Here’s how Amsterdam turned into New York overnight. New Amsterdam was renamed New York on September 8, 1664, in honor of the then Duke of York (later James II of England), in whose name the English had captured it. In 1667 the Dutch gave up their claim to the town and the rest of the colony, in exchange for control of the Spice Islands. Was it a good deal? Well, possibly, but what spices? And why is that man hanging in the middle of the picture below?
New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw-Amsterdam) was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, which served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The factorij became a settlement outside of Fort Amsterdam. Situated on the strategic, fortifiable southern tip of the island of Manhattan, the fort was meant to defend the Dutch West India Company's fur trade operations in the North River (Hudson River). It became a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic as of 1624 and was designated the capital of the province in 1625.
New Amsterdam in 1651
New Amsterdam was renamed New York on September 8, 1664, in honor of the then Duke of York (later James II of England), in whose name the English had captured it. In 1667 the Dutch gave up their claim to the town and the rest of the colony, in exchange for control of the Spice Islands.
New Amsterdam in 1660
On Aug. 26, 1664, 350 years ago Tuesday, a flotilla of four British frigates led by the Guinea, which was manned by 150 sailors and conveying 300 redcoats, anchored ominously in Gravesend Bay off Brooklyn, between Coney Island and the Narrows.
Over the next 13 days, the soldiers would disembark and muster at a ferry landing located roughly where the River Café is moored today, and two of the warships would sail to the Battery and train their cannon on Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan.
Finally, on Sept. 8, the largely defenseless settlement tolerated a swift and bloodless regime change: New Amsterdam was immediately renamed New York. It would evolve into a jewel of the British Empire, endowed with a collective legacy — its roots indelibly Dutch — that distinguished it from every other American colony.
Do not take it personally, though, if you have not been invited to the 350th birthday party. None is scheduled in the city. Neither the British nor the Dutch are planning any official commemoration. Nor is Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The reasons behind New Yorkers’ nearly unanimous indifference are, well, historical, chief among them an ambivalence toward the British and a dispassion for the past.
Until around the time of World War I, Evacuation Day, which marked the belated departure of English troops from New York after the American Revolution (on Nov. 25, 1783), was celebrated with considerable brio, especially when compared with the periodic commemorations of 1664 anniversaries.
In 1974, Paul O’Dwyer, the Irish-born and Anglophobic president of the New York City Council, seized upon the 700th anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam in the Netherlands to actually expunge “1664” from the city’s official seal and flag and replace it with 1625, to coincide with the arrival of the Dutch.
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Alluding to the current lack of any hullabaloo, Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, said, “This year, Paul O’Dwyer is smiling in his grave.”
Mike Wallace, a City University historian and a co-author of “Gotham: A History of New York to 1898,” said the British might have their own reasons not to observe the milestone.
“I doubt the English see this as something to carry on about, particularly at a moment of the Scotch independence drive,” he said. “I’m trying to imagine what it would look like: a re-enactment of British ships threatening to bombard the Wall Street area? But nothing actually happened, not a shot fired, except for Peter Stuyvesant’s temper tantrum. Not sparky stuff.
“Lowering a Dutch flag somewhere and raising a British one instead? Doesn’t set the pulse a-pounding.”
Map of New Amsterdam in 1660
Nor, apparently, did the anniversary inspire much celebration in the past.
In 1914, New York City chose not to commemorate its 250th birthday, instead honoring the 300th anniversary of the chartering of the New Netherlands Company. In 1964, fewer than 300 people showed up at Bowling Green for a party put on by the Mayor’s Committee for the 300th Anniversary of the Founding of the City of New York. The mayor, Robert F. Wagner Jr., was not among them; however, a George Washington look-alike was.
This year, the typically undemonstrative British have no plans to honor the occasion, perhaps mindful that in 1673 they proved no better at defending Manhattan when the Dutch attacked and that a little over a century later they were kicked out of the country altogether.
The events that led to the Dutch surrender essentially began on March 22, 1664, when King Charles II gifted the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, in return for four beaver pelts a year, to his younger brother James, Duke of York, a rival of the Dutch West India Company in the slave trade. (Then, without telling James, the king gave away what would become New Jersey to two confederates.)
