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New Amsterdam to New York: How the Dutch Lost Manhattan | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we travel back nearly 400 years to a wide grey harbor at the mouth of a great river where a handful of traders, farmers, soldiers and sailors built a small walled town at the southern tip of an island.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the Lenape people called Manahata.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch called that town new Amsterdam.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within a single lifetime, it would change hands, change names, and become something the world now knows as New York.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of how that happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It begins in 1609, with an English captain sailing for a Dutch company, looking for a short cut to Asia, and finding instead a river lined with forests and full of fish.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It moves through the long patient years of the fur trade, when beaver pelts were worth more than gold to the merchants of Amsterdam.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It follows the rise of a stubborn, one-legged governor named Peter Stuyvesant, who tried to bring order to a quarrelsome little port filled with people from all over the world, and it ends with English warships anchored in the bay, a torn-up letter pieced back together by worried citizens and a quiet surrender that changed the course of American history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Check to one, the river and the island.
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[SPEAKER_00]: long before any European ship entered the harbour.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The land around it was home to the Lenape people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They lived across a wide region that stretched from the lower Hudson Valley down through what is now New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The groups who lived around the harbor and on the island itself spoke a dialect known today as Munsee and they moved through the year with the seasons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In spring, they fished the rivers
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[SPEAKER_00]: In summer, they tended fields of corn, beans and squash, planted together in mounds so that the cornstarchs gave the beans something to climb and the broad squash leaves shaded the soil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In autumn, they gathered nuts and hunted deer in the forests.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In winter, they moved inland to sheltered places away from the cold winds that blew off the water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The island they called Manahatta was a very different place from the one we know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was covered in hills, streams, marshes and meadows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oak, chestnut, hickory, and tulip trees grew across its rocky spine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fresh water ponds sat in its hollows, and the largest of these, a deep spring-fed pond near the southern end, would one day be known to the Dutch as the collect.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oysters grew in enormous beds along the shores.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So many that the people who harvested them left great heaps of shells behind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them piled for centuries.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Turkey's deer, wolves, foxes and beavers lived in the woods and wetlands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Along the edges of the island, ran paths worn by countless generations of feet, and one of these, a trail running north along the length of the island, would one day become the street called Broadway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The meaning of the name Manahata has been debated for a very long time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is often translated as the island of many hills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: those scholars have offered other interpretations as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is certain is that the Lenape did not think of the land in the way that European merchants would come to think of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Land, to them, was something one used and shared and moved across, not something one owned forever and sealed away with ink and paper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That difference in understanding would shape almost everything that followed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The story of new Amsterdam truly begins far away in the busy port cities of the Dutch Republic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1600s, the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands were in the middle of a long war for independence from Spain, a struggle that historians call the 80 years war.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the war,
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[SPEAKER_00]: or perhaps partly because of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch had become some of the most skilled sailors, shipbuilders, bankers and merchants in the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Amsterdam was growing rapidly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Its harbors were crowded with ships bringing grain from the Baltic, herring from the North Sea, and increasingly
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[SPEAKER_00]: spices from the far side of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1602, the Dutch founded the Dutch East India Company, a vast trading enterprise that was granted a monopoly on Dutch trade with Asia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The company's ships sailed south around the tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean to the spice islands of the East Indies, where pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and mace could be bought cheaply and sold in Europe
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the voyage was long and dangerous, and the merchants of the company were always interested in the possibility of a shorter route.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some geographers of the time believed that a passage might exist across the frozen seas north of Russia, or somewhere through the unknown lands of North America that would lead directly to China and the Indies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1608,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The company hired an English navigator named Henry Hudson to search for such a passage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hudson had already made two voyages for an English company, sailing far into the Arctic in search of a northern route, and both times he had been turned back by ice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was an experienced and determined captain, though by many accounts not always an easy man to sail with.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch East India Company gave him a small, sturdy ship called the Half Moon, a vessel of around 80 tonnes and a crew of about 18 or 20 men, some Dutch and some English.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His instructions were clear.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was to sail north and east around the top of Norway and Russia and search for a passage to Asia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was not to look for any other route.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1609, the half moon left Amsterdam and headed north.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By May, the ship had reached the icy waters near the islands of Novaya Zemlion, north of Russia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there, once again, the ice closed in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cold was
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[SPEAKER_00]: and the crew, some of whom had sailed in the warm waters of the East Indies, grew unhappy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Faced with an impossible sea and a restless crew, Hudson made a fateful decision.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than return home, he turned the ship around and sailed west across the Atlantic toward North America, where he hoped he might find a passage through the continent instead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some historians believe he had already been considering this possibility.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Having received letters and maps from the English explorer, John Smith, of the Virginia colony, suggesting that a channel might exist somewhere north of Virginia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Through the summer,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The half moon crossed the Atlantic and worked its way along the coast of North America, touching at Newfoundland, sailing past Cape Cod, and exploring as far south as the Chesapeake Bay before turning back north.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In early September of 1609, the little ship came to a broad opening in the coast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and sailed into the Great Harbour.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The crew saw green and pleasant land, and people who came out to meet them, some to trade, and some watching wearily from a distance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The ship's officer, a man named Robert Jue, kept a journal of the voyage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it is through his writings that much of what we know of these first encounters survives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The meetings were mixed, the Lenape traded tobacco, corn and furs for knives, beads and cloth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some visits were friendly, and the crew noted the people's clothing of deer skin and their ornaments of copper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but there was also violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A few days after the ship's arrival, a small boat sent out to explore the waters was attacked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and one of the English sailors, a man named John Coleman, was killed by an arrow through the throat.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was buried on a point of land that the crew named after him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following weeks, there would be other tensing counters, and on the return trip down river outright fighting, in which several Lenape were killed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hudson sailed north up the river
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[SPEAKER_00]: and for a time it seemed promising.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The water was salty, far upstream, as the tides of the ocean pushed in from the sea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And perhaps Hudson hoped that this salty water meant he had found a straight, leading somewhere far to the west.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The ship passed the tall cliffs that would later be known as the palasades and sailed on through the beautiful highlands where mountains rose steeply on both sides of the water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, near the place where the city of Albany now stands, more than 150 miles from the sea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The river grew too shallow for the half moon to continue.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hudson sent a small boat farther ahead to take soundings, and it's crew reported that the river narrowed and grew shallower still.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was not a passage to Asia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was simply a river, though, a very fine one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Near the head of Navigation, Hudson and his men met people of the Mohican nation, who were friendly and eager to trade.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Duit's journal recorded that they brought furs, especially beaver and otter, and it is this detail more than any other that would matter to the merchants back in the Netherlands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The beaver was the key.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In Europe, the belts of beavers were prized for making felt, and felt hats made from the soft undefur of the beaver were extremely fashionable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: European beavers had been hunted nearly to extinction,
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[SPEAKER_00]: and so the furs of North America.
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[SPEAKER_00]: represented a fortune waiting to be collected.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Pudson turned back down the river and sailed out of the harbour in early October.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than returning directly to Amsterdam, he sailed to Dartmouth in England, where he arrived in November.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There, English authorities, unhappy that an Englishman had been exploring on behalf of a foreign company
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[SPEAKER_00]: His logs and reports were sent on to the Netherlands, but Hudson himself never returned to the river he had explored.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1610, he set out once again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This time under the English flag, a border ship called the Discovery, and sailed into the Great Inland Sea, now known as Hudson Bay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The ship became trapped in the ice
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[SPEAKER_00]: His starving crew mutant, they set Hudson, his young son, and several loyal sailors adrift in a small boat in the cold waters of the bay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were never seen again, but Hudson's report on the river had done its work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within a year or two, Dutch merchants were sending ships across the Atlantic to trade for furs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These early voyages were not the work of a single great company, but of small groups of merchants, often competing with one another, who sent ships out each season and hoped for a profitable return.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their captains anchored in the harbour and sailed up the river, trading kettles, knives, axes, cloth and beads for beaver pelts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most notable of these early traders was a captain named Adriane Block.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the winter of 1613 into 1614, his ship, the tiger, court fire and burned while anchored near the southern tip of Manhattan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Stranded for the winter, block and his crew set to work building a new vessel from the timber of the island's forests.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They called it the on-rust, a word meaning restless.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When spring came, block sailed the little ship through the dangerous tidal strait that the Dutch would later call Hellgate into the long body of water now called Long Island Sound.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and on to explore the coast of New England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He sailed past an island that still bears his name, block island, and up the Connecticut River.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the early 20th century, during the digging of a subway tunnel in Lower Manhattan, workers uncovered charred timbers that some believed might belong to the remains of the tiger, though this has never been proven with certainty.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another early figure in this story deserves to be remembered, in 1613.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A ship captained by a man named Thais Mosul arrived in the harbour to trade.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A board was a man named Juan Rodriguez, sometimes recorded in Dutch as young Rodriguez.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a free man of African and European descent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Born on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and he served as an interpreter and trader.
