THE GATEWAYS TO THE WEST FROM NEW ENGLAND AND VIRGINIA
In 1609, the English navigator, Henry Hudson, had explored the river which now bears his name, acting on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. During the next decade, small Dutch settlements, trading posts, were established along the river; but the first real settlement is generally dated 1623 when thirty families of Walloons arrived. These were people from northern France and the southern Netherlands who had been driven into Holland by religious persecution and wanted to escape from the unsympathetic treatment which they were receiving in the southern part of Holland. Their language was not Dutch but French.
Speaking at large the Dutch settlement of New Netherland was, at the beginning, a trading venture and was based on a stronghold at the mouth of the river and another one at the head of navigation. For many years the latter settlement, originally called Fort Orange and later Albany, was much more important than the little town of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.
Restrictions on land tenure held back colonization, and at no time during the Dutch occupation did its reach extend much beyond the fertile farm lands of the Hudson valley northerly to Fort Orange, though an outpost to the west was established at Schenectady and scattering settlements had also been made in New Jersey and on Long Island.
In all these outlying regions, the pressure of New England migrants was too strong for the scanty Dutch population to withstand, and even in Manhattan the New Englanders had become early an important part of the population.
The immigration of respectable Dutch families did not begin in general until after 1638 when the monopoly of the West India Company was abolished. Many of the families who became great land owners in the northern part of the Hudson River valley were from Gelderland, east of the Zuyder Zee, the town of Myjerka being one of the principal centers of emigration. While many of these Dutch families were of excellent mercantile stock, it is a mistake to suppose that they represented the social élite of the home country.
Although the Dutch have left a permanent mark on the Hudson River valley, the contribution which they made to the future population of the State was small. When England captured the colony in 1664 and the Dutch immigration ceased, there were probably not many more than 10,000 inhabitants in the whole region, and of these from a quarter to a third were English.
Holland at the time was not at all a colonizing nation. Its overseas ventures were for the purpose of trade, and it had not sufficient surplus population to settle colonies permanently.
The amount of Dutch and Huguenot blood that was perpetuated in the later history of the colonies was, therefore, small by comparison with the English, but was for the most part of the same racial stock. Six or seven thousand Dutch in the present State of New York in 1664 are to be compared with 35,000 English in Virginia and 50,000 in New England at the same date.