New Netherland

The colony matters for three reasons beyond its own short life. It was the most successful attempt by a European chartered company to run a settler colony as a business: the West India Company owned the trade, appointed the governor, garrisoned the forts and sold land rights to patroons, and the colony's politics for forty years were largely the politics of that arrangement. It left New York a legal and religious inheritance — Dutch property law, Dutch inheritance customs, a Reformed church establishment, and a habit of tolerating other people's worship that the English found convenient to keep. And it was a slaveholding society from its earliest years, tied into the Atlantic slave trade through Curaçao and Angola, a fact that the pleasant legend of tolerant, mercantile Manhattan has often obscured.

The evidence is awkward in ways worth stating at the outset. The colony's own records are in seventeenth-century Dutch, dispersed between Albany and The Hague, and for the first two directors they are simply gone: nothing survives of the administrations of Peter Minuit (1626–32) or Wouter van Twiller (1633–38). Many of the documents quoted below reached print only through the nineteenth-century transcriptions commissioned by the State of New York, and their English is the translators'. Population figures are estimates built backwards from tax lists, church rolls and travellers' reports, and they disagree. Where a number is contested, this entry says so.

At a glance

What did Hudson's voyage of 1609 actually find?

Henry Hudson was an English navigator in the service of the Dutch East India Company, and he was not looking for a colony. He was looking for a passage to Asia. In 1609 he took the Halve Maen north-east along the Russian coast, found the ice unbroken, turned back and sailed west across the Atlantic on the strength of a rumour that a passage might lie through the American continent at about 40 degrees north. What he found instead was a river.

Robert Juet, the ship's mate, kept a journal, and it is the only detailed eyewitness account of the voyage. The ship made land in the first days of September. On 6 September Hudson sent a boat to sound the other channel across the bay, and it was attacked on its return: Juet records that they "had one man slaine in the fight, which was an Englishman, named John Colman, with an arrow shot into his throat, and two more hurt". Colman was buried on the point that took his name. The crew's confidence in the people of the country never recovered.

On 11 September the ship went in through the Narrows, and on the 12th, in Juet's words, "there came eight and twentie canoes full of men, women and children". The Dutch traded beads, knives and hatchets for oysters, beans, corn and tobacco, and then for skins: on the 19th, "many brought us bevers skinnes and otters skinnes". The ship worked north past the Highlands, anchored below the shoals near present-day Albany, and on the 22nd sent the boat upriver until it "found it to bee at an end for shipping to goe in". They left the river on 4 October and reached Dartmouth on 7 November.

Two things follow from that account. First, the voyage established a trade, not a title. Hudson's employers read his report and cared about the beaver; the Dutch claim to the river would rest for the next half-century on occupation, forts and purchase, not on discovery. Second, the violence at the outset set a pattern: the Dutch came to the river to trade, distrusted the people they traded with, and were never numerous enough to impose their will by force.

Hudson himself did not return. Sailing for England in 1610, he was set adrift with his son and a handful of loyal men by a mutinous crew in Hudson Bay in 1611, and died there. The river kept his name; the colony did not.

Why did the States General charter a West India Company?

Because the Dutch Republic had made peace with Spain in 1609 and the peace was due to expire in 1621, and because its merchants wanted a war company on the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic model. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, had shown what a monopoly with sovereign powers could do in Asia. The West India Company, chartered by the States General on 3 June 1621, was meant to do the same in the Atlantic: trade with the Americas and West Africa, plant colonies, and make war on the Spanish Empire.

Its structure mattered for New Netherland. The charter gave the Company a monopoly of navigation and trade in the West Indies for twenty-four years, with the States General retaining sovereignty and the right to approve its instructions. Management sat with a board of nineteen directors, the Heeren XIX, drawn from five chambers — Amsterdam, Zeeland, the Maas, the North Quarter and Groningen — with Amsterdam holding eight of the nineteen seats. Amsterdam's money and ships therefore shaped the colony's fortunes far more than any colonial assembly did. The Company was also, from the beginning, a slaving company: its remit included the African trade, and its Caribbean entrepôts at Curaçao and St Eustatius would matter more to its accounts than the Hudson ever did.

