In late August 1664, four English warships anchored in the Narrows below what is now Brooklyn and sent a message ashore. The colony of New Netherland was to surrender. Its director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, was inclined to fight. Almost nobody else was, and by 8 September the Dutch flag was down and the town was called New York.
It is a strange founding story for a city that thinks of itself as combative: the moment that gave New York its name was a negotiated capitulation, and the terms were generous enough that most residents barely noticed the difference.
The company town
The Dutch presence began with a commercial calculation. Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch East India Company, entered the harbour in 1609 looking for a passage to Asia and found a river instead. What he reported back was the fur.
The Dutch West India Company established a permanent post on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625 and named it New Amsterdam. In 1626 the company’s director, Peter Minuit, made the famous purchase of the island from a group of Lenape for trade goods valued at sixty guilders — the twenty-four dollars of the schoolbook version, a figure invented by a nineteenth-century historian converting currencies loosely. Whether the Lenape understood the transaction as a permanent transfer of land, a concept that did not exist in their law, is doubtful, and the group involved may not even have been the ones who used the island.
New Amsterdam was never a colony in the way New England was. It was a company outpost, run for profit, and the company was consistently unwilling to spend money on it.
Not a Dutch town
What made the place distinctive was who lived in it. A visiting Jesuit reported in 1643 that eighteen languages were spoken in a settlement of a few hundred people. There were Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, English, enslaved Africans, and from 1654 a group of Sephardic Jews who arrived from Recife after the Portuguese retook it.
Stuyvesant tried to expel the Jewish arrivals and was overruled by the company in Amsterdam, several of whose shareholders were Jewish. He tried to ban Quaker worship and was overruled again, after the residents of Flushing in what is now Queens sent a written protest — the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 — arguing for religious tolerance. It is one of the earliest such documents in American history and it came out of a Dutch village in Queens.
The tolerance was not principled so much as commercial. The company wanted trade, and trade required people, and people came with their own religions.
The wall, and the streets
Stuyvesant arrived in 1647 to find a town with no proper defences, a fort falling down, and a population that mostly ignored him. He built. The wall across the northern edge of the settlement in 1653 — a twelve-foot timber palisade from river to river, meant to keep out the English — gave Wall Street its name. The canal down the middle of town gave Broad Street its width. The shoreline gave Pearl Street its name, for the oyster shells.
The street pattern of Lower Manhattan is still the Dutch one. Nothing below Wall Street follows the grid because none of it was laid out after 1811.
1664
England and the Netherlands were commercial rivals and periodically at war. Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660, granted his brother James, Duke of York, a patent over territory that included New Netherland — land the crown did not actually control — and sent Colonel Richard Nicolls to take it.
Nicolls arrived with four ships and about 450 men, and offered terms: residents could keep their property, their businesses, their inheritance customs and their religion. Nothing would change except the flag and the tax collector.
Stuyvesant wanted to resist. The fort had inadequate powder, the walls were in poor repair, and the town’s leading citizens — including Stuyvesant’s own son — signed a petition asking him to surrender. He tore up Nicolls’s letter; the burghers taped it back together and read it aloud. On 8 September he signed the articles of capitulation.
The town was renamed New York after the Duke. Fort Amsterdam became Fort James. The Dutch retook the place briefly in 1673, renaming it New Orange, and gave it back by treaty the following year in exchange for Suriname, which at the time looked like the better deal.
What the Dutch left
More than the street plan. The city’s early commercial character — a port that would trade with anyone, run by a merchant class rather than a religious one — came directly out of the West India Company’s priorities and did not change when the flag did.
A number of words came with it: cookie from koekje, stoop from stoep, coleslaw from koolsla, boss from baas. So did place names — Brooklyn from Breukelen, Harlem from Haarlem, the Bronx from the farmer Jonas Bronck, Coney Island from Konijneneiland, rabbit island. Yonkers, Flushing from Vlissingen, Staten Island from the States-General.
Stuyvesant stayed. He retired to his farm — his bouwerij, which is why the Bowery is called that — and is buried in the vault under St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village, which stands on his land.