Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay.

And today, we’re going to be talking about the Big Apple—back before people called it that. We’re going back to the year 1664 when New York was controlled by the Dutch, and was still known as New Netherland. At the time, the community didn’t extend much beyond the very southern tip of what we now call Manhattan, and numbered only a few thousand people, even if you included all the scattered villages and farms that existed along the shores of modern Brooklyn, Queens, and surrounding areas of Long Island. But in the world of 17th-century geopolitics, New Netherland punched well above its weight, as it was a bustling, multicultural trade hub populated by not only Dutchmen, but also Englishmen, Jews, emancipated black yeomen, immigrants from all over western Europe, and enslaved peoples captured from Spanish ships.

From the English point of view, it was also an aberration, as Dutch control of the area around modern New York City and the Hudson Valley was seen as a geographical aberration that separated England’s Massachusetts colony in the northeast from the Virginia-based colony to the south.

Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America - Russell Shorto

Why is New York the archetypal modern city – brash, bold, pulsing with energy? The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers up a thrilling narrative of how New York came to be.

Russell ShortoFollow Russell Shorto on Goodreads

In a newly published book, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, historian Russell Shorto gives a blow by blow account of how the English took Manhattan from the Dutch—without bloodshed, and, crucially, without destroying the thriving cosmopolitan trading culture that the Dutch had fostered, and which has persisted to this day, three and a half centuries later.

In my interview with Shorto—who is also the founder of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society—he’ll describe the two main characters—Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial administrator who served as the director-general of New Netherland; and the much lesser known Richard Nicolls, the English military officer who was tasked with taking Manhattan by his childhood friends, King Charles II and his brother, the future king James II, who’d been restored to power following the English civil war.

As you’ll hear, taking Manhattan was just one of the two big jobs that the royals had dispatched Richard Nicolls to accomplish in 1664. The other was to restore some order to Boston, which rogue puritans had turned into a sort of quasi-theocratic city state during the chaos of the English Civil War.

The nature of the two projects, Shorto argues, come with important echoes that signal America’s two conflicting identities right up to the present day—the hardline Christian identity that took root in Boston, and the more diverse and capitalist society that emerged in New Netherland, and that Richard Nicolls, to his credit, preserved following his peaceful takeover of the future metropolis.

Please enjoy my interview with author and historian Russell Shorto, author of Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

Transcript

 Jonathan Kay: Russell Shorto, thank you for joining the Quillette podcast.

Russell Shorto: Happy to be with you.

JK: Tell me a little bit about Richard Nicolls because Peter Stuyvesant, who came out on the losing end of this, his name is well known in New York. Richard Nicolls, much less so despite the fact that in some ways he’s the father of New York.

RS: Yeah. That’s why I devoted so much time to him because he’s so consequential and so little known. For a writer of history, that’s ideal.

JK: Yeah.

RS: You talked about him being complicated. I actually find him to be a pretty straightforward figure compared, for example, to Stuyvesant who always seemed to have a lot of baggage.

JK: He wore a lot of hats. And he had a lot of different constituencies he had to please.

RS: Yeah, and he had a temper. He had this feeling that he should be treated … I mean, he called the people in his colony “his subjects.” He felt like he should be treated as royalty or something.

JK: Just a quick little aside: Is he one of these guys who benefited from the fact that, whatever you could say about him, he was better than the guy he replaced?

RS: I think Stuyvesant was quite a capable leader. I think he came into the job … We’re now talking about Stuyvesant leading the colony of New Netherland. He came in with certain expectations about how this was going to go. He came into a colony that was in upheaval. They replaced the previous leader, who had started a war against the native people. The colonists themselves had opposed that war because they were there to do business, to trade with the native people. So he thought he had to come in and really be heavy-handed. Then he quickly learned that these colonists of his were very strong-willed traders. They had their own trading networks that extended to the Caribbean and South America and Europe and they weren’t going to bow down to him.

 JK: It wasn’t a feudal situation.

