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New Netherland Dutch colony 1614 — 1664 1673 — 1674 → The coastline claimed by New Netherland and some prominent settlements shown relative to modern borders. Capital New Amsterdam Language(s) Dutch Political structure Colony Director-General  - 1626-1632 Peter Minuit  - 1638-1647 Willem Kieft  - 1647-1664 Peter Stuyvesant History  - Established 1614  - Treaty of Breda August 27, 1664

New Netherland (Dutch: Nieuw-Nederland) is the name of the former Dutch territory on the eastern coast of North America in the 17th century. The colony covered parts of what are now the states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

History

Exploration

The first European to visit the area was the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who was hired by the French crown and in 1524 sailed the Dauphine (English: Dolphin) from Cape Fear in the south to Nova Scotia in the north during his expedition to find a route to the Pacific Ocean.¹

In 1609, during the first year of the twelve-year armistice between the Dutch Republic and Spain, Henry Hudson, who had been hired by the Dutch East India Company, sailed the yacht Halve Maen (English: Half Moon) across the Atlantic on an expedition in search of a passage to China. He made landfall at Newfoundland Island and then at Cape Cod, which he mistakenly thought was an island as well. Setting off again, he sailed south to the Chesapeake River and explored the coast northward, including the bays and rivers, ending at the location of present-day Albany on the Hudson River, where the water became too shallow to continue. Hudson reported to his superiors that he had engaged in small-scale bartering for furs with the natives he had encountered along what was then called the Mauritius River; his report attracted further Dutch interest to the area.²

In 1609, the prospect of exploiting Hudson’s report of a new trade resource was the catalyst for Dutch merchant-traders to explore the region. This interest resulted in the only known commercial expedition in the year 1610 by Symen Lambertsz Mau to the Mauritius.

In 1611-1612, the Admiralty of Amsterdam sent two covert^{citation needed} expeditions to find a passage to China with the yachts Craen and Vos, captained by Jan Cornelisz May and Symon Willemsz Cat, respectively.

In 1611-1614, during four voyages, the area between present-day New Jersey and Massachusetts was explored, surveyed and charted by Adriaen Block, Hendrick Christiaensz, and Cornelis Jacobsz May. Their map of 1614, presented to the governing body of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, the States General, claimed the territory as New Netherland for the republic.

Some of those explorers are still honored today, such as Adriaen Block, for whom Block Island has been named, and Cornelis Jacobsz May, for whom Cape May, New Jersey is named, and his business partner Thymen Jacobsz Hinlopen for whom Cape Henlopen, Delaware, is named.

Map based on Adriaen Block's 1614 expedition to New Netherland, featuring the first use of the name.

The results of these explorations, surveys, and charts made from 1609 through 1614 were consolidated in Block’s map, which named ‘’’New Netherland’’’ for the first time; it was delivered on behalf of various competing trading companies in the Hudson River region which had amalgamated in a new alliance, the New Netherland Company.

The map and a companion detailed report were presented in response to a States General promulgation of March 17, 1614, that it would grant an exclusive patent for trade between the 40th and 45th parallels, good for four voyages to the discoverer of new countries, harbors, and passages. The journeys had to be undertaken within three years after granting the trading rights, to the exclusion of all other Dutch. The New Netherland Company was the winner on October 11, 1614, with the patent to expire on January 1, 1618.

The New Netherland Company had the Delaware area surveyed by skipper Cornelis Hendricksz of Monnikendam in 1614, 1615, and 1616. It was, however, unable to secure an exclusive patent from the States General for the area between the 38th and 40th parallels. Upon Block’s departure for his homeland in June 1614, the commander appointed Cornelis Hendricksz as skipper of the Onrust (English: Restless).

The new vessel was a replacement ship built by Block in or near Manhattan to replace his yacht Tyger, which had been lost to fire in January 1614. Hendricksz then proceeded to explore the Zuyd Rivier (the Delaware River), from its top to the lower bay. His observations were preserved in a map drawn in 1616.

The Dutch West India Company

At the conclusion of an armistice with Spain, in 1621, the Dutch West India Company received a charter from the States General.³ It had very broad objectives covering the entire Atlantic region as formulated in a concept patent in 1606, and it still incorporated the narrow objectives of the company’s spiritual founder, Willem Usselincx, who, between 1600 and 1606, had made the case for the company as primarily a source of colonies in the new world.

