The island of Manhattan, which was to become the site of New Amsterdam, served as a marshy camp and hunting ground for Native Americans, including the Canarsies and the Manhattans. In 1609 Henry Hudson became the first European to record the existence of the island. Dutch explorer Adrian Block built a temporary base there in 1613 while repairing his ship. Citing those voyages, the Netherlands laid claim to the entire Hudson River valley by right of discovery, and the Dutch called the area New Netherland.
The Dutch West India Company (WIC) built Fort Orange in 1621 at the northern navigable end of the Hudson River, where merchants operated a fur trade with neighboring Indians. The company subsequently established New Amsterdam in 1625 as a terminal for that trade. The initial wave of settlers consisted mostly of soldiers and traders employed by the WIC, but also included Protestant refugees from the southern Netherlands (present-day
This print shows New Amsterdam's fine natural harbor, which helped make it a commercial center. (Library of Congress)
Belgium), who had previously lived on Nut Island in the harbor. The following year, Peter Minuit, a company official, “purchased” the island from the Canarsies for 60 guilders (about $24 today), though it is clear that the Indians understood this transaction in a very different way from that of Europeans as not transferring permanent ownership of land. Despite the intention to maintain friendly trading relations with local Natives, a number of Dutch-Indian Wars broke out during the settlement’s history.
With its excellent deep-water harbor, New Amsterdam served two main functions: to act as a port and agricultural supply station for the fur trade with Native Americans and as a support base for privateers to harass Spanish shipping in the Caribbean as part of the continuing Dutch war of independence against the Habsburg Empire. Focused on these goals, the Dutch settlers never developed an agrarian economy as extensive as the contemporary English colonists to the north and south.
New Amsterdam played host to varied groups of people, including seamen and traders from throughout Europe, free and enslaved Africans, Jewish refugees from Portuguese Brazil, and Indians. However, this diversity was not uncontested. Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664, sought to oversee the settlement’s cultural composition, refusing to grant toleration to any religious denomination but that of the company-sponsored Dutch Reformed Church. He also planned to expel all Jews from the settlement, but he was overruled by the company, which judged the need for settlers more important than social exclusion. Despite Stuyvesant’s efforts, New Amsterdam remained one of the most diverse cities in the New World. Notwithstanding persistent inequalities, women possessed greater legal rights than did women in the English colonies, including the right to own property and to sue for divorce.
New Amsterdam’s growing influence, strategic location, and power, significantly evident in its use as the base from which the Dutch captured the troubled Swedish colonies to the south, its neighbors. Meanwhile, the growing English presence on Long Island rendered the Dutch position increasingly vulnerable. England seized the fort in the lead up to the second Anglo-Dutch War in September 1664. Stuyvesant initially remained defiant, but. faced with opposition from both the inhabitants and the Dutch West India Company, he relented. Both the colony of New Netherland and the town of New Amsterdam were renamed New York. Despite a brief reoccupation by Dutch forces in 1673, New York remained in English hands and continued to grow in both size and importance as a commercial center.
Further reading: Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004); Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
—Simon Finger
World History
