Peter Stuyvesant

Peter Stuyvesant (circa 1610-72), the last Dutch governor of colonial New York, born in the province of Friesland. He entered the Dutch army in the West Indies about 1625 and was governor of Curaçao, a colony belonging to the Dutch West India Company from about 1634 to 1644. In 1644, during an attack on the then Portuguese island of Saint Martin, he received a wound that necessitated the amputation of his right leg. After being fitted with a wooden leg in Holland, Stuyvesant arrived in another Dutch West India Company colony, New Netherland (comprising the present-day states of New York and New Jersey), in 1647 and served as director general of the colony. He became known as an able but despotic administrator. Although he settled the boundaries between the English and Dutch territories, restrained the Native Americans, and furthered the commercial prosperity of the settlement of New Amsterdam, on the present-day island of Manhattan, he was hated by the colonists because of his harsh policies, which included the imposition of heavy taxes and the persecution of religious dissenters. By persuading the authorities in the Netherlands to grant them a municipal government in 1653, the colonists of New Amsterdam partially limited his powers.

In 1655 Stuyvesant expelled the Swedish settlers from the Delaware River area and established Dutch authority there. An English fleet landed in what is now New York Bay in 1664, however, and claimed New Netherland. Preferring English rule to that of Stuyvesant and the Dutch West India Co., the Dutch settlers refused to defend their land, and Stuyvesant was forced to surrender. He went to Holland briefly and then returned to New Amsterdam (renamed New York), where he cultivated an extensive farm, or bouwerij (bowery). He was buried on his farm, where the Church of Saint Mark's in the Bowery now stands.