Dutch Settlements in North America

Dutch Settlements in North America. The Dutch claim to North America derived from the voyage of Henry Hudson, who in 1609 set sail in the Half Moon on behalf of the Dutch East India Company in an attempt to find a northeast passage to China above Norway. When halted by ice, Hudson decided to cross the Atlantic and search for a northwest passage. Hudson's search led him to explore the North American coast from Delaware Bay to the headwaters of the river that would bear his name.

Between 1614 and 1618 private merchants from Amsterdam exploited the region and established a fur trade in the area they christened “New Netherland.” Private trade ended with the chartering of the West India Company in 1621. Within its chartered domain (from the Cape of Good Hope to the Philippines), the West India Company, a national joint‐stock company, was authorized to trade, colonize, and wage war in the name of the United Provinces.

In 1624, the company settled some three hundred Walloons (French‐speaking Protestant refugees from the southern Netherlands) at the mouth of the Delaware River, on the Hudson River near present‐day Albany, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, and on Manhattan Island. Within two years the settlements were consolidated at New Amsterdam (on Manhattan Island, purchased from the local Indians for forty guilders in 1626 by Pieter Minuit) and Fort Orange (present‐day Albany).

The small settlements survived on farming and the fur trade. Meanwhile, in 1629, the directors of the West India Company hatched a plan to establish feudal estates in the colony. The company soon abandoned the plan, however, and in 1640 opened the colony to vrij burghers (free citizens), promising two hundred acres for each head of household. The 1640s witnessed hard times for the colony. Indian wars, called the “Kieft Wars” after Willem Kieft, the director general at the time, threatened Europeans with annihilation and nearly led to the abandonment of New Netherland. The company directors responded by replacing Kieft in 1647.

Peter Stuyvesant (ca. 1610–1672), immortalized as the one‐legged tyrant in Washington Irving's satirical Knickerbocker History of New York (1809), ruled New Netherland with an iron fist as director general from 1646 to 1664. His administration brought political stability even while his enforcement of a strict Calvinistic orthodoxy made him a symbol of intolerance. He aggressively defended Dutch colonial rights wherever they were challenged. In 1655, he led a military expedition to capture the colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River, and he prepared for a siege when the English Navigation Acts precipitated a series of commercial wars between Great Britain and the United Provinces. By the early 1660s New Netherland had become a target of English imperialist ambitions.

In September 1664 an attack financed by England's Duke of York forced the capitulation of New Netherland. The invasion was the opening round in the Second Anglo‐Dutch War (1664–1666). At war's end a grateful Charles II bequeathed “New York” to his brother, the Duke. New Amsterdam became New York City. A Dutch naval squadron recaptured New York in the third Anglo‐Dutch War (1673–1674), but the United Provinces surrendered it once again in the Treaty of Westminister (1674).
See also Colonial Era; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800.

Bibliography

Charles R. Boxer , The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1850, 1965, reprint 1990.
Oliver A. Rink , Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York, 1986.

Oliver A. Rink