New Netherland was never the Company's main venture. Brazil, captured from the Portuguese in 1630, absorbed men and money on a scale the North American settlements never approached; the Caribbean islands and the Guinea trade were more profitable. The Hudson colony was a fur factory with settlers attached, and the Company ran it as a cost centre for most of its life. That is the single most important fact about its government: decisions were made in Amsterdam by men who had never seen the river, on the advice of a director who was paid to send home pelts.

Before the Company existed, the river had already been staked out. In 1614 the States General granted a trading monopoly to a group of Amsterdam and Hoorn merchants, the New Netherland Company, whose charter of 11 October 1614 grants the trade of the coast under the name Nieuw-Nederland — one of the earliest official uses of the name — and was issued with a chart of the North River drawn within five years of Hudson's voyage. The same year the traders built Fort Nassau on Castle Island, just below the later site of Albany, a wooden post with a small garrison, which was given up after repeated flooding. Hendrick Christiaensen, who built it, was one of the first Dutchmen to trade regularly upriver, and the post was the Company's only foothold above Manhattan for a decade.

How did a trading post become a colony?

By sending families. Trade needed only a handful of men and a warehouse; a colony needed farmers who would stay through the winter, and the Company discovered in the 1620s that it could not hold a coast with a few dozen soldiers.

The first colonists came in 1624, in the Company's ship New Netherland, under Cornelis Jacobsz May and Adriaen Jorissen Tienpont: some thirty families, many of them Walloons from the southern Netherlands, French-speaking Calvinists who had been trying to leave the Spanish provinces for years. They were deliberately split between four posts — Fort Orange on the Hudson, Fort Nassau on the Delaware, a post on the Fresh River in Connecticut, and the island of Manhattan — so that a single voyage could occupy every river mouth the Company claimed. A director followed: Willem Verhulst in 1625, then Peter Minuit, who arrived in May 1626.

Minuit's first decision was to concentrate the settlers. The outlying posts were too weak to defend and too far apart to supply, so the colonists were moved to Manhattan, where a stone-and-earth fort, Fort Amsterdam, stood at the island's southern tip. The Company's own account of the colony in 1626 shows what it was doing there. In a letter of 5 November 1626 to the States General, Pieter Schagen reported that the colonists had "purchased the Island of Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; 'tis 11,000 morgens in size", and that the returning ship carried 7,246 beaver skins, several hundred otter and smaller furs, oak timber and hickory. That single cargo explains the colony's existence.

The purchase is the most quoted transaction in New York's history and the most misunderstood. Sixty guilders was a sum in trade goods — cloth, axes, knives, beads, kettles — not coin, and Schagen's letter gives no inventory. The sellers are usually identified as Canarsee from the western end of Long Island rather than the Lenape who lived on Manhattan itself, which is one reason the Dutch spent the following decades buying the same ground again from other groups, including Staten Island in 1630 and the Jersey shore in the 1640s. Whether the Lenape understood the transaction as the permanent alienation of land, or as an agreement to share it and trade, is a question the documents cannot answer; the Dutch record is the only record, and it was written by the buyers. What is certain is that the land was not empty, that the price was set by the Company, and that the colony's title rested on a series of such payments rather than on conquest.

For the next decade New Netherland was a small, anxious place. Minuit governed until 1632, when he was recalled amid complaints that he had let private trade flourish. Wouter van Twiller, who followed, was a Company clerk with a talent for land and a distaste for accounts. Population in the 1630s is usually put at a few hundred, clustered at Fort Orange and on Manhattan and the Jersey shore, with a garrison, a minister, a schoolmaster and a company store. The colony's survival depended on the fur trade, and the fur trade depended on the Mohawk and Mahican hunters who brought pelts down the river and on the Company's ability to keep Dutch, English and French traders from undercutting it.

