Peter Minuit: Biography and Much More from Answers.com
- ️Wed Jul 01 2015
Peter Minuit (1580-1638) was director general of the New Netherland colony in America and founder of New Amsterdam. He later became first governor of New Sweden.
Of Huguenot Walloon descent, Peter Minuit was born in Wesel on the German Rhine. Growing up in his native city and apparently becoming a merchant there, he was deacon in the local Dutch Reformed congregation. In 1624 Spanish troops occupied Wesel; Minuit fled to Holland and then to the Dutch West India Company's American colony of New Netherland. In 1625 he was appointed to the governor's council of William Verhulst, but he soon returned to Amsterdam. Early 1626 found him once more in the colony, perhaps only as supercargo for the company; yet on September 23 the New Netherland council deposed Verhulst and proclaimed Minuit his successor.
Presumably Minuit had not planned to stay in America, for he sent for his wife only after his appointment as first director general. One of his earliest official acts was to convene Indian leaders of the region and to purchase Manhattan Island from them for trinkets valued at $24. This gave the company a semblance of legality for its occupation of the island, and its New Netherland headquarters was moved to Manhattan.
Upon completing a fort, warehouse, and mill, Minuit made his town of New Amsterdam the concentration point for scattered Dutch settlements in the colony. When regular church services commenced at New Amsterdam in 1628, Minuit and his brother-in-law (the company's storekeeper) served pastor Jonas Michaëlius as elders.
Missing records limit historical information on Minuit's administrative activities. It is known he opened both diplomatic and commercial relations with Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1627. He also became involved in a bitter quarrel with Johan Van Remunde, secretary of the company in New Netherland; Michaëlius sided with the secretary and soon attacked Minuit as hypocritical, cruel, and dishonest. Both Minuit and Remunde were recalled to Holland for an investigation. After prolonged inquiry Minuit was discharged while Remunde returned to the colony.
Minuit retired to Emmerich, Duchy of Cleves. But in 1635 a company director recommended him to Sweden's chancellor as ideally qualified to establish a colony in America on the Delaware River. A meeting at The Hague (1637) resulted in the formation of a Swedish trading and colonizing company. Minuit, present at the organizational session, provided one-eighth of the 24,000 guilders capital.
Departing in late autumn with two shiploads of Swedish and Finnish colonists, Minuit reached Delaware Bay in March 1638. Late that month, having purchased a tract along the right bank of the river from neighboring Indian chiefs, he proclaimed "New Sweden" and erected Ft. Christina (present-day Wilmington). After completing the fort and leaving a subordinate in charge, Minuit sailed in June 1638 to the Caribbean to trade for tobacco. Visiting a Dutch merchantman in St. Christopher, he was drowned when a hurricane struck the island.
Further Reading
Data concerning Minuit are scattered and incomplete. For his life in New Netherland the best authorities are J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 (1909); I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909, vol. 1 (1915); and Albert Eckhof, Jonas Michaëlius: Founder of the Church in New Netherland (1926). There is some account of his role in New Sweden in Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, vol. 1 (1911), and Christopher Ward, New Sweden on the Delaware (1938).
(born c. 1589, Wesel, Kleve — died June 1638, Caribbean Sea) Dutch colonial governor of New Netherland. In 1626 the Dutch West India Co. named him director general of the colony on Manhattan Island. According to legend, to legitimize Dutch occupation of the island he persuaded the Indians to sell it for a handful of trinkets worth about 60 guilders ($24). At the island's southern tip he founded New Amsterdam. He was recalled to Holland (1631) and later was sent to establish the colony of New Sweden on Delaware Bay, where he again purchased land from the Indians and built Fort Christina (later Wilmington, Del.) in 1638.
For more information on Peter Minuit, visit Britannica.com.
Peter Minuit
Peter Minuit == Life and work == Minuit's Walloon family, originally from the city of Tournai, was one of many Protestant families that fled persecution from the Roman Catholic government of the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium), and found refuge in the Dutch Republic and Protestant parts of the Holy Roman Empire.
