How Dutch settlers got their start in the New York Harbor

In “Taking Manhattan,” author Russell Shorto writes about the deal that New Netherland Director General Peter Stuyvesant made with English military officer Richard Nicolls to transfer the Dutch colony over to English control. But before that agreement, there’s about 40 years of Dutch colonial history in the New York Harbor area. In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Fort Amsterdam, Shorto, who is also the director of the New Amsterdam Project at The New York Historical, talked about Dutch commercial aims, their relationship to Native American tribes and how New Amsterdam was a multicultural melting pot nearly 400 years ago. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Starting at the founding of the New Netherland colony, the first settlers arrived in 1624 and established themselves on Governors Island. And then the next year, move to found Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan – and that is the 400th anniversary of New York City that we’re celebrating this year. What do we know about these settlers and why they came here?

So the first ones probably arrived in 1624. They originally thought that Governors Island, which they called Nut Island, would be a logical base. And I think they were just thinking small, and it’s a smaller place. And then it took a year or so for them to realize that wasn’t going to work out. So they kind of looked across to lower Manhattan and said, no, let’s do it there. They started at Governors Island, and (with) the colony of New Netherland, they had big plans, and it was a big area. So it encompassed all or parts of five future states, New York, New Jersey, some of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware. They were, of course, aware of the English, and the notion of claiming territory at the time meant being meticulous. They wanted to negotiate treaties with the Native people for deeds, even though they knew that the Native people didn’t think of property in that way. But also they believed that you needed to have signs of settlement, and they had only a few dozen people initially, so they spread them out incredibly thinly across this vast terrain. A handful of people (went) up the Hudson River, around what is now Albany, and then some in New York Harbor, initially on Governors Island, and then later on Manhattan, and some in what they call the South River, so the Delaware (River). It was kind of like you’re holding your hands on all this territory to try to say, “No, this is ours.” And that’s why they wanted young couples. So the idea that they were founding settlements for the future and putting crops in the ground and women giving birth, that was how they signified to the wider world that they had laid claim to this territory.

You write about the immense wealth in Amsterdam during this time, with spices and products from across the world being available there. What sort of commercial aims did the Dutch have with this New Netherland territory?

The Dutch global empire begins even before they founded the Dutch East India Company in the 1590s. They had some really crazy missions to the East Indies, that is to Asia, to Indonesia, basically, in today’s terms. And it succeeded well enough that they organized a new venture, the Dutch East India Company. And in doing that, they really kind of created some of the building blocks of capitalism, the concept of shares of stock and having investors to spread around risk. And so the East India Company was founded to exploit the East Indies, that is Asia, and right away, there were huge profits from rare spices, from this trade in cinnamon and nutmeg and pepper. And then in 1621, they decided to do the same thing with the West Indies. And the West Indies meant, if you’re in Europe and looking at a map, it meant basically everything to your left, so the coast of North America, the Caribbean and coastal South America. So the Dutch West India Company was formed to exploit those areas. It took a couple of years for them to raise the capital. And then in 1624 (was) the first shipment to North America, to this colony in New York Harbor and the surrounding area.

You write about the myth of the initial purchase of the land in lower Manhattan in 1626 between Lenape and the Dutch and this purchase price of 60 guilders. Do you want to clear up the broad misconception that people have about this deal and what really happened?

So the Dutch understood that the Native people did not have notions of real estate transfer. They wanted to get deeds because that's the way they were set up themselves – their society and their mental orientation. But also they were thinking of other Europeans, so they wanted to have a deed so they could show the English or whoever else that they had gotten title to this land. At the same time, they knew the Native people didn’t think that way, and they entered into their traditions for arranging things. So their tradition would have been not a deed that says, here you go, you have this land, we’ll walk away, but rather a kind of alliance. And from the Native perspective, and thinking now about 1626, and the deed that did exist for Manhattan Island, it would have meant they were interested in European manufactured goods. So OK, we’ll arrange a treaty with you that will allow you to set up a trading post and homes, and we’ll continue to be on the island whenever it suits us. We’ll bring furs, and you’ll bring knives and kettles and things like that. And it’ll also be a defensive alliance, so if one of us is attacked, the other will help them. I think initially it’s fair to say that the Dutch entered into that thinking that that would suit them, that kind of arrangement. But very quickly, the power balance began to change, and the real force behind that change was the diseases that Europeans brought that the Native people had no immunity to, because within 10 or 20 years, you see Dutch writers or other writers saying, we went to this village, and it used to be full of people, and now it's empty, or now there's just a few people here. So the estimates were that at least 90% of the population was decimated. That is such a transformation in the balance of power, or the balance of who even am I dealing with anymore. So then those who were remaining kept trying to fight this and to deal with this new situation. Mainly meaning the decimation of their population, and then also the steadily growing numbers of Europeans. And then on the European side, it's just easier than to start just pushing them aside because there just aren't as many of them. And then that, of course, becomes the story of America, pushing people further and further west and swindling them one way or another, out of their land and everything.

In portions of your book you talk about pluralism and the mixing of cultures in the New Netherland colony. During this colonial period, what cultures did we have mixing together, and how does that impact the trajectory of the city?

