What American city was traded
for sugar and spice?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

January 20, 2004

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In 1621, the Dutch chartered the Westindiscke Compagnie (WIC) with high hopes of a second company having the financial success of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company). In 1626, Peter Minuit bought an island from the natives and began the settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam. The West India Company plied trade between Africa and the Americas, mostly the trade of humans as slaves.

The VOC held all the Spice Islands except for the English-controlled island of Run, probably held both for the nutmeg and to aggravate the Dutch since the massacre at Ambon.
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As an additional slap at the Dutch, Cromwell insisted that ships passing through English waters salute English warships. Vying for power and trade, the First Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1652. By 1654, the war ended when the Dutch lost more than 1,000 merchant vessels to English warships.

To increase sales, the Dutch slavers undersold the English slavers. Tensions heated when the English retaliated in 1663 by taking two Dutch outposts on the coast of West Africa. Then in 1664, English frigates took Nieuw Amsterdam without a shot fired. This started the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The Dutch learned a lot from the first war and in 1667 almost broke the English fleet. They captured the southern coast of England.

The second war ended with the Treaty of Breda. The treaty set down territories, dividing the world among European interests—basically a very grand real estate exchange. The WIC was never as successful as the VOC. The Dutch desperate to continue their highly lucrative monopoly of the spice trade allowed the English to keep Nieuw Amsterdam; in exchange, they got the sugar-exporting Suriname in South America and the last Spice Island, Run.

In the end, the Dutch could not control the Torresian Imperial pigeon and nutmeg trees spread outside the plantations. Clove and nutmeg trees were smuggled to islands off the east coast of Africa and eventually the West Indies.

The Dutch founded a new Nieuw Amsterdam on the coast of Suriname. And the old Nieuw Amsterdam became New York.

(Compiled from: "Dutch West India Company" Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911; The Contemplator's Short History of The Anglo-Dutch Wars; and "III. Stuyvesant and the End of Dutch Rule" New York, Theodore Roosevelt, 1906, electronic publication Bartleby.)

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