Peter Stuyvesant

Peter Stuyvesant was the last Director-General of New Netherland, ran it for seventeen years, and surrendered it to the English without firing a shot. Born in Friesland around 1610, the son of a Reformed minister, he studied at Franeker and left without a degree, joining the Dutch West India Company in his twenties. He served in Brazil and the Caribbean and became governor of Curaçao. In 1644 he led an attack on the Spanish-held island of Sint Maarten, where a cannonball shattered his right leg; it was amputated below the knee, and he wore a wooden leg banded with silver for the rest of his life. He arrived at New Amsterdam in 1647 to find a disorderly settlement of about a thousand people, with taverns for roughly a quarter of its buildings. He imposed order with considerable success: he built a wall along the northern boundary, which is why Wall Street has its name, established a hospital, a school, a fire watch and a market, paved streets, and negotiated the Treaty of Hartford in 1650 fixing the boundary with Connecticut. The population grew several-fold. He also governed autocratically and was religiously intolerant, attempting to exclude Lutherans, persecuting Quakers, and in 1654 trying to expel a group of Jewish refugees from Brazil. The Company overruled him on both counts, in the Jewish case because Jewish shareholders objected — the origin of the Jewish community in New York. In August 1664 four English warships appeared. Stuyvesant wanted to resist; the inhabitants, including his own son, petitioned him not to, and he surrendered in September. The city was renamed New York. He remained on his Manhattan farm, the Bouwerij, and died in 1672.

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