1626

There is just one doctor/surgeon. Settlers are seafarers, traders, businessmen and their families.

June 11
African slaves arrive, captured off Spanish or Portuguese ships. Regarded as indentured servants for the Dutch West India Company, they are eventually given land and freedom. More slaves are imported to work in the fur trade and to build public works.

June
Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, is 1st black landowner's home. The Village (togheter with SoHo) will house most of Manhattan's black population for 200 years.

Peter Minuit buys Manhattan for 60 guilders worth of goods = $24 in 1869 American dollars - $30 at current exchange rates. The sum was enough then for a round trip transatlantic passage. At the edge of Columbia University's Baker Field, a plaque on a large rock claims that this is where Minuit bought the island. However, 13 miles away on the southern tip of Manhattan, an inscription on a flagpole in Battery Park claims the deal was struck here.

City council fines miscreants but corporal punishment can be delivered only on Holland. Initially settlers worship in their own homes but soon a room in a loft is used for services. Crew and passengers of the Arms of Amsterdam, return to Holland and state: "When the fort, staked out at Manhates, will be completed, it is to be named Amsterdam".

Peter Minuit consolidates settlements at island's southern tip. 30 houses are built plus, in time, a blacksmith's forge, gristmills, a counting house, a warehouse, and saw and flour mills. One mill grinds bark for tanning (a horse turned in a circle to power machinery).


May 4
Minuit assembles Algonquin chiefs and wives. He buys Manhattan island from them. Back in Amsterdam, in the only surviving record of this momentous event, P J Schagen writes: "... they have bought the island of Manhattes from the wild men for the value of sixty guilders ...".

September 23
Arms of Amsterdam sails from Manhattan with pelts from 7.246 beavers, 675 otters, 48 mink and 36 wildcats.

May
Peter Minuit becomes 1st popularly elected governor and Director General. German by birth, French by name, and Dutch by residence & citizenship, he returns to the Netherlands for confirmation of the post, arriving back in America in May.

First mill at 20-22 South William Street doubles as a religious meeting place on Sundays and as a room for public meetings.