Who were the patroons, and did their colonies work?

The Company's answer to the settler problem was to sell the problem on. On 7 June 1629 the Heeren XIX enacted the Freedoms and Exemptions, a charter of privileges for anyone who would plant a colony in New Netherland at his own expense. A patroon who shipped fifty souls over the age of fifteen within three years, a third of them in the first year, received a grant of land four leagues along one bank of a navigable river or two leagues on both banks, "and so far into the country as the situation of the occupiers will permit", with manorial rights: he could hold a court, appoint officers, and dispose of his estate by will. The Company reserved Manhattan to itself.

The most successful patroon never saw his colony. Kiliaen van Rensselaer was an Amsterdam diamond merchant and one of the Company's original directors; from 1630 he assembled Rensselaerswijck, a tract on both sides of the Hudson around Fort Orange, by buying up earlier traders' purchases of land and recruiting tenants rather than by leading a settlement himself. He argued with his agents about cattle, rents and accounts, and died in 1643 without crossing the Atlantic. His estate outlived him by two centuries. Rensselaerswijck kept its own court and its own leases, survived the English conquest, and its rent rolls were still being collected when the anti-rent tenants revolted in the 1840s.

Other patroonships were less durable. Michiel Pauw took Pavonia, the Jersey shore opposite Manhattan, and peopled it thinly; Samuel Godijn's Swanendael on the Delaware was wiped out within a year of its settlement in 1631; Cornelis Melyn's Staten Island colony was abandoned after the Indian wars of the 1640s and 1650s; Adriaen van der Donck's Colen Donck, north of Manhattan, gave its name to Yonkers and its owner to the colony's politics. The patroonships failed as a colonisation scheme for a simple reason: a manorial lord needed tenants, tenants needed security, and security needed the garrison that the patroons were not obliged to provide. What the patroons did do was to establish private property in land on a European model, with surveyed estates, rent rolls and courts, in a colony that had previously known only Company warehouses.

The Freedoms also created the constitutional quarrel that ran through the rest of the colony's life. Patroons claimed jurisdiction over their tenants; the director claimed jurisdiction over the patroons; both appealed to Amsterdam, and Amsterdam answered slowly. Van Twiller's government was accused of granting land to friends and trading on his own account. His successor, Willem Kieft, arrived in 1638 with instructions to tighten the Company's grip, and within four years had managed to unite the patroons, the colonists and the Lenape against him.

How did New Amsterdam make its money?

Furs first. The beaver trade was the reason the Company came and the reason it stayed: pelts taken by Mohawk and Mahican hunters in the upper Hudson valley and traded at Fort Orange for duffel cloth, axes, knives, kettles, tobacco and wampum. The Mohawk were the easternmost of the Haudenosaunee, and the alliance they kept with the Dutch — guns, cloth and a market for captives — outlasted the colony itself. The 1626 cargo of 7,246 beaver was exceptional but not fantastic; the trade fluctuated with European fashion and with the wars that interrupted shipping, and it was always vulnerable to smuggling. Traders from the English colonies in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and Dutch private traders working for anyone who would pay, drained the trade away from the Company's monopoly throughout the 1630s and 1640s.

By the 1640s the colony had a second economy: farming. The rich silt of the Hudson valley and the flat land of Long Island and the Jersey shore produced wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans and flax, and the colonists raised cattle, pigs and horses on the meadows. New Amsterdam became a market town and a port, with mills, breweries, a bakehouse and a ferry, and its merchants shipped grain, flour, peas, beef, pork and timber to the Caribbean, where the sugar islands could not feed themselves. That trade tied New Netherland to Curaçao and St Eustatius and to the Company's wider Atlantic system, and it grew fastest in the 1650s, when New Amsterdam's merchants traded with Virginia, New England, the Caribbean and the Netherlands in defiance of the English Navigation Act of 1660.