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[SPEAKER_00]: by choice, with a supply of trade goods, including hatchets and knives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He lived among the Lenape, learned their language, and traded with other Dutch ships that came afterward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because of this, he is often remembered as the first non-native person to live on the island of Manhattan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today, a stretch of Broadway in Upper Manhattan bears his name.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The rivalry among Dutch merchants was fierce and to bring some order to the trade, in 1614, a group of them formed the New Netherlands Company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The governing body of the Dutch Republic, the state's general, granted this company the exclusive right to trade in the region for a period of three years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was around this time on a map drawn after blocks voyages that the name of New Netherlands first appeared on paper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: for the land between the English colony of Virginia to the south and the French territories to the north.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The new Netherlands company built a small trading post on an island in the upper river near present day Albany and called it Fort Nassel.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a modest place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a wooden house surrounded by a stockade and a mot with a few small guns and a handful of men.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The island flooded in the spring and the fort was soon damaged and abandoned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the company's charter expired, it was not renewed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and for several more years the trade continued in a scattered and competitive way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, back in Europe, great changes were taking shape.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1609, the very year of Hudson's voyage, the Dutch and the Spanish, had agreed to oppose in their long war.
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[SPEAKER_00]: known as the 12 years truce.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the truce came to an end in 1621, the war resumed and the leaders of the Dutch Republic looked for new ways to strike its Spain and its empire across the oceans.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the answers was the creation of a new company, modeled in part on the Dutch East India Company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was the Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was given a monopoly over Dutch trade along the coasts of West Africa and throughout the Americas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1624, a ship called the New Netherlands sailed into the harbour, carrying around 30 families.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them were Wallooms, French-speaking Protestants from the Southern Netherlands, a region now part of Belgium.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them had fled religious persecution and were living in the Dutch Republic as refugees.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were farmers, craftsmen and laborers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they had agreed to go to the new land in the service of the West India Company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These first settlers were not all placed
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[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the company spread them out across the territory it claimed, as if to plant small markers of Dutch presence along its rivers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some were sent far up the river to build a new fort, which they named Fort Orange near the site of the abandoned Fort Nassau.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others were placed on a small island in the harbour, just off the southern tip of Manhattan, which the Dutch called Nut Island, because of the walnut, hickory and chestnut trees that grew there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today, it is known as Governor's Island.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Still others were sent south to an island in the Delaware River, and a few went east to the Connecticut River.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The following year, in 1625, more ships arrived, bringing livestock.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three vessels carried more than 100 horses, cows, sheep, and pigs across the Atlantic, with careful stalls and supplies of fresh water, an enormous effort at the time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A new director named Villam Verholst came with them, carrying detailed instructions from the company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was told to choose a central place for the colony's main settlement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and to have a fort built there according to plans drawn up by an engineer named Kryn Fredericks.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The site that was eventually chosen was the southern tip of Manhattan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was an excellent location.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The island was surrounded by deep water that could shelter ships.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It sat at the mouth of the Great River, where trade from the north would naturally flow towards the sea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It could be defended.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so slowly, the scattered settlers began to be gathered together on the island and work began on a fort.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Verholst himself did not last long.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He quarreled with the colonists, and with the members of his own council, and he was accused of mismanagement and harsh treatment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within a year, he was removed from his post and sent back to the Netherlands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In his place, the council chose one of its own members, a man who had arrived with Verholst and who would make one of the most famous
20:59
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Peter Minuit, chapter two, a company town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Peter Minute was not Dutch by birth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was born in the late 1500s in the town of Wessel in the Rhineland, a region of the Holy Roman Empire close to the Dutch border.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His family were well known Protestants who had fled from the southern Netherlands to escape religious persecution and like many such families they had found a home among the Protestant communities along the Rhine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Minuit himself had spent time in the Dutch Republic and had come to New Netherlands in 1625.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps as part of Verhol's expedition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When Verholst was removed, Minuit was named director of the colony.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in May of 1626.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was during Minuit's time as director that the famous purchase of Manhattan took place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our main source for this event is a single, short letter written in Amsterdam on 5 November 1626.
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[SPEAKER_00]: by a man named Peter Shagan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shagan was a representative of the government of the Dutch Republic, who served as a liaison with the West India company, and he wrote to the state's general to report on the arrival of a ship from New Netherlands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: called the Arms of Amsterdam.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The letter is brief, only a handful of lines, but it contains a remarkable sentence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shagan wrote that the settlers had purchased the island of Manhattan from the native people for the value of 60 guilders.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is all the letter says about the purchase.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It does not describe what goods were given or who took part or exactly where and when the agreement was made.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Many details of the story that are often repeated today, such as the claim that the island was bought for a handful of beads and trinkets worth $24 came much later.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The figure of $24 was calculated in the 19th century by a historian who converted 60 guilders into the currency of his own day, and it has been repeated ever since, without accounting for the changing value of money over the centuries.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The goods were probably things like cloth, kettles, axes, hoes, and other useful items, which had real value to the people who received them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The people who took part in the exchange almost certainly understood it in very different ways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To the Dutch, it was a sale, a permanent transfer of ownership recorded according to the laws of the Netherlands.
23:54
[SPEAKER_00]: To the Lenape, it was more likely understood as an agreement to share the land.
23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: or to grant the newcomers the right to use it, in exchange for gifts and an ongoing relationship.
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Some historians have also suggested that the group who made the agreement may not have been the people who primarily used the island at all, but rather a neighbouring group.
24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the understanding on each side, the purchase gave the Dutch what they wanted most.
24:23
[SPEAKER_00]: A claim to the island that they could present to the English, the French, or anyone else who questioned their right to be there.
24:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The same letter from Chargen contains another detail, one which tells us a great deal about what the colony was for.
24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It lists the cargo of the arms of Amsterdam.
24:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The ship carried 7,246 beaver skins, along with hundreds of otters skins, as well as smaller numbers of mink, wildcat, and muskrat skins.
24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It also carried a quantity of oak and hickory timber, and it brought samples of the crops the settlers had grown that some, including wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, canary seed, beans and flecks.
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Shagan noted with evident satisfaction that the settlers were in good spirits and lived in peace and that their women had born children there.
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In that same year of 1626, events far up the river brought more settlers to Manhattan.
25:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The commander at Fort Orange, a man named Daniel van Kreckerbeek,
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: had joined a party of Mohican warriors on a raid against their rivals, the Mohawks, the raid went badly, the Mohawks ambushed the party, and van Kriegerbeek and several of his men were killed.
25:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Fearing for the safety of the families living near Fort Orange, Minuit ordered most of them brought down the river to Manhattan, leaving only a small garrison of soldiers
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: From then on, Manhattan was clearly the center of the colony.
26:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The settlement that grew on the southern tip of the island in these years was small, rough and practical.
26:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Its heart was fought Amsterdam.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Built near the water at the very tip of the island, close to the place where the old United States custom house now stands, facing the green open space called bowling green.
26:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The fort was built of earth, with walls of packed sod and four pointed bastions at its corners, the kind of design that military engineers of the time favored.
26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It was never as strong as its planners hoped.
26:42
[SPEAKER_00]: the earthen walls crumbled in the rain, and cows and pigs wandered over them, grazing on the grass and wearing them down.
26:51
[SPEAKER_00]: For much of its existence, the fort was in some state of disrepair.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Around the fort, a small village took shape.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There were perhaps 30 houses at first, built of wood with roofs of thach or reeds.
27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a counting house for the company, where furs were stored and trade goods kept.
27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a horse-powered mill for grinding grain, and in the loft above the mill, the settlers gathered for religious services until a proper church could be built.
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: A man named Bastian Jan's Crowe, who held the office of Comforter of the Sick, led prayers and red from the scriptures, since there was not yet an ordained minister in the colony.
27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Another valuable description of the early colony comes from a man named Isaac Dorassia, who served as the company's secretary in the late 1620s.
27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In a long letter, he described the harbour, the rivers, the native peoples, and the trade.
27:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Darassia also made a notable journey in 1627, sailing east to visit the English Pilgrims at their settlement of Plymouth in what is now Massachusetts.
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There, he met with the colony's governor, William Bradford, and among the goods he brought to trade was Wompum, the strings of small, carefully drilled shell beads that the native peoples of the coast valued highly.
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch had learned to use Wompum as a kind of money in the fur trade, and Doracia's visit helped introduce it to the English as well.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Wompum, which the
28:37
[SPEAKER_00]: would serve as a common currency in New Netherlands for decades, used for everyday purchases in the streets of New Amsterdam alongside coins.
28:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In these same early years, another group of people arrived in New Amsterdam who did not come by choice.
28:55
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1626 or 1627, the West India Company brought a group of enslaved African men to the colony, most likely taken from Portuguese or Spanish ships that Dutch private years had captured.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Records preserve some of their names.
29:13
[SPEAKER_00]: There was Paolo Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese, a man known as Big Man Well, and another called Little Man Well, among others.
29:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Their names often recorded the places, or the people associated with their past, such as Angola or the Congo.
29:35
[SPEAKER_00]: which suggests that many came from the region of West Central Africa where the Portuguese had long been active in the slave trade.
29:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A few years later, several African women were also brought to the colony.
29:50
[SPEAKER_00]: These men and women belonged to the company itself and they were put to work on the hardest tasks the settlement required.
29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They cleared land, cut timber, built roads, worked on the fort
30:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Slavery in New Amsterdam was, in some respects, different from the forms it would later take in other colonies.
