Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Kenneth C. Davis

correctly assumed that this route did not lead to the Pacific. (As noted, the ill-fated Hudson had even worse luck. During another voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, Hudson’s crew mutinied in 1611 and put their captain into an open boat in Hudson Bay.)
    England was flexing its new muscles in the early 1600s, but it was the Dutch who had become the true world power in maritime matters by building the world’s largest merchant marine fleet. There was literally not a place in the known world of that day in which the Dutch did not have a hand in matters. Amsterdam had become the busiest and richest city in the European world. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was formed with the aim of taking over trade between Europe and the New World, and the Dutch soon took from the Portuguese control of the lucrative slave and sugar trades. Fort Orange, the site of present-day Albany, took hold as a fur trading outpost in 1624. Two years later, the trading village of New Amsterdam, later to be renamed New York, was established at the mouth of the Hudson. The Dutch West India Company did more than trade and set up colonies. In 1628, the Dutch admiral Piet Hein captured a Spanish treasure fleet, pirating away enough silver to provide company shareholders with a 75 percent dividend.
    Did the Indians really sell Manhattan for $24?
     
    The first Dutch settlers to arrive on the narrow, twelve-mile-long island of Manhattan didn’t bother to pay the Indians for the land they chose for their settlement. But when Peter Minuit arrived in the spring of 1624 and was chosen as leader of the settlement, he quickly met with the local Indian chiefs. Before them he set a sales agreement for all of Manhattan Island and two boxes of trade goods—probably hatchets, cloth, metal pots, and bright beads—worth sixty Dutch guilders. At the time, that equaled 2,400 English cents, which has come down in history as the famous $24 figure.
    From its inception, Dutch New Amsterdam was far less pious and more rowdy than Puritan New England. As a trading outpost it attracted a different breed of settler, and unlike Boston, taverns in New Amsterdam quickly outnumbered churches. As few Dutch settlers were lured to the new colony by the promise of low pay to work on West India Company farms, the company welcomed settlers from any nation, and by 1640, at least eighteen languages were spoken in New York, a polyglot tradition that was to continue throughout the city’s history.
Must Read: The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto.
     
    How did New Amsterdam become New York?
     
    The Dutch got New York cheap. The English went them one better. They simply took it for nothing. Why pay for what you can steal?
    Dutch rule in America was not long-lived, but it was certainly influential in the stamp it put on the future New York. It was the Dutch who erected, as a defense against Indians, the wall in lower Manhattan from which Wall Street takes its name. And what would some Dutch burgher think of finding today’s Bowery instead of the tidy bouweries , or farms, that had been neatly laid out in accordance with a plan drawn up in Amsterdam? Besides the settlement on Manhattan island, the Dutch had also established villages, such as Breukelen and Haarlem. And early Dutch and Walloon (Belgian Protestant) settlers included the ancestors of the Roosevelt clan.
    New Amsterdam developed far differently from the English colonies, which held out the promise of land ownership for at least some of its settlers. Promising to bring over fifty settlers to work the land, a few wealthy Dutch landholders, or patroons , were able to secure huge tracts along the Hudson in a system that more closely resembled medieval European feudalism than anything else, a system that continued well after the Revolution and that contributed to New York’s reputation as an aristocratic (and, during the Revolution, loyalist) stronghold.
    New Amsterdam became New York in one of the only