Document: Letter from Andries van der Sluys to Petrus Stuyvesant

Honorable General Petrus Stuyvesant.

The object of these few lines is to request your honor most humbly that your honor will please to inform me, whether your honor has not been informed in regard to the office of precentor, which was given to me by the honorable lords directors of the chartered West India Company, as your honor saw and read in the extract. I need the said position very much to support myself, my wife and child with decency, whereas the present prospect is very bad and besides I have suffered great loss here on the strand during the last troubles, which holds us young people back a great deal. The inhabitants here would like to keep me in the office, to proclaim the Lord's gospel according to my ability and catechise the children and teach them reading and writing: but because the honorable general has spoken with them about a preacher, therefore they dare not or cannot engage me for several years. I request therefore most humbly and submissively that the honorable general will please to assist me in one way or the other that I may honorably make my way through the world by these means and with God's assistance; awaiting hereupon your honor's favorable reply in as short a time as possible and commending your honor, after sincere salutations, to the protection of the Almighty, I am and remain,

Great Esopusthe 25th of September anno 1658.

[ ADDRESSED: ]

To His Honor, the Lord Director General Petrus Stuyvesant residing in the city of N. Amsterdam.

By a friend.

Andries van der Sluys