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New Netherland (Dutch: Nieuw-Nederland, Latin: Novum Belgium or Nova Belgica), 1614-1674, was the territory on the eastern coast of North America in the 17th century which stretched from 38 degrees latitude to 45 degrees latitude as originally claimed for and on behalf of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces of the Low Lands or the Netherlands.

The acknowledgment of the inevitable interposition of New England above Cape Cod (see John Smith's 1616 map as self-anointed Admiral of New England) reduced the northern latitude of 45 degrees to 42 degrees. This happened upon New Netherland's transformation of a place for private commercial interests― since 1614 by way of patents granted by the States General, the governing body of the Dutch Republic―to a North-American province of the Dutch Republic in 1624.

That transformation to a province―extrapolating the Dutch Republic’s laws and ordinances―took place on Noten Eylant, renamed Governors Island in 1784. New Netherland as a province, so founded in 1624, comprised the modern day New York Tri-State State area with Manhattan as its locus and extended, however, to just south of the Delaware Bay to Cape Hinlopen and east of the Connecticut River to include Cape Cod, named New Holland by Henry Hudson in 1609.

The 1624 Governors Island settlement completed the claim on the territory according to the Law of Nations: (1) Discovery in 1609 (2) Surveying and Charting from 1611-1614 and (3) taking Possession through Settlement.

Some of the Governors Island settlers were geographically dispersed to the Delaware River at Verhulsten Island, now Burlington Island , the Connecticut River at Kievietshoek, now Seabrook, and at the top of the Hudson River at Fort Orange (now Albany) in order to legally delineate the claim to the Province of New Netherland. The Governors Island settlement was the best-planned first landing ever by any nation on the North-American continent and represents the legislatively acknowledged birthplace and birth date of New York State.

History

Private Commercial Period: The original 1614 claim came chiefly as the result of the (covert) explorations of the Dutch East India Company with the yacht Halve Maen, captained by Henry Hudson in 1609. It was the first year of the twelve-year armistice between The Dutch Republic and Spain (April 9, 1609-1621) when unaccompanied and unarmed Dutch ships would be free from attack by the Spanish enemy. The truce enabled the Halve Maen to traverse the Atlantic. Hudson’s report to his superiors relayed that he had engaged in small-scale bartering for furs with the natives he had encountered along the Mauritius River―so named by him after Holland’s Lord Lieutenant Maurits, a nobleman of the house of Orange Nassau who was leading the Republic’s land war against Spain.

At the conclusion of the armistice in 1621, the Dutch West India Company received its charter from the States General. It had very broad objectives covering the entire Atlantic region as originally formulated in a concept patent in 1606. In 1621, it still incorporated the narrow objectives of its spiritual founder Willem Usselincx who, between 1600 and 1606, had made the case for the Company as primarily a vehicle for the founding of colonies in the new world. In 1620, he made a last appeal to the States General who rejected his principal vision as primary goal. The result was that colonization would take now a tertiary place after the Company’s chief aims of military and profit seeking activities in the Atlantic arena. New Netherland was thus destined to become the State General’s stepchild until 1654 when it had surrendered Dutch Brazil’s sugar plantations to the Portuguese enabling it to focus belatedly on its nation-building effort in North America.

The prospect of exploiting Henry Hudson’s 1609 report of a new trade resource had been the catalyst for Dutch private merchant-traders to assume the risk of exploring the river region Hudson had discovered. It resulted in the only known commercial expedition in the year 1610 by Symen Lambertsz May of Monnikendam to the Mauritius River. The following year and in 1612, the Admiralty of Amsterdam sent (covert) expeditions to find a northwest passage to China with the yachts Craen and Vos, captained by Jan Cornelisz May and Symon Willemsz Cat respectively. In the same years of 1611 and 1612, as well as the year 1613 and 1614, Adriaen Block, Hendrick Christiaensen and Cornelis Jacobsz May undertook commercial explorations to Hudson’s river while surveying and charting the coastline and all river inlets between Cape Cod and the Delaware Bay.

Some of those explorers are still honored today such as Adriaen Block, for whom Block Island has been named, and Cornelius May, for whom Cape May, New Jersey is named, and his business partner Thymen Jacobsz Hinlopen for whom Cape Hinlopen, Delaware, is named. However, Hendrick Christiaensen for whom Hendrick Christaens Island was named has now been renamed No-Man Island (just west of Martha’s Vineyard).

The results of these explorations, surveys and charts made from 1609-1614, were consolidated in a map made by Adriaen Block and presented to the States General in 1614 (the Block Map). The map named New Netherland for the first time and was delivered on behalf of various competing trading companies in the Hudson River region. They had amalgamated in a new company named The New Netherland Company.