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Inslaved people in the early Dutch colony could own some property, could marry in the church, could testify in court, and could bring legal complaints.
30:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Some would eventually gain a limited form of freedom, as we will see, but they were still enslaved.
30:33
[SPEAKER_00]: held against their will and forced to work without pay and the foundations of the colony were built in part by their labour.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a part of the story that was long overlooked and which historians in more recent times have worked hard to recover.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: As the years passed, the leaders of the West India Company grew increasingly concerned about the slow growth of their colony.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The fur trade
31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: and the colony cost a great deal to maintain.
31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The company had no great desire to pay for the transportation of large numbers of settlers itself.
31:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, in 1629, it adopted a new plan, set out in a document called the charter of freedoms and exemptions.
31:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Under this charter, any member of the company who agreed to bring 50 adult settlers to New Netherlands within four years, at his own expense, would be granted a large estate of land along the rivers.
31:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He would be known as a patrune, and he would hold powers somewhat like those of a lord of a medieval manner.
31:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He could establish chords, appoint officials, and collect
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea was that wealthy investors would pay to populate the colony, relieving the company of the burden, while the company kept control of the valuable fur trade for itself.
32:01
[SPEAKER_00]: several patrunchips were attempted, but nearly all of them failed.
32:06
[SPEAKER_00]: One was established on the western shore of the Hudson, across from Manhattan, in the area the Dutch called Pavonia, which today forms part of Jersey City.
32:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Another called Swan and Dale, meaning Valley of Swams was founded on the shores of Delaware Bay.
32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It came to a terrible end in 1632, when the entire settlement of more than 30 colonists was destroyed in a conflict with the local native people, which began, according to later accounts, with a dispute over a sheet of tin bearing the coat of arms of the Dutch Republic.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Only one patrune ship truly succeeded.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It belonged to a wealthy Amsterdam diamond and pearl merchant named Killian Van Rensselier, one of the directors of the West India Company.
33:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He claimed in enormous stretch of land on both sides of the Upper Hudson River around Fort Orange, eventually amounting to hundreds of thousands of acres, and he named it Rensselier's Wick.
33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Van Rensselier never visited his estate.
33:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He managed it entirely from Amsterdam, writing long letters of instruction to his agents and sending over farmers, carpenters, millers and other workers.
33:27
[SPEAKER_00]: His estate survived in one form or another for more than two centuries, and the van rents a little family remained among the most powerful landowners in New York.
33:38
[SPEAKER_00]: until the middle of the 1800s, when tenant farmers finally rose up against the old system of rents.
33:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter Minuit's time as director came to an end in 1631.
33:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He was recalled to the Netherlands, partly because of disputes between the company and the patrumes, in which Minuit was thought to have
34:03
[SPEAKER_00]: On his voyage home, his ship was blown into the English port of Plymouth, where English authorities seized it, claiming that the Dutch were trading illegally on lands that belonged to England.
34:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The ship was eventually released, but the incident was a sign of things to come.
34:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The English had never accepted the Dutch claim to New Netherland, and their growing colonies to the north and south would press on the Dutch colony for decades.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who replaced Minuit as director in 1633 was named Wouter Van Twiller.
34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a young clock.
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: from the company's warehouse is in Amsterdam, and he was also a nephew of the Patrune Kilian Van Rensselier, which may have helped him obtain the position.
34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Van Twillers' time as director is remembered less for any greater achievement than for a general air of disorder.
35:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Later critics accused him of drinking heavily, of quarrelling with the minister, and of using his office to enrich himself.
35:09
[SPEAKER_00]: He acquired a number of farms and properties for himself, including Nut Island, the small island in the harbour, where some of the first settlers had landed.
35:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Later, under English rule, the island would be set aside for the use of the colony's governors, and that is how it came by the name it carries today, Governors Island.
35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: to be fair to Van Twiller, the colony did grow and build during his time.
35:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Several new houses were constructed for the company's officials, a new wooden church was built near the waterfront, and a new minister arrived to lead it, a man named Everardus Bogardus.
35:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Bugardus was a passionate and strong-willed creature, and he would clash repeatedly with Van Twiller, and with the director who came after him.
36:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He married a widow named Anakin Jans, who owned a large farm along the Hudson shore of Manhattan, and the land she owned would become the subject of lawsuits and legends for centuries after it.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Van Twiller also faced the growing challenge of the English.
36:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1633, the Dutch built a small trading post on the Connecticut River, which they called the House of Hope near the site of the modern city of Hartford.
36:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Within a few years, English settlers from Massachusetts were moving into the Connecticut River Valley in large numbers.
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: surrounding the little Dutch post and building their own towns.
36:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch protested, but there was little they could do.
36:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The English simply had far more people.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: While New Netherland counted its population in the hundreds, the colonies of New England were growing into the tens of thousands.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1630s, the little town at the tip of Manhattan was beginning to be known by the name New Amsterdam.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It was still very small.
37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: A visitor walking from the fort to the edge of the settlement would pass only a few streets of houses, gardens
37:16
[SPEAKER_00]: a patchwork of farms, which the Dutch called Boweries, stretching up along the eastern side of the island.
37:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond the farms lay forests and fields that remained, for the most part, the land of the Lenape, pings roamed freely through the streets.
37:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Boats were pulled up on the shore, the sounds of many languages could be heard at the waterfront, the leaders of the West India company, looking at their colony from the far side of the ocean were not satisfied.
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not growing as quickly as they had hoped.
37:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It was costing them money, and it seemed to be poorly governed.
37:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1637, they recalled Van Twiller and chose a new director.
38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: They hoped he would bring order, discipline, and profit to new Netherlands.
38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he would bring the colony to the edge of ruin.
38:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Willam Keeft arrived in New Amsterdam in March of 1638.
38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a merchant from a respectable Amsterdam family, but his earlier career had been marked by misfortune.
38:35
[SPEAKER_00]: According to some accounts, he had been entrusted with money to ransom Christian captives held in North Africa and had managed the task poorly.
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the truth of these stories, the West India company now
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: with instructions to restore order and make the colony pay.
38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: What Keith found on his arrival dismayed him, the fort was falling apart.
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: its walls crumbled and trampled by livestock, its guns dismounted.
39:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Several of the company's farms lay empty and neglected.
39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The company's ships were in poor condition and the windmills did not work properly.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The colonists he believed had grown lacks and disordling,
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He forbade the sale of guns and gunpowder to the native peoples.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He set rules for trade and for the hours of the taverns.
39:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He ordered that sailors returned to their ships by nightfall.
39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: He was determined to govern firmly, and he governed largely alone.
39:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a council, but it consisted of only one other member, and Keith held two votes to that member's one.
39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: At around the same time, the West India Company made an important change in its policy towards the colony.
39:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1639 and 1640, it gave up its monopoly on the fur trade, and opened the colony to private traders and settlers, so long as they paid duties to the company.
40:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It also offered new and more generous terms for those who wish to settle and farm the land.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The results were felt quickly, new settlers arrived, not only from the Netherlands but from many other places, including a growing number of English families from New England.
40:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of whom were seeking relief from the strict religious rule of the Puritans in Massachusetts.
40:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Farms began to spread across Manhattan and onto the surrounding lands.
40:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the East River, on the western end of Long Island, Dutch and Walun Farmers settled in the area that would later become Brooklyn.
40:49
[SPEAKER_00]: To the north, across the narrow river at the top of Manhattan, a settler named Jonas Brunk established a large farm in 1639.
40:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a Scandinavian sea captain.
41:03
[SPEAKER_00]: probably from Sweden or Denmark.
41:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And the river that flowed past his land came to be called Bronx River.
41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In time, the entire surrounding area would take its name from him, and it is known today as the Bronx.
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: New Amsterdam itself grew lively.
41:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1642, a large stone tavern was built near the waterfront to serve visitors and traders called the City Tavern.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In that same year, a new stone church was built inside the walls of the fort, replacing the old wooden church.
41:42
[SPEAKER_00]: According to a story told by one of the colonies early visitors, the money for the church was raised at a wedding feast.
41:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The minister, Bogardus, was celebrating the marriage of his stepdaughter.
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And after the guests had enjoyed several rounds of drinks, Keith took out a subscription list.
42:04
[SPEAKER_00]: and invited them to pledge money toward the new church.
42:08
[SPEAKER_00]: In the cheerful mood of the celebration, the guests competed with one another in generosity.
42:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, some of them regretted their pledges, but Keith would not allow anyone to withdraw.
42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most vivid descriptions of New Amsterdam in this period comes from a French Jesuit priest named Isaac Joges.
42:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Joges had been working as a missionary among the Huron people of New France when he was captured by the Mohawk's in 1642.
42:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He endured terrible suffering as a prisoner and in the summer of 1643.
42:45
[SPEAKER_00]: with the help of Dutch officials and traders at Fort Orange.
42:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He escaped and was taken down the river to New Amsterdam.
42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Keith received him kindly, gave him clothing, and arranged passage for him back to Europe.
42:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Joges later wrote a brief description of the colony.
43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He noted that the island was home to people of many nations and that, according to the director, 18 different languages could be heard there.
43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw Catholics and Protestants, Puritans and Lutherans and Anabaptists all living together under Dutch rule.
43:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Joges later returned to North America and was killed by the Mohawk's in 1646.
43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He is now honored as a saint in the Catholic Church, but beneath this growth, troubles were building.
43:35
[SPEAKER_00]: As more settlers arrived and more farms were cleared, the relationship between the colonists and the Lenape grew more strained.
43:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Farmers cattle and pigs wandered into the unfenced cornfields of native villages and trampled or ate the crops.
43:53
[SPEAKER_00]: When the Lenape killed the animals, the colonists demanded payment.
43:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Traders sold alcohol to native men, which led to violence.
44:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Disputs overland arose constantly, since the two people continued to understand ownership in very different ways.
44:12
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1639,
44:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Keeft made a decision that deeply angered the native peoples around the harbour, claiming that the Dutch protected them from their enemies and that the fort was expensive to maintain.
44:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He demanded that the Lenape communities pay a tribute to the company in corn, furs or womper.
44:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The Lenape were astonished.
44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They had not asked for Dutch protection, and they had allowed the Dutch to live among them, sharing their land and their trade.
44:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Why, they asked, should they now pay for the privilege?
44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1640, some pigs went missing from a farm on Staten Island, kift blamed the raritan people who lived nearby, and sent a party of soldiers to punish them.
45:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Several raritans were killed, and their crops were destroyed.
45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It later turned out that the pigs had likely been taken by Dutch colonists themselves, or by the crew of a passing ship.
45:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The Rarrittons retaliated by attacking a farm on Staten Island, killing several of the workers.
45:22
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1641,
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Another incident deepened the crisis, an elderly Dutch wheelwright named Clay Switz, who lived near the place now called Turtle Bay on the east side of Manhattan, was killed by a young man of the Weckway's geek people.
45:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The young man explained that years earlier, as a boy, he had watched his uncle killed by Dutch colonists,
45:48
[SPEAKER_00]: and that he had sworn to avenge him, when Kift demanded that the young man be handed over for punishment, the Wekwiskeak refused.
45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Kift wished to go to war, but he knew that he could not do so without the support of the colonists, who would bear the risks.
46:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, in August of 1641, he did something that had never been done before, in New Netherlands.
46:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He called
46:17
[SPEAKER_00]: and asked them to choose 12 men to advise him.
46:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This body, known simply as the 12 men, was the first representative assembly of any kind in the Dutch colony.
46:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The 12 men agreed that the killing of swits should be avenged, but they urged caution and delay, and having been given a voice they used it.
46:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They presented Keeft with a list of requests for reforms in the government of the colony.
46:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They asked for a larger council for the right of the people to have a say in public affairs and for other changes that would limit the director's power, Keeft was not pleased.
47:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He thanked the 12 men for their service and dissolved them for bidding any further public meetings without his permission.
47:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea that the colonists might have a voice in their own government had been planted and it would not go away.
47:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The crisis came to a head in the winter of 1643.
47:19
[SPEAKER_00]: In February,
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A large force of Mohawk warriors, armed with guns they had acquired through trade with the Dutch at Fort Orange, came down the river to demand tribute from the Weckwees Geek, the Tappen and other river peoples, fleeing the Mohawks.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: hundreds of these people sought refuge near the Dutch settlements.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Some camped at Pavonia, on the western shore of the Hudson, across from Manhattan, and others at a place called Caller's Hook, on the eastern shore of Manhattan itself.
47:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They had come, in a sense, seeking the protection that Keeft had once insisted the Dutch provided, Keeft saw an opportunity.
48:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the warnings of several of the colony's leading men, including a respected patrune and sea captain named David DeVries, who pleaded with him not to proceed, keyfed ordered his soldiers to attack the refugees.
48:21
[SPEAKER_00]: On the night of the 25th of February, 1643, Dutch soldiers crossed the river to Pavonia and attacked the sleeping camp.
48:31
[SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, a group of colonists attacked the refugees at Callears Hook, around 120 people were killed, including many women and children, Devries, who were staying at the fort that night, later wrote that he heard the cries from across the water.
48:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and was horrified by what he witnessed.
48:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The attack is remembered today as the Pavonia massacre, and it remains one of the darkest moments in the history of the colony.
49:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequences were swift and terrible.
49:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Native peoples across the region who had previously been divided among themselves united against the Dutch.
49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Within weeks, war parties were attacking farms and settlements
49:18
[SPEAKER_00]: farmhouses were burned, cattle were killed, and colonists were slain or taken captive.
49:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Families fled their farms and crowded into new Amsterdam, seeking the protection of the fort.
49:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The settlements on Long Island, Staten Island, and the mainland were nearly all abandoned.
49:38
[SPEAKER_00]: For a time, the colony shrank back almost entirely to the southern tip of Manhattan, where the frightened settlers huddled behind the decaying walls.
49:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the victims of the war was a woman who had become famous or notorious in the English colonies to the north.
49:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Her name was
49:58
[SPEAKER_00]: was Anne Hutchinson, a deeply religious woman with strong opinions.
50:03
[SPEAKER_00]: She had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1638 for her religious teachings, which the Puritan authorities considered dangerous.
50:14
[SPEAKER_00]: After living for a time in Rhode Island, she moved with her family to Dutch territory in 1642, settling in what is now the Northeastern Bronx,
50:25
[SPEAKER_00]: near a river that is today called the Hutchinson River.
50:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1643, a war party attacked the Hutchinson farm, Anne Hutchinson and most of her household were killed.
50:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Only her young daughter Susanna survived, taken captive and held for several years before she was returned to the English.
50:47
[SPEAKER_00]: the Hutchinson River Parkway, which today carries traffic through the northern Bronx and West Chester, is named after the river, and through it after her.
50:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1643, with the colony in crisis, Keith once again turned to the colonists for support.
51:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A new body was chosen, known as the 8 men.
51:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They were even less willing than the 12 men had been to accept keyfes leadership without question.
51:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote letters directly to the West India Company and to the state's general in the Netherlands, describing the disastrous state of the colony and placing the blame squarely on keybed.
51:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In one letter, they described how the colonists were living in fear, unable to farm or trade, while their homes and crops lay in ruins.
51:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They begged for help and for a new director.
51:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The fighting continued for two more years.
51:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch hired a hardened English soldier named John Underhill, who had fought in the brutal peacock war in New England, to lead expeditions against the native villages.
51:59
[SPEAKER_00]: In the late winter of 1644, Underhill led a force of Dutch and English soldiers north, to a large village near what is now the town of Pound Ridge, in Westchester County.
52:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They surrounded the village at night and set it ablaze.
52:16
[SPEAKER_00]: hundreds of people were killed, perhaps 500 or more.
52:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them burned in their homes.
52:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the deadliest single attack of the war, and it broke the strength of the local peoples.
52:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In the midst of the war, in 1644, another significant event took place in New Amsterdam.
52:36
[SPEAKER_00]: 11 of the enslaved African men who belonged to the West India Company, including some of those who had been brought to the colony nearly two decades before, petitioned Kieft for their freedom.
52:50
[SPEAKER_00]: They had served the company for many years, and they asked to be released so that they could support their families.
52:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Kieft and his council granted what historians
53:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The men were released from their bondage and given land of their own in an area north of the town along the road leading up the island.
53:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They could farm and live as free people, but there were conditions.
53:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Each year they had to pay the company a quantity of grain and a hog and they had to work for the company when called upon.
53:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And most troubling of all, their children,
53:28
[SPEAKER_00]: both those already born and those yet to be born would remain the property of the company.
53:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The farms of these freed men and women formed a small community stretching along the area, that today includes parts of Greenwich Village, Washington Square and the neighborhoods nearby.
53:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Some historians have suggested that the company placed them there deliberately as a buffer between the town and the lands where conflict with native peoples was most likely.
54:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the reasoning,
54:02
[SPEAKER_00]: These farms represent one of the earliest free black communities in North America.
54:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following decades, other enslaved people would also gain their freedom and a number of free black families became landowners and members of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam.
54:21
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1645, both sides were exhausted.
54:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Through the efforts of several leaders on both sides and with the help of the mohors, who had their own interest in peace along the river, a treaty was finally signed at Fort Amsterdam at the end of August.
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: 1645, the war that historians call Keith's war was over.
54:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It had cost the lives of perhaps 1,600 native people and dozens of colonists.
54:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Farms and villages across the region lay in ashes.
55:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The colony that had been growing so promisingly at the start of the decade had been set back by years.
55:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The West India Company had heard enough.
55:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The complaints of the eight men, the reports of the war and the financial losses, convinced the directors in Amsterdam that Keith had to go.
55:19
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1646, they selected a new director, a man who had already shown his toughness in the company's service in the Caribbean.
55:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Preparations and delays meant that it would be many months before he arrived.
55:34
[SPEAKER_00]: when he finally did.
55:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1647, Keith prepared to return home.
55:42
[SPEAKER_00]: In August of 1647, Keith boarded a ship called the Princess Amelia bound for the Netherlands.
55:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He carried with him a substantial fortune.
55:54
[SPEAKER_00]: which his critics claimed he had gathered through his years as director.
55:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Also aboard was the minister Everardus Bugardus, who had been one of Keith's fiercest critics, preaching against him from the pulpit and calling him to account for the war.
56:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And also aboard were two of the colony's leading citizens, Cornelis Melin and Jochem Coiter, who had been members of the eight men and who were being sent back to the Netherlands to face charges brought against them.
56:23
[SPEAKER_00]: partly at Keith's urging for that criticism of the government, the voyage ended in disaster.
56:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In September, the ship lost its way in bad weather and was wrecked on the rocky coast of Wales near the entrance to the Bristol Channel.
56:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Some 80 people died, including both Keith and Bogardis, who had been enemies in life and were lost together in the sea.
56:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Melon and Kuta survived, clinging to wreckage and eventually made their way to the Netherlands
56:59
[SPEAKER_00]: and won a hearing.
57:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The colony that Keeft left behind was battered, diminished and divided.
57:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Its people distrusted their government and many had lost everything in the war.
57:12
[SPEAKER_00]: But they had also begun through the 12 men and the 8 men
57:16
[SPEAKER_00]: to find their voice and to insist that they had a right to be heard.
57:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The new director, who now stepped ashore at New Amsterdam, would have to reckon with that voice.
57:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And with the many troubles of the colony, he was a man of iron will, deep faith, and quick temper, and he walked with a wooden leg.
57:36
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Peter Stiverson.
57:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter Styversand was born around the year 1610, in the northern Dutch province of Friesland, in a small village where his father, Balthasar Styversand, served as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church.
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: He grew up in a household of strict Calvinist faith, and that faith would remain at the centre of his life.
58:13
[SPEAKER_00]: As a young man, he studied for a time at the university in the freezing town of Franica, but he left without completing his studies.
58:22
[SPEAKER_00]: A story later told about him, claims that he was expelled after a romantic scandal involving his landlord's daughter.
58:30
[SPEAKER_00]: though the evidence for this is thin, and it may be no more than gossip.
58:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Around 1630, Styversand entered the service of the West India Company.
58:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He began as a clerk, and he was sent first to a small island of the coast of Brazil, and then to the Dutch island
58:51
[SPEAKER_00]: of Kurosau in the southern Caribbean.
58:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Kurosau was an important company base, a centre of trade, a source of salt, and a staging ground for operations against the Spanish.
59:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Styverson proved capable and energetic, and in 1642 still only in his early 30s, he was made director of Kurosau and the nearby Dutch islands.
59:16
[SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1644, Styversant led an expedition to attack the island of St. Martin, which the Spanish had seized from the Dutch a few years earlier.
59:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The attack failed.
59:28
[SPEAKER_00]: During the siege, a Spanish cannonball struck Styversant's right leg shattering it.
59:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The leg could not be saved, and the surgeons amputated it below the knee.
59:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Styversant returned to the Netherlands to recover,
59:45
[SPEAKER_00]: later legends would claim that the leg was decorated with bands or nails of silver, earning him nicknames such as old silver nails.
59:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Though there is no firm evidence from his own lifetime that this was so.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_00]: What is certain is that the wooden leg became part of his identity and his heavy uneven step would become a familiar sound in the streets of New Amsterdam.
1:00:13
[SPEAKER_00]: While he was recovering in the Netherlands, Stavis and married a woman named Judith Byard, the daughter of a French Protestant minister in the city of Brader.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_00]: She would accompany him to New Netherlands and spend the rest of her life there.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1646, the West India Company appointed Stavis and Director General of New Netherlands.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_00]: along with the Dutch islands of the Caribbean.
1:00:40
[SPEAKER_00]: After many delays, he set sail with a small fleet of ships stopping in Curacao on the way.
1:00:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the 11th of May, 1647, he stepped ashore at New Amsterdam.
1:00:53
[SPEAKER_00]: According to accounts written by his critics, Stiversants arrival set the tone for the years to come.
1:01:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The colonists gathered at the shore to greet the new director.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_00]: and some of them stood for a long time with their heads uncovered as a mark of respect, while Stavisant remained with his hat on, as was the custom for a person of authority.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_00]: In a speech to the people, he is said to have declared that he would govern them as a father governs his children for the benefit of the company and of the people alike.
1:01:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It was meant as a promise of care.
1:01:29
[SPEAKER_00]: to many of the colonists who had suffered greatly under-ceived and who longed for a voice in their own affairs, it sounded more like a warning, stivers and found the town in a sorry state, years of war and neglect had left their mark.
1:01:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The fort was again in poor repair, houses were scattered and badly built, fences were broken
1:01:56
[SPEAKER_00]: rooting through gardens and damaging the earth and walls of the fort.
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Tavans were everywhere.
1:02:03
[SPEAKER_00]: One later account claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration.
1:02:07
[SPEAKER_00]: that a quarter of the buildings in the town were taverns, or shops, selling beer, brandy, and tobacco.
1:02:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Knife fights broke out in the streets, sailors and soldiers drank and crowned, and the Sabbath was not always kept as strictly as a minister's son would wish.
1:02:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Styverson set to work with characteristic energy, within weeks, he issued a series of ordinances.
1:02:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Tavans were forbidden to serve drinks during Sunday church services, and could not serve after a certain hour at night.
1:02:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone who drew a knife in anger would be fined, and if they wounded someone, the fine was greater.
1:02:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Merchants were required to use fair weights and measures.
1:02:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The fences were to be repaired, and animals kept under control.
1:02:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The building of houses was regulated, with surveyors appointed to oversee the layout of streets and lots.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, the town began to take on a more orderly appearance.
1:03:08
[SPEAKER_00]: More houses were built of brick.
1:03:11
[SPEAKER_00]: with the stepped gables that were common in the Netherlands, facing the street with their narrow ends.
1:03:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Small gardens and orchards grew behind them.
1:03:20
[SPEAKER_00]: A canal was dug along what is now broad street, lined with wooden planks, so that small boats could carry goods into the heart of the town.
1:03:31
[SPEAKER_00]: much as they did in Amsterdam itself.
1:03:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1658, one of the town streets, then called Brewer Street, became the first in the colony to be paved with cobblestones.
1:03:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The street is still there today, a short narrow lane in Lower Manhattan, and it is still paved with stones.
1:03:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It is now called stone street.
1:03:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Stuyvesant did not rule without any advice.
1:03:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Shortly after his arrival, he allowed the colonists to elect a group of 18 men, from whom he chose 9 to serve as an advisory body known as the 9 men.
1:04:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He likely expected them to support his efforts and to help raise money for repairs to the fault and the church.
1:04:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But, as with the 12 men and the 8 men before them, the 9 men soon turned their attention to the government itself.
1:04:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The most important figure among them was a young lawyer named Adrien Vandadunk.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He was educated at the University of Lydon, one of the finest universities in Europe, and he had come to New Netherlands in 1641 to serve as a law officer on Kilian Van Rensseler's greatest state up the river.
1:04:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Later,
1:04:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He acquired a large tract of land, north of Manhattan, along the Hudson.
1:04:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Vandodonk held the title of Johnk here, a Dutch term, meaning a young gentleman or square.
1:05:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The area around his estate became known as the Johnk here's land.
1:05:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And over time, that name became the name of the city of Yonkers.
1:05:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Vandodomk was curious, energetic, and deeply interested in the land and its peoples.
1:05:21
[SPEAKER_00]: He learned about the native nations, studied the plants and animals of the region, and wrote about everything he saw.
1:05:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He also believed firmly that the colonists of new Netherlands deserved the same rights that citizens enjoyed in the cities of the Dutch Republic.
1:05:40
[SPEAKER_00]: where towns people elected their own officials and ran their own local affairs.
1:05:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He collected testimony from colonists about the problems of the colony.
1:05:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1649, he and the other members of the nine men drafted a long document addressed to the state's general in the hate.
1:06:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It became known as the remonstrance of new Netherlands.
1:06:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The remonstrance was a sharp criticism of the West India Company's rule.
1:06:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It argued that the colony had been mismanaged, that the company cared only for its own profit, and that the colonists had been denied the freedoms and protections that Dutch citizens deserved.
1:06:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It praised the land itself, its rivers and forests and fertile soil and argued that, under a better government, it could become one of the finest places in the world.
1:06:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It asked that the state's general take the colony away from the company and govern in directly and that the people be given a local government of their own.
1:06:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Stivercent was furious.
1:06:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw the remonstrance as an act of disloyalty and had Vandodonk briefly arrested and his papers seized.
1:06:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But Vandodonk and two companions sailed to the Netherlands to present their case in person.
1:07:04
[SPEAKER_00]: For several years, Vandodonk remained in the haig, arguing on behalf of the colonists.
1:07:11
[SPEAKER_00]: His efforts were not entirely successful.
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The states general did not take the colony away from the company.
1:07:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1652, the company finally agreed to grant new Amsterdam a municipal government on the second of February 1653, the day of the Old Christian Festival of Candlemass, the new city government was proclaimed.
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_00]: New Amsterdam would now be governed like the cities of the Netherlands by two burger masters who served as something like mayors and a group of five sheepers who served as magistrates and judges.
1:07:54
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also a shout.
1:07:56
[SPEAKER_00]: an officer who acted as both Sheriff and Prosecutor.