The third economy was coerced labour. The Company brought enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam from its earliest years — the first are usually dated to 1626–27, when Company servants were set to clearing land and building fortifications — and by the 1650s enslaved people were being bought and sold privately in the town. A complaint lodged with the States General in 1656 by a Spanish merchant, Juan Gallardo, describes a cargo of Africans sold at New Amsterdam, "some of these negroes ... still on hand here, with divers inhabitants, as bond slaves, purchased and paid for", and records that most had already been resold two or three times. The director and council refused to return them on the ground that the buyers had paid in good faith. There were also indentured servants, Company soldiers paid partly in land, and a floating population of sailors, traders and refugees.

The Company's own finances were another matter. New Netherland rarely paid for its garrison, and after the Brazilian adventure collapsed in the 1640s the Heeren XIX had little to spend on a colony that produced furs and arguments. The colonists' answer was to tax themselves and ask for self-government, a demand that Amsterdam resisted for as long as it could.

Why did the Dutch fight the Lenape in the 1640s?

Because Willem Kieft decided to tax people he could not govern. In 1639 Kieft demanded a contribution in maize, wampum and pelts from the Lenape communities around Manhattan and the lower Hudson, on the argument that the Company protected them from their enemies. The demand was resented and only partly paid. In 1640 a group of Raritans on Staten Island, accused of stealing pigs, were attacked by Dutch soldiers, and several were killed and their crops destroyed; the Raritans retaliated by burning the Dutch settlement on the island. In 1641 a Dutchman, Claes Cornelissen Swits, was killed by a Raritan, and Kieft demanded the culprit be handed over for punishment.

The demand exposed the weakness of the Dutch position. The Lenape had no single authority who could deliver an accused man, and they had no intention of surrendering one to a court they did not recognise. Kieft convened twelve leading colonists for advice in 1641, then dissolved them within months for presuming to sit as a representative body. In February 1643 he ordered an attack on the Lenape who had taken refuge near the Dutch farms, and on the night of 24–25 February two parties of soldiers and burghers fell on the encampments at Pavonia, on the Jersey shore, and behind Corlaer's plantation on Manhattan.

The killing was indiscriminate and was understood as such at the time. Adriaen van der Donck, the colony's advocate and later its historian, wrote that "at which two places about eighty Indians were killed, and thirty were taken prisoners", and that the dead included women and children surprised in their sleep. The interrogatories later put to the Company's secretary, Cornelis van Tienhoven, ask whether he had not seen Kieft "cause a party of Indians, our friends, to be massacred with women and children in their sleep". Kieft's own council had not approved the attack; the colonists were appalled, and the Algonquian peoples of the region were united against the Dutch within days.

The war that followed lasted two years. Dutch farms were burned, settlers withdrew to the fort, and the Company's trade collapsed. In the winter of 1643–44 a Dutch force with English volunteers crossed to the country east of the East River and attacked a Lenape winter camp; Van der Donck, who was present, says that more than five hundred were killed and that some said seven hundred, with eight men escaping. Peace was patched together in 1645, on terms that neither side trusted. The war left the colony's population lower than it had been, its finances ruined, and its politics poisoned: the colonists blamed Kieft, the Company blamed the colonists, and both sides sent delegations to the States General.

Kieft was recalled in 1646, and died in the wreck of the ship carrying him home. His war is the single most consequential event of the colony's first thirty years, and the one most often left out of the New York story: it established that the Dutch could not impose their will on the Lenape by force, and that the Company would not pay for the attempt.

What did Stuyvesant try to impose?

Peter Stuyvesant arrived in May 1647 with a soldier's instincts and a reformer's brief. He had lost a leg in the Company's service in the Caribbean and had been governor of Curaçao; he was authoritarian, industrious, honest about money and impatient with anyone who questioned him. Within a year he had reorganised the colony's finances, repaired the fort, regulated the taverns, appointed fire wardens, and begun the campaign against smuggling that the Company wanted.

