Just before dawn on September 15, 1655, the same day Pieter Stuyvesant would extract the surrender of New Sweden on the Delaware River, more than 500 Indians of various tribes from along the Hudson paddled more than sixty canoes to New Amsterdam in lower Manhattan. They ran through town shrieking and vandalizing, but neither Dutchman nor Indian was harmed until the Indians were about to leave after having met with the city council. Then somebody shot and wounded Hendrick van Dyck with an arrow, and the Dutch militia, under the command of a drunken and incompetent officer, opened fire on the retreating Indians.  Three on each side died in the skirmish. The Indians retaliated.  Over the next few days, attacks on Staten Island and and in New Jersey would take fifty Dutch lives and more than 100 European prisoners. So began “The Peach Tree War,” which was followed by two even more violent wars at the settlement of Esopus, in today’s Kingston, New York.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y.

D. L. Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

Jaap Jacobs, “’Hot Pestilential and Unheard-Of Fevers, Illnesses, and Torments’: Days of Fasting and Prayer in New Netherland,” New York History, Summer/Fall 2015.