RS: Once he learned that, which took him a while, then he did something very clever and very skilful. He refashioned his job and saw himself as kind of a middleman between the directors of the Dutch West India Company—under whose auspices this colony existed—and these traders, his population on Manhattan and elsewhere in the colony.

JK: I got the sense that, in modern parlance, it was almost a good cop/bad cop situation where he was the good local cop, intermediating with a bad cop overseas: the corporate types back in the Netherlands who didn’t really understand the situation fully in New York City.

RS: Yeah. There was a lot of that. He had to mediate between these two. The directors of the company were these wealthy people in the home country who none of whom were ever going to travel to America. They had no notion, and he was often trying to give them a sense of how big these areas were, how far it was to get from Manhattan to Beverwijck to Albany, which was 150 miles up the river. It wasn’t just like: “we’ll run there and back.” And then he would turn around to his traders, his population. And I think with those he was close with, he was able to say—of course it’s not written down, these kinds of interactions—but he was able to say, “Look, here’s what I’m dealing with back home. Help me out.” What he did, which he has never been fully given credit for … although a colleague of mine, Dennis Maika, is writing a book about just this subject right now. He created Manhattan, later New York City as this capitalistic global trading centre, and so he laid the groundwork for what New York City became.

JK: My original question had been about Richard Nicolls, and then I interrupted you. I haven’t seen any statues to Richard Nicolls anywhere in Manhattan. Maybe they exist. Can you give us a biographical sketch?

RS: So Richard Nicolls is from a little town in Bedfordshire called Ampthill. His lifetime is one of great turmoil in England. For the longest time, of course, you had kings running the place. Beginning in the early 1600s, the Puritans start to grow in power. And the Puritans, as the name suggests, they want to purify society and they want to purify the monarchy—the monarchy they associate with corruption—and the corruption in the Church of England.

So they want to create this new church that is more aligned with what God wants. By the middle of the century, this erupts into civil war. The Puritans have gained power in parliament. Charles I, the father of Charles II and James, is dead set against the Puritans taking power.

It comes to a head literally when the Puritans capture Charles I and behead him, and then the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell becomes the leader of England. The two young princes, Charles and James, flee into exile on the continent of Europe. Now, Richard Nicolls grows up in this little village of Ampthill at a time when… Charles I before he’s beheaded is a great hunter and he visits regularly with his sons because this Ampthill is the centre of the royal hunting ground, and Richard Nicolls’ father is the keeper of this hunting preserve, and the largest fanciest house for the king and his family to stay in is Richard Nicolls’ father’s house.

So you get this picture then: these two young princes growing up with this six- or eight-year-older boy, Richard Nicolls. They would come regularly and they would hunt together and play and do all these manly-boy activities. Then, naturally enough, when the civil war happens—when society splits into the Puritans and the Royalists—Richard Nicolls and his family side with the Royalists, because they’ve known them all their lives. When the royals go into exile, Nicolls goes with them. He is particularly attached to James, the younger of the two Stuart sons.

So he’s there with them throughout the period of the Civil War. When Oliver Cromwell is leading the Puritan government, Nicolls is acting as a spy and as a go-between…

JK: this would be the 1650s

RS: … trying to get the royals back on the throne. Finally, in 1658, Cromwell dies, and in 1660, the English are exhausted by this turmoil and invite Charles II to take the throne.

So the royals come back, and Richard Nicolls comes with them. His whole life, he has been connected to these people. They trust him. They’ve known him since they were all children. They are then in London—it’s 1660. For decades, the English have been envious of the Dutch, who have built this global trading empire.

And they now decide: all right, we’re back on the throne; we have to catch up. They look across the Atlantic Ocean to North America and what they see are English colonies in New England, English settlements in Virginia and Maryland, and this whole piece in between—the Dutch, four decades earlier, had started their colony of New Netherland, with the capital New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

So the Dutch are trading in West Africa, they’re trading in Asia, they’re the only European nation trading with Japan. They’re active all over the world, and there they are in North America with this colony that is taking a bite out of these English colonies in North America. So the king and his brother want to send an expedition to take over this Dutch colony. The second mission of this expedition is going to be to deal with the English in New England.

