October 26, 2013

There’s a board game about the Dutch West Indies Company

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 3:41 pm

new_amsterdam

This past summer Texas game manufacturer Pandasaurus released a board game called Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam) about the earlier years of the 17th century Dutch colony that was run by the Dutch West Indies Company, which later became New York City.

New Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch West Indies Company in order to encourage the lucrative beaver pelt trade with the local Native American hunters along the Hudson River. To establish a trading post there, they needed a town and a fort, which was built on the tip of Manhattan Island. To encourage European patroons, settlers of means or noble birth to populate the colony, they granted them both land and indentured servants. The patroons became the lords of a new feudal system not unlike in Europe. In New Amsterdam, players are those patroons, and they bid on action lots in order to build businesses, work land for both food and building materials, compete in elections, ship furs to the Old World, and trade with the Lenape Indians – a process that gets more complicated as players claim more land and push the Lenape camps farther up the Hudson River.

It is apparently not yet available in the ‘old country’, but I’m sure it’s just a question of time.

Here’s a review of New Amsterdam:

(Links bright.nl, pandasaurusgames.com, Image: Castello Plan of the tip of Manhattan)

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November 29, 2010

Surinam’s deed of independence has been lost

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 2:13 pm

A reporter from Surinam daily De Ware Tijd has discovered that the document in which former Queen Juliana recognised the independence of Surinam in 1975 has been lost.

Home Affairs Minister Soewarto Moestadja, has started a search and is focussing on three leads. The document that signifies the birth of a nation may be in the vault of the national bank, it may be in the national archive, or it may have been lost to the flames of the fire that destroyed the Ministry of General Affairs during the 1980s.

The Netherlands still has its own copy of the deed of recognition, somewhere.

In 1667 the Netherlands ‘traded’ New York (then New Amsterdam) for Surinam in a treaty that concluded the Second Anglo-Dutch War. In reality both colonies had already been conquered by respectively the English and the Dutch, and the treaty merely cemented the status quo. The independence 318 years later was accompanied by the same lack of dramatics, as Surinam asked for independence in 1973 and received it two years later.

(Link: Waterkant.net, Photo by Ian Mackenzie, some rights reserved)

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September 11, 2009

New York birthday celebrations suffer heavy inflation

Filed under: General,History by Branko Collin @ 4:51 pm

new_amsterdamWrites the Washington Post:

Four hundred years ago this month, Henry Hudson sailed on a Dutch ship into what became New York Harbor, a journey that inspired traders from the Netherlands to become the first immigrants to New York and establish a tolerant, motley Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam.

[…] While many New Yorkers are unaware of the festivities […].

Times have changed since previous anniversary celebrations. In 1909, there were two weeks of events, forming what was then the biggest citywide celebration New York had seen with millions of participants.

In 1959, the current queen of the Netherlands, then Princess Beatrix, came to New York for the 350th anniversary of Hudson’s arrival, and celebrated with a ticker tape parade.

“The world then was a different world,” Dutch Ambassador Renée Jones-Bos said. “Now there are far more countries. You have to work harder as a country to show what you can do and raise your profile.”

(Image: Castello Plan of the tip of Manhattan)

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