New Netherlander
The concepts of civil liberties and pluralism introduced in the colony are supposed to have later become a mainstay of American political and social life.
The WIC was chartered by the States-General and given the authority to make contracts and alliances with princes and natives, build forts, administer justice, appoint and discharge governors, soldiers, and public officers, and promote trade in New Netherland.
The realization that greater inducements had to be offered to increase the development of the colony led the West India Company to the creation of the so-called "patroon system".
Over a period of four years was entitled to a plot with 25 miles of front to the river, with exclusive rights to hunting and fishing, and civil jurisdiction and criminal on earth.
Everardus Bogardus the second minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, the oldest established church in present-day New York, frequently was combative with the Director-General of the New Netherlands and their management of the Dutch West India Company colony, going up against the often-drunk Wouter van Twiller and famously denouncing Willem Kieft from the pulpit during the colony's disastrously bloody Kieft's War (1643–1645).
A Council of Twelve Men was chosen on 1641 by the residents of New Amsterdam to advise the Director of New Netherland, Willem Kieft, on relations with the Native Americans due to the murder of Claes Swits.
[9] Though the region became a British colony in 1674, it retained its "Dutch" character for many years[10] as early settlers and their descendants developed the land and economy.
[14] The first non-Native American to settle in Manhattan was Juan Rodriguez (Jan Rodrigues in Dutch), a Dominican man of African and Portuguese descent born in Santo Domingo.
[21] King Manuel I of Portugal populated the São Tomé and Príncipe islands, in the slave trade route, with about 2,000 entrepreneur Sephardic Jews refugees after their expulsion from Spain.
[23][24] An early settler from Africa was a wealthy Muslim, and land owner, Anthony Janszoon van Salee a religious refugee from Spain.
In mid-seventeenth century, for political and religious unrest in England, emigrated to the Atlantic coast of North America, numerous Protestant Puritans, who settled in New Amsterdam.
They had to attract, "through attitude and by example", the natives and nonbelievers 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."
[31] The exchange of gifts in the form of sewant or manufactured goods was perceived as trade agreement and defense alliance which included farming, hunting, and fishing rights.
[28] The River Indians, such as the Wecquaesgeek, Hackensack, and Canarsee, within whose territories many European settlements were established, had regular and frequent contact with the New Netherlanders.
The Lenape's quick adoption of trade goods, and their need to trap furs to meet high European demand, resulted in their disastrous over-harvesting of the beaver population in the lower Hudson Valley.
While the Lenape produced wampum in the vicinity of Manhattan Island, temporarily forestalling the negative effects of this decline in trade,[32] Dutch settlers founded a colony at present-day Lewes, Delaware, on June 3, 1631, and named it Zwaanendael (Swan Valley).
[35] Lenape population fell, due mostly to epidemics of infectious diseases carried by Europeans, such as measles and smallpox, to which they had no natural immunity.
