When was manhattan island purchased

These items may have included anything from Wampum glass beads , metal tools, bowls, knives, and possibly fur pelts. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements.

To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK". Sign Up. Travel Guides. Videos Beyond Hollywood Hungerlust Pioneers of love. Vincent Amoroso. Alfred Fredericks Wikicommons. Portrait of Peter Minuit Wikicommons. Give us feedback. While misleading and overly romanticized, the artistic renderings of the "purchase" nevertheless offer quite an entertaining vision of this occasion, despite the need to take them with a pinch of salt.

Sometimes the Dutch are shown as slim and youthful; sometimes they are the more traditional burghers with the generous waistline. At times they appear earnest, sincere, and importunate; at other times they look rather formal, haughty, and grand, bearing flags, muskets, and swords as they overawe the Indians, urging them to accept the chests of trinkets. No illustration gives any clear sign of fear or enmity from either party.

The impression conveyed is that of probably just what it was—a rather uncomfortable gathering of mutually uncomprehending strangers from hugely different backgrounds feeling their way towards areas of shared understanding. It's clear that many of the artists were clueless about the Indians and did little research in order to get it right.

Notable is the Indians' wildly differing appearance. Some illustrations show them almost naked or bare-chested, and with a couple of feathers in their hair, while others are elaborately dressed in leggings and ornate tasseled tunics. Some Indians have spiky feathers sticking up, while many others are more familiar to us because they are wearing richly eagle-feathered headdresses and thus look very much like Midwestern Plains Indians of the nineteenth century.

It's as if Minuit were trading with the Sioux or the Cheyenne. Clearly many of the illustrators had very little idea of what northern American tribes looked like, nor did they take the trouble to find out about the observable differences among native peoples in terms of costume and ornament. What seems to emerge from these illustrations, therefore, is a rather careless and patronizing attitude towards the Indians along with the easy assumption of their innocent fascination with the white man's cheap and sparkling goods.

An example of these illustrations that contains a lot of detail is Alfred Fredericks' d. This shows a beach scene where there is a gathering of native inhabitants of Manhattan beneath a tree. Some are wearing out-of-place many-feathered war bonnets and richly decorated and fringed garments. They are being shown strings of beads, various jars, bowls, a small casket, and a candlestick. Many of these riches spill decoratively out of a chest at the feet of a bearded and mustachioed Dutchman holding a document, presumably Peter Minuit, and presumably the deed for the sale of Manhattan.

He is gesturing towards the lavish and glittering display, some of which has been removed from the chest and is set out on a cloth on the sand. His kneeling companion is proffering an embroidered tasseled cloth to the impassive Indians, who seem as yet unconvinced by these strangers in funny hats. Seated in the foreground, two natives, one clutching a pipe, discuss the curious visitors.

In the background we see a large ship from which a small boat has beached, its crew hauling up another heavy chest. In all the illustrations there invariably appears one or more chests in which the Dutch have brought their trade goods. Sometimes, as in this case, another chest is being heaved to the site by some of Minuit's group. The chest's lid is always open and trinkets are draped over the edge, down its sides, and spilled on to the ground to display the contents, both to the Indians and to us.

A oil painting in the collection of the New York Historical Society by an unidentified artist depicts the scene in a very similar way. Here again we see Indians, this time bare-chested and simply clad, also in a shady spot under a tree next to a beach. It's worth noting that although the "purchase" took place in May, more than a few of the illustrations show trees in full summer foliage. This error is doubtless just more artistic license, something that none of these depictions lack.

Wearing little more than loincloths, these Indians are more suitably dressed for their eastern tribe than those in Fredericks' drawing; one carries a bow and two nubile women are also present.

Nineteenth century historians converted those 60 guilders to U. According to this converter from the International Institute of Social History at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences , 60 guilders in was equivalent to A few accounts say that the Dutch got the wool pulled over their eyes, and bought the land from a group of natives that lived on Long Island and were only traveling through Manhattan. Coming upon the European rubes, they traded away land they had no claim to and continued on home with the Dutch loot.

This marks just the first of several uncertainties about the information in Schagen's letter. Most notably, it isn't primary evidence; Schagen's text discusses the sale of Manhattan, but there's no known paper record of the exchange. Whether you call it a piece of evidence is questionable. The letter contains no details of the individuals involved in the sale, nor the precise date of the exchange. That figure was taken from a history book published in and has somehow remained unchanged since then.

Furthermore, there's no indication of what that money represented in terms of traded goods, though many accounts have perpetuated the questionable idea that native people sold their homelands for little more than a few " trinkets. The absence of evidence doesn't mean the exchange didn't occur, however. Trading land was actually common during this period; there are many cases in which there is much more convincing evidence that land was exchanged in some way between Native Americans and the Dutch.

For instance, there are several formal land deeds, signed by Native American sellers and Dutch buyers, for the purchase of Staten Island in , for parts of Long Island in , and also for Manhattan, again, in But considering that it's become the defining symbol of New York City's "origins," that first purported sale ironically seems to be the least reliable account we have. Even assuming the historic transaction did go ahead, there are other factors that make it unlikely that Manhattan was traded so straightforwardly, as the story suggests.

Related: Why is it called 'Wall Street'? Historians have dissected the various accounts of land sales across 17th-century New Amsterdam and have concluded that broad cultural differences in the understanding of property rights and ownership would have muddied what it really meant to "sell" land.