In the Chessmen Museum, American colonists are positioned on the opposite side of the board from the Indians. Off the chess board they have also fought each other for ages. Between 1643 and 1645 tensions led to a bloody war between the Indians and the colonists of New Netherland.
In the seventeenth century European countries colonized many overseas territories and founded trading posts. New Netherland, in North America, was one of these new colonies. Englishman Henry Hudson was ordered by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, to find new trading routes. In 1609 Hudson arrived at the coast of North America and there he sailed up the river. The territory along this river, the current Hudson River, hadn’t been claimed by any European nation yet. Although the VOC wasn’t very interested in this area, Amsterdam traders thought otherwise. They thought they could make good money selling fur and so they founded the colony of New Netherland.
New Amsterdam in 1660
WIC, the Dutch West India Company
After the founding of the WIC, VOC’s little sister for western territories, New Netherland came under official Dutch rule in 1621. Tradesman Willem Kieft arrived in 1638 as the new governor of the colony. He didn’t have any governmental experience but he had the right connections for the job. He wasn’t a very diplomatic man. In 1639 he decided that the Indians living in the area had to pay corn and furs by way of taxes. In return they would enjoy the protection of the Dutch fortresses. The Indians refused outright. They considered themselves the protectors of the Dutch, to whom they regularly gave food and sold merchandise. Kieft was pretty mad about this and decided to start a war on these stubborn savages the minute he got the chance.
The other colonists disagreed with their governor. Trading with the Indians was the biggest source of income in New Netherland and the colonists just wanted to live peacefully together with the Indians. Peace didn’t matter much to Kieft though. In July 1640 a small number of Raritan Indians attacked a pinnace with three colonists on board and for Kieft this was the perfect motive for revenge. He sent eighty men over to the tribe and what followed was a massacre. Women and children were not spared. This sparked a series of mutual acts of retaliation that would afterwards be known as Kieft’s War (1643-1645).
Conspiring Indians
For the first time in history different Indian tribes from the region united and formed an army of some fifteen hundred men. During the two years of war they would bring destruction and death to the colonists. The remotely situated farms and their residents were easy to attack. The Dutch soldiers kept arriving late at the crime scenes and could not protect the Dutch population. The Indians burnt down farming lands and trade eventually came to a standstill. With the help of the English, the Dutch people managed to survive. In the end the Indians understood that the colonists wouldn’t surrender and so in August 1645 they signed an imperative peace agreement.
Indians and colonists battleing on the chess board
The relationship between the two populations had been disturbed though and the Dutch that were able to leave, left. After the war the colonists filed a written complaint to the WIC in Amsterdam. Everything they had managed to build up over the years in their new homeland had been completely destroyed by Kieft’s thirst for war.
The complaint letter was one of the causes for the WIC to investigate the situation and governor Kieft was fired. He was ordered to come back to the Republic to give his version of events. This never happened since on his way back Kieft was shipwrecked and did not survive. His successor Peter Stuyvesant was the last governor before the English would annex New Netherland in 1664. Capital city New Amsterdam was then renamed New York.
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