It is said that history is written by the victors. ¹ But not always. As I continue to read about America's colonial period, a historian introduced me to the book ² The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto. ³

Richard Nicolls, at the direction of King Charles II in 1664, forced Peter Stuyvesant to surrender New Netherland to the crown. (Conquest of New Netherland). The King gave it to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany, who later became King James II. James gave part of the New Netherland colony to the proprietors George Carteret and John Berkeley, the part that became New Jersey.

England strained justification for its claim to New Netherland. Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch, not England, in 1609 was the first explorer to thoroughly explore and document the area, laying claim to it for the Dutch. England's claim, tenuous as it was, was based on John Cabot's 1497 "footfall" in Newfoundland, and stretched to all connecting land not previously settled by Europeans. As Shorto says: "The Dutch didn't buy it." The Dutch actually occupied and charted the land in question, not just have sailed near it, or by it. ⁴ But England had the might, and often might makes right. In the eyes of those with the might, anyway.

New Amsterdam was renamed New York, for the Duke of York, and its history prior to 1664 has largely been told by the victors, hiding, overlooking, spinning, or just not knowing the finer details of its history as New Amsterdam. Little original documentary evidence was available.

It turns out that a significant part of its original written history has been rediscovered. In Dutch, of course.

In 1973, Charles Gehring, a scholar and specialist in seventeenth century Dutch language, was shown a collection in the New York State Library in Albany, New York. Dr. Gehring took on the task of his lifetime. Funding was found to translate it. In 1974, The New Netherland Project was formed, and under various new names the translation work continued. Shorto met Charles Gehring in 2000, twenty-six years later, and he was still working on it, having produced sixteen volumes of translation, and several more to come. ⁵ This translation provided much new information for Shorto's book.

This was not the first attempt to translate this archive. In 1801 Aaron Burr recommended it, but it did not happen. In the 1820s a Dutchman, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, whose command of English was very shaky, produced a complete, but very flawed, translation. In the early 1900s a skilled translator worked on a translation for two years. His work was lost in 1911 in a fire at the state library. He abandoned the work. The 1820s translation was also lost in the same fire, that version perhaps fortunately. Fortunately, the original document pages were spared in the fire. ⁶

Shorto's book also introduces a Dutchman who had a profound impact on not only New Amsterdam in its day, but also into its future. More on this in the next RHB installment.