JK: Let me stop you right there, because this is a very interesting subplot. His first order of business had nothing to do with New York. Nicolls, as he was sailing across the Atlantic—his first order of business was to stop in Boston.

At the time, the Puritans who’d come to the area we now call Massachusetts were running a kind of little theocracy. And they didn’t think much of the English throne at the time.

RS: Right. Well, exactly.

JK: And Nicolls had to knock them into shape, as I understand.

RS: That was part of his mission because, throughout this whole century, you’ve had the Puritans in opposition to the monarchy, and the Church of England, and other institutions, and it came to this violent civil war.

Now the Stuarts are back on the throne. And it was the Puritans who founded these colonies—in particular, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, based in Boston. And over these decades, they have grown very powerful, with this religious kind of theocracy. And they continue to despise the Stuarts, even though the Stuarts are back on the throne.

JK: It’s not quite a secessionist movement, but there’s clearly a huge divide.

RS: Yeah. I mean, they’re not doing anything so brash as to separate from England, but they are doing their best to ignore England.

JK: You not only focus on Nicolls, you focus on some key members of his retinue as he sailed west. And there were one or two very important figures who essentially were religious refugees from Massachusetts, who’d gone to England and knew all about who was who back in Boston—and where the bodies were buried, so to speak.

RS: Yeah. There were, I think, 24 people who had lived in Massachusetts and who showed up in London when the new monarch came to the throne to tell the King: look, do you realise what’s going on? These people are just—they’re minting their own money.

JK: Wow. That does sound like an almost separatist move. I mean, if this had gone another way, it sounds like Boston, in a generation or two, could have created its own country, and history could have been very different.

RS: American historians have long looked to this period as the forerunner to what the New Englanders are going to do—and particularly what Boston is going to do—in the Revolution.

Nicolls, then, has this twin mission. The one mission, what we’ve been talking about now, is to make the Puritans based in Boston toe the line—make them bow down to the monarchy. And I should say that when we talk about the Royalists and that party in England, it doesn’t just mean people who loved the King. What united the Royalists was opposition to Puritans. They were people who did not want the Puritans to take over and to outlaw Christmas, dancing, and theatre—which is what the Puritans did. They wanted some sort of return to normalcy.

So Nicolls’s first mission is to go to Boston, and the language of his commission is such that they’re basically saying: figure out, see what you can do here, try to make the Puritans toe the line. The second mission was to take this colony from the Dutch. So Nicolls had his hands full on both of these fronts. What he was able to do ultimately was take the colony from the Dutch—although, you know, the whole point of the book is that it wasn’t a very straightforward takeover.

JK: OK, so we’ve talked a bit about the English perspectives and what their situation was. Now maybe let’s shift our gaze. As you take pains to note, this is not the first time this territory changed hands. Originally, of course, the whole area was inhabited by and controlled by Indigenous groups. You make the point—it’s just mind-blowing when I visit Manhattan now—to think that Broadway is a former Indigenous trail. Tell us about the indigenous facts on the ground that pre-existed the Europeans arriving.

RS: The area around New York City and New Jersey was the homeland of the people who were variously called Lenape, or Munsee, or Delaware. Long Island had several different native groups—the Shinnecock, the Montauk. Further north, in what’s now New York State, you had, on the east side of the Hudson River, the Mahican people. On the west side and moving westward, you had the Haudenosaunee nations, also called the Iroquois.

Each of these is a different people, who speak a different language from one another, who have different customs, who periodically are at war with one another. I mean, yes, the Europeans came and imposed themselves on this landscape. Nevertheless, most of these native groups saw something in it for them. They were interested in European manufactured goods. They didn’t produce metal objects. They were interested in knives and guns.