In 1620, Usselincx made a last appeal to the States General, which rejected his principal vision as its primary goal. The result was that colonization would now take a third place after the company’s chief aims of (1) military domination and (2) profit-seeking activities in the Atlantic arena. New Netherland was thus destined to become the States General’s stepchild until 1654, when it was forced to surrender Dutch Brazil. Losing this possession, the richest sugar-producing area in the world, thus enabled the company to focus belatedly on the colonization effort in North America.

In preparation for that effort, then, the West India Company between 1621 and 1623 recalled all commercial parties operating in the New Netherland territory, and invalidated all their interests. That action voided maritime law as the only legal recourse in the area.

The peopling and growth of New Netherland as an overseas province was to be financed partly by profits from the North American fur trade, which was thenceforth made exclusive to the West India Company.

Colonization

Main article: Dutch colonization of the Americas

A fur trading post was established by Dutch traders in 1614 or 1615 with the construction of Fort Nassau on Castle Island, up Hudson's river, in the area of present-day Albany. The location of the fort proved to be impractical, due to repeated flooding of the island in the summers, and the fort was abandoned in 1618.⁴ In 1624, Fort Orange was built nearby, on the west bank of the river. The primary purpose of the forts was to defend river traffic against interlopers and to conduct fur trading operations with the natives. (Fort Nassau and Fort Orange were named in honor of the House of Orange-Nassau, whose members occupied positions of power as lord-lieutenants of various provinces of the Dutch Republic.)

The issue of patents by the States General in 1614 turned New Netherland into a private, commercial venture. In 1624, though, New Netherland became a province of the Dutch Republic, which lowered the northern border of its North American dominion to 42 degrees latitude in acknowledgment of the claim by the English north of Cape Cod (see John Smith's 1616 map as self-appointed Admiral of New England).

Because the international law required not only discovery and charting but also settlement to perfect a territorial claim, the Dutch landed 30 families on Noten Eylant, modern Governors Island. in May 1624.

Green area is territory claimed by New Netherland at its greatest extent.

They disembarked from the ship “New Netherland,” under the command of Cornelis Jacobsz May, the first director of the Province of New Netherland. Some of these colonists made their way upriver to settle near Fort Orange, where the settlement of Beverwijck grew up. (This settlement was the forerunner of New York state's capital, Albany; its name was changed when the English captured New Netherland in 1664.)

In June, 1625, 45 more colonists disembarked on Noten Eylant from three ships named Horse, Cow, and Sheep, which also delivered 103 horses, steers, cows, pigs and sheep. Thus was successfully completed in 1624 the Dutch Republic’s first planting of a colony.

Director May (1624-1625) was replaced with Director Willem Verhulst (1625-1626).

Before the establishment of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1625, there was a fort on Noten Eylant in 1624. On the Delaware River there existed Fort Wilhelmus on Verhulsten Island, now Burlington Island, and Fort Nassau (1623-1651), now Gloucester, New Jersey. On the Connecticut River was Fort Goede Hoop, also known as Huys de Hoop (En. "House of Hope") (1633), giving rise to Hartford.

In 1643–1645, the Dutch colonists fought the Weckquaesgeek Indians in the bloody Kieft's War, near today’s Jersey City and elsewhere in New Netherland.

New Netherland as a utopian settlement

Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova, 1635.

Although the Dutch West India Company had established the Reformed Church as the official religious institution of New Netherland ⁵, the early Dutch settlers planted the concept of toleration as a legal right in North America as per explicit orders in 1624. They had to attract, “through attitude and by example”, the natives and nonbelievers to God’s word “without, on the other hand, to persecute someone by reason of his religion, and to leave everyone the freedom of his conscience” (or, in Dutch, levenshouding en voorbeeld moesten zij de Indianen ende andere blinde menschen tot de kennisz Godes ende synes woort sien te trecken, sonder nochtans ijemant ter oorsaecke van syne religie te vervolgen, maer een yder de vrijch[eyt] van sijn consciencie te laten).^{citation needed}

Those instructions derived from the founding document of the Dutch Republic, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, stating “that everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion” (dat een yder particulier in sijn religie vrij sal moegen blijven ende dat men nyemant ter cause van de religie sal moegen achterhaelen ofte ondersoucken). That statement, unique in the world at the time, became the historic underpinning for the opening of the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere at Recife in Dutch Brazil in 1642. as well as the official granting of full residency for both Ashkenazim and Sephardim Jews in New Amsterdam in 1655.

