Early exploration and settlement (1609–1624) In 1524, nearly a century before the arrival of the Dutch, the site that would later become New Amsterdam was named
Nouvelle Angoulême by the Italian explorer
Giovanni da Verrazzano, to commemorate his patron King
Francis I of France, whose family consisted of the
Counts of Angoulême. The first recorded exploration by the Dutch of the area around what is now called
New York Bay was in 1609 with the voyage of the ship
Halve Maen (English: "Half Moon"), commanded by
Henry Hudson in the service of the Dutch Republic, as the emissary of
Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and
stadholder of Holland. Hudson named the river the Mauritius River. He was also covertly attempting to find the
Northwest Passage for the
Dutch East India Company. Instead, he brought back news about the possibility of exploitation of
beaver by the Dutch who sent commercial, private missions to the area the following years. At the time, beaver pelts were highly prized in Europe, because the
fur could be
felted to make waterproof hats. A by-product of the trade in beaver pelts was
castoreum—the secretion of the animals' anal glands—which was used for its medicinal properties and for perfumes. The expeditions by
Adriaen Block and
Hendrick Christiaensen in 1611, 1612, 1613 and 1614, resulted in the surveying and charting of the region from the
38th parallel to the
45th parallel. On their 1614 map, which gave them a four-year trade monopoly under a patent of the
States General, they named the newly discovered and mapped territory New Netherland for the first time. It also showed the first year-round trading presence in New Netherland,
Fort Nassau, which would be replaced in 1624 by Fort Orange, which eventually grew into the town of
Beverwijck, renamed
Albany in 1664. Spanish trader
Juan Rodriguez (rendered in Dutch as Jan Rodrigues), was born in the
Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, the first
Spanish Colony in the Americas. Allegedly of
Portuguese and
African descent, he arrived on Manhattan Island during the winter of 1613–1614 under the command of Thijs Volckenz Mossel captain of the
Jonge Tobias, trapping beavers and trading with the local population as a representative of the Dutch East India Company. He is the first recorded non-Indigenous inhabitant of what would eventually become New York City. The territory of New Netherland was originally a private, profit-making commercial enterprise focused on cementing alliances and conducting trade with the local Indigenous peoples. Surveying and exploration of the region was conducted as a prelude to an anticipated official settlement by the Dutch Republic, which occurred in 1624.
Pilgrims' attempt to settle in the Hudson River area '' sailing from England to America in 1620, in
Plymouth Harbor|alt=A painting depicting a ship partly encrusted in snow and ice at anchor in a calm harbor. A small boat full of men is moving away from the ship. In 1620 the
Pilgrims attempted to sail to the Hudson River from England. However,
Mayflower reached
Cape Cod (now part of Massachusetts) on November 9, 1620, after a voyage of 64 days. For a variety of reasons, primarily a shortage of supplies,
Mayflower could not proceed to the Hudson River, and the colonists decided to settle near Cape Cod, establishing the
Plymouth Colony.
Dutch return The mouth of the
Hudson River was selected as the ideal place for initial settlement as it had easy access to the ocean while also securing an ice-free lifeline to
the beaver trading post near present-day Albany. Here, Indigenous hunters supplied them with pelts in exchange for European-made trade goods and
wampum, which was soon being made by the Dutch on
Long Island. In 1621, the
Dutch West India Company was founded. Between 1621 and 1623, orders were given to the private, commercial traders to vacate the territory, thus opening up the territory to Dutch settlers and company traders. It also allowed the laws and ordinances of the states of Holland to apply. Previously, during the private, commercial period, only the law of the ship had applied. On May 20, 1624, the first settlers in New Netherland arrived on Noten Eylandt (Nut or Nutten Island, now
Governors Island) aboard the ship
Nieu Nederlandt under the command of
Cornelius Jacobsen May, who disembarked on the island with thirty families to take legal possession of the New Netherland territory. The landing on Governors Island in 1624 brought with it the "legal and cultural DNA" of the Republic of the United Netherlands, including progressive values such as freedom of conscience and tolerance, which were foundational to the culture of early New Netherland. Compared to many parts of Europe at that time, New Netherland embraced a relatively progressive philosophy of inclusion, allowing various nationalities, religions, and races to coexist. The ideals of popular sovereignty and free trade formed the backbone of this diverse society, setting it apart from other colonial powers. However, despite these advanced ideals, the colony also engaged in practices that reflected the broader colonial context, such as the mistreatment of Indigenous populations and the introduction of slavery in 1626. These actions show that while the early settlers were ahead of their time in embracing tolerance, they were also part of the colonial systems that perpetuated injustice and exploitation. The WIC ordered engineer and surveyor Crijn Fredericxsz for the construction of
Fort Amsterdam. The families were then dispersed to
Fort Wilhelmus on Verhulsten Island (
Burlington Island) in the South River (now the
Delaware River), to Kievitshoek (now
Old Saybrook, Connecticut) at the mouth of the Verse River (now the
Connecticut River) and further north at
Fort Nassau on the Mauritius or North River (now the
Hudson River), near what is now Albany. A fort and
sawmill were soon erected at Nut Island. The
windmill was constructed by Franchoys Fezard and was taken apart for iron in 1648.
