lines of purple wampum along its length – the lines symbolizing a separate-but-equal relationship between two entities based on mutual benefit and mutual respect for each party’s inherent freedom of movement – neither side may attempt to "steer" the vessel of the other as it travels along its own, self-determined path. A nineteenth-century French dictionary of the Mohawk language defined the very word for wampum belt (kahionni) as a human-made symbol emulating a river, due in part to its linear form and in part to the way in which its constituent shell beads resemble ripples and waves. Just as a navigable water course facilitates mutual relations between nations, thus does kahionni, "the river formed by the hand of man", serve as a sign of "alliance, concord, and friendship" that links "divergent spirits" and provides a "bond between hearts". The treaty "Contemporary Haudenosaunee oral tradition identifies the original elaboration of kaswentha relations between Iroquois nations and Europeans with a circa 1613 agreement negotiated between Mohawks and a Dutch trader named Jacob Eelckens at Tawagonshi, as a precursor to the formal establishment of Dutch Fort Nassau at nearby Normans Kill." According to Parmenter, "Dating of the original agreement prior to circa 1620 finds support in [a] 1701 recitation, in which Haudenosaunee delegates described their original agreement with the Dutch occurring 'above eighty years' prior to that date, and in 1744 Onondaga headman Canasatego dated the origin of the relationship to "above One Hundred Years Ago'." Parmenter has investigated the extent to which Haudenosaunee oral tradition is corroborated by surviving documentary (written) records and found that "the documentary evidence, considered in the aggregate, reveals a striking degree of consistency over time in the expression of fundamental principles of the kaswentha tradition by Haudenosaunee speakers", with "the fullest single written source that corroborates the early seventeenth-century origins of a kaswentha relationship between Iroquois nations and the Dutch appear[ing] in [...] 1689". And the earliest record of Haudenosaunee speakers explicitly mentioning or reciting the kaswentha tradition before Anglo-American and French colonial audiences dates to more than 30 years before this, in 1656 (43 years after the putative origin of the treaty in 1613). While the evidence that the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch entered into some kind of political or economic agreement in the early seventeenth century is overwhelming, some historians have found reasons to be cautious about assuming the nature of that agreement was formal