By Wim Klooster

Anonymous, Vergadering van de Staten-Generaal, 1639 from the Rijksmuseum's Collection

In 1664, the residents of New Amsterdam famously gave up their city — without a fight. But there was more resistance to surrendering the Dutch colony of New York in old Amsterdam. A remarkable group of men, nearly all merchants, joined hands in 1667, as the second Anglo-Dutch War was winding down, and petitioned the States General – the Dutch government – to demand restoration of New Netherland. Amazingly, this document and its seventy authors have never been analyzed.

In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the Dutch West India Company organized maritime and land-borne warfare against the Iberian foes, in what was intended to be a western front in the Dutch struggle for independence. The Company was particularly successful in Brazil, where the area under Dutch control grew by leaps and bounds after 1630. Soon, the Company controlled half of all former Portuguese-ruled areas. By 1654, however, the local Dutch surrendered to a Portuguese fleet, which ended the colonial adventure of the Dutch in Brazil and virtually doomed their plans for an Atlantic empire.

The English conquest of New York and the rest of New Netherland in 1664 occurred ten years after the Dutch had lost their other mainland stronghold of Brazil, half of whose territory had been captured by the Dutch West India Company. When New York fell, the disintegration of what had once seemed a Dutch Atlantic empire was virtually complete. However, the legality of the conquest, which had taken place during peacetime, remained uncertain until the end of the second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67). At that point, the aforementioned set of protesters, a motley crew of seventy, gathered in Amsterdam to petition the Dutch government, stressing the need for New Netherland’s restoration. The petition is undated, but was probably drafted in the late spring of 1667, when peace negotiations between England and the Dutch Republic were about to start in Breda.

The petitioners especially lamented the loss of New Netherland. From there, the Dutch could import “in time of need” a large variety of goods for which the Dutch now sailed to the Baltic, including grain, hemp, flax, tar, oak, and pine timber for the construction of ships and houses. From old New York, merchants selling linen and woolen cloth, wine, and brandy could also find a ready market in the rest of New Netherland. The beaver and otter skins obtained in return which were sent to Russia, where specialists processed it, and the final product would be sold from the Dutch Republic to France. This was, the petitioners stressed, a very lucrative business. The English occupation of New Netherland and the subsequent Anglo-Dutch War had led to considerable losses. The petitioners therefore implored authorities to make return of the colony a priority in the upcoming peace negotiations.

Nicolaes Visscher, Novi Belgii Novaeque Angliae nec non partis Virginiae tabula multis in locis emendata, 1651-1656, from New York Public Library

They added an imperial (or, at least, geopolitical) argument. If England retained New Netherland, they warned, it will not only derive resources which Englishmen previously had to buy in the Baltic, but would fuel England’s rise as a power in the North Atlantic. With great foresight, the petitioners predicted that it would one day be master of North America, since the French wouldn’t be able to keep Canada. And that it would build a formidable fleet, capable of capturing any ships coming from the West and East Indies and Russia. All of that had to be prevented.[1]

Many of the petitioners had links with New York, and most of those who did had lived in New Netherland. Conspicuous among them were members of the four families that historian Oliver Rink identified as the leading Amsterdam mercantile firms trading with New Netherland: those of Verbrugge, De Wolff, Van Rensselaer, and Van Hoornbeeck.[2] Johannes Verbrugge had left Amsterdam for New Amsterdam before 1651, married there in New Amsterdam in 1658, and died in New York City. His uncle was Gillis Verbrugge, one of the great Amsterdam specialists of the trade with New Netherland, who had passed away by the time of the English takeover.[3] Among the men working for the company of the Verbrugges was Dirck Jansz Croon, who was another petitioner. Croon, a Dutch native, moved to New Netherland in his mid-twenties, eventually settling in Rensselaerswijck, where he became involved in the fur trade. But he also supported his commercial ties with Amsterdam by crossing the ocean at least four times between 1650 and 1661. After the last crossing, he settled down in Amsterdam.[4]

Petitioner Gerrit Jansen Cuyper belonged to the De Wolff family. When he disembarked in New Netherland in 1651, it was not his first time in the Dutch colony, where he owned some property including a house near Fort Orange. Cuyper worked as an agent for some Amsterdam merchants but also ran his own business. He never settled permanently in New Netherland, though, and got married in Old Amsterdam in 1655. Around the same time, his father-in-law Dirck de Wolff, who had started out as a baker in Haarlem, began to put out his feelers in New Netherland, ostensibly trying to create work for his son Abel, another one of our petitioners. Documents show both men sending duffels and blankets to New Netherland for trade with indigenous groups. Their supplier was Amsterdam cloth salesman Jan Hendricksz Sijbingh, who also ended up on the list of petition signatories. Sijbingh had lived in the upper Hudson in the late 1640s and early 1650s and was a friend of Dirck Jansz Croon.[5]

