From Novum Belgium, by Father Isaac Jogues, 1646, in J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664 (New York, 1909), pp. 259–260.

In 1609, the Dutch East India Company hired English sea captain Henry Hudson to search for the elusive northwest passage to the East. Hudson failed to find the passage, but he did explore what is now known as the Hudson River Valley, which he claimed it for the Netherland. The creation of the (Dutch) West India Company led to the settlement of thirty families in 1624 in what is now Manhattan. The settlers’ goal was to establish the fur trade. In 1626 the colony’s director “purchased” the island from Native Americans. The trade possibilites of the new settlement, which the Dutch called New Netherland, greatly expanded after the West India Company gave up its monopoly in 1640. New Netherland attracted a wide variety of settlers, and various reports from the 1640s refer to the diversity of people and languages found there. One of these reports is excerpted below. In the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1664 the Dutch lost the colony to the English, who renamed it New York.

On the island of Manhate, and in its environs, there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there on the river, above and below, as the beauty and convenience of the spot has invited each to settle: some mechanic however, who ply their trade, are ranged under the fort; all the others are exposed to the incursions of the natives, who in the year 1643, while I was there, actually killed some two score Hollanders, and burnt many houses and barns full of wheat.

The river, which is very straight, and runs due north and south, is at least a league broad before the fort. Ships lie at anchor in a bay which forms the other side of the island, and can be defended by the fort.

Shortly before I arrived there, three large ships of 300 tons each had come to load wheat; two found cargoes, the third could not be loaded, because the savages had burnt a part of the grain. These ships had come from the West Indies, where the West India Company usually keeps up seventeen ships of war.

No religion is publically exercised but the Calvinist, and orders are to admit none but the Calvinists, but this is not observed; for besides the Calvinists there are in the colony Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans, Anabaptists, here called Mnistes [Menonites], etc.