130 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)liberally from Roman law— were seen to be two: fi rst, a bona fi de intention
on the part of the prior own er to part with his title, and second, some out-
ward, formal act of transfer to mark the actual passage of own ership. Th e
Dutch were the fi rst to make signifi cant use of this method of acquisition.
Th ey also engaged in one of the most memorable applications of it, in their
purchase of Manhattan Island from local Indians in 1626. Th e payment was
a collection of objects to which legend has fi rmly affi xed the value of twenty-
four dollars.
Th e French were the chief supporters of this strategy. More than any
other Eu ro pe ans, they took care to obtain at least a formal ac cep tance or
submission on the part of native rulers to their dominion, although no spe-
cifi c ceremony or form of words was prescribed for this. It must be admit-
ted that the evidence of this consent was sometimes fairly tenuous. Th is was
instructively illustrated by French explorer Jacques Cartier’s account of a
ceremony in 1534 in present- day Canada. A cross was placed on the terri-
tory, and Cartier and his fellow explorers knelt in prayer before it, with
hands joined. Th e natives did not participate in the prayer, he conceded, but
they witnessed it and indicated their approval by means of “admiring looks.”
Cartier also claimed that over thirty Indians came to his ships in canoes,
indicating their assent to the cross.
En glish colonists, too, came to rely heavily on cession (as well as on oc-
cupation, as noted before). An early example was a conveyance of land in
present- day Connecticut by the Mohegan Indians to En glish colonists in
16 40. Sometimes, moral or religious sensitivities provided the motivation
for a policy of purchase. Quakers were especially scrupulous about obtain-
ing consent from native rulers. William Penn, most famously, was careful
to purchase land for his colony of Pennsylvania from the local Delaware
Indians (with a vivid, if imagined, image of the event painted a century
later by the artist Benjamin West). But there were less high- minded reasons,
too. As in the case of occupation, lands acquired by purchase belonged to
the purchaser in his own right, without any dependence on the largesse of the
crown.
Even cession, though, was not without its problems. Th e principal one
was the question of whether the purported transferor actually had the power
or right to eff ect the transfer. In Eu ro pe an law, there was a venerable prin-
ciple that a prince, being a mere steward of his kingdom rather than an ab-