THE DIRECTORS	59
man unused to authority and hampered by his
instructions.551
In his new office Van Twiller was confronted
with questions dealing with the encroachment of
the patroons from within and of the English from
without, the unwelcome visit of Eelkens, of whom
we shall hear later, and massacres by the Indians
on the South River. Such problems might well
have puzzled a wiser head and a more determined
character than Van Twiller's. We cannot hold
him wholly blameworthy if he dealt with them in
a spirit of doubt and hesitation. What we find
harder to excuse is his shrewd advancement of his
own interests and his lavish expenditure of the
Company's money. The cost of building the fort
1 Van Twiller's advocate, W. E. Griffis, quotes the Nijkerk records
in proof that Van Twiller was born on May £2, 1606, which would fix
his age at twenty-seven when he'was sent out to the colony. The
editor of the Van Rensselaer-Bowier manuscript states that Kiliaen
Van Rensselaer was born in 1580, that his sister, Maria, married
Richard, or Ryckaert, Van Twiller and that the Wouter of our chron-
icles was their son and therefore Van Rensselaer's nephew. We are
the more inclined to accept the year 1606 as the true date of Van
Twiller's birth because the year 1580, previously accepted by his-
torians, would have been the same as that of the birth of Kiliaen
Van Rensselaer himself, and because, according to the author of
the Story of New Netherlands Maria Van Rensselaer was betrothed
in 1605. Otherwise we should find it almost beyond credence that a
youth of twenty-seven should have been so suddenly promoted from
the counting-house at Amsterdam to the responsible post of Director
of New Netherland.