JK: And this was further complicated by the fact that Indigenous conceptions of real estate ownership and control were very different from those of the Europeans. But in broad strokes, how did the southern tip of Manhattan become a de facto Dutch possession?

RS: I think the Dutch came very early to understand that the native people had a different notion—

JK: This wasn’t fee simple land ownership.

RS: The event you’re referring to is the deed for the purchase—quote, unquote “purchase”—of Manhattan Island in 1626. What the Dutch would have done is two things: they would have entered a ceremony, they would have done what the native people would understand, not as a transfer of real estate, but something like an alliance. From the native perspective, it would have been: OK, this is our territory, this island is our land, but we’ll allow you to come here as well, and we will defend one another if one of us is attacked.

And it had to be renewed. So there were a lot of ways that the native people looked at it that the Dutch, I think, very quickly learned. At the same time, the Dutch were conscious, of course, of other Europeans—the English, the French—and so they wanted to have something they could show. For that matter, they also needed to demonstrate legitimacy to other Dutch people. So they created a deed they could show saying: look, we purchased this.

That deed has been lost. But what remains is a letter that was sent when the next ship returned to the Dutch Republic. An official named Pieter Schaghen wrote a summary of what had just happened—what he learned from the people on board—for his bosses. And he said, “Our people have purchased the island of Manhattan for the value of sixty guilders.” That did not mean an outright purchase price.

JK: This was the European spin on what had happened.

RS: That’s right. So sixty guilders, which then gets translated or converted to $24—the infamous swindle. And certainly from our perspective, it was a swindle. But on the ground at the time, which is how I try to look at it when I’m doing history, what they were doing was not purchasing it for $24. What they were doing was giving gifts. In these ceremonies, you gave gifts as a way of sealing the deal.

The deal, again, was not a purchase. It was more like, “We’ll both use this island.” I mean, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s maybe complicated enough. That’s the so-called purchase of Manhattan Island. And the Dutch went on and created hundreds of deeds with native groups up and down the Hudson River, throughout New Netherland.

New Netherland, by the way, was quite a broad territory. It encompassed all or parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, some of Pennsylvania, and Delaware. So it was a big area, and they were doing what Europeans would continue to do. And that’s the story of North America, of the US, and of Canada. The purchase of Manhattan is one of the first—and probably the most infamous—of these.

JK: A lot of the background here is European conceptions of what makes it legally official when a European power takes possession of what we now call a colony. So in the French context, Samuel de Champlain was very eager to set up these year-round settlements, even though often half the people died of scurvy by the time spring came. Because the idea was: if you had a year-round settlement, that created facts on the ground, and in European legal terms, that gave you a case for possession.

In your book, you talk about how the English just took it for granted that from a European perspective, they had legal right to the entire coastline. Maybe this question can’t be answered, but: who had the better legal claim to Manhattan in 1660?

RS: Well, the English claim was certainly very tenuous. It was based on the logic of contiguity. So John Cabot—who, by the way, is an Italian who had sailed for the English—

JK: Yeah. He went to Newfoundland. Because he touched land—this was during the time of Henry VII, I think—

RS: Because he touched foot, more than a century before, on Newfoundland, then basically all of North America was presumed to be under the domain of the English monarch. That was their logic. Now, they couldn’t defend that. They couldn’t even think about it really for a long time. Then the Dutch come along, and they say, “This is our territory,” and they start negotiating treaties with native people and build this colony. And for forty years, they have this colony. Because of their prowess and their capitalism and the strategic significance of New York Harbour and Manhattan Island, they develop this little empire. They’re trading from Manhattan with parts of Europe and the Caribbean.

So they develop this very sophisticated place. Finally, coming back to our story, the English are ready to say, “No. We want that because we want to get serious about developing North American colonies.” And they go back to that logic of possession and contiguity—“Oh wait, this guy, over a hundred years ago, touched foot there and planted a little flag. Therefore, the whole of North America is ours by right.”

JK: So they saw the Dutch presence there as a sort of geographical aberration that they were just coming to sort out?

