New Netherland

New Netherland was the Dutch colony on America's east coast from 1614 to 1674, the Manhattan beginning of New York. Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for Holland, nosed the Half Moon up the river that bears his name in 1609; five years later Dutch skippers claimed the coast between 38 and 45 degrees and named it New Netherland. The West India Company, chartered 1621, planted thirty Walloon families in 1624 and the next year raised Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan's tip, bought, legend says, from the Lenape for sixty guilders of trinkets. Beaver pelts paid for everything: Fort Orange upriver, patroon manors like Rensselaerswyck, and a polyglot town of Dutch, Walloons, Jews, Africans and English where eighteen languages sounded by 1660. Director Stuyvesant, the peg leg, bullied Swedes out of Delaware and puritans out of Flushing, but could not make farmers of traders. In August 1664 four English frigates anchored off the fort and the town surrendered New Amsterdam without a shot; retaken in 1673 during the third Anglo Dutch war, it was signed away for Suriname at Westminster in 1674, and New Netherland became New York, leaving the Dutch gables, the Wall Street wall and the Santa Claus of New Amsterdam behind.