400 Years Ago: Nieuw Amsterdam

Two years ago the nation joined Virginia in celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. Elizabeth II came to pay her respects to an experiment whose consequences included independence from the Mother Country. Four hundred years ago, Henry Hudson, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, sailed into what now is known as New York.

Originally named Nieuw Amsterdam, New York became the world's greatest metropolis. It soon earned a reputation for commerce, diversity, and hectic streets. The Dutch connection persists in references such as Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Tappan Zee. The Hudson Valley boasts Netherlandish lineage as well.

The Roosevelt dynasty -- producers of Presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano, as well as other notables and rakes -- established itself in the 1600s. The New York Knicks take their nickname from Knickerbockers, a word for a Dutch gentry clad in knee-breeches. The memory of one of the colony's founders, Peter Stuyvesant, lives as the name of a vast middle-class housing complex. A member of the Editorial staff remembers walking past a church in New York's East 20s that advertised services in Dutch.

According to myth, Peter Minuit secured title to Manhattan from the Lenape for a modest sum of wampum, or for a batch of stuff valued at 60 guilders, give or take. The story serves as a reminder that neither the Dutch nor the Jamestown settlers nor the Pilgrims arrived in an empty land. For the original inhabitants, the "discovery" of the New World proved a blessing very much mixed. Tears watered many trails and have not completely dried.

Although tolerance flourished in Nieuw Amsterdam, for some reason Quakers gave offense. The persecution of the Society of Friends led to 1657's Flushing Remonstrance, in which a group of English inhabitants argued on behalf of religious freedom. Stuyvesant exiled to Holland an Englishman sympathetic to Quakers, but Dutch authorities eventually sided with the remonstrators. Freedom of faith took root. When Nieuw Amsterdam transferred to the British crown, officials pledged to recognize the right of citizens to "keep and enjoy the limits of their consciences in religion." This happened before Jefferson's birth. Various and curious are the sources of American liberty.