RS: Yes. That the Dutch had just taken advantage of the fact that the English were distracted by their civil war and other things.

JK: The French would have a viceroy—someone connected to the royal family—and everything was integrated into the Crown. But for the Dutch, it was more of a corporate project. Like it was outsourced?

RS: The Dutch system, which they built their empire on, was based on the Dutch Republic, which was a very loose confederation—kind of like the American Confederation before the Constitution. In the American context, the states had all the power and the federal government had none. That was sort of the situation in the Dutch Republic. You had these individual provinces, like Friesland and Holland. They conducted their foreign diplomacy and empire-building by means of, first, the Dutch East India Company, which operated in Asia, and then the Dutch West India Company, which tried to do the same thing in the West Indies.

The “West Indies,” if you’re in Europe and looking at a map, meant basically everything to your left: coastal North America, the Caribbean, and South America. That was the West Indies. The East India Company just immediately exploded with wealth, exploiting the spice trade and other luxury goods. The West India Company never really made a go of it. They kept plodding and plodding, and it was much harder to do.

New Netherland was founded under the auspices of the West India Company, so that’s how the Dutch Empire operated.

JK: You make the point that, in many ways, the Dutch who lived in what we now call Manhattan were much more cosmopolitan than the English. They inhabited what, in some ways, is a multicultural society. I don’t want to exaggerate this point, because I think Peter Stuyvesant banned Jews at one point. I mean, there were all sorts of official prohibitions on what kind of religion you could be. But some of your protagonists in your book are free black people who operated as merchants. And it does seem to have had a multicultural, freewheeling character to it.

RS: Yeah. That’s very much part of my thesis—with those caveats. The Dutch pioneered religious toleration in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. This was a time when intolerance was official policy in England, France, and Spain. The common sense at the time was that it’s a dangerous world out there. If we’re going to get ahead, we all have to be on the same page.

The Dutch did something different. They made diversity work, and they became probably the most powerful nation in the world, as tiny as they were—certainly the most powerful in Europe for a time—by exploiting this notion of diversity and religious toleration.

In New Netherland, the same thing: there was this overarching policy of religious toleration.

Peter Stuyvesant, the last and most prominent director of the colony, was himself quite intolerant. For practical reasons, and I think also for his own religious way of looking at things, he thought Jews were a deceitful race, and he tried to bar them from settling. And when he couldn’t, he just tried to make life difficult for them. The same with the Quakers.

JK: Taxation and legal rules?

RS: Yes. He taxed them as burghers, citizens of the city, but he wouldn’t give them the privileges of burghers. So what they did was appoint one of their small Jewish community as their leader, and he went to court and said, “Either tax us and give us the privileges, or don’t tax us.” Then Stuyvesant tried to say, “Too bad. If you don’t like it, leave.” They appealed to the home country, and Stuyvesant was overruled.

So that’s a civil rights story, and the system working. Famously, there were at one point eighteen languages being spoken on Manhattan, when there were probably only about 500 people there.

JK: Wow.

RS: So, as I like to say, New York was New York even before it was New York. That is a seed of what New York later became.

JK: You talk a lot about slavery in the book. Peter Stuyvesant seemed to have no moral objection to slavery. At the same time, there are two factors that militate the other way. One is that you also have scenes where slaves would come to him and he would effectively emancipate them. They’d been in loyal service to people in the colony, and it was by his hand that they gained their freedom. Slavery seems to have been a commercial fact. He saw it as something that could help make a buck, but he doesn’t seem to have been a monomaniacal bigot or somebody who endorsed slavery for its own sake.

Slavery was most horrific and most prevalent in colonies like Haiti—Saint-Domingue—where you needed thousands and thousands of people to create cash crops, and the situation was completely inhumane and Europeans wouldn’t do that work themselves. Whereas that wasn’t really the commercial situation in New York City. It sounds like slaving in New York City at the time was more like a hub for slaves. It wasn’t like thousands of them were being imported and put to work making sugar or cotton.

