Viele, Aernout Cornelissen (1640–1704), trader and linguist, was born in New Amsterdam, the largest town of the New Netherland colony, but baptized in Albany in 1640, the son of Cornelis Volkertszen Vielé, a tavernkeeper, and Maria du Trieux. Aernout Cornelissen grew to manhood in the atmosphere of public exchange of information that typified taverns on both sides of the Atlantic. Traders from the Dutch colony to the Five Nations frequented his father’s establishment, and perhaps from them Aernout developed what became a lifelong fascination with the culture and language of the Five Nations. At the age of twenty he signed a petition drawn up in 1659 by concerned traders who sought to suppress illicit trade and contacts of Europeans with Native Americans by calling for the interdiction of European trading in the Indian lands without prior approval of the Dutch colonial leaders....