Fort Amsterdam (1624) (north is to the right) The threat of attack from other European colonial powers prompted the directors of the
Dutch West India Company to formulate a plan to protect the entrance to the Hudson River. In 1624, 30 families were sponsored by Dutch West India Company moving from Nut Island to Manhattan Island, where a citadel to contain
Fort Amsterdam was being laid out by Cryn Frederickz van Lobbrecht at the direction of
Willem Verhulst. By the end of 1625, the site had been staked out directly south of
Bowling Green on the site of the present
U.S. Custom House. The
Mohawk-Mahican War in the Hudson Valley led the company to relocate even more settlers to the vicinity of the new Fort Amsterdam. In the end, colonizing was a prohibitively expensive undertaking, only partly subsidized by the fur trade. This led to a scaling back of the original plans. By 1628, a smaller fort was constructed with walls containing a mixture of clay and sand. The fort also served as the center of trading activity. It contained a barracks, the church, a house for the West India Company
director and a warehouse for the storage of company goods. Troops from the fort used the triangle between the
Heerestraat and what came to be known as
Whitehall Street for marching drills.
1624–1664 in Austria. It is probably the oldest, lifelike depiction of the colony Verhulst, with his council, was responsible for the selection of Manhattan as a permanent place of settlement and for situating Fort Amsterdam. He was replaced as the company director of New Netherland by
Peter Minuit in 1626. According to the writer Nathaniel Benchley, to legally safeguard the settlers' investments, possessions and farms on Manhattan island, Minuit negotiated the "purchase" of Manhattan from a band of
Canarse from Brooklyn who occupied the bottom quarter of Manhattan, known then as the
Manhattoes, for 60
guilders' worth of trade goods. Minuit conducted the transaction with the Canarse chief Seyseys, who was only too happy to accept valuable merchandise in exchange for an island that was actually mostly controlled by the Weckquaesgeeks. An official letter of November 7, 1626 in which Pieter Schagen informed the
States General of the purchase (by
Peter Minuit) of
Manhattan ("'t eylant Manhettes", groot 11000
morgen) from the "wilden" (wild ones). This area amounts to . Schagen also mentioned the successful first harvest and the shipload of 7,246 beaver skins (
Nationaal Archief,
The Hague). For a transcription of the text, see Schagenbrief and Transcriptie Schagenbrief The deed itself has not survived, so the specific details are unknown. A textual reference to the deed became the foundation for the legend that Minuit had purchased Manhattan from the Native Americans for twenty-four dollars' worth of trinkets and beads, the guilder rate at the time being about two and a half to a
Spanish dollar. The price of 60 Dutch guilders in 1626 amounts to around $1,100 in 2012 dollars. Further complicating the calculation is that the value of goods in the area would have been different from the value of those same goods in the developed market of the Netherlands. The Dutch introduced
windmills first at
Noten Eylandt for a sawmill, to exploit the stand of hardwoods found there. Later they exploited the hydropower of existing creeks by constructing mills at Turtle Bay (between present-day East 45th–48th Streets) and Montagne's Kill, later called Harlem Mill Creek (East 108th Street). In 1639 a
sawmill was located in the northern forest at what was later the corner of
East 74th Street and
Second Avenue, at which African slaves cut lumber. , a 1660 map of New Amsterdam (the top right corner is roughly north). The fort gave
The Battery (in present-day
Manhattan) its name, the large street going from the fort past the wall became
Broadway, and the city wall (right) gave
Wall Street its name. The New Amsterdam settlement had a population of approximately 270 people, including infants. In 1642 the new director
Willem Kieft decided to build a stone church within the fort. The work was carried out by recent English immigrants, the brothers John and Richard Ogden. The church was finished in 1645 and stood until destroyed in the
Slave Insurrection of 1741. A pen-and-ink view of New Amsterdam, drawn on-the-spot and discovered in the map collection of the
Austrian National Library in Vienna in 1991, provides a unique view of New Amsterdam as it appeared from Capske (small Cape) Rock in 1648. It was associated with
Adriaen van der Donck's
Remonstrance of New Netherland, and may have inspired later views as by
Claes Jansz. Visscher. Capske Rock was situated in the water close to Manhattan between Manhattan and Noten Eylant, and signified the start of the East River roadstead. New Amsterdam received
municipal rights by a charter from New Netherland Governor Peter Stuyvesant on February 2, 1653, thus becoming a city. Albany, then named
Beverwyck, received its city rights in 1652.