RS: I think the main factor is that slavery was a very ad hoc thing for almost the whole life of the Dutch colony.

JK: It’s mentioned almost casually in the documentation. A ship would arrive and say it contained this many bales of this, that, and fifty slaves.

RS: For most of the life of the colony, enslaved Africans arrived by accident. The Dutch were fighting a war against the Spanish and the Portuguese. A Dutch ship would capture a Spanish or Portuguese ship in the Caribbean, and they knew there was a Dutch colony in Manhattan, so they’d haul it there and drop them off …

JK: As war booty, basically.

RS: So it’s like, “OK, what do you know?” The leader of the colony is like, “All right, now I have to deal with these people.” Those first enslaved Africans were put to work for the West India Company in New Amsterdam, and that’s more or less how slavery operated in the colony.

Until almost five years before the English takeover. This gets back to the point that the West India Company was not able to make a profit—either in New Netherland or in the Caribbean and South America. What it was doing was trying different things. Finally, they said, “Alright, let’s go all in on slavery.”

The directors said to Stuyvesant, “We want you to”—the phrase was—“experiment with a consignment of Negroes.” So Stuyvesant, in 1660, began this process of trying to make Manhattan into a hub for slavery. And as you say, it was not a situation with plantations and that kind of thing. It was more like, “Let’s start bringing enslaved Africans here and selling them,” selling them to English planters in Maryland and Virginia.

That’s what I think they had in mind. Then in 1664, Richard Nicolls comes in. And—we haven’t talked much about the actual transfer yet—but it becomes New York. Two weeks before Nicolls arrived, the first big shipment of Africans came: 290 men, women, and children. So then it was largely left to the English to figure out, “OK, what do we do now? Are we going to make slavery into a business here?”

JK: Let’s get back to the timeline. Nicolls has sorted things out to the best of his ability in Boston. I think he probably realises this is going to be a long-term project. And then he says, “OK, now I’m going to do the second item on my to-do list, which is take Manhattan.” It’s the title of your book, but what happens? You describe it very artfully. It’s not exactly a military encounter, because there was no military action, so to speak. It really is literally gunboat diplomacy.

Nicolls sailed his little armada—very small by contemporary military standards, but more than enough force. If he had wanted to, he could have stormed Manhattan. The defences were fairly primitive. As you describe it, the arsenal there had been shortchanged by Amsterdam. They hadn’t really invested in defences properly. A lot of the militia was ad hoc.

He basically said, “I don’t want this to get ugly. So hand over the keys. It’s over.”

RS: As you said earlier, Nicolls, when he was still in London, was really doing his homework. He was interviewing all these disgruntled...

JK: They were a huge asset to him. They had all this intelligence.

RS: Yeah, so he was learning about Boston and the Puritans and how strong they were. He was also learning about New Amsterdam. He interviewed people who had lived there, people who had worked in Stuyvesant’s government.

JK: And some came with him on the ship, right?

RS: Yes, he brought them with him. He was very well-informed, and he became more and more intrigued about what this place was, what the Dutch had built there.

JK: Oh, and by the way, he was something of a scientist and empiricist. There’s all this correspondence at the time. He’s connected to people at the Royal Society.

JK: He’s an intellectually curious person.

RS: As was Stuyvesant.

JK: Yes. They were all part of this network of gentlemen, sending letters to each other like, “I saw the most extraordinary bird. Let me describe it.”

RS: So Nicolls sails into New York Harbour with four ships, 450 soldiers, filled to the brim with gunpowder and so forth. His mission is just—they’d just fought a war with the Dutch, and they were about to fight another one—so just take it. That was his brief.

But he had learned that the Dutch had created something very special. And he knew that if he just bombed away and took the island, he’d just have an island. What he came to realise was that he wanted the secret sauce—this society. And that meant appeasing them.

So he decided he was going to do everything he possibly could to make it appealing for them to give it to him. And what he did—this is a two-week back and forth with Nicolls and his ships in the harbour.

