The credit for golf in its modern form is generally given to the Scots, but they certainly did not invent it from scratch.

The credit for golf in its modern form is generally given to the Scots, but they certainly did not invent it from scratch.

When Kiliaen van Rensselaer purchased the land for his patroonship on the upper Hudson in 1631, Fort Orange--the Dutch West India Company's permanent trading post in the region--was seven years old.

Perhaps the most peculiar name of a neighborhood in the Bronx—thee northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City— is Spuyten Duyvil.

One the many myths that blur the story of the Dutch “purchase” of Manhattan—one that is firmly cemented in the popular psyche—says that the price was mere “beads and baubles.”

Whatever you believe to be true about the Dutch acquisition of Manhattan—notably the tale of the baubles and beads and the $24—there is another broader myth that underlies all of this.

One the many myths that blur the story of the Dutch “purchase” of Manhattan—one that is firmly cemented in the popular psyche—says that the price was mere “beads and baubles.”

In the 1590s, the Dutch began to turn their attention to the East Indies, the lands and islands of Southeast Asia, and in time this interest grew into a vast moneymaking concern.

During the first decade of trade with the East Indies, a Dutch retourschip leaving Texel bound for the East Indies followed the old route that Arab and Portuguese sailors took—south
down the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, northeast through the Mozambique Channel and across the Indian Ocean, sometimes via India or Ceylon.

The Dutch “purchase” of Manhattan from the Indians has been called “the deal of the millennium,” though some say it was the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, or that of Alaska in 1867, that was the most lucrative real estate deal in American history.

It’s a serious loss to historians that no Dutch or American archive contains any kind of
contract, receipt, or deed of transfer to serve as proof of the so-called “purchase” of Manhattan.
Apart from anything else, such a document would have put a stop to much of the endless
theorizing and half-baked legend-making associated with this event.

On a warm, cloudless night in February I walked into the rustling garden of my friends’ house and looked up at the sky. What I saw up there wasn’t a complete surprise, and yet it was still striking, and very strange to me. Despite the lights of the city I could see plenty of stars, and yet I was unable to link them together into any discernable pattern, as I was so used to doing at
home. The simple reason for both my awe and my confusion was that I was in Auckland, New Zealand. This was the southern sky, presenting me with an unfamiliar clutter of stars.