Peter Minuit

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Peter Minuit

In office
1626–1632
Preceded by Willem Verhulst
Succeeded by Sebastiaen Jansen Krol
Born 1580
Wesel (modern North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany)
Died August 5, 1638
St. Christopher

Peter Minuit, Pierre Minuit or Peter Minnewit (1580 – August 5, 1638) was a Walloon from Wesel, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, then part of the Duchy of Clèves. He was the Director-General of the Dutch colony of New Netherland from 1626 until 1633, and he founded the Swedish colony of New Sweden in 1638. According to tradition, Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from Native Americans on May 24, 1626 for the equivalent of $24 USD.

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[edit] Early life and education

Peter Minuit was born in 1580 in Wesel. This was during a period of religious tensions between Protestants and Catholics polities following the Protestant Reformation that culminated in the Thirty Years' War. Minuit's Walloon family, originally from the city of Tournai, was among those Protestants who migrated away from suppression under the Roman Catholic government of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1580, Minuit's family took refuge in the city of Wesel, that had become a haven for Protestants as early as 1540.

The Eighty Years' War split the Netherlands into a Catholic South and a Protestant North. The religious wars were concluded by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. They would leave much of Germany devastated, though Rhine-Westphalia suffered less than some areas. Protestant refugees from German states and France migrated to sympathetic nations and cities such as London. The neighboring Dutch Republic emerged in the 17th century as a dominant force in Europe.[citation needed]

At some point, Minuit moved to Utrecht.

[edit] Career

At the age of 45 in December 1625, Minuit was appointed the third director-general of New Netherland by the Dutch West India Company. He sailed to North America and arrived in the colony on May 4, 1626.[1]

[edit] The legendary purchase of Manhattan

On May 24, 1626, Minuit was credited with purchasing the island from the natives — perhaps from a Metoac band of Algonquian-speaking Lenape known as the Canarsee.[2] — in exchange for trade goods valued at 60 guilders.

This figure comes from a letter by a member of the board of the Dutch West India Company, Pieter Janszoon Schagen, to the States-General in 1626. Sixty guilders in 1626 had the approximate value of $1000 now.[when?][vague][3][4] In 1846 a New York historian converted the figure of Fl 60 (or 60 guilders) to US$24. "[A] variable-rate myth being a contradiction in terms, the purchase price remains forever frozen at twenty-four dollars," as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace remarked in their history of New York.[5] (Note: FL stands for the older florins, which were no longer used. The FL was used as a symbol for guilders until the euro was adopted.) A further embellishment of the myth in 1877 converted the figure into "beads, buttons and other trinkets".

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 similar trade goods were involved in the Manhattan arrangement", Burrows and Wallace surmise, "then the Dutch were engaged in high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness in tasks ranging from clearing land to drilling wampum". Though Minuit believed he had made an excellent deal, he "purchased" the land from the wrong Native Americans. He paid the Canarsee for Manhattan, but they lived on present-day Long Island and were perhaps passing through on a hunting trip. Minuit should have traded with the Wappinger, an Algonquin tribe.[citation needed] As historians have noted, the parties to the "purchase" had markedly different understandings of concepts of property use and ownership.

[edit] Minuit's subsequent career

In 1631, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) suspended Minuit from his post.[why?] 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, also disappointed by the WIC, drew Minuit’s attention to Swedish efforts to found a colony on the Delaware River south of New Netherland. In 1636 or 1637, Minuit made arrangements with Samuel Blommaert and the Swedish government to create the first Swedish colony in the New World. Located on the lower Delaware River within territory earlier claimed by the Dutch, it was called New Sweden. Minuit and his company arrived at Swedes' Landing (now Wilmington, Delaware), in the spring of 1638. Minuit constructed Fort Christina that year, then returned to Stockholm for a second load of colonists. He made a side trip to the Caribbean on the return to pick up a shipment of tobacco for resale in Europe to make the voyage profitable. Minuit died during this voyage during a hurricane at St. Christopher in the Caribbean. The official duties of the governorship were carried out by the Swedish Lieutenant Måns Nilsson Kling, whose rank was raised to Captain for about two years. It took the government that long for the next governor from mainland Sweden to be appointed and travel to North America.[citation needed]

[edit] Legacy

[edit] Popular culture

The story of Minuit's buying Manhattan is one of the first schoolchildren in New York learn.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b "Peter Minuit" (biography), Wesel, Germany, webpage: Wesel-Minuit.
  2. ^ Europeans often referred to the native inhabitants simply by the Lenape language place name for the larger area: Canarsee, in this case.[citation needed]
  3. ^ "Letter of 1626, stating that Manhattan Island had been purchased for the value of 60 guilders", The College of New Jersey, Accessed April 26, 2007
  4. ^ Traditionally, the 60 guilders have been converted to about US$24. This is a mistake, as 60 guilders in 1626 had a much higher value. The International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam calculates its value as 60 guilders (1626) = €678.91 (2006), equal to about 1000 dollars in 2006.
  5. ^ Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, (1999: xivff)

[edit] 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, Delaware: Kalmar Nickel Foundation. ISBN 0-9625563-1-9. 
  • Russell Shorto (2004). The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Random House. ISBN 1400078679. 
  • Jaap Jacobs (2005), New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, ISBN90 04 12906 5.

[edit] Further reading

  • Mickley, Joseph J. Some account of Willem Usselinx and Peter Minuit: Two individuals who were instrumental in establishing the first permanent colony in Delaware, The Historical Society of Delaware, 1881

[edit] External links

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
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