Peter himself was born in a time of great upheavals and struggles by Protestants against Catholics, which culminated in the Thirty Years' War and finally led to an exhausted Peace of Westphalia a century later.
Minuit was appointed the third director-general of New Netherland by the Dutch West India Company, in December 1625, and arrived in the colony on May 4, 1626. [1] On May 24 of the same year, he is credited with the purchase of the island from the natives — perhaps from a Lenape or Metoac tribe known as the "Canarsee" [2] (Canarsie) — in exchange for trade goods valued at 60 guilders. This figure is known from a letter by Peter Schagen to the board of the Dutch West India Company; it has traditionally been converted to $24. The trade goods are sometimes identified as beads and trinkets, but that may also have been an embellishment by 19th century writers. A contemporary purchase of rights in Staten Island, New York to which Minuit was also party involved duffel cloth, iron kettles and axe heads, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, "Jew's Harps," and "diverse other wares". If the island was purchased from the Canarsees, they would have been living on Long Island and maybe passing through on a tooka. In 1631, Minuit was suspended from his post, and he returned to Europe in August 1632 to explain his actions, but was dismissed.[1] He was succeeded as director-general by Wouter van Twiller.
His friend, Willem Usselincx who had also been disappointed by the Dutch West Indian Company, drew Minuit’s attention to the Swedish efforts to found a colony. In 1636 or 1637, Minuit made arrangements with Samuel Blommaert and the Swedish government to create the first Finno-Swedish colony in the New World. Located on the lower Delaware River at what is now Wilmington, Delaware, within the territory earlier claimed by the Dutch, it was called New Sweden, with the Swedes (and Finns) landing there in the spring of 1638. Minuit finished Fort Christiana that year, then departed to return to Stockholm, Sweden for a second load of colonists, and made a side trip to the Caribbean to pick up a shipment of tobacco for resale in Europe to make the voyage profitable. Minuit died while on this voyage during a hurricane at St. Christopher in the Caribbean.
The official duties of the governorship were carried out by the Finnish Lieutenant (raised to the rank of Captain) Mauno Kling, until the next governor was chosen and brought in from the mainland Sweden, two years later.
Legacy
Peter Minuit is commemorated by Peter Minuit Plaza, a small park at the foot of Manhattan, New York City; by a marker in Inwood Hill Park at the site of the actual purchase; by a granite flagstaff base in Battery Park, which shows the historical purchase; by the Peter Minuit School (Public School 108); New Holland the Peter Minuit Chapter of the D.A.R.; and also by a Memorial on Moltkestrasse in Wesel (Germany).a big building on Claremont Ave. is also named in his honor.
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Willem Verhulst |
Director of New
Netherland May 4, 1626–1631 |
Succeeded by Sebastiaen Jansen Krol |
| New title
new colony |
Governor of New Sweden March 29, 1638 – June 15, 1638 |
Succeeded by Måns Nilsson Kling |
Notes
- ^ a b
"Peter Minuit" (biography), Wesel, Germany, webpage: Wesel-Minuit.
References
- Tobias Arand, Peter Minuit aus Wesel - Ein rheinischer Überseekaufmann im 17. Jahrhundert; in: Schöne Neue Welt. Rheinländer erobern Amerika, hg. v. Rheinischen Freilichtmuseum und Landesmuseum für Volkskunde in Kommern, Opladen 1981, 13-42
- Weslager, C. A. (1989). A Man and his Ship: Peter Minuit and the Kalmar Nyckel. Wilmington: Kalmar Nickel Foundation. ISBN 0-9625563-1-9.
External links
- Project Gutenberg's Narrative New Netherland, edited by J.F. Jameson, includes a footnote about the life of Minuit, but gives an improbable birth date of 1550.
- The Canarsees
- Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace: Gotham, 1999.
- Kenneth T. Jackson, ed.: Encyclopedia of New York City. 1995.
- The Kalmar Nyckel Foundation & Tall Ship Kalmar Nyckel.
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Minuit, Peter |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | third director-general of New Netherland, founder of the Swedish colony of New Sweden in 1638 |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1589 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 5, 1638 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | St. Christopher |
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