1626

Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan. Peter Minuit, the Dutch West India Company’s director, acquires Manhattan from a group of Lenape for trade goods valued at sixty guilders. The figure of twenty-four dollars comes from a loose nineteenth-century currency conversion. Whether the Lenape understood the transaction as a permanent transfer of land, a concept absent from their law, is doubtful — and the group involved may not even have been the people who used the island.