1:08:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Styverson kept the right to appoint these officials himself, at least at first, and he chose men he trusted, but it was a real step towards self-governed.
1:08:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The city tavern.
1:08:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The large stone building near the waterfront was turned into the city hall, and there the new officials met to hear cases, make rules, and govern the town.
1:08:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Many historians mark 1653 as the official birth of New Amsterdam as a city.
1:08:31
[SPEAKER_00]: and with it, the beginning of the municipal government of what would one day become New York City.
1:08:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Even as the city gained its new government, danger loomed.
1:08:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1652, war broke out between England and the Dutch Republic.
1:08:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of three Anglo-Dutch wars that would be fought over the following two decades.
1:08:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The two nations were the greatest sea-faring and trading powers of their day, and they were bitter commercial rivals.
1:09:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In New Amsterdam, word arrived that the English colonies of New England might attack.
1:09:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Styversand and the new city government decided to build a defensive wall across the northern edge of the town.
1:09:19
[SPEAKER_00]: from the East River to the Hudson River.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall was built in the spring of 1653.
1:09:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a palisade made of tall wooden posts about 12 feet high, sharpened at the top and set firmly into the ground with an earthen embankment behind it.
1:09:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It ran for about half a mile across the island.
1:09:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Two gates allowed travellers in and out.
1:09:45
[SPEAKER_00]: One on the eastern side, near the waterfront,
1:09:48
[SPEAKER_00]: and the other at the road leading north up the island, which the Dutch called the Broadway.
1:09:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The attack from New England never came and the war ended in 1654.
1:10:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The war slowly fell into disrepair and its planks were often taken by townspeople for firewood, but the path that ran along its inner side remained and it took its name from the war, it is called Wall Street
1:10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: along the Delaware River, the Dutch faced a different rival.
1:10:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The colony of New Sweden founded by Peter Minutie years before had grown slowly with forts and farms along the river banks.
1:10:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1651, Styverson built a new fort on the Delaware called Fort Casimir.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: near the present town of Newcastle, Delaware, to challenge Swedish control of the river.
1:10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1654, the newly arrived Swedish governor, a man named Johann Rising, seized Fort Casimir and renamed it Fort Trinity.
1:10:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Stiversant responded the following year.
1:11:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In the late summer of 1655, he sailed south with a fleet of seven ships and more than 300 soldiers, the largest military force ever assembled in New Netherlands.
1:11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The Swedes were vastly outnumbered.
1:11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Fort Trinity surrendered without a fight, and after a brief siege, so did Fort Christina, the capital of New Sweden.
1:11:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The Swedish colony
1:11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Though many of its settlers remained on their farms, now under Dutch rule, the descendants of the Swedish and Finnish settlers would continue to live in the Delaware Valley for generations.
1:11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and some historians credit them with introducing the log cabin to North America.
1:11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But whilst stivocent and most of the soldiers were away on the Delaware, disaster struck at home, in September of 1655, a large number of native warriors, some accounts say 500 or more, arrived at New Amsterdam in dozens of canoes.
1:12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Their reasons for coming are not entirely clear.
1:12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They may have been on their way to fight other native peoples on Long Island, or they may have come in search of a particular enemy.
1:12:12
[SPEAKER_00]: But the situation was already tense.
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: A short time before, a former official named Hendrik Van Dyke, had shot and killed a native woman, whom he caught picking peaches in his orchard on the west side of Manhattan.
1:12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The warriors moved through the town, entering houses and searching them.
1:12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: and as the day went on, the tension grew.
1:12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: When Van Dyke was found, he was wounded by an arrow and fighting broke out.
1:12:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The colonists gathered as militia drove the warriors back to their canoes, but the warriors then crossed the river to Pavonia and Staten Island where they attacked the scattered farms.
1:12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next several days, around 50 colonists were killed, more than 100 were taken captive.
1:13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: and many farms were burned.
1:13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The conflict became known as the Peach War, because of the incident in Vandix Orchard.
1:13:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Stivers and hurried back from the Delaware.
1:13:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than launching a war of revenge, as Keith had done, he chose to negotiate.
1:13:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following weeks, he arranged for the release of most of the captives, paying ransoms in gunpowder, led and other goods.
1:13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He also ordered that the colonists' farms which had been spread out across the countryside be grouped together into villages that could be more easily defended.
1:13:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In these years, New Amsterdam continued to welcome newcomers from many places, though not always willingly, in September of 1654.
1:13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: A small ship arrived carrying 23 Jewish refugees, men, women and children.
1:14:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They had come from the Dutch colony of Recipe in Brazil, which had recently been retaken by the Portuguese.
1:14:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Fearing persecution under Portuguese rule, many Jewish families had fled, and this small group, after a long and difficult journey, had made their way to New Amsterdam.
1:14:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Stiversant did not want them to stay.
1:14:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote to the directors of the West India Company, asking for permission to send them away.
1:14:30
[SPEAKER_00]: expressing views about Jewish people that were common among many Christians of his time, but which were harsh and prejudiced even then, but the company's directors refused his request.
1:14:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Several of the company's own shareholders were Jewish, and the Jewish community of Amsterdam had supported the company and suffered losses in the fall of Brazil.
1:14:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1655,
1:14:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The directors wrote back, instructing Styverson to allow the Jewish refugees to live and trade in New Netherlands, so long as they cared for their own poor and did not become a burden on the company or the community.
1:15:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Even then, the Jewish settlers had to struggle for their rights.
1:15:16
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them, a butcher named Asa Levy.
1:15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: petitioned for the right to stand guard with the town's militia, rather than paying a special tax in place of service.
1:15:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And in time, he won that right.
1:15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Levy also sought and obtained the status of Berger, a citizen of the city with the right to trade, which had first been denied to Jewish residents.
1:15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He became a successful merchant and property owner.
1:15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The small community he belonged to would grow into the congregation known as Sherith Israel, which still exists in New York today, and which is the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.
1:15:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Stiver since faith made him especially intolerant of religious groups, he considered dangerous.
1:16:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He refused to allow the Lutherans of the colony to have their own minister.
1:16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: and when one arrived from the Netherlands, Stuyveson sent him home.
1:16:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He was even harsher toward the Quakers.
1:16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: a new religious movement whose members refuse to swear oaths or remove their hats before authorities and who spoke openly about their beliefs.
1:16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1657, a young quaker preacher named Robert Hodgson was arrested on Long Island, brought to New Amsterdam and severely punished.
1:16:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In response, a group of residents of the town of Flushing on Long Island,
1:16:42
[SPEAKER_00]: most of them English.
1:16:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Signed a petition addressed to Stavisant at the end of December, 1657.
1:16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It is known today as the flushing remnants.
1:16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The signers were not themselves Quakers.
1:16:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But they declared that they could not in good conscience punish people for their faith.
1:17:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote that they wished to extend love, peace and liberty to all people, even as they put it to Jews, Turks and Egyptians.
1:17:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They argued that the law of love, peace, and liberty in the Netherlands extended to all, and that they would let every person follow their own conscience.
1:17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Styverson arrested several of the signers.
1:17:30
[SPEAKER_00]: A few years later, in 1662, he arrested a flushing farmer named John Bound, who had allowed Quakers to hold meetings in his house.
1:17:41
[SPEAKER_00]: when Bound refused to pay a fine, stivison, banished him, and sent him to the Netherlands.
1:17:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But Bound went to the West India Company and pleaded his case.
1:17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1663, the directors wrote to Stivison.
1:17:57
[SPEAKER_00]: telling him firmly that he should allow people to follow their own beliefs, so long as they behaved quietly and did not disturb the peace.
1:18:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They reminded him that the city of Amsterdam had grown great by welcoming people of many faiths, and that this tolerance had drawn people and wealth to it.
1:18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Bound returned to his home in flushing, and his house still stands today.
1:18:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The flushing
1:18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: is now regarded as one of the early expressions of the idea of religious freedom in America.
1:18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite all these struggles, the colony grew during stivocens years, more than in all the years before.
1:18:41
[SPEAKER_00]: new villages sprang up across Long Island, the mainland, and up the river.
1:18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Dutch farming villages with names like broochalun, midwout, Amosfort, and new Utrecht dotted the western end of Long Island.
1:18:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They would later become Brooklyn, flat bush, flatlands, and new Utrecht, all neighborhoods
1:19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Stuyverson founded the village of New Harlem in the northern part of Manhattan, naming it after the Dutch city of Harlem.
1:19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It is known today as Harlem.
1:19:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the river, the village of Bergen was founded in 1661 in what is now Jersey City.
1:19:27
[SPEAKER_00]: and it became the first permanent European town in what is now New Jersey.
1:19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Up the river around Fort Orange, the growing town of Beverwijk took shape, a busy centre of the fur trade, the city itself filled out.
1:19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A survey of the town around 1660.
1:19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: counted a few hundred houses, and a beautiful map from that time.
1:19:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Now known as the Castelo Plan shows the town in remarkable detail.
1:19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: With its thought, its windmill, its canal, its gardens and orchards, and its rows of houses lining the streets.
1:20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: A small Latin school was opened.
1:20:08
[SPEAKER_00]: ships arrived and departed regularly, carrying furs, tobacco, timber and grain.