He also had to govern with the colonists. The Nine Men, a board of leading inhabitants elected to advise the director and audit the accounts, became the nucleus of a colonial politics that looked to the States General rather than to Amsterdam. In 1649 their spokesman, Adriaen van der Donck, carried a remonstrance to The Hague setting out the colony's grievances — arbitrary government by a company, no voice in its own affairs, land granted to favourites, trade monopolised — and asking the States General to take New Netherland under its own protection. The States General did not abolish the Company, but it did order reforms, and the colony's affairs were debated in The Hague for years afterwards.

Stuyvesant's answer to the boundary problem was war by other means. The English colonies to the east had been encroaching on the Connecticut valley and Long Island for two decades, and in September 1650 commissioners met at Hartford and agreed a line running north from Greenwich Bay, with the Dutch to keep the west. The agreement was never ratified and the English kept coming; within a decade Dutch authority on Long Island was confined to the western towns.

Three years later the town got a municipal government of its own. From 1653 New Amsterdam had burgomasters and schepenen, its own court and its own seal, and the villages around it — Breukelen, Midwout, Amersfoort, Flushing, Gravesend, Hempstead — had magistrates and town patents of their own. In December 1653 the burgomasters and the deputies of seven villages, English and Dutch together, signed a remonstrance to the States General that is the most representative petition the colony ever sent. It was also, from Stuyvesant's point of view, a nuisance.

Stuyvesant's most spectacular success was the destruction of New Sweden. The Swedes had planted a colony on the Delaware in 1638 and taken Fort Casimir from the Dutch in 1654; in September 1655 Stuyvesant sailed south with the Company's ships and several hundred men, retook Casimir without a shot on the 11th, and received the surrender of Fort Christina a few days later on terms that guaranteed the Swedish settlers their property and the Augsburg Confession. New Sweden ceased to exist as a political entity; its people stayed, and the Delaware valley became a Dutch, and then an English, colony with a Swedish and Finnish population.

That victory was overshadowed within a week. On 15 September 1655, while the expedition was away, several hundred Munsee in some sixty canoes landed at the south end of Manhattan, filled the streets, and were persuaded by the council to leave at sunset. As they were embarking, a scuffle broke out and a Dutchman, Hendrick van Dyck, was wounded by an arrow; the fiscal, Cornelis van Tienhoven, ordered the guard to fire, and three men on each side were killed. The Munsee then crossed to Pavonia and Staten Island, where they burned farms, killed cattle and carried off prisoners. Stuyvesant later reported 40 Christians killed and about 100 taken captive, 28 farms destroyed and 12,000 skipples of grain burned. The immediate cause is usually given as Van Dyck's killing of a Munsee woman he caught picking peaches in his orchard; the deeper cause was the resentment left by the conquest of New Sweden, whose Susquehannock trading partners had no interest in seeing the Dutch take the Delaware.

Did the Dutch really tolerate other religions?

Enough to be useful, not enough to be principled. The Dutch Reformed Church was the colony's public church, paid by the Company, and its ministers — Jonas Michaelius from 1628, Everardus Bogardus from 1633, Johannes Megapolensis at Fort Orange and later New Amsterdam — regarded the colony's non-Calvinists as a problem to be managed. The Company's policy, which the directors repeated to every governor, was freedom of conscience but not freedom of public worship: no one was to be examined in his faith, but only the Reformed Church was to hold services.

That policy was a commercial instrument. The Company needed settlers from wherever it could get them — Lutheran Scandinavians, German and French Protestants, English Puritans from New England, Sephardic Jews from Brazil — and it could not afford to ask about their theology. In practice the line was tested repeatedly. Lutherans petitioned for a minister in 1649 and were refused. Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil arrived in 1654 and were permitted to remain and to bury their dead, though not to build a synagogue; Stuyvesant objected and was overruled by Amsterdam, where the Jews included substantial shareholders. Quakers were another matter: Stuyvesant arrested and banished them, and in 1657 the town of Flushing, whose patent of 1645 had promised liberty of conscience, sent him a remonstrance signed by thirty inhabitants.