Nieuw Haarlem, now known as
Harlem, was formally recognized in 1658. The first Dutch
Jews known to have arrived in New Amsterdam arrived in 1654. First to arrive were Solomon Pietersen and Jacob Barsimson, who sailed during the summer of 1654 directly from Holland, with passports that gave them permission to trade in the colony. Then in early September,
23 Jewish refugees arrived from the Brazilian city of
Recife, which had been
conquered by the Portuguese in January 1654. The director-general of New Netherland,
Peter Stuyvesant, sought to turn them away but was ultimately overruled by the directors of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam.
Asser Levy, an
Ashkenazi Jew who was one of the 23 refugees, eventually prospered and in 1661 became the first Jew to own a house in New Amsterdam, which also made him the first Jew known to have owned a house anywhere in North America. On September 15, 1655, New Amsterdam was occupied by several hundred
Munsee, possibly in response to a Dutch colonist killing a woman stealing peaches from his orchard. No bloodshed occurred until the Munsee were fired upon as they were preparing to depart. This triggered attacks on
Pavonia and
Staten Island. Stuyvesant reported 28 farms destroyed, 40 deaths and 100 captives taken in what later became known as the
Peach War. In 1661, the
Communipaw ferry was founded and began a long history of trans-Hudson ferry and ultimately rail and road transportation. In 1664, Jan van Bonnel built a
Saw mill on
East 74th Street and the East River, where an long stream that began in the north of today's Central Park, which became known as the Saw Kill or Saw Kill Creek, emptied into the river. Later owners of the property George Elphinstone and Abraham Shotwell replaced the sawmill with a leather mill in 1677. The Saw Kill was later redirected into a culvert, arched over, and its trickling little stream was called Arch Brook. File:Novum Amsterodamum 1650 (New Amsterdam) painting by Laurens Block.jpg|Novum Amsterodamum 1650, by Laurens Block File:New Amsterdam 1660 Scale Model Museum of NYC 1933.jpg|Scale model of New Amsterdam in 1660 File:New Amsterdam from East River 1660 (Scale Model) Museum of NYC.jpg|New Amsterdam from the East River in 1660, Scale Model File:Party For New Year's Day In New Amsterdam 1636 by George Henry Boughton.jpg|Party For New Year's Day In New Amsterdam 1636 (
George Boughton) File:Courtship in New Amsterdam painting by Francis W Edmonds 1850.png|Courtship in New Amsterdam (
Fancis W. Edmonds)
English capture On August 27, 1664, while England and the Dutch Republic were at peace, four English frigates sailed into New Amsterdam's harbor and demanded New Netherland's surrender, effecting the bloodless
capture of New Amsterdam. On September 6, the local Dutch deciding not to offer resistance, Stuyvesant's lawyer
Johannes de Decker and five other delegates signed the official
Articles of Surrender of New Netherland. This was swiftly followed by the
Second Anglo-Dutch War, between England and the
Dutch Republic. In June 1665, New Amsterdam was reincorporated under English law as New York City, named after the
Duke of York (later
King James II). He was the brother of
King Charles II, who had been granted the lands. In 1667, the
Treaty of Breda ended the conflict in favor of the Dutch. The Dutch did not press their claims on New Netherland but did demand control over the valuable sugar plantations and factories captured by them that year on the coast of
Surinam, giving them full control over the coast of what is now
Guyana and
Suriname. On August 9, 1673, during the
Third Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch quickly but briefly
retook the colony of New Netherland, which the English called "New York", with a combined fleet of a squadron of ships from Amsterdam and a squadron of ships from Zeeland. The commanders were
Jacob Benckes (Koudum, 1637–1677) and
Cornelis Evertsen de Jongste (Vlissingen, 1642–1706) under instruction of the
States General of the Dutch Republic.
Anthony Colve was installed as the first Dutch
governor of the province. Previously there had only been West India Company Directors and a Director-General. Amidst the recapture, New York City would be again renamed, this time to
New Orange. However, after the signing of the
Treaty of Westminster in February 1674, both the Dutch territories were relinquished to the English. With the effective transfer of control on November 10, 1674, the names New Netherland and New Orange reverted to the English versions of "New York" and "New York City", respectively.
Suriname became an official Dutch possession in return. File:The Dutch Surrender New Amsterdam (Peter Stuyvesant) 1664 by Ogden.jpg|The Dutch surrender New Amsterdam in 1664 File:Allard -Totius Neobelgii Nova et Accuratissima Tabula (Detail).png|The
Reconquest of New Netherland File:City of New Orange (New Amsterdam) 1673 sketched.png|City of New Orange in 1673 ==Cartography==