1:20:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The population of New Amsterdam grew to perhaps 1,500 people, and that of the entire colony to around 9,000, stivers and himself lived well.
1:20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1651, he purchased a large farm from the West India Company on the eastern side of Manhattan,
1:20:38
[SPEAKER_00]: where he built a house, a chapel, and out buildings, and where he lived with Judith and their two sons.
1:20:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch word for a farm was Bauerich.
1:20:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and the road that led from the town to Styverson's farm became known as the Bowery, a name it still carries today.
1:20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: According to a long tradition, Styverson planted a pear tree near his house which he had brought from the Netherlands.
1:21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The tree is said to have survived for more than two centuries, standing at a street corner in Manhattan until it was
1:21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: New Amsterdam was a busy, growing, and remarkably diverse town.
1:21:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It had its own city government, its own courts, its own churches, and schools, and taverns.
1:21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Its people spoke many languages and followed many faiths, and though they quarreled often with each other and with their stubborn director, they had built something that was beginning to feel permanent.
1:21:47
[SPEAKER_00]: in London, men were looking at maps of North America and considering a very different future for the town at the mouth of the river.
1:21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 The Ships in the Harbour In 1660, after years of civil war and the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the English monarchy
1:22:15
[SPEAKER_00]: the new king and his advisors were eager to build England's wealth and power, and they looked with envy and frustration at the Dutch, whose merchant ships dominated the trade routes of the world.
1:22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The English had passed a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which required that goods traded with English colonies be carried in English ships.
1:22:43
[SPEAKER_00]: sat right in the middle of England's American colonies between New England to the north and Maryland and Virginia to the south.
1:22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Dutch traders bought tobacco from English planters in Virginia and Maryland and carried it to Amsterdam avoiding English taxes and English ships to the officials in London.
1:23:03
[SPEAKER_00]: New Amsterdam looked like a great open door, through which English profits were slipping away, and there was another argument they liked to make.
1:23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: England had long claimed the entire coast of North America on the basis of voyages made by the explorer John Cabo more than a century and a half before.
1:23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In their view, the Dutch had never had any right to be there at all.
1:23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: At the center of these plans was the King's younger brother, James, the Duke of York.
1:23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: James was the Lord High Admiral of England in command of the Navy and he was also the leading figure in a new English company formed to trade along the coast of West Africa in direct competition with the Dutch West India Company.
1:23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: He was ambitious and energetic, and he was interested in both the prophets and the prestige that an American colony might bring.
1:24:01
[SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1664, King Charles granted his brother an enormous territory in North America.
1:24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The grant included all the lands between the Connecticut River and the Delaware River.
1:24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: along with Long Island and several other islands, as well as a portion of what is now main, nearly all of New Netherlands was included in the grant.
1:24:26
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only one problem.
1:24:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The land already belonged as far as the Dutch were concerned to the Dutch Republic.
1:24:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The Duke of York would have to take it.
1:24:36
[SPEAKER_00]: James assembled a small expedition.
1:24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He appointed a trusted officer named Colonel Richard Nichols to lead it and to serve as governor of the new territory once it had been secured.
1:24:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols was a loyal royalist who had fought for the king during the English Civil War and had followed the royal family into exile.
1:25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: under his command were four ships, and somewhere between three and 400 soldiers.
1:25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The expedition sailed from England in the spring of 1664, and after a long crossing arrived first at Boston, where Nichols sought support from the New England colonies.
1:25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in New Amsterdam,
1:25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Stuyvesant had heard rumours that an English fleet was coming.
1:25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In early August, he received a warning, and he began preparations for defence.
1:25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But then, a message arrived from the West India Company in Amsterdam, suggesting that the English ships were bound only for New England to settle disputes among the English colonies there.
1:25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: reassured, and with troubles brewing far up the river among the native peoples near Fort Orange, stivers and sailed north to deal with them.
1:25:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He was there when word arrived that the English ships had been sighted.
1:26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He hurried back down the river, arriving at New Amsterdam just before the English fleet appeared.
1:26:09
[SPEAKER_00]: In the last days of August, 1664, the four English ships sailed through the narrows and anchored in Graves N. Bay, off the western end of Long Island near the present neighbourhood of Coney Island.
1:26:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols landed soldiers on Long Island and quickly took control of the blockhouse,
1:26:30
[SPEAKER_00]: that guarded the ferry across the East River to Manhattan.
1:26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: English volunteers from Long Island and New England joined his forces.
1:26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he sent a message to Styversand, demanding the surrender of the town and fort.
1:26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: At this time, the Dutch and the English used different calendars.
1:26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch had adopted the newer Gregorian calendar, which had been introduced by the Pope in the 1580s, to correct the drift of the old calendar against the seasons.
1:27:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The English, being Protestant and wary of anything coming from Rome,
1:27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: still use the older Julian calendar, which by this time ran 10 days behind.
1:27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So an event that happened on one date in an English record might happen on a date 10 days later in a Dutch one.
1:27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Historians have long had to keep both calendars in mind when piecing together the events of these weeks.
1:27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Stiver since position was weak.
1:27:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Fort Amsterdam, despite all the efforts to repair it over the years, was still an earthen fort with low walls.
1:27:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Houses had been built right up against it, so close that an attacker could climb onto their roofs and look down over the walls.
1:27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The fort had perhaps 24 cannons, but its supply of gunpowder was small, by some accounts enough for only a single day of fighting.
1:27:58
[SPEAKER_00]: There were about 150 company soldiers in the garrison, and perhaps a few hundred men in the town who could bear arms.
1:28:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But many of them had little interest in fighting.
1:28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The town's wall to the north was in poor condition, and the town depended for food and supplies on ships and farms that were now cut off by the English.
1:28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The city could not withstand a long siege.
1:28:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not wish to be remembered as the man who had surrendered new Netherlands without a fight.
1:28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent messages to Nichols, asking for time and for an explanation of the English claim.
1:28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols replied politely but firmly.
1:28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He offered generous terms.
1:28:45
[SPEAKER_00]: If the Dutch surrendered peacefully, every person in the colony would keep their property, their freedom and their liberties, they could continue to trade with the Netherlands.
1:28:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They could continue to worship in their own church.
1:29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing of their way of life would be taken from them.
1:29:05
[SPEAKER_00]: but if they refused, they would face the consequences of war.
1:29:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came the episode that is perhaps the most famous moment of the entire surrender.
1:29:16
[SPEAKER_00]: John Winthrop the younger, the governor of the English colony of Connecticut, had joined Nichols, and he knew Stuyvesnt well from years of negotiations.
1:29:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Winthrop wrote a letter to Stuyvesnt, repeating Nichols' generous offer and urging him as a friend.
1:29:34
[SPEAKER_00]: to accept it and spare the town from bloodshed.
1:29:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Styverson to receive the letter in a meeting with the city's burger masters in council.
1:29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The officials asked that the letter be read aloud to the people so that they could know what terms were being offered.
1:29:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Styverson refused.
1:29:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He feared that once the people heard the terms, they would refuse to defend the town.
1:29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: when the officials insisted, stivocent, in a rage, tore the letter into pieces.
1:30:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The burgo masters were outraged.
1:30:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them gathered up the scraps of paper, carefully piece them back together, and made copies so that the people could read what the English had offered.
1:30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Word spread quickly through the town.
1:30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The people of New Amsterdam were merchants, craftsmen, and farmers, not soldiers.
1:30:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them had little loyalty to the West India Company, which had governed them poorly for years and had failed to send the soldiers and supplies they needed.
1:30:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The English terms seemed fair, perhaps even attractive.
1:30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Why, many asked, should they risk their homes, their families, and their lives for the company?
1:30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, two of the English ships sailed up past the fort and anchored in the river, their guns pointed at the town.
1:30:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Stivercent is said to have stood on the walls of the fort, beside a gunner with a lit match.
1:31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: ready to give the order to fire on the English ships.
1:31:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But two ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, Johannes, Megapolensis and his son came up to the walls and led him gently away, pleading with him not to begin a battle that could only end in the destruction of the town.
1:31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The final pressure came from the people themselves.
1:31:31
[SPEAKER_00]: A petition was drawn up, signed by 93 of the town's leading citizens, urging Styverson to accept the English terms.
1:31:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the names on the petition was that of Styverson's own son, Balthazar.
1:31:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The petition pointed out the weakness of the fort, the lack of powder and supplies, the overwhelming strength of the English, too, and the certainty that resistance would bring death and ruin to the innocent women and children of the town.
1:32:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Styversand is reported to have said that he would much rather be carried out dead than surrender.
1:32:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But faced with the United will of his people, he finally gave way.
1:32:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Representatives of both sides met at Styversand's farm, the Bauerige, to the north of the town, and there they agreed on the terms of surrender.
1:32:28
[SPEAKER_00]: set out in a document of 23 articles.
1:32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch residents would keep their property and their inheritance customs.
1:32:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They would be free to worship according to the Dutch reformed faith.
1:32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They could continue to trade with the Netherlands, at least for a time, and those who wish to leave the colony could do so, taking their belongings with them.
1:32:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldiers of the Garrison would be allowed to march out with their weapons, their flags flying and their drums beating as befitted and honorable surrender.
