Juan Rodriguez trading with Lenape people

In 1613, the settlers at Jamestown were finally putting the “starving time” of 1609 behind them.

A new settlement was being built at Charles City, and the first tobacco crop was going into the ground.

Emboldened to confront the Powhatan head-on, they had contrived to kidnap a native girl named Matoaka or “Pocahontas” to use as leverage in what they termed “negotiations” with local indigenous communities.

Three days’ sailing to the north, another enterprising young man was setting-up his own trading post on the island later lnown as Manhattan.  Although this area had been scouted for the past three or four years by Dutch expeditions, no one had actually yet attempted to plant boots on the ground.

This small trading post would later become a favoured supply stop for early pirates and sea dogs, known by 1624 as “New Amsterdam” – the town which would pass into English hands in 1664, before being re-christened “New York”.

But in 1613, this one man with his Lenape friends and family was content to trap for beaver.  Beaver skins and glands fetched an exorbitant price in Europe at the time, the pelts being made into waterproof hats, the glands being used in the perfume industry.

Although this man traded on behalf of the Dutch, and the later Dutch West India Company, he was no Dutchman himself.

This man was Juan Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, the oldest city in what we now call the Dominican Republic.  At that time, the population of Santo Domingo was at least 10% Portuguese, and Juan Rodriguez was born to an African mother by a Portuguese – possibly Portuguese Jewish or Romani – father.

This largely forgotten character was the first non-Native American inhabitant of what is now New York.

Some reports suggest that he lived until at least 1640, but beyond this, he and his mixed-ethnic family’s later exploits are lost to the fog of history…

But.

By the mid-1600s, we find “free people of color” named “Driggers” living in Virginia – “Driggers” being widely thought to be an Anglicized version of “Rodriguez”.

Of course, “Rodriguez” and “Rodrigues” are not rare surnames among the Portuguese and Spanish.

But it is surely tempting to wonder what happened to the children of a man willing and able to sail over 1,500 miles from the Caribbean to New York, a man valuable to traders far and wide for his fluency in the language of the Lenape.  A man unafraid of the wilderness.  A man only 300 miles, or 3 days sailing, from Virginia.

Whether connected to the founder of New Amsterdam or not, descendants of “Driggers” people from the 1600s can be be found in the southeastern USA in places like the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia, while others intermarried with Melungeon families such as the Perkinses of Southern Appalachia.

Claims of Portuguese ancestry made by many Melungeon families of Southern Appalachia over the decades can be viewed in a sympathetic light when we learn about people like Juan “Jan” Rodriguez.

Neither Dutchman nor Englishman, let’s salute the multi-ethnic founder of New York City.