In addition, the laws and ordinances of the states of Holland were incorporated by reference in those first instructions to the Governors Island settlers in 1624. They contained the legal and cultural code that lies at the root of the New York Tri-State traditions and, ultimately, American pluralism (diversity) and liberty.^{citation needed}

In 1658 Franciscus van den Enden and Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy worked on a project for a utopian settlement in New Netherland, in the area of the present Delaware. In 1663 Plockhoy and 41 settlers made their way to Delaware Bay and established their colony near the former Swaanendael.^{citation needed}

English incursions

William Wood’s 1634 map is the first to show Cape Cod as part of New England, evidence of English settlement spilling over from New England into New Netherland. Unable to militarily defend their large territorial claims, the Dutch could do nothing but protest the growing flood of English. With the founding of New Haven in 1638, the flood picked up, and English settlers began moving into the areas around New York and Long Island.

Peter Stuyvesant was director-general of the colony from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664.

Reprint of 1650 map of New Netherland

With the 1650 Treaty of Hartford, Stuyvesant provisionally ceded the Connecticut River region to New England, drawing New Netherland's eastern border 50 Dutch miles west of the Connecticut's mouth on the mainland and just west of Oyster Bay on Long Island. The Dutch West India Company refused to recognize the treaty, but since it failed to reach any agreement with the English, the Hartford Treaty set the de facto border.

In March 1664, Charles II of England resolved to annex New Netherland and “bring all his Kingdoms under one form of government, both in church and state, and to install the Anglican government as in old England”. In the face of this decision, the directors of the Dutch West India Company comforted themselves that the religious freedom of the colony rendered military defense against New England unnecessary. They wrote to Director-General Peter Stuyvesant:

. . . we are in hopes that as the English at the north (in New Netherland) have removed mostly from old England for the causes aforesaid, they will not give us henceforth so much trouble, but prefer to live free under us at peace with their consciences than to risk getting rid of our authority and then falling again under a government from which they had formerly fled.

On August 27, 1664, four English frigates sailed into New Amsterdam’s harbor and demanded New Netherland’s surrender. They met no resistance because numerous citizens’ requests for protection by a suitable Dutch garrison against “the deplorable and tragic massacres” by the natives had gone unheeded. That lack of military defense, ammunition, and gun powder — as well as the indifferent responses from the West India Company upon frequent and urgent requests for reinforcement of men and ships against “the continual troubles, threats, encroachments and invasions of the English neighbors and government of Hartford Colony” — made New Amsterdam defenseless.

Governor Stuyvesant made the best of a bad situation and negotiated successfully for good terms from his “too powerful enemies." The capture of the city was one of a series of attacks on Dutch colonies that resulted in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

During the negotiations over the Articles of Transfer, as the surrender of the city was known, Petrus Stuyvesant and his council secured the principle of tolerance in Article VIII, which assured New Netherlanders that they “shall keep and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in religion” under English rule.

In the 1667 Treaty of Breda ending the war, the Dutch did not press their claims on New Netherland. The status quo, with the Dutch occupying Suriname and the nutmeg island of Run, was maintained; no definitive solution was decided.

Restitution

Within six years, the nations were again at war, and in August 1673 the Dutch recaptured New Netherland with a fleet of 21 ships, then the largest ever seen in North America. It was composed of two squadrons, one under the command of Vice-Admiral Cornelis Evertsen de Jongste, sent out by Pieter Huybert, ‘’raadspensionaris’’ of the Zeeland Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, and one under Jacob Binckes, sent by the Amsterdam Chameber.

The victors chose Anthony Colve as governor and renamed the city "New Orange", reflecting the installation of William of Orange as Lord-Lieutenant (stadtholder) of Holland in 1672. (He became King William III of England in 1689).

Nevertheless, after the conclusion of the third Anglo-Dutch war, 1672-1674, — the historic “disaster years” in which the Dutch Republic was simultaneously attacked by the French under Louis XIV, the English, and the Bishops of Munster and Cologne — the republic was financially and morally bankrupt.

The States of Zeeland had tried to convince the States of Holland to take on the responsibility for the New Netherland province, to no avail. In November 1674, the Treaty of Westminster concluded the war and ceded New Netherland to the English.

Demographics

Population estimates:

• 1628: 270
• 1630: 300
• 1640: 500
• 1664: 9,000 (700 of whom were black)

Legacy

New Netherland has left a profoundly enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Perhaps most significant was the impact of cultural and religious tolerance, which led to a wealth of diversity in New Amsterdam. This tolerance was the mainstay of its mother country, the Dutch Republic as nation-state and a haven for refugees from surrounding autocratic or despotic regimes. In 1682, the visiting Virginian William Byrd commented about New Amsterdam that "they have as many sects of religion there as at Amsterdam". This religious freedom was preserved under the Articles of Transfer to English authority.

