Where did New York come from? “For half a century it was New Amsterdam”
The natives in the interior preferred to trade rather than shoot. As a result, Hudson returned to Amsterdam with a large shipment of hides and skins, and his directors decided they could do a good deal with them. They formed the New Netherland Company, and on October 11, 1614, they were granted a three-year monopoly by the States General on trade between the 40th and 50th parallels of the Western Hemisphere. When the license expired, the colony opened its doors to all Dutch traders, sparking legal disputes that lasted for several years.
It was not until 1623 that all parties complied with the arbitrators’ decision to hand over the region to the Dutch West India Company (WIC), and soon after, 30 Walloon families led by Cornelius Jacobsen May landed on Noten Eylandt (Delaware: Paggank, i.e. Nut Island) – a small 37-hectare plot of land located 732 meters from the southern tip of Manhattan. May sent 18 men to build Fort Oranje, the first permanent settlement in New Netherland on the Hudson River.
He ruled the colony for only a year, and his legacy was taken over by Willem Verhulst, who arrived in Manhattan in January 1625 to prepare quarters for the next group of colonists sailing on the ships Paert, Koe, Schaep, and Makreel (Horse, Cow, Sheep, and Mackerel). He had just begun construction of Fort Amsterdam, a mile south of the modern World Trade Center. The fortress was intended to protect the English and French from access to New Netherland and consisted of four pentagonal bastions connected by earthen embankments forming a diamond.
During the construction, three Wappinger Indians came to the settlers with beaver skins to exchange for iron tools and beads. At Lake Kalck (Cretaceous Lake, so named because of the worn oyster shells that the natives had thrown there for centuries), the newcomers were attacked by three Dutch farmers, killing one. 15 years later, the nephew of the murdered man, in revenge for his uncle, started a war with the whites, which ended with the deaths of at least 1,500 Wappingers. However, Verhulst quickly fell out with the settlers and was dismissed from the headquarters, and the position of director of New Netherland went to the famous Peter Minuit.
“He had a good head on his shoulders / Minuit – that old moneylender / Who bought Manhattan Island / For twenty-four dollars” – Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1939 hit “Give the Indians Their Land” perpetuated the myth that the colony’s director made a deal with the original owners of New York to own the best deal in the history of real estate. This myth, repeated uncritically in countless guidebooks and publications claiming to be popular science literature, has nothing to do with reality.
It is known that Minuit was a Walloon born in Germany, where his Protestant parents had emigrated for fear of the Inquisition. In his hometown of Wesel, he was considered a good-natured, honest and even generous man. Thanks to the dowry of his wife Gertrude, he became a commercial broker, but the city, destroyed by the Thirty Years’ War, fell into decline, so he decided to go to Holland. There, the WIC appreciated his skills and in 1625 sent him to the New World to investigate what else – besides furs – could be bought cheaply.
Minuit’s report must have been very optimistic, because he got Verhulst’s job, and after coming to America… Well, what? No one has been able to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt whether the bargain with the Indians was made by him or his predecessor. $24 is another fiction. Minuit became director on May 4, 1626, and the first written record of the transaction comes from a report that Pieter Schagen, a member of the WIC board, presented to his fellow directors on November 5 of that year.
In it we read that the ship Wapen van Amsterdam from New Holland stopped at the capital’s port and, according to the captain, “our people are in good health, do not lose heart, live in peace, and the women have already given birth to children.” The colonists also announced that they “bought from the Indians for 60 florins the island of Manhattan with an area of 11,000 morga. They sowed the fields in May and again in August, so they are sending samples of the summer crops: wheat, rye, barley, oats, seeds and flax fiber.”
How New York was discovered. “The natives preferred to trade rather than shoot”
In 1846, historian John Romeyn Broadhead converted 60 guilders into contemporary money and the amount was $24. This figure has forever been engraved in the myth of early New York, although it has been counted several times. In 1992, columnist Cecil Adams of the Chicago Reader, based on the price of silver, raised the rate to $72. However, in the 17th century, silver had a completely different purchasing power than it did in the late 20th century, because it was smaller. In 2006, the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Social History reported the amount at 678.91 euros, or approximately $1,000.