1:33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 8th of September 1664, according to the Dutch calendar, the Garrison of Fort Amsterdam marched out of the fort and down to the waterfront.
1:33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: There they boarded a ship called the Gideon, which would carry them back to the Netherlands.
1:33:24
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a sad irony in the choice of that ship.
1:33:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Only a few weeks before, the Gideon had arrived in the harbour carrying around 300 enslaved Africans brought from the coast of Africa to be sold to the colonists.
1:33:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols' soldiers marched into the fort, and the English flag was raised over it.
1:33:47
[SPEAKER_00]: not a single shot had been fired.
1:33:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols immediately renamed both the colony and the town in honor of his patron, the Duke of York.
1:33:58
[SPEAKER_00]: New Amsterdam became New York.
1:34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Fourth Amsterdam became Fort James.
1:34:03
[SPEAKER_00]: A few weeks later, the small garrison at Fort Orange far up the river also surrendered, and the fort and the town of Bevelweik beside it were renamed Albany.
1:34:15
[SPEAKER_00]: After another of the Duke's titles, the Duke of Albany in Scotland.
1:34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: On the Delaware, the surrender was not as peaceful.
1:34:24
[SPEAKER_00]: An English officer named Sir Robert Carr attacked the Dutch town of New Amstil near the old site of Fort Casimir after its commander refused to surrender immediately.
1:34:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The English soldiers plundered the town, killed several of the Dutch defenders, and carried off property and people.
1:34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But elsewhere, the transition was quiet.
1:34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols governed with tact and moderation.
1:34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He understood that the Dutch residents greatly outnumbered the English in the town and that their cooperation was essential.
1:35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his promises, the Dutch kept their property and their church.
1:35:07
[SPEAKER_00]: and many of the same families who had led the town under the Dutch continue to lead it under the English.
1:35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1665, Nichols replaced the Dutch form of city government with an English one, with a mayor, Alderman and a sheriff.
1:35:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The first mayor of New York was a man named Thomas Willett, an English merchant from Plymouth Colony, who had lived and traded among the Dutch for years and who spoke their language.
1:35:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Nichols also issued a new code of laws for the colony, known as the Duke's Laws, which brought English legal customs such as trial by jury to the people of New York and what of Peter Stivesett.
1:35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1665, he sailed to the Netherlands to answer charges brought against him by the West India Company, which blamed him for the loss of the colony.
1:36:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote a long defense of his actions, pointing out that the company had ignored his repeated requests for soldiers, ammunition, and supplies, and that he had been left with no real means of defending the town.
1:36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The arguments went back and forth for some time.
1:36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end, it seems that no formal judgement was ever made against him.
1:36:28
[SPEAKER_00]: His reputation was damaged, but he was not punished.
1:36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Stuyvescent could have remained in the Netherlands.
1:36:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he chose to return to the place that had become his home.
1:36:40
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1667, he sailed back across the Atlantic to New York and settled once more on his farm, the Bourage, with his wife Judith.
1:36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived there quietly for the rest of his life.
1:36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: as a private citizen under English rule, tending his farm and his family, and attending the services in the small chapel he had built.
1:37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He even became friends with Richard Nichols, and the two men, former enemies, are said to have shared meals together at Styverson's Farmhouse.
1:37:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter Styverson died in February of 1672, at around the age of 60.
1:37:19
[SPEAKER_00]: and he was buried in a vault beneath his chapel.
1:37:22
[SPEAKER_00]: More than a century later, in 1799, a new church was built on the site of that chapel.
1:37:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It is called St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, and it still stands today in the east village of Manhattan.
1:37:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Stuyverson's tomb can still be found in
1:37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The fate of New Netherlands, however, was not yet entirely settled.
1:37:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The English seizure of the colony, along with other English attacks on Dutch trading posts in West Africa, helped bring about a second war between England and the Dutch Republic, which began in 1665.
1:38:08
[SPEAKER_00]: This time, the Dutch fared well.
1:38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1667, a Dutch fleet sailed boldly up the river medway in England, and attacked the English fleet at its anchorage, burning several great warships, and towing away the flagship of the English Navy as a prize.
1:38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the most humiliating defeats in English naval history.
1:38:32
[SPEAKER_00]: When the war ended with the Treaty of Breida in July of 1667, the two sides agreed that each would keep the territories it held at the end of the fighting.
1:38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: This meant that the English would keep New York.
1:38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: and the Dutch would keep the colony of Surinam on the northern coast of South America, which they had captured from the English during the war.
1:38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch also kept the tiny island of Rung.
1:39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: in the far-off Banda Islands of the East Indies, which was one of the only places in the world where nutmeg trees grew, and to which the English had long held a claim.
1:39:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In later centuries, this arrangement was often described as the Dutch trading Manhattan for a nutmeg island.
1:39:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Though in truth, each side simply kept what it already held.
1:39:25
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time,
1:39:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch did not regard the bargain as a poor one.
1:39:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Suriname produced sugar and nutmeg was worth more than gold by weight.
1:39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Few could have imagined what the little town at the mouth of the Hudson would one day become.
1:39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, there was one more turn in the story.
1:39:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1672, England and the Dutch Republic went to war for the third time.
1:39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1673, a Dutch fleet of more than 20 ships, under the command of two captains
1:40:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The English governor at the time, a man named Francis Lovelace, was away in Connecticut.
1:40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The fort was poorly defended, and after a brief exchange of fire, its commander surrendered.
1:40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 9th of August, 1673 by the Dutch calendar.
1:40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch flag once again flew over the fort at the tip of Manhattan.
1:40:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch renamed the town once more.
1:40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: This time they called it new orange in honour of the young Prince William of Orange, who was leading the Dutch Republic in its war against England and France.
1:40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The fort was renamed Fort Villem Hendrik and Albany became Villemstadt.
1:40:50
[SPEAKER_00]: A Dutch officer named Anthony Cove was appointed governor.
1:40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and for a little over a year, the town at the mouth of the Hudson was Dutch again.
1:41:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the town's old Dutch families welcome the change.
1:41:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Others, especially the English residents, were less happy and some had their property seized, but the Dutch return was brief.
1:41:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The war was going badly for the Dutch Republic in Europe, where French armies had invaded the Netherlands itself and the Dutch needed peace with England.
1:41:26
[SPEAKER_00]: In February of 1674, the two nations signed the Treaty of Westminster, which ended the war and returned all conquered territories to their previous owners.
1:41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: new orange was to be given back to the English.
1:41:42
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 10th of November 1674 Anthony Cole formally handed the colony over to a new English governor Edmund Andrews.
1:41:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch flag was lowered from the fort for the last time, and the English flag rose in its place.
1:42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: New orange became New York once more, and this time the name would last.
1:42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The colony of New Netherlands, which had begun with a ship searching for a passage to Asia 65 years before, had come to its end.
1:42:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But in many ways, the Dutch never really left.
1:42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The families who had built new Amsterdam stayed on, and for generations, Dutch was spoken in the homes, churches, and farmhouses of New York, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley.
1:42:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Dutch reformed churches continued to hold services in the Dutch language well into the 1700s.
1:42:41
[SPEAKER_00]: and in some rural communities of the Hudson Valley, a form of the Dutch language was still spoken into the 19th and even the early 20th century.
1:42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The family names of New Neveland, names like Roosevelt, Van Buren, Vanderbilt, Skyler, and Van Courland, would become some of the most famous in American history, Martin Van Buren,
1:43:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The eighth president of the United States grew up speaking Dutch in the village of Kinderhook in the Hudson Valley and he remains the only president for whom English was a second language.
1:43:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dutch left their mark on the map as well.
1:43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Brooklyn, Harlem, Flushing, the Bowery, Wall Street, Broadway, Coney Island, Staten Island, the Bronx, Yonkers and the Waterway.
1:43:37
[SPEAKER_00]: called Sputan Doeville at the top of Manhattan, all carry traces of the Dutch colony in their names.
1:43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Small streams and channels throughout the region are still called kills from the Dutch word for a creek as in the Kilvanko, which separates Staten Island from New Jersey and the town of Peakskill and the Catskill Mountains.
1:44:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Today,
1:44:03
[SPEAKER_00]: If you walk through the narrow winding streets of the southern tip of Manhattan, you are walking in many places along the paths the Dutch laid out nearly 400 years ago.
1:44:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Pearl Street follows the old shoreline of the East River where oyster shells once lay thick along the beach.
1:44:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Stone Street still has its cobblestones.
1:44:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Broad Street follows the line of the old canal.
1:44:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Wall Street runs along the course of the old palasade.
1:44:34
[SPEAKER_00]: and Bowling Green, the small oval park at the foot of Broadway, sits where the Dutch once held their cattle market in front of the long vanished walls of Fort Amsterdam.
1:44:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The towers of the modern city rise high above these old streets now, glass and steel reaching into the sky, but beneath
1:44:56
[SPEAKER_00]: the shape of the little Dutch town remains, like the faint lines of an old drawing beneath the new painting.
1:45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The beaver traders, the wuloon farmers, the enslaved and the free, the Lenape who watched the strangers arrive, the stubborn director with his wooden leg, and the citizens who pieced together a torn letter and chose peace over war.
1:45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: All of them