The Flushing Remonstrance of 27 December 1657 is worth quoting, because it states the case in the colonists' own words. The signatories refused to "stretch out our hands against" the Quakers, and grounded their refusal in the law of the Dutch state: "The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland". It is a plea for toleration, not a doctrine of separation of church and state, and its authors were themselves members of a Dutch Reformed town with an English majority. When the English took the colony in 1664 they kept the arrangement and guaranteed it in the articles of capitulation: "The Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their consciences in Divine Worship and church discipline."

The limits matter. Toleration did not extend to public worship outside the Reformed Church, to Catholics in office, or to enslaved people, who were baptised only rarely and whose marriages and families had no legal standing. New Netherland was a plural society, but it was not a liberal one, and its pluralism was the by-product of a labour shortage rather than a theory of rights.

How did the colony fall, and what did Breda settle?

By a grant, a fleet and a shortage of gunpowder. On 12 March 1664 Charles II gave his brother James, Duke of York, a patent for all the land between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers, including Long Island, Martha's Vineyard and the Dutch settlements in between. The grant ignored the Dutch claim entirely, and the Duke's agents had been preparing an expedition since the previous year. In August 1664 a squadron under Richard Nicolls appeared off New Amsterdam, landed at Gravesend, and demanded the surrender of a colony whose charter came from a state with which England was not at war.

Stuyvesant wanted to fight. The town did not. Its merchants had more to lose from a bombardment than from an English governor, the fort's walls were crumbling, and there were fewer than a thousand pounds of powder in the magazine, much of it spoiled; Stuyvesant's own report to the States General afterwards blamed the Company for starving the garrison of powder and men. A petition of the burghers and the council pressed him to negotiate, and on 27 August Old Style — 6 September by the calendar the Dutch used — the articles of capitulation were signed at the governor's bouwerie. The terms were generous: Dutch property, inheritance and religion were guaranteed, the town was to choose deputies, the Company's soldiers were to march out with honours, and the article which mattered most for the future provided that if the kings of England and the Netherlands ever agreed to restore the place, it should be handed back. The English renamed the town New York by order of 7 September, and Fort Orange became Albany.

The war ended in Europe two years later, with New France and Denmark fighting alongside the Dutch. The Treaty of Breda, signed on 31 July 1667, applied the principle of uti possidetis: each side kept what it held on 20 May 1667. The Dutch had taken Suriname from the English in February 1667, and they kept it; the English held New Netherland, and they kept it; the English gave up their claim to the island of Run in the Banda Islands, and the Dutch kept their Caribbean empire intact. The Dutch instruction to their plenipotentiaries at Breda had offered the English a choice between mutual restitution and uti possidetis, and the English chose the second.

This is where the popular account needs correcting. New Netherland was not traded for Suriname in a clause of the treaty. No article names the two colonies as an exchange; the treaty confirmed a military situation, and the situation happened to leave the Dutch with a sugar colony worth more than a fur colony and the English with a harbour worth more than either. The exchange is a later summary of the outcome, accurate in substance and misleading in form: it implies a bargain that nobody struck.

Was there a Dutch restoration?

Yes, for fifteen months, and it is the part of the story most often forgotten. In the Second Anglo-Dutch War a Zeeland squadron under Cornelis Evertsen and Jacob Benckes, having raided the Chesapeake, appeared off New York in August 1673. The fort was taken on 9 August; the Admiralty's own report to the States General records that the commanders "became masters of the principal fortress situate on the Island Manhates, on the 9th of August". The province was renamed New Orange, Anthony Colve was installed as governor, and the Dutch set about governing again, appointing magistrates, administering oaths and calling on the towns to send deputies.

