1
1) Locate “Northwest Passage” and begin trading with China
2) Economic Benefits
The Dutch were active traders and had established trade relationships throughout the
world, including in the Middle and Far East with their Dutch East India Trading
Company. In 1624 they founded the Dutch West India Company to explore the
potential economic benefits of a permanent settlement in North America. The Dutch
had seen the economic benefits the French had received from the fur trade and were
eager to engage in similar activities.
3) Stick it to Spain
The Dutch had launched a revolt against Spanish rule in the late 1500s. Eight provinces
had declared their independence and broken away from Spanish rule to form a new
Dutch Republic.
2
Henry Hudson
September 1609- Henry Hudson established a Dutch claim to the Northeast after
arriving in waters near modern Day Manhattan and sailing up what is now the Hudson
River. Hudson was seeking a Northwest Passage and when one could not be found, he
began exploring the northern coast of North America. Along his journey he
encountered several Indian tribes that were eager to trade with Europeans given their
previous encounters.
Hudson’s encounter with the Indians spurs Dutch interest in establishing trading posts
in North America.
Hudson would make one more attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1611.
When it fails and he gets his crew stuck in the Canadian winter, they set him, his son,
and the ill adrift before sailing for Europe.
3
Following news of Hudson’s “discovery”, the Dutch began sending traders to the
Americas to trade with various Indian tribes of the Eastern United States.
A fortified trading post was established at Fort Nassau, at the site of present-day
Albany in upstate New York
In the summer of 1624, the Company established a small settlement under the
command of Cornelis Jacobsz May, the first provincial director, transporting some
thirty families to what is now Governor’s Island. More colonists arrived the following
year, and the settlement was relocated a short distance across the bay to the equally
secure and more commodious lower tip of present day Manhattan, establishing New
Amsterdam, what would become the largest settlement in the colony. To secure the
settlement, Peter Minuit, then the provincial director, offered sixty guilders worth of
blankets, kettles, and knives to neighboring Indians, who accepted the trade goods as
gifts, sealing a defensive alliance with the newcomers and not, as was once supposed,
as payment for the island of Manhattan.
4
New Netherland and New Amsterdam were governed by the Dutch West India
Company
From its inception, the Company assumed ruling power in New Netherland
with the drafting of the Provisional Orders. The Orders allowed the Company to
appoint the colony’s governor, or provisional director, his advisory council, and
to control all trade in New Netherland. While it did not create any type of
representative government,
In 1647 the Company shareholders dispatched Peter Stuyvesant to restore the colony.
A stern and sober man, Stuyvesant was also a fiercely loyal employee who had lost a
leg in the Company’s service while fighting the Portuguese on the Caribbean island of
Saint Martin. No sooner had he arrived than
Stuyvesant and his hand-picked council issued a flurry of orders on matters ranging
from compulsory
church attendance to fire prevention and the keeping of hogs and goats. This set the
tone for his
seventeen-year administration, during which time he negotiated boundary agreements
with the English to the north, led a force of seven hundred men to expel the Swedes
from the Delaware River to the south, and, through a combination of diplomacy and
armed force, rebuilt Dutch influence and strength in the region. Stuyvesant managed
to navigate a middle course between the competing demands of settler lobbies
5
seeking greater autonomy and distant Company shareholders trying to preserve their
authority and chartered prerogatives. Although he acquired a reputation as a
domineering and autocratic administrator, most historians agree that under
Stuyvesant’s care, New Netherland’s population of independent traders and farmers
collaborated, establishing orderly villages and small towns.
5
Although the Dutch West India Company encouraged farmers to emigrate and
consistently promoted agricultural efforts, it received most of its profits from
the lucrative fur trade. Dutch ships used the colony as a base to conduct the fur
trade and to trade with other European colonies in the New World but few
colonists made New Netherland their home. In an effort to boost the number of
settlers, the patroonship system was established in 1629. Stockholders, or
patroons, in the Dutch West India Company could receive large tracts of land in
New Netherland by guaranteeing to bring 50 new emigrants to the colony
within four years. These emigrants would become tenant farmers on the
patroon's land and pay rent in a system reminiscent of the medieval European
feudal system.
Only three patroonships were established in New Netherland—Pavonia,
Swaanendael, and Rensselaerswyck—and only the last met with even limited
success. Relatively few people wanted to leave the Netherlands for an uncertain
life across the Atlantic. There were no armies of desperate paupers willing to be
sold off as temporary slaves, no oppressed religious sects seeking a more
tolerant environment to nurse their faith. The wide availability of land
elsewhere in the colony and the limited benefits to tenants kept many
individuals from volunteering for a life of serfdom. The patroons themselves
6
often became exceedingly wealthy, but usually through trade.