The map and a companion detailed report was 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 at the exclusion of all other Dutch. The New Netherland Company was the winner on October 11, 1614 with the date of patent expiration on January 1, 1618.

The New Netherland Company had the Delaware area surveyed by skipper Cornelis Hendricksz of Monnikendam in the years 1614, 1615 and 1616. However, it was unable to secure an exclusive patent from the States General for the area between the 38th and 40th parallel. Upon Block’s departure to patria in June 1614, Cornelis Hendricksz had stayed behind and had been appointed by Block as skipper of the North American-built ship Onrust or “Trouble”. The “Trouble” (often less correctly translated as “Unrest”), was a replacement ship built by Block in the vicinity of Manhattan upon the destruction of his yacht the Tijger which had been lost to fire in January 1614. Adriaen Block never returned to New Netherland. Cornelis Hendricksz’s Zuyd Rivier, (Delaware River) explorations, from its very top to the lower bay, has been preserved in a map of 1616.

In preparation for North American colonization, the West India Company recalled all private commercial parties operating in the New Netherland territory in 1621, 1622 and 1623 and invalidated all private commercial interests, thus voiding maritime law as only legal recourse in the region. The peopling and growth of New Netherland as an overseas province was to be financed partly by profits from fur trading operations. That trade was therefore made exclusive to the West India Company in order to minimize the company’s financial exposure to the colony.

In the summer of 1624, the New Netherland territory received its first immigrants, a colony of thirty families on Noten Eylant, now Governors Island. These colonists had disembarked on Governors Island from the ship named “New Netherland” under the command of Cornelis Jacobsz May, the first director of the Province of New Netherland.

In June, 1625, forty-five more colonists disembarked on Governors Island from three ships named Horse, Cow and Sheep which also delivered 103 horses, steers and cows, in addition to numerous pigs and sheep. It successfully completed the Republic’s first planting of a colony in 1624, and extrapolated the Republic’s culture, its 1579 Constitution and legal-political guaranty of tolerance onto the North American continent. Director May (1624-1625) was replaced with Director Willem Verhulst (1625-1626).

Forts

Prior to the Fort Amsterdam built on Manhattan Island in 1625, giving birth to New York City, there was a fort on Noten Eylant now Governors Island in 1624, giving birth to New York State (as wel as New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware). The earliest fort however was Fort Nassau (1614) on the top of Hudson's river, constructed on Castle Island, and, because of its inundation after 1618, was replaced by Fort Orange on the mainland in 1624, giving birth to Beverwijck which became Albany, New York State’s capital. On the Delaware River there existed a Fort Wilhelmus on Verhulsten Island, now Burlington Island, a Fort Nassau (1623), now Gloucester in New Jersey, and in the Connecticut River was Fort the Good Hope 1633, giving birth to Hartford. The primary purpose of the forts was to defend river traffic against interlopers and to conduct fur trading operations with the natives. (The Forts 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.

New Netherland as a Province

Provincial Period: Those settlers to Governors Island in 1624 planted the concept of toleration as a legal right on North America as per explicit orders in 1624. They had to attract, “through attitude and by example”, the natives and non-believers 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” (via “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 van sijn consciencie te laten”).

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 at New Amsterdam in 1655. Furthermore, 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-cultural code that lies at the root of the New York Tri-State traditions and, ultimately, American pluralism (diversity) and liberty.

English Incursions: William Wood’s 1634 map of New England is the first indication that the English spilled out of New England south and southwestwards. Wood’s map depicted Cape Cod as now having become part of New England. The stream of Englanders settling in New Netherland became a flood and in spite of heavy protestations and the dispatch of deputations nothing could be done as the size of New Netherland could not be defended militarily. English villages were started everywhere on the westward move of the New Englanders.

In 1650, the provisional Treaty of Hartford ceded temporarily the Connecticut River region to the New Englanders with some pockets of Dutch sovereignty around the Connecticut River. New Netherland now started provisionally west of Groenis (Greenwich, Connecticut) and, with respect to Long Island, west of Oester Bay (i.e., now the Nassau - Suffolk County border). All lands east of those lines became conditionally English sovereignty. Because of the State General’s inability to negotiate with England about the New England - New Netherland border, the Hartford Treaty became de facto a definitive border.

In March 1664, King Charles II of Great Britain resolved to annex New Netherland and to “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 rumors of an English invasion, the Lord Directors of the West India Company attempted to make a virtue out of weakness and suggested that liberty (freedom of conscience in religion) did not need to be militarily defended and would take care of itself. They wrote to Director-General Petrus 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, Stuyvesant's worst fears were realized when four English frigates sailed in New Amsterdam’s harbor and demanded New Netherland’s surrender. Stuyvesant and his council had to yield New Netherland provisionally to the invading enemy force during a time when the two European nations were at peace. This behavior was recognized by the States General as an act of piracy and resulted in the Second Anglo-Dutch War between England and the United Netherlands.

