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Fort Orange, today Albany, which was considered the most important part of the territory because it was where the furs could be acquired from the Indians. Catelina Trico, one of the Fort Orange–bound settlers, wrote years later that the Indians were “as quiet as lambs and came and traded with unimaginable freedom.”
    The 1624 Provisional Regulations of the West India Company stated that the colonists were free to pursue the inland trade as long as they sold the goods they collected to company agents. They were also free to carry on their own hunting, fowling, and fishing, but “all minerals, newly discovered or still-to-be-discovered mines of gold, silver, or any other metals, as well as precious stones, such as diamonds, rubies and the like, together with the pearl fishery, shall be allowed to be worked by the Company’s men only. But anyone who discovers any of the aforementioned will be granted to him and his heirs one tenth of the proceeds for the first six years.”
    The colonists “shall not permit any strangers (whereupon are understood all persons who are outside the jurisdiction of the Company or its commissaries) coming to their shores to do any trading . . . .” They were also sworn to secrecy about anything they knew of the inner workings of the company and had to make a commitment to stay where they were sent for six years and plant what they were told. They were also required, under threat of “being rigorously punished,” to honor any agreement made with an Indian.
    No wonder the company emphasized the fur trade. Though they were never able to ship enough pelts to realize the profits of which they had dreamed, at least the furs were there and were valuable. Gold, silver, diamonds, precious stones, were a fantasy. As for the “pearl industry,” it was a gross misunderstanding of biology that still exists today. Word had reached Holland of the tremendous oyster beds throughout the huge estuary. This was exciting news for the Dutch, whose pearl industries in Brazil and in Asia were so profitable that the word
pearl
was almost synonymous with wealth, which was why every Dutch town had a Pearl Street. Oysters abounded in the lower Hudson. And, as most everyone knows, pearls come from oysters.
    The problem was that they don’t.
    If an irritating foreign particle, something indigestible, is sucked in by an Ostreid, a true oyster, the animal will eject it. In a few cases, a coating is built up, but it is a dull gray substance, usually applied in an irregular sphere. Several chroniclers of the time complained of the “brown” pearls. Van der Donck wrote of the local oysters:
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    Some of these are like the Colchester oysters, and are fit to be eaten raw; others are very large, wherein pearls are frequently found, but as they are of a brownish color they are not valuable.
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    Lustrous, bright, valuable pearls are found in an animal popularly known as a pearl oyster but known in biology as
Meleagrina
or
Pintada.
While being a bivalve whose shell bears a physical resemblance to an oyster shell, the pearl oyster, which is most commonly found in tropical waters, belongs to the family Pteridae, and not the family Ostreidae. A number of animals in this family have the characteristic that if an indigestible food particle—not a grain of sand, as is commonly believed—gets trapped in the shell, the animal will build up a coating of a calcium-carbonate crystal called argonite and a protein, conchiolin, the two materials it uses to build its shell. These two ingredients, in surrounding the particle, become nacre or mother-of-pearl.
    The pearl oyster and its relatives in the Pteridae family are more closely related to mussels than oysters. Pearl oysters attach to objects by extending threads, the way a mussel does, and not by secreting a substance from a foot, the way a true oyster does.

    So the famously mercantile
Dutch were disappointed by