By John B. Manbeck
a Brooklyn historian
Special to The Brooklyn Eagle

As you may have heard, Brooklyn has been in Dutch for many years, say 400, and this year joins with the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico in celebrating its birthday. With our abundance of Dutch farmhouses—from Wyckoffs to Lotts to Lefferts—we still live with our Dutch ancestors. Relics of our Dutch origins can be discovered in all five boroughs as well as in architecture and vestiges of language: boss from baas or master; cookies from koeckjes or sweet cakes; Brooklyn stoops; Santa Claus from Sinterklaas.

Festivities abound these weeks with celebrations on Governors Island (or Nutten Island), the first Dutch settlement; South Street Seaport; at the Museum of the City of New York; and at Brooklyn’s historic Wyckoff Homestead.

As Russell Shorto in his sharp analysis of the Dutch experience in The Island at the Center of the World has pointed out, our American heritage owes more to the Dutch than to the English. Whereas the 17th century Dutch were traders and intellectuals, the English who arrived in New England were more autocratic and theocratic, stemming from their associations with Oliver Cromwell, the dictatorial leader of England.

In the seventeenth century, The Netherlands stood at the center of European culture and intellectual curiosity. Having wrested off the shackles of Spanish control, the Dutch embarked on a mission to explore the world for commercial ends. Only the British had established a competitive challenge.

In 1607, the Dutch fleet defeated the Spanish armada at Gibraltar; in 1609, the Dutch East India Company contracted with Henry Hudson to discover new trading routes. Hudson landed at Coney Island; the subsequent murder of his mate, John Coleman, spurred a recent query by The New York Times writer Sam Roberts into an attempt to solve this early crime.

By 1621, the newly formed Dutch West India Company had been granted a monopoly to settle the trading post of New Netherland which reached fruition in 1624. When the third governor-general, Peter Minuit, arrived in 1626, “bought� Manhattan Island, and built Fort Amsterdam, the post began to resemble a colony rather than a business enterprise. Around this time, the newcomers turned their attention south across the East River and made several land “purchases� from the native Lenapes, who probably did not understand the concept, according to historian Ken Jackson. Between 1636 and 1684, after the British occupied the Dutch property, Brooklyn lands were transferred to Europeans in over two dozen deeds.

Among the Dutch purchases were tracts in Flatlands (New Amersfoort), by Wallabout Bay, and in Gowanus. In 1642, a ferry service was established between Brooklyn and New Amsterdam, a step that increased interaction between the two areas. Kieft’s War between the Dutch and natives also started that year. Willem Kieft, the governor, invited several English groups to settle in outlying areas as a safety buffer for New Amsterdam on Manhattan. The Brooklyn colony was led by Lady Deborah Moody who inhabited Gravesend at Kieft’s invitation.

Kieft’s successor, Peter Stuyvesant, became the most influential and colorful of the administrators. Under his rule from 1647, the Town of Midwout (Flatbush) was founded, the Peter Claeson Wyckoff house was constructed, the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church was organized, and the Town of Gravesend “purchased� Conye Islant. Other towns—New Utrecht and Boswijck (Bushwick)—materialized before the British captured New Amsterdam in 1664, although the Dutch re-captured the colony in 1673 and renamed it New Orange until the Treaty of Westminster in 1674.

In the first census held in 1790, 80,000 Dutch immigrants and their descendents were counted among New York’s residents. The original Dutch records had an arduous journey from New Amsterdam to London to Albany, where they survived a fire in the State Library. Shorto’s book evolved from the studious translations of Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Project, who laboriously recorded the colloquial Dutch to modern English for American history.

Other original documents from the National Archives of the Netherlands are included at South Street Seaport in this 400th birthday party for New York.

© 2009 John B. Manbeck manbeck@brooklyneagle.net