However, Stuyvesant and his council negotiated New Netherland’s explicit founding condition of toleration in article VIII, out of twenty-four articles of provisional transfer, assuring New Netherlanders under future English jurisdiction, that they “shall keep and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in religion.”

That article was an affirmation of the existing cultural-legal tradition as the basis of diversity in New Netherland. It was to become New York’s cultural heritage when—upon the insistence of New York’s first Governor George Clinton—toleration became codified in the American Constitution through the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights upon its ratification in 1791: “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion”.

In the multilateral Treaty of Breda, in 1667, the Dutch withdrew their claims on New Netherland. Its conditions included the guarantee for the rights to Suriname and a tiny island named Run in North Maluku, rich in nutmegs.

However, in a subsequent war between the English and the Dutch, the Dutch recaptured New Netherland in August 1673 with a fleet of 21 ships, then the largest one seen in North America, installing Anthony Colve as “governor” and renaming the city "New Orange". This third Anglo-Dutch war 1672-74―the historic “disaster years” wherein the Dutch Republic was simultaneously attacked by the French (Louis XIV), the English and the Bishops of Munster and Cologne―had disastrous consequences. The country survived but New Netherland was ceded permanently to the English in November 1674 in the Treaty of Westminster and renamed New York. In 1691, an act of Parliament outlawed the Roman Catholic religion in England and in its North American possessions.

Legacy

The analogous republics―the United States of America and the United Provinces of the Netherlands―were not coincidental. The latter’s DNA and precepts, planted in the year 1624 on Governors Island and embedded in America’s earliest childhood, were responsible for the traits that shaped America's flourishing, compatible personality of liberty and freedom.

New Netherland therefore has left a profoundly enduring legacy on America as it formed the foundation of a highly relevant and important piece of American history whose principles have withstood the test of times and were indispensable in the further development of the United States. The concepts of religious and ethnic tolerance, and civic and economic inclusiveness are the very ideals which form the bedrock of American culture and political philosophy. To this very day those notions live in America’s cultural history, its political institutions, and in its political and civic culture.

The right to rebel against tyranny, the right to seek redress of grievances and to freedom of conscience in religion, freedom of the press, all can be traced to the New York Tri-State region when it was known as New Netherland with New Amsterdam (now New York City) at its center. It was no wonder that the Virginian William Byrd, on his visit to the city in 1682, commented that "they have as many sects of religion there as at Amsterdam".

It started in 1624 with the legal-cultural tradition of tolerance as the underpinning of cultural diversity. And it was perpetuated by the Articles of Transfer safeguarding those values under English authority. The notion of tolerance as indispensable partner of American freedom is America’s ultimate virtue and originated in New Netherland. It is New Netherland’s distinct contribution to American culture and the true underlying meaning and distinct theme of the Halve Maen (Half Moon)’s arrival on September 11, 1609, in what is now New York harbor as the predecessor event to what was to come.

New Netherland’s significance, therefore, lies in the fact that it gave rise to the most diverse city in the world and the nation’s largest municipality (a legal concept from New Amsterdam of 1653). It meant the onset of the most pluralistic, most powerful nation of this world based on the implicit principle of personal freedom that can only be defined by the notions of tolerance and liberty as equal partners.

That inheritance is also immensely pertinent to the future of our diverse nation as its precepts define “AMERICAN” freedom thus distinguishing it from “GENERIC” freedom.

Many New York Tri-State places still retain the names reflective of that cultural introduction and enduring contribution to North America, such as Cape Hinlopen, Cape May, Kinderhook, Catskill, Claverack, Block Island, Hoboken, Lange Eylant (Long Island), Breuckelen (Brooklyn), Harlem, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Bronx, Konynen Island (Coney Island), Staten Eylant (Staten Island), Hell Gate (Hellegat), Oester Bay, Tappan Zee etc., many roads and establishments. Also many NY citizens are of Dutch descent in direct relation to the citizens of New Netherland. The most famous among them is the Roosevelt family which gave two presidents to the United States. The ancestor of the family, Claes van Roosevelt arrived at Nieuw Amsterdam in about 1650 from Haarlem. The Van Buren family of President Martin Van Buren also originated in New Netherland, first known Van Buren was Maes Van Buren, who never lived in New Netherland but his descendents did.

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 until 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

See also

• Director-General of New Netherland
• New Amsterdam
• Patroon
• Kiliaen Van Rensselaer

References

• Russell Shorto (2004). The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Random House. ISBN 1400078679.

External links

• New Netherland Project
• Dutch Portuguese Colonial HistoryDutch 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.

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• History of New Jersey
• New Netherland