The colony they recovered was not the one they had lost. The town corporation wrote to the States General on 8 September 1673 estimating the Dutch inhabitants at "about six to seven thousand souls", scattered and vulnerable, and asking for troops. The States General, negotiating at Cologne, offered Charles II in December 1673 to restore New Netherland in return for a reciprocal restoration of Dutch conquests. The Treaty of Westminster of February 1674 ended the war on terms of restitution, and the English reoccupied New York later that year. The Dutch never returned.

The afterlife was longer than the colony. Dutch remained the language of church, court and household in parts of New York and New Jersey into the eighteenth century; Dutch surnames, place names and property law survived; the Reformed Church kept its privileges under the English until the Anglican establishment of 1693; and the patroon estates of the Hudson valley shaped the region's politics down to the nineteenth century. New York City was the first capital of the United States, and the Dutch street plan of lower Manhattan survived under the American grid. Washington Irving's comic History of New-York of 1809 fixed the pipe-smoking, pantalooned Dutchman in the anglophone imagination and buried the actual colony under a joke that is still being dug out. For the wider Atlantic, the more consequential legacy was the Dutch Caribbean: Curaçao, St Eustatius, Saba and St Maarten passed through British occupations and Dutch recoveries to become, in the nineteenth century, the colony of Curaçao and Dependencies and eventually the Netherlands Antilles.

What can the records not settle?

Almost every number in the story is an estimate, and the disagreements are worth knowing. The population of New Netherland in 1664 is usually given as about 9,000, with some 2,500 in New Amsterdam, but that figure is reconstructed from tax lists, militia rolls and the reports of English officials who had reason to exaggerate the prize; the Dutch corporation's own estimate nine years later was 6,000–7,000. The number killed in Kieft's massacre is given as eighty by Van der Donck and higher by later writers. The number killed in the 1643–44 winter attack ranges from five hundred to seven hundred in Van der Donck's own text. The date of Fort Christina's surrender in 1655 varies by a few days between the Company's own letter and the English accounts, which give 15 September. The price paid for Manhattan is recorded as sixty guilders of goods and has been converted into dollars at nineteenth-century exchange rates ever since.

The deeper uncertainty is interpretive. The nineteenth-century historians who first wrote New Netherland's history — Brodhead, O'Callaghan, the compilers of the colonial documents — saw a failed colony: a company that mismanaged its estate, a people who never became a nation, a Dutch interlude before the real story of New York began. That view has been under revision since the 1970s, as the Dutch records were translated and published and as historians began to treat the colony as a case study in early modern Atlantic commerce rather than as a failed England. The revision has produced a better colony and a more complicated one: commercially vigorous, socially stratified, dependent on enslaved labour, governed by a company that could neither pay for it nor let it go.

What remains genuinely open is the Lenape side of the story. The records of the people who sold Manhattan, burned Pavonia and took the captives of 1655 are oral, archaeological and reconstructed; the Dutch wrote down what they wanted to remember. A history of New Netherland that reads only the Dutch documents will always be a history of the Dutch in New Netherland, which is not the same thing.

Common myths about New Netherland

Timeline of New Netherland

What the map shows next

At 1650 on the map the colony is drawn at its widest, taking in the Hudson valley and the Delaware, the Guiana coast, and the Company's Brazilian conquests as far south as Pernambuco. That shape is generous: by 1650 the Dutch held Manhattan, Fort Orange and the western end of Long Island firmly, contested the Delaware with the Swedes, and had already lost ground in Connecticut.

At 1670 on the map the mainland has gone. The polygon has shrunk to the Caribbean and the Wild Coast, where the Company's islands and Suriname outlasted the colony by a century and a quarter. At 1673 on the map the Dutch are back on Manhattan for fifteen months, but the border data does not show it; at 1802 on the map only a fragment of the Dutch Caribbean remains. The map is a record of what the Company held, not of what it meant.