By July, New Amsterdam’s 1,500 inhabitants had been roiled by fears of a surprise, unprovoked invasion. Seeking to inherit an intact town, a 23-point Articles of Capitulation drawn up by a British colonel, Richard Nicolls, offered the Dutch guarantees of religious and other freedoms, provisions that would preserve their customs and contracts, and a pledge that “all public Houses shall continue for the uses, which now they are for,” referring to bars.
Stuyvesant, New Amsterdam’s director-general, shredded the offer. The city fathers pieced it back together and, along with Stuyvesant’s teenage son, importuned him to accept the terms begrudgingly. The Dutch believed the transfer was only temporary, though. They recaptured the city in 1673, but relinquished it after about a year more or less in exchange for sugar-rich Suriname.
Steven H. Jaffe wrote in “New York at War”: “Outgunned, weary of the West India Company’s indifference to their fate, valuing their lives and property above loyalty to a distant homeland, and already acquainted with English ways through contact with their neighbors, New Amsterdam’s people would make an easy choice.”
Dennis J. Maika, a scholar at the New Netherland Institute in Albany, said the move was fortunate. “Members of Manhattan’s merchant community turned a potential disaster into a guarantee of commercial and political security,” he said, “and may have ensured a brighter future than what they might have envisioned under Dutch West India Company jurisdiction.”
The Dutch soldiers departed for Holland on the Gideon, a ship that had just delivered 290 more hungry slaves for the beleaguered settlement to feed.
While Colonel Nicolls was popular for his pragmatic peace terms (an avenue barely five blocks long was later named for him in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn), Washington Irving wrote in his satirical history of New York that the Dutch so disliked the British nation “that in a private meeting of the leading citizens it was unanimously determined never to ask any of their conquerors to dinner.”
The impact of the transfer of power after four decades of Dutch rule is still debated.
“The names, the court system and the language changed, but the tolerance, aspirational spirit, geography and diversity remained the same,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian and the editor of “The Encyclopedia of New York City.”
Professor Wallace described the shift as “hugely significant,” because “it moved New Amsterdam out of the declining Dutch empire, in which it was a decided backwater, into the rising British Empire, in which it became a very important provincial port.”
Russell Shorto, the author of “The Island at the Center of the World,” agreed.
“The Dutch brought their pragmatic tolerance and their aggressive free-trading sensibility,” Mr. Shorto said. “Those two forces got fused into the bedrock of Manhattan Island. When the English took over, they saw that the island was functioning like no other place in North America. So they kept things more or less intact.”
“By the time of the great waves of immigration in the 19th century, newcomers arriving in Manhattan saw a teeming mix of people all getting ahead by what we would call upward mobility,” he added. “They decided it was America. It wasn’t America: It was New York. And it was New York because it had been New Amsterdam. But as they slowly migrated farther west, all the way to the Pacific, they brought some of that sensibility with them. And so they made it part of America.”
The original city map of New Amsterdam called Castello Plan from 1660
(the bottom left corner is approximately south, while the top right corner is approximately north)
Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (2000) excerpt and text search
Goodfriend, Joyce D.; et al., eds. (2008). Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009.
Jacobs, Jaap. The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (2009) excerpt and text search
Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
McFarlane, Jim. Penelope: A Novel of New Amsterdam, Greer, SC: Twisted Cedar Press, 2012. 371 pages. ISBN 9780985112202
Schmidt, Benjamin, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670, Cambridge: University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0521804080
Scheltema, Gajus and Westerhuijs, Heleen, eds. Exploring Historic Dutch New York (Museum of the City of New York/Dover Publications, 2011). ISBN 978-0-486-48637-6
Schoolcraft, Henry L. (1907). "The Capture of New Amsterdam". English Historical Review 22 (88): 674–693. doi:10.1093/ehr/xxii.lxxxviii.674. JSTOR 550138.
Shorto, Russell, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, Doubleday, 2004. ISBN 978-0385503495
Swerling, Beverley, City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan, Simon & Schuster, 2002. ISBN 978-0684871738
Full size photograph of manuscript map in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana of Florence, Italy.
The Castello plan is the earliest known plan of New Amsterdam, and the only one dating from the Dutch period. The text at the top of the image states: "Image of the city Amsterdam in New Netherland".
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