Of course, in 1626 there were no dollars, let alone euros, so the above considerations are futile. Furthermore, 60 guilders is an approximate value. Minuit (or Verhulst) did not give money to the natives because it had no value to them. It is known that in Staten Island, neighboring Manhattan, the Indians received sailcloth, iron kettles, axes, hoes, awls, jews, as well as wampums, that is, strings of beads made of shells and tied to belts. For the natives, they had religious and cultural value, although they were also valuable in the sense that making them with primitive tools took a long time.
Furthermore, the Indians did not give up their right to land ownership because they were unfamiliar with the concept of real estate. In the civil law sense, the island could be considered a lease to the settlers, and both parties believed they had made a great deal. The Wappingers were happy to gain contractors with new technologies and potential allies in conflicts with other tribes. The Dutch were laying the groundwork for a lasting trade agreement.
The alleged all-time bargain so fascinated Americans that in the mid-19th century, forged contracts between Indians and Dutchmen were sold for big money to nouveau riche collectors on Fifth Avenue by at least three professional fraudsters. How much Manhattan—the world’s most valuable real estate, now worth more than $3 trillion, including its buildings—really cost, we will never know. But $24 is an apt metaphor for the plunder of the continent carried out under the majesty of the law.
The Dutch controlled New Amsterdam until 1674, when they handed it over to the English under the Treaty of Westminster in exchange for the Indonesian island of Run, which was crucial to maintaining their monopoly on the nutmeg trade. During half a century of Dutch rule, the beginnings of a city were already established. After Minuit, who was dismissed in 1638, New Netherland was administered by four more directors, the most famous of which, apart from the purchaser of Manhattan, was Peter Stuyvesant.
It was he who built (with the hands of slaves) on the northern border of the city a four-meter-high palisade that stretched between the shores of the island, from which the name Waal Straat, or Wall Street, was derived. The merchants met under the palisade and exchanged money for stocks and bonds, and this is how it has remained, although today they trade indoors. The main street of New Amsterdam became the old Wickquasgeck (Birchbark) Indian track, renamed first Heerestraat and later Brede weg. In the first half of the 17th century, present-day Broadway ended at the palisade; today it is 53.2 km long.
The Stuyvesant Town housing project now stands on the site of the director’s 25-acre farm, and Brooklyn is home to the entire Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. And the Bowery—a Manhattan street known in the 19th and 20th centuries for its dives and drug dens and touted to tourists as the birthplace of punk rock—got its name from the word Bouwerij (Dutch for “farm”). The Dutch were just one of many nations who lived in Manhattan. Early “New Yorkers” also included African slaves, Caribbeans, Indians, Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians, Germans, Jews, Portuguese, and Spaniards.
Stuyvesant—the colony’s warden, the son of a Dutch Reformed minister—was not known for his tolerance. He not only forbade Lutherans from building their own church, but even from praying in their homes. When the Spanish occupied the Dutch colony of Recife in what is now Brazil in 1654, the warden refused to accept local Jews fleeing the Inquisition, arguing that this “insidious, repulsive, and Christ-hating race should not poison the life of the colony by their presence and cause it trouble.” He sentenced 23-year-old Quaker preacher Robert Hodgson to prison and imposed a prison sentence for harboring Quakers. The central government forced him to legally equalize all denominations, but it was not until 1663.
Several months later, Stuyvesant had to surrender New Netherland to the English, who arrived in four warships with 450 men and, after a bloodless victory, renamed New Amsterdam New York. The Netherlands regained the colony for a time in 1673, but eventually lost it as a result of the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Stuyvesant died in 1672 and was buried in the family chapel. Charles Bukowski mentions in his book “Women” that before a meeting with readers organized there, he vomited on the tombstone of the last director of the colony.
The city’s Dutch roots have not been forgotten. The flag of New York is based on the flag of the East India Company – it has vertical stripes: blue, white and orange. The central element of the emblem is a windmill, two barrels of salted herring and two beavers, and the shield is held in unison by a Dutch settler and an Indian leaning on an arch. Almost all the streets in the Financial District have retained their original names, only translated into English. There are Beaver Street (Bever, i.e. Bobrowa), Pearl Street (Parel – Perłowa) and Stone Street (Steen – Kamienna).
New Yorkers celebrate Dutch Memorial Day on May 5, and in December they can experience the atmosphere of a 17th-century Christmas in the historic town of Richmond on Staten Island. The 100-acre town has 24 buildings, including a courthouse, a tavern, a mill, a carriage house, a carpentry shop, shops, residential houses, and a public restroom with two rows of three-seater seats. As you can see, the settlers were extremely sociable people.