JK: Delegations are coming back and forth to the deck of his ship…

RS: … rowing back and forth with messages. Several times, one side or the other gives up and says, “You know what? We’re going to just open fire.” Then the temperature lowers, and they start over again.

Basically, the terms of surrender that they worked out—nobody surrendered anything, really, except that they gave over overall control. But the so-called Articles of Surrender are a bill of rights to the people of New Netherland. It says: you will keep your homes, your families, your businesses, your trade networks—by all means. That’s exactly what Nicolls wanted.

JK: And he stuck to it, more or less, right?

RS: He stuck to it. There were times when they had to remind him. They would come to him literally waving this paper, saying, “This is our agreement.”

From the Dutch perspective—as you hinted at—they had come to realise, not just Stuyvesant but everybody in New Amsterdam, that they were not going to get real support from the West India Company or from Europe. They weren’t getting soldiers. They weren’t getting more settlers. They were on their own.

From Nicolls’s side, he now wants what they’ve created. So they realise in this negotiation that there is something they—meaning the people on the ground—want that is in common. The people in Europe are going to be annoyed when they find out about it. The West India Company is going to be really annoyed. But for the people on the ground—the 1,500 people in New Amsterdam, the 10,000 people in the colony—this is a pretty decent situation.

They’ll keep everything they have, and the flag on top of the fort will change, but they’ll keep their lives and livelihoods. In allowing them to maintain everything they had, Nicolls creates a new city: New York. An English city that operates very much along Dutch principles. And that’s the essence of New York City: that from the beginning it operated differently from other places in the British Empire as it developed.

JK: And it’s ironic because he had just been to Boston, where the Puritans had come saying, “We’re going to build this city on a hill. It’s going to be the perfect English society. We’re going to start over. All the corruption of the old world will be forgotten. We’re going to build this perfect English Puritanical society,” which was rejected. The English who came were much more impressed with this Dutch model.

RS: That’s because you have two different sides in England. You have the Puritans and you have the Royalists, who are the moderates, basically. In terms of looking at this in relation to later American history—and right down to today—what Nicolls’s two missions did was this: the failure to deal with the Bostonians allows Puritanism to grow and flourish as an American ideology. And his success in negotiating this deal for Manhattan allows this other sensibility—this moderate, globalist sensibility—to take root in America.

Those two forces, I would argue, have been at war with each other ever since in American history.

JK: Let’s talk about the aftermath, because when Peter Stuyvesant went back to the Netherlands, he had to face the music. They were like, “How could you just—you literally just gave the English New York.” Did the same thing happen to Nicolls when he went back to England? Did he face the music for being so generous—call it malleable—in the terms that he gave to what we would now call New Yorkers?

RS: We don’t have any evidence that he got flack for the way he negotiated it. Maybe he did, but we don’t have any evidence for it. Stuyvesant, as you say, was recalled and put on trial, and he spent about two years defending himself. In a sense, he didn’t have an argument, because yeah, he did give it away.

JK: It was all there in black and white.

RS: Right.

JK: It was richly documented.

RS: But what he argued was: you didn’t give me the means to defend it. You know? “We asked for years. We kept saying we need more.” And he did—he created a paper trail.

JK: By the way, there’s a modern corporate lesson there: create a paper trail.

RS: Exactly. He created a paper trail that showed him writing to them, saying, “You have to give us the means to defend the place, otherwise the English are going to take it.” I mean, it was obvious what was going to happen.

In that two-week standoff, he had to deal with the question of his loyalties. He had a loyalty to the West India Company. He had a loyalty to the Dutch government. But ultimately, he decided that his greatest loyalty was to this community that he himself had helped to build. He had raised his family there. People were in their second or third generation of New Netherlanders. So preserving that was what mattered most to him, and that’s what he did.

Ultimately, he was exonerated. And then the most interesting thing of all about Stuyvesant is what he did next: he went back. He went back and lived out his life in New York, as a New Yorker. And he seems to have been an unofficial advisor to Nicolls.

