India Company. While the States General were often capable
of taking a statesmanlike view of New Netherland, and as it
lost control of the former found itself involved in greater
and greater financial embarrassments, which made it increasingly
difficult to do justice to the latter. We may also set down
on the credit side of the account that though the administration
was slow to concede representative institutions to the province,
it did not a little to organize local self-government, Kieft
granting village rights, with magistrates and local courts of
justice, to Hampstead in 1644, to Flushing in 1645, to Brooklyn
in 1646, while Stuyvesant bestowed such rights on a dozen towns
during his seventeen years' rule and gave New Amsterdam a
somewhat restricted municipal government in 1653.

Of those whose signatures follow Van der Donck's at the end
of the _Representation_, Augustin Herrman was a Bohemian of
Prague, who had served in Wallenstein's army, had come out to
New Netherland in 1633 as agent of a mercantile house of
Amsterdam, and had become an influential merchant. A man of
various accomplishments, he probably made the drawing of New
Amsterdam which is reproduced at the foot of Van der Donck's
map in this volume. Later he made for Lord Baltimore a fine
map of Maryland, and received as his reward the princely estate
of Bohemia Manor. Arnoldus van Hardenberg, another merchant,
had been a victim of judicial oppression by both Kieft and
Stuyvesant. Jacob van Couwenhoven had come out in 1633 and
resided at first at Rensselaerswyck; he was afterward of note
as speculator and brewer in New Amsterdam. Oloff Stevensz
van Cortlant had been store-keeper for the Company and deacon
of the church; later he was burgomaster of New Amsterdam.