In 1640 the patroonship system was officially abandoned. Under the
“Freedoms and Exemptions” policy adopted that year, the Dutch West India
Company offered 200 acres of land to any settler who improved the land and
attempted to recruit other individuals to come to New Netherland. The policy
did not require the individual receiving the land be Dutch, which allowed many
English Puritans to take advantage of the policy to obtain land.
6
the Provisional Orders did protect freedom of religious belief. Probably because of this
protection, New Netherland was one of the most religiously diverse areas in the worldwith Lutherans, Catholics, Puritans, Quakers, Muslims, and even Jews, who were
excluded from many North American colonies and European countries, making it their
home. Visitors were shocked by New Netherland’s religious, ethnic, and linguistic
diversity. In 1643 Father Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit working in New France, estimated New
Amsterdam’s population at 500 from a variety of countries speaking eighteen different
languages.
In addition, patroons held enormous power within their domains, serving as judges in
both civil and criminal cases within their settlement, including capital crimes, literally
giving them the power of life and death over there tenants.
7
Throughout New Netherland’s history, relations with the Indians were generally fair
and cordial, however this was more the result of Dutch self-interest than of
enlightened thinking. Unlike other European settlements on the eastern seaboard, the
New Netherlanders remained outnumbered by the Indians throughout the period of
Dutch rule. Offending the tribes of the Iroquois Nation would have been not only
suicidal but also bad for business, as they were the source of most of New
Amsterdam’s fur supply.
Beginning in 1640, the Company was involved in a series of wars (known collectively as
the Dutch-Indian Wars) with local Indian tribes. The spark for these conflicts was the
decision of provincial director Willem Kieft to demand payment of a tribute from the
Raritan Indians. In Kieft’s view, since the Indians, as defensive allies, benefited from
the presence of the Company and the colonists, it was only reasonable that they bear
some of its costs. The Indians, for their part, could see little benefit in having allies who
stuck to the coast and concentrated on trade, and they rejected Kieft’s authority to
levy a tribute. The two sides clashed inconclusively until 1643, when the slaughter of
some eighty Wecquaesgeek Indians across the river from New Amsterdam at Pavonia
(Jersey City) succeeded in uniting almost the entire Indian population of the Lower
Hudson Valley against New Netherland. The on-going wars hindered the company's
efforts to recruit settlers and severely damaged farming efforts and the fur trade in the
colony.
8
Though the Dutch presence in North America was brief when compared with other
European powers, they had a fair amount of conflict with the Indian populations in the
lands they claimed.
In 1626 Peter Minuit and other Dutch settlers arranged for the purchase of the island
of Manhattan from a group of local Indians. The Indians they purchased the island from
were not the Indians who traditionally lived on Manhattan and the Dutch quickly found
themselves fighting the Indians who had lived on Manhattan. Wall Street received its
name for the defensive wall that the Dutch built to protect themselves by attacks from
these Indians.
Despite the conflicts they often found themselves involved in, the Dutch did manage to
sustain some positive trade relationships with several Indian groups, particularly the
Mohawk and the Iroquois Confederacy who did not want to trade with the French due
to the French Alliance with their enemies, the Huron.
Though trade was an avenue to peace with the Iroquois, it angered the Algonquian
who felt they were being given less generous terms. Both the Dutch and the Indians
engaged in acts of vandalism, theft, and kidnapping. All out war broke out in the 1640s
and the Indians very nearly defeated the Dutch.
By the time the English took over New Netherland the Dutch had largely come to
peace with the local Indian tribes.
8
During Stuyvesant’s tenure as provincial director, New Netherland experienced its
most serious challenge when the first Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1652. The conflict
erupted between the English and Dutch because of England's attempt to impose
restrictive trade acts on its North American colonies and their shipping. The Dutch
generally ignored these laws and encouraged English colonists to smuggle their goods
in Dutch ships, intensifying imperial competition.
In an effort to drive the Dutch from North America, Charles II, King of England, granted
his brother, James, the Duke of York, control of all the territory lying between the
Delaware and Connecticut rivers—the territory comprising New Netherland. In 1664
James led a force of English soldiers on New Amsterdam in an effort to claim the
colony. Stuyvesant encouraged resistance, however most New Netherlanders were
more interested in peace. The New Netherlanders negotiated an unusual surrender
agreement, the Articles of Capitulation, to ensure the survival of Dutch norms and
values. New Netherlanders would keep their business and inheritance laws, property,
churches, languages, and even their local officials. They would continue to trade with
the Netherlands, making New Amsterdam the only city in the world with simultaneous
ties to both major trading empires. Most important, religious toleration was ensured.
New Netherland would be renamed New York, but its culture carried on.
The Articles of Capitulation were formalized in 1674 in the Treaty of Westminster,
which granted New Netherland to the English and officially removed the Dutch from
9
North America. The Dutch West India Company went bankrupt shortly thereafter, and
the Netherlands abandoned all efforts to colonize the New World.
9