JK: Is it weird that Stuyvesant’s name is well known—it’s part of a neighbourhood in Brooklyn—whereas I’m guessing 99 out of 100 modern-day New Yorkers have no idea who Richard Nicolls is?

RS: I think it’s more than that. It’s 99.9. That is weird, because Nicolls was the so-called victor. Stuyvesant, however, was there for seventeen years in office, and then he went back and lived the rest of his life there. So he had a longer time to put an imprint on the place.

Nicolls—the interesting thing about him is that Stuyvesant decided to go back, indicating that that really was his home. It had become his home. Nicolls, after four years as the first governor of New York—the man who named New York after the Duke of York, who almost named New Jersey “Albania,” and who set the parameters of New York City—he decided Manhattan Island would be New York City, whereas before it was just the tiny triangle of land in the Financial District that was New Amsterdam.

So in many ways, he defined New York. But after four years, he asked to be reassigned. He was done with his job.

And so I think that may have something to do with it. His footprint was quite big, but shallow as far as history was concerned.

JK: And he went full circle, as I understand. He went back to Ampthill, the old royal hunting grounds, and was buried with full honours in the church there, right?

RS: Yeah. I visited with the town historian. We visited the church, which has this lovely little tomb of his inside. A British and an American flag are on it.

JK: Oh, that’s so nice.

RS: And supposedly, the cannonball that killed him—because in 1672, he’s in battle off the coast of England against the Dutch, and he dies there—supposedly the cannonball that killed him is embedded in the tomb. Though how anybody would know at the time, if you think about it: “Wait. That guy is going to be seen as important because he…” “Let’s save that out in New York, and I’m going to grab that cannonball.”

JK: OK, one last question, which is about the physical way that history is commemorated. Earlier in your book, you’re talking about the English ships approaching—this is the southern tip of what is now Brooklyn. There’s this tiny little outpost on the coast, and the Dutch soldiers there see the English ships. They raise the hue and cry.

RS: There was a Dutch blockhouse, a Dutch lookout, on Staten Island, on the shore. And they saw the ships come in. The ships actually anchored in Gravesend Bay, opposite there, because that was an English community within New Netherland. So they then sent word to New Amsterdam.

JK: And the subplot here is that there were actually a lot of English speakers, or English descendants, in the area who became natural allies for Nicolls.

RS: Yeah. That’s why, when Nicolls sailed in—again, having done his homework—he knew that Gravesend was a town within New Netherland that had been settled by the English. The Dutch, being this multicultural people, allowed English people to settle as well. Gravesend was a largely English-speaking community, and Nicolls went there and anchored, knowing that would be a friendly base within the colony.

JK: After I read your book, I happened to be doing a business trip to New York City. I said, “You know what? I’m going to visit some of these important historical sites.” I went out to Gravesend Bay thinking, “I’m going to see what the perspective would have been of these Dutch soldiers in their blockhouse, seeing this armada approach.”

You know, it’s like the Star Wars Imperial March theme plays in our head. This is going to be so dramatic. And I found the place on the map that I thought corresponded to your description, and I went there, expecting the momentous weight of history to be felt on my shoulders. And there I was, in the middle of Coney Island. I think I was standing next to some guy selling foam domes and candy floss. I didn’t see a lot of historical plaques or anything like that. Which I thought was an interesting metaphor for the ignorance that a lot of modern America… Americans revere history in very specific contexts, like the Boston Tea Party. But the Dutch facts? Even this little encounter? I thought, well, that should be celebrated. The point where that blockhouse was should be a museum.

Sometimes American history feels like it starts with George Washington. Whereas I find this stuff much more interesting.

RS: New York City, in particular, just paves things over. It’s always about right now and the future. Whereas Boston, to continue the contrast, it’s always about the 1700s.

JK: Russell Shorto is the author of Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America. Thank you so much for being on the Quillette podcast.

RS: Thank you, Jonathan. It’s been fun.

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