Peter Minuit

Peter Minuit
3rd Director of New Netherland
In office 1626–1632
Preceded by	Willem Verhulst
Succeeded by	Sebastiaen Jansen Krol
Personal details
Born	1580 Wesel, Duchy of Cleves, Holy Roman Empire (modern North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany)
Died	August 5, 1638 St. Christopher

Peter Minuit, Pieter 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 Cleves. He was the Director 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 goods to the value of 60 Dutch guilders, which in the 19th century was estimated to be the equivalent of $1000 USD.

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 French-speaking city of Tournai in modern day Belgium, 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, which 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 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.

At some point Minuit moved to Utrecht and never returned to his homeland.

Career

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

Purchase of Manhattan

On May 24, 1626, Minuit was credited with purchasing the island from the natives (most likely the Lenape tribe ) in exchange for trade goods valued at 60 guilders.

The figure of 60 guilders comes from a letter by a member of the board of the Dutch West India Company, Pieter Janszoon Schagen, to the States-General in November 1626. 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. Sixty guilders in 1626 had the approximate value of $1000 in 2006, according to the Institute for Social History of Amsterdam Based on the price of silver, Straight Dope author Cecil Adams calculated an equivalent of $72 in 1992.

The transaction is often viewed as one-sided, usually to the benefit of the Dutch, though one popular history of Manhattan claims that Minuit actually purchased the island from the wrong tribe (the Canarsee, who lived on Long Island). In any event, there is no evidence that either the Dutch or the Indians believed they had swindled, or been swindled by, the other party to the deal An 1877 embellishment of the myth claimed that the Dutch offered "beads, buttons and other trinkets," though there is no evidence for this. However, according to researchers at the National Library of the Netherlands: "The original inhabitants of the area were unfamiliar with the European notions and definitions of ownership rights. For the Indians, water, air and land could not be traded. Such exchanges would also be difficult in practical terms because many groups migrated between their summer and winter quarters. It can be concluded that both parties probably went home with totally different interpretations of the sales agreement."

A contemporary purchase of rights in nearby Staten Island, 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."

The calculation of $24 also fails to recognize that the concepts of property trading and ownership held by the 17th century Dutch and East Coast natives were both different from modern conceptions. Comparisons to modern land dealing distort the reality of what Minuit was trying to do. Both the Dutch and the Indians undoubtedly included intangibles along with any hard goods in their concept of the total value of transaction. For Indians and Minuit alike, both sides felt they were getting far more than a mere 60 guilders. For instance, the natives most certainly would have thought the trade included the value of the Dutch as potential military allies against rival Indian nations -- a 'good' that cannot be valued strictly in currency. As well, the value of the sale to the Dutch and the Indians, would have included the prospect of future trade. The settlement at Manhattan was to be created, after all, to trade furs with the Indians, with both communities expecting to benefit from the relationship.

Minuit's subsequent career

In 1631, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) suspended Minuit from his post for reasons that are unclear, but probably for abetting the landowning patroons who were engaging in illegal fur trade and otherwise enriching themselves against the interests and orders of the West India Company. He returned to Europe in August 1632 to explain his actions, but was dismissed. He was succeeded as director by Wouter van Twiller.

His friend Willem Usselincx, also disappointed by the WIC, drew Minuit’s attention to Swedish efforts to have 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 on the Fogel Grip and Kalmar Nyckel 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. Nine expeditions to the colony were carried out before the Dutch captured the colony in 1655, well after Minuit's death.

Legacy

• Peter Minuit Plaza, north of the South Ferry-Whitehall Street subway station and adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry Whitehall Terminal;
• A marker in Inwood Hill Park at the supposed site of the purchase of Manhattan;
• A granite flagstaff base in Battery Park, which depicts the historic purchase;
• A school and playground in East Harlem are named for him;
• The Peter Minuit Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution; and
• A memorial on Moltkestraße in Wesel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Popular culture

• The beginning lines of Rodgers and Hart's 1939 song "Give it Back to the Indians" recount the sale of Manhattan: Old Peter Minuit had nothing to lose when he bought the isle of Manhattan / For twenty-six dollars and a bottle of booze and they threw in the Bronx and Staten / Pete thought that he had the best of the bargin but the poor red man just grinned / And he grunted "ugh!" meaning "okay" in his jargon for he knew poor Pete was skinned.

• One version of Minuit was played by Groucho Marx in the 1957 comedy film The Story of Mankind.

• Minuit is mentioned on the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire, where the character Edward Bader tells a joke featuring the line, "'50 bucks?' the fella says. 'Peter Stuyvesant only paid 24 for the entire island of Manhattan!'", while Steve Buscemi's' character Enoch 'Nucky' Thompson has to correct Bader and inform him that is was in fact Peter Minuit who bought Manhattan, not Stuyvesant.

• Bob Dylan mentions Minuit in his song "Hard Times in New York Town" (released on The Bootleg Series Volume 1) in the following line: Mister Hudson come a-sailing down the stream / and old Mister Minuit paid for his dream. However, in the released recording of the song, Dylan spoonerizes "Mister Minuit," which he pronounces as "Minnie Mistuit." The official lyrics have the correct version of the name, except that Minuit is spelled "Minuet."

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 1-4000-7867-9.
• Jaap Jacobs (2005), New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, ISBN 90-04-12906-5.

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

External links

• Project Gutenberg's Narrative New Netherland, edited by J. Franklin Jameson, includes a footnote about the life of Minuit, but gives an improbable birth date of 1550.
• "The Canarsees", Angelfire
• Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace: Gotham, 1999.
• Kenneth T. Jackson, ed.: Encyclopedia of New York City (1995)
• Pieter (later English spelling Peter) Schaghen, "Letter on the purchase of Manhattan Island",
• "Exhibit of 'Novum Belgium' share certificates", in honour of Peter Minuit, CollectValue
•  Arthur Elmore Bostwick (1900). Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J. (eds.). Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)