The famous statistic is in 1643, a Jesuit missionary who had been captured by Native peoples further north and was freed, or he got free, and then he made his way down to New Amsterdam, and he’s visiting at the time when Willem Kieft is the director, and he reports that there are 18 languages being spoken. And my guess is that there were probably only about 500 inhabitants in New Amsterdam at the time. So 18 languages among 500 people, that’s kind of already New York City in miniature. And the writer Ross Perlin, he wrote this book last year called “Language City” that was a really interesting book about New York City and its linguistic diversity and he devotes time to the New Amsterdam period. He says that, in fact, that 18 is probably low because they almost certainly were not considering there were at least three different African languages and then if you take into consideration the Native languages spoken in the region, so among European languages, there were German speakers, Swedes, there was a couple of Danes. There was the odd Italian. There were French speakers. Of course, there were English settlers in the Dutch colony. I said the Swedes came and made an incursion into New Netherland itself. So you have a whole range of European settlers, and it’s a little misleading when you’re looking at the Dutch records, because everything seems to be Dutch, and because Dutch was the language to which people defaulted and the records were kept in Dutch.

You do note in the book that this Dutch toleration of different religions was unusual at the time for many European countries. And as you mentioned, this multicultural coalition of people coming together to make a new city sounds very familiar to the rest of New York City’s history.

I’ve had lots of Dutch people, because they like to be self-deprecating, they’ll say there never was any Dutch toleration. On the one hand, you can understand people thinking that or saying that, because, for one thing, it wasn’t so much of an ideal, necessarily, it was more of a pragmatic thing. They were in international business, and they saw it as good for business and, in order to do business in far flung corners of the world, you have to learn other languages and perspectives. So the prevailing wisdom was that intolerance should be official policy because it’s a dangerous world, and religion in particular is a divisive force. And so you want everybody to be on the same page. You want to have a state church. And the Dutch did have a state church, as did other countries, but they allowed for others, so they had built into their de facto constitution a provision that I maintained was a watershed that said each shall be free in his religion. Nobody will be persecuted or investigated because of his religion. So that meant that the Dutch Republic would be a kind of the melting pot of Europe. It was unusually multiethnic, and it defied the common wisdom. Common wisdom said, if you do that, you’re going to have chaos. But in fact, they became arguably the most powerful country, and they were this tiny country in Europe. And so when that society founded this colony with its capital on Manhattan, all that came along with it, you immediately have to start talking about Dutch intolerance. They began slavery in New York, which is a pretty intolerant thing, and then this process of dispossessing Native peoples is not especially tolerant. And then (Peter) Stuyvesant, he actually admired the intolerance of the Puritan colonies of New England. Any thought as, along with the prevailing wisdom, that if you could keep your colony pure, it would be easier to govern. And so he tried to make life miserable for Jews. The Jews in the colony, there was a small Jewish population, and for Quakers, and in both cases, they went over his head and appealed and said, there’s this policy of toleration, and he was overruled. So each of those, those then is kind of a civil rights story. There is a law that says, this is how we will set up our society. And then you have a ruler who tries to ignore that. And then people appeal, they go to court. And, with any luck, you get justice.

Peter Stuyvesant comes to New Netherland as the director general of the colony in 1647. Who he was as a leader and what were his plans for the colony?

He was the last and the longest-serving and most effective of the leaders of the colony. He was an employee of the Dutch West India Company, which had established the colony. And he initially came, and this is in my earlier book, “The Island at the Center of the World,” was the story of him initially coming in the midst of this incredible turmoil, having to do with the fact that the previous director, Willem Kieft, had declared war on the Native people in the region, against the wishes of his population, because the traders of his community basically argued we came here to do business with the Native people, not to try to exterminate them. (We) know that we’re not going to win this war, so this is a disaster, and it was a disaster. So out of that, they then petitioned the government, and the government replaced Kieft with Stuyvesant. So Stuyvesant comes in having served the company for a long time, and his last posting was in the Caribbean, and he had lost his leg in a battle there with the Spanish. So he’s this tough guy. He could have after that, the logical thing would have been OK, you did your service, you survived, you don’t have to go. But he wanted this post. They fitted him with a wooden leg, and he comes and he decides, OK, whatever has been going on here, it’s clear that they need a strong-handed leader, that these people are being given too much freedom. He comes in trying to be this real tough guy, laying down the law and referring to them as his subjects and things like that, only to learn that, in fact, this community, which had been there for some decades, were very strong-willed businesspeople. Just imagine in the 1600s, you set up trade networks from this little outpost to islands in the Caribbean and to cities in South America. They knew the world, and they were determined to exert themselves. So over the next several years, he comes to figure out, I have to have a different relationship with this place. He comes to redefine his role, and he makes his role that of a middleman between this complicated band of traders who are his populace and the directors of the West India Company in the home country, none of whom are ever going to come here, and they’re just saying, here’s what you need to do with America. He’s talking to one and talking to the other and trying to make it succeed as a commercial entrepôt. And it does succeed, and that’s one reason that the English really want it. So at the end then, where he’s in the standoff in the harbor with Richard Nicolls, the Englishman, who comes into to try to wrest it, this what I get to and the climax of the book, is that for Stuyvesant, he has tried for years to get the home country to give support to this colony. He said, look, we’re this tiny place, and we're doing trade with all different parts of the world, and we’ve got this whole continent we can expand into, but you’d need to support us, give us more people, more soldiers, more settlers, more equipment and they’re ignoring him because they’re just focused on things that are easier to make money, like the East Indies and like the Caribbean. He ultimately realizes he’s alone – he and his community are alone. And then in this deal that he hashes out, this negotiation with Richard Nicolls, because Nicolls realizes he wants not just this geography, which is what he was tasked with, just take this from the Dutch. Nicolls realizes that, in fact, he also wants this system that the Dutch have devised there, and the only way to do that is to appease them. He’s in these negotiations (and) Nicolls is willing to offer, basically, you can keep everything. Everything will stay as it is, and you keep expanding, you keep trading with distant places. Just let me take over, and let’s make it an English place. And ultimately, Stuyvesant decides that is in the best interest of the community itself, even though he knows there’s going to be hell to pay, for him, because he’s giving up the colony.