States which were part of New Netherland

More visible traces of Dutch influence include the prevalence of Dutch placenames from Rhode Island to Delaware to this day. Examples include:

• Amsterdam - named after the Dutch capital
• Bergen- hills, as in the New Jersey Palisades
• Block Island - named after the explorer Adriaen Block who used the island from which to survey the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound
• Broadway - "Breede weg"
• Brooklyn - "Breuckelen", named after a Dutch town
• Cape Cornelius - named after Cornelius Jacobsz May
• Cape Henlopen - named after Thijmen Jacobsz Hinlopen, a wealthy Baltic Trader and business partner of Cornelius May
• Cape May - named after Cornelius Jacobsz May who traded on a non-exclusive basis with the Delaware River Indians
• Catskill - "Kil" is the Dutch word for a river inlet. This one is named after the Sachem named Cats
• Claverack - a "rack" or "rak" is a straight stretch of river good for anchorage. This stretch named after clovers that grew on its banks
• Coney Island - "Konynen Eylant", meaning Rabbit Island
• Flushing - named after the Dutch town of Vlissingen
• Gramercy - a corruption of the little river named "Krom Messie" which is old Dutch for "(small) crooked knife"
• Harlem - Nieuw Haarlem, named after a major Dutch city
• Hell Gate - "Hellegat", meaning Hell's Passage because of the violent currents, or else Bright Gate
• Hempstead - "Heemstede", the name of a village on the southside of Haarlem Holland and, later, the surrounding town in Nassau County
• Hoboken - a district of Antwerp in Belgium, an estate of the Van Hoboken family Hoboken in 17th century Rotterdam?, a bastardization of the Lenape?
• Kinderhook - "Kinderhoek", meaning children's corner
• Long Island - "Lange Eylant"
• New Utrecht Avenue - after the colonial town of New Utrecht itself named after another major Dutch city
• New York was called New Amsterdam until 1665
• Oyster Bay - "Oester Baai"
• Pavonia - a failed patroonship on the west side of the Hudson named by Michael Pauw, whose Latinized name means peacock
• Rotterdam, named after a major Dutch city
• Spuyten Duyvil Creek is a one-mile-long channel connecting the Hudson and Harlem Rivers. "Spuyten Duyvil" literally means "Devil's Spout" or "Spuitende Duivel" in Dutch, a reference to the strong and wild currents.
• Staten Island - "Staaten Eylant", meaning States Island, named for the Dutch assembly Staten-Generaal)
• Tappan Zee - "Zee" is the Dutch word for "sea". The Tappaans were an Indian tribe to the West of the Hudson River where it is widest
• Wall street - named after the Walloons and then later after the wall that was erected to protect the city against the threat of an English invasion in 1654 during the first Anglo-Dutch war
• Yonkers - established by Van der Donck, who was known locally as the Jonkheer or Jonker (etymologically, "young gentleman"; in effect, "Esquire"), a word from which the name "Yonkers" is directly derived.
• ...and others, including many streams (kills), roads and establishments.

In addition, many New York citizens are directly descended from the Dutch citizens of New Netherland. For instance, the Roosevelt family, which produced two Presidents, are descended from Claes van Roosevelt, who emigrated from Haarlem in about 1650. The Van Buren family of President Martin Van Buren also originated in New Netherland.

Further, the colors of the flag of the City of New York are the blue, white and orange of the old Dutch flag. The colors are also seen in the Nassau County flag, material from New York's two World's Fairs and the uniforms of the New York Mets baseball club, New York Knicks basketball club, and New York Islanders hockey club.

The folk tales of the Dutch peasants of the Hudson Valley gave literary inspiration to Washington Irving for his two most famous short stories, Rip van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, proving the survival of the local Dutch culture well into the first part of the 19th century.

A dialect of Dutch, known as Jersey Dutch, was spoken in and around Bergen and Passaic counties in New Jersey until the early 20th century ⁶

See also

Hudson Valley portal

• Dutch colonization of the Americas
• Dutch Empire
• List of director generals of New Netherland
• New England
• New France
• New Sweden

References

Notes

Sources

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Nieuw Nederland

• The New Netherland Museum
• New Netherland Project
• Un-Pilgrims - Article by Russell Shorto
• 17-page article on Jewish arrival in New Netherland
• Right of the People to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances; exercised in 1649 and codified in 1791 First Amendment
• New York and its origins
• Dutch Portuguese Colonial History: history of the Portuguese and the Dutch in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), India, Malacca, Bengal, Formosa, Africa, Brazil. Language Heritage, lists of remains, maps.
• NEW NETHERLAND AND BEYOND: Collections of Genealogy and History, Including Maps and Various Lists!