New Amsterdam

New Amsterdam was a seventeenth-century Dutch colonial town that later became New York City.

Early exploration

In the early seventeenth century, the Netherlands, like other nations of northern Europe, sent explorers to search for a sea route around North America to the riches of the Far East. The principal explorer for the Dutch was Henry Hudson (d. 1611), an Englishman who in 1609 explored the river that now bears his name. When Hudson and other navigators failed to find the Northwest Passage, the Dutch decided to occupy the lands they claimed in the New World and exploit their resources.

While hoping to discover gold and silver as the Spanish had done in the south, the Dutch soon found that furs, obtained through trade with the natives, were the most readily exploitable resource of the middle Atlantic coastal region. At the time, beaver pelts were highly prized in Europe because the fur could be “felted” to make waterproof hats. The demand in Europe for furs and pelts was so great that one shipload could make its owners wealthy.

In the interests of further discovery and to stimulate trade, the Dutch parliament, the States-General, granted to its traders and explorers the exclusive right to make four voyages to any new lands that they might explore. Under this grant, in 1614 five ships visited the Hudson River, which the Dutch called the Mauritius. Later that same year, these traders combined as the United New Netherland Company and received from the States-General a monopoly of the trade in the Hudson Valley. Ignoring Manhattan Island, these early traders sailed up the Hudson to the site of present-day Albany, New York , where they erected Fort Nassau on Castle Island as a base of operations and exchanged their goods for the furs of the Mohican Indians. Following the expiration of the charter of the United New Netherland Company in 1618, a succession of different companies exploited the Hudson River fur trade.

Colony beginnings

In 1621, a number of influential merchants obtained from the States-General a charter for the Dutch West India Company , with the sole right to trade on the Atlantic coasts of Africa and of North and South America for twenty-four years. Although the new company was organized primarily to challenge Spain's control of Spanish America, it was also interested in the Hudson River area.

In 1624, the company dispatched Captain Cornelius May with a shipload of thirty families to settle in North America. Opposite Castle Island (where the original Fort Nassau had been abandoned because of repeated floods), they established a trading post named Fort Orange. They also formed a settlement, Fort Nassau, on the Delaware River (near present-day Gloucester City, New Jersey ) and established a trading house on Governor's Island in New York Harbor.

New Amsterdam Colony

The first two governors, Cornelius May and William Verhulst, lived and administered the colony from the Delaware River site, but Peter Minuit (1580–1638), the third governor and first director-general of New Netherland, shifted his base of operations to Manhattan Island. A native of Wesel, then in the Duchy of Cleves on the German Rhine, he was of Huguenot Walloon descent. Minuit was described as a shrewd and somewhat unscrupulous man.

One of Minuit's earliest official acts was to convene Indian leaders from the Canarsee and Manhattan tribes of the region and purchase Manhattan Island from them for trinkets valued at sixty guilders, or about $24. This gave the company a semblance of legality for its occupation of the island, which at the time of the purchase was covered with a great forest and abounding with game and wild fruits.

Minuit made his town of New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of Manhattan, the center of Dutch activity in the area. A large fort, pentagonal in shape, surrounded on three sides by a great moat and fronting on the bay, was one of the first structures to be built. When it was finished, Minuit brought several families from Fort Orange to settle in the town, and ordered Fort Nassau on the Delaware River evacuated and the garrison transferred to New Amsterdam.

Upon completion of the fort, a warehouse, and a mill, the town of New Amsterdam was the concentration point for scattered Dutch settlements in the colony. When regular church services commenced in New Amsterdam in 1628, Minuit and his brother-in-law (the company's storekeeper) served Pastor Jonas Michaëlius as elders. Despite his vigorous administration of the colony, Minuit was recalled to Holland for examination in 1632, and was dismissed from the West India Company's service.

Attempts at colonial expansion

In 1629, the directorate of the company, with the approval of the States-General, issued a Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions, which provided for the grant of large estates, called patroonships, to those members of the company who would settle at least fifty persons above the age of fifteen on their lands within four years. Designed to promote farming in New Netherland, these grants were intended primarily to encourage settlers to go up the Hudson to settle and make further contacts with the Indians and thereby extend the fur trade. The furs, it was expected, would be sent down the river to New Amsterdam, from where the West India Company had the sole right to export them. These patroonships were mostly unsuccessful.

End of the colony

Relations with the Indians remained good, and the fur trade continued to prosper until 1641, when hostilities with the natives broke out in a conflict known as Governor Kieft's War. New Netherland governor Willem Kieft's (1597–1647) attempt to collect taxes from the Algonquin tribes for Dutch “protection” provoked the fighting. The conflict was terminated by a treaty of August 29, 1645.

In 1647, Kieft was succeeded by Peter Stuyvesant (c. 1610–1672), the last Dutch governor or director-general of New Netherland. Stuyvesant surrendered the colony to the British, who conquered it in August 1664 and renamed it New York. Thus the seventeenth-century Dutch colonial settlement of New Amsterdam would later become New York City.