@Taw
LOL. Oh... so you're just reading up on the English aspects?
@RILMS - Warning, following may bore you but in case you are interested:
"Hendrik" Hudson was English. But he varyingly was backed by English and/or Dutch financiers depending upon his voyage to the New World. (hence the Dutch spelling of his first name also being "valid"
. But his "discovery" of Manhattan, the Hudson River, etc. was under a Dutch West Indies Company contract (1609).
The point would be that a French contract was granted to Giovanni da Verrazzano (an Italian from Tuscany) in around 1524-5 who also entered the waters of New York Harbor, the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, Narragansett Bay, and many more shores up through Nova Scotia and Newfoundland (New York City's Verrazzano Narrows <straits> and Bridge now bear his name). Being rather single-minded, however, Verrazzano's sole purpose was to discover and
lay claim to the Northwest Passage in the name of the King of France (Francis I) so he did not claim these lands at the time. Had he done so, as he first came to landfall off the shores of North Carolina and then voyaged North, much of what would become the original 13 colonies could have been French.
The permanent New Amsterdam settlement on Manhattan is credited to Peter Minuit who paid 60 guilders to the Lenape Indians he met with under the presumption that they had title to Manhattan Island and had the authority to sell the island (a fact now in question academically).In fact, the Dutch already were settled on Manhattan at the time (1624, Capt. Cornelius May on
the New Netherland) and Minuit's arrival there (1626) was as the third of a succession of Directors of the settlement.
Peter Minuit was NOT ethnically Dutch. He was a Walloon. In that complex mixture of faiths and languages that is Belgium even today, his was a family of French speaking Protestants who had to flee to Holland to escape the persecution of the Spanish whose Catholic monarchy at the time had held royal title and claim to the Low Countries and from whom the Dutch, at least, had
been able to become independent (also recall the Spanis Inquisition - real version as opposed to Monty Python's
).
Minuit himself was born to his Walloon parents in Germany. Anyway, after the Dutch took possession of Manhattan Island, it functioned as a busy Dutch sea port until 1664 when the English sent warships to New Amsterdam and took over without too much resistance (the place was not well defended at the time). The English first rename the place Fort James and then fairly quickly New York after that. In 1673, the Dutch retook "New Amsterdam" but then cede it back to England in 1674, from which time the settlement was known as New York.
The Dutch people of New York, however, were not evicted by the English. While some may have left with the change in regime, most stayed, not only in Manhattan but throughout the Hudson River Valley and westward as well (northern New Jersey, Mohawk Valley).
Thu Mar 18, 2004 6:22 am 
