padua receives a letter in May from Venetian mathematician Paolo Sarpi advising him that a Flemish inventor has exhibited a spyglass at Venice. Galileo uses the doctrine of refraction to invent a similar instrument, and the Strasbourg newspaper Relation reports in its 47th issue, "Signor Gallileo [sic] . . . found a rule and visual measure, by which one can . . . look at places 30 miles away, as if they were close by." Galileo uses his telescope in the night sky at year's end to make discoveries that will revolutionize scientific thinking about astronomy (see 1610).
Expulsion of Spain's Moriscos begins as Felipe III acts on the advice of Francisco Gomez de Sandoval y Rojas, 57, duque de Lerma. Some 275,000 Moriscos (converted Muslims who continue to practice their old religion in secret) will leave the country in the next 5 years, disrupting the economic life of Valencia (whose population will decline by one fourth) and creating problems in Castile, Aragon, and Andalusia as well.
A Majestätsbrief (letter of majesty) from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II permits free exercise of religion in Bohemia to the three estates—lords, knights, and royal cities.
English lay sister Mary (originally Joan) Ward, 24, founds a religious community of women in France that includes a school for girls. Having entered a convent of the Poor Clares at St. Omer 3 years ago and adopted the name Mary, Ward will go on to start communities at Liège, Cologne, Vienna, Prague, Rome, Naples, and elsewhere, each with a school for English refugee boarding students and poor local girls (see 1619).
Aviso Relation oder Zeitung begins weekly publication January 15 at Wolfenbuttel in Lower Saxony; Relation and Aller Furnemmen und Gedenkwürdigen Historien begins publication at Strasbourg, a four-page weekly with no advertising and no headines. Intended to be read mostly by the rich, powerful, and well educated, they are the world's first regular newspapers (see 1605). By the middle of the century the first daily paper will be published at Leipzig.
Nonfiction: "Concerning the Power of the Pope" ("De Potestate Papae") by Scottish cleric William Barclay of Aberdeen; The Thesaurus of Time, Including the Chronicle of Eusebius Pamphilus (Thesaurus temporum, complectens Eusebi Pamphli Chronicon) by the late philologist-historian Joseph Justus Scaliger, who has died at Leyden January 21 at age 68.
Poetry: Humours Heav'n on Earth; with the Civile Warres of Death and Fortune by John Davies (of Hereford) is a description of the plague; Sonnets by William Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 18 begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
Painting: Flight into Egypt by German painter Adam Elsheimer, 31, at Rome; Self-portrait with His Wife Isabella Brant by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, 32; Fra Paravicino by El Greco. Annibale Carracci dies at Rome July 15 at age 48.
Theater: Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, by Ben Jonson: "O revenge, how sweet thou art!" (IV, v); Coriolanus by William Shakespeare.
"Three Blind Mice" ("A Round or Catch of Three Voices") is published in Deuteromelia, or The Second Part of Music's Melodic, or Melodius Musicke.
Venice's Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni is completed on the Grand Canal.
The Virginia colony declines in population to 67 by January as food stocks run low despite the introduction of carrots, parsnips, and turnips (see 1608). The colonists discover that their stores of corn have rotted and been consumed by rats. In a period that will be called the "starving times" until crops can be harvested, Captain John Smith disperses the survivors to various points depending on their aptitudes for fishing, gathering, and hunting. Some catch sturgeon, whose flesh is pounded and mixed with sorrel and other herbs to make "bread and good meat." Some gather cattail roots, marsh marigolds, Jerusalem artichokes, and other wild plants, but food remains scarce and summer brings hundreds of new arrivals to the colony. Captain Smith orders idlers to work and arranges for the purchase of food from Indians but is obliged to return to England after sustaining a serious injury. Corn stocks soon disappear; the natives, no longer friendly, try to prevent the colonists from gathering wild foods; men, women, and children subsist on acorns, roots, walnuts, berries, mushrooms, and a little fish when they are lucky. Horses, dogs, cats, rats, and snakes are all consumed, and many colonists die of starvation (see 1610).
William Shakespeare relates hunger to political unrest in his play Coriolanus: "They said they were an-hungry; sigh'd forth proverbs,/ That hunger broke stone walls, that dogs must eat,/ That meat was made for mouths, that the gods send not/ Corn for rich men only; with these shreds/ They vented their complainings" (I, i).
English traveler William Biddulph visits Constantinople and writes, "Their most common drink is coffa, which is a black kind of drink made of a kind of pulse, like pease, called coava; which being ground in a mill, and boiled in water, they drink it as hot as they can suffer; which they find to agree very well with them against their crudities and feeding on herbs and raw meats" (see 1601; restaurants, 1650).
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