Another leading Amsterdam firm active in the New Netherland trade was headed by Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, son of patroon Kiliaen. In 1651, Jan Baptist sailed to New Netherland to inspect Rensselaerswijck, becoming its director in the following year. Once he found himself on the other side of the Atlantic, Jan Baptist realized the potential profits to be made in private trade with Amsterdam. He began this trade after his return to Amsterdam in 1658.[6] In his dealings with New Netherland, he often partnered with Gillis van Hoornbeeck, a latecomer in trade with the colony. Van Hoornbeeck was a man of many qualities, who besides his pursuits as a shipowner and freighter also was active as a financier, insurance broker, and fur distributor.[7] The names of Jan Baptist and Gilles both appear on the petition.

What makes the petition particularly interesting is a second group of signatories, who were involved in the Russia trade. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch trade with Muscovy suddenly assumed large proportions, which led firms from the Dutch Republic to send agents who settled in various parts of the country. In four towns, including Arkhangelsk, the resident Dutch community established a Calvinist church.[8] One of the most prominent traders with Arkhangelsk was Coenraad van Klenck. His father, Georg Klenck, a German native, had been one of the pioneers of Dutch trade with Archangelsk and other Russian towns after obtaining a permit from the czar. The elder Klenck had also been involved in a loan extended by a group of Amsterdam merchants to one of the czars. From Arkhangelsk, his firm imported seal skins, moose hides, goat hides, mats, whale oil, and tallow. In addition, he controlled Russia’s caviar exports for about a decade along with another Amsterdam merchant.

Coenraad van Klenck had lived in Muscovy as a young man, spoke Russian, and was known in Muscovy as Kondratij Yuryevich Klimkin. He was not only a businessman.[9] Coenraad was the agent of Dutch stadholder William Frederick in Amsterdam and became one of Amsterdam’s most respected public officials.[10] In 1675, the Dutch government would commission him with the task to travel as a special envoy to Moscow, where the Dutch Republic did not yet have a permanent ambassador. In negotiations with the czar’s closest confidants, Coenraad’s task was to persuade the Russian czar Aleksei to attack Sweden and thereby join an alliance against France. The embassy was unsuccessful. Three members of one family with ties to Arkhangelsk also signed the petition of 1667. They belonged to the Bernard family. One of the men was, Jean, co-founder of a mercantile in Nizhniy Novgorod that became very prominent in the Dutch trade with Russia. In 1660, he and a brother received from the czar the rank of court merchants.

Although a number of signatories were deacons of Amsterdam’s Reformed Church, there is no echo of their religious outlook in the 1667 petition. The interests of merchants trading with New York and Muscovy were, however, reflected in the document. First and foremost, the traders with New Netherland sketched a happy future in which the colony would offer both major economic benefits and safeguard the Dutch from the rise of England as an Atlantic superpower. The traders with Muscovy emphasized the lucrative beaver trade that linked New York and Russia. And then there was another contingent of men who had lived in Dutch Brazil. These men, most of whom were Jews who had resided in Dutch Brazil, lacked an identifiable commercial objective. One can only surmise that they saw the petition as a device to ask the States General for one last time to restore the greatness of the Dutch Republic as an Atlantic power, whose loss they bitterly mourned. All of these groups were ultimately left empty-handed, since the negotiators ignored the plea for restitution. New Amsterdam thus became New York, and — apart from an intermezzo in 1673-74 when Dutch rule was briefly restored — has remained so ever since.

Wim Klooster is Robert H. and Virginia N. Scotland Endowed Chair in History and International Relations at Clark University. He is author of, among other books, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World.

[1] Nationaal Archief, Staten-Generaal 5768, petition presented to the States General, undated.

[2] Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Cooperstown, N.Y.: New York State Historical Association, 1986), 175-77.

[3] Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664 (Hilversum: Verloren; Albany, N.Y.: State University Press of New York, 2003), 242.

[4] Venema, Beverwijck, 239-244.

[5] Ibid., 240, 242.

[6] Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 199-200. Venema, Beverwijck, 197-198.

[7] Ibid., 200-3.

[8] Eric H. Wijnroks, Handel tussen Rusland en de Nederlanden, 1560-1640: Een netwerkanalyse van de Antwerpse en Amsterdamse kooplieden, handelend op Rusland (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 300-1.

[9] Kees Boterbloem, “Russia and Europe: The Koenraad van Klenk Embassy to Moscow (1676-76),” Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010), 187-217: 200. Boris Raptschinsky, “Het gezantschap van Koenraad van Klenck naar Moskou,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 36 (1939), 149-199: 154.

[10] Geert H. Janssen, Princely Power in the Dutch Republic: Patronage and William Frederick of Nassau (1613-1664) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 79.

A Petition to Keep New York under Dutch Rule