Mappa di New York nel 1664
A Description of the Towne of Mannados or New Amsterdam Anonymous, 1664 After the English Restoration in 1660 Charles II, from the House of Stuart, became king. His younger brother James II became the Duke of York and Lord High Admiral. In 1664 Charles granted James all of the American territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers.1 Of course directly in the middle of this land grant was New Amsterdam. Charles, however, vowed to “bring all his Kingdoms under one form of government, both in church and state, and to install the Anglican government as in old England.” At his own expense James sent a flotilla of warships to capture the Dutch colony. On 27 August 1664 four frigates with some 450 soldiers under the command of Richard Nicolls entered New York Harbor, demanded Stuyvesant’s surrender and promised the settlers that they could “peaceably enjoy whatsoever God’s blessing and their own honest industry have furnished them with and all other privileges with his majesty’s English subjects.” Stuyvesant intended to resist, but badly outnumbered and with no support from either the WIC or his own citizenry he was forced to surrender. On 8 September 1664 he boarded a ship back to Amsterdam.
It took two more Anglo-Dutch wars to sort this all out but in the end the Dutch relinquished their claim. New Amsterdam under the control of the WIC became New York under the control of James II. The source of the map, which claims to show the city “as it was in September 1661” was most likely the survey of Jacques Cortelyou, although other historians have suggested William Hack, Augustine Herrman or even an English spy living amongst the Dutch. The map itself, a 27¼ × 21¾" ink and watercolor on vellum manuscript, was prepared in 1664 by one of the decorative chart makers near the Tower of London – a master of the Thames School – and may have accompanied the town's request to the Duke of York for his patronage.2 It entered the royal collections and was presented to the British Museum in the 1820s by George IV. It is now part of the King’s Topographical Collection in the British Library.3 It was found in 1858 by George Moore, librarian of the New York Historical Society, who named it “the Duke’s Plan.” A lithographic reproduction was included in the next edition of the Valentine’s Manual and was copied by Henry Dunreath Tyler, ca.1890
[from: http://www.nyc99.org/1600/duke.html]
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Mappa di New York nel 1664 (Castillo Plan)
The Castillo Plan Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt (Picture of the City of Amsterdam in New Netherland) Jacques Cortelyou/Anonymous, ca.1665 To safegaurd Dutch interests in New Netherland Willem Verhuls, the second Director-General the Dutch West India Company (WIC) built Fort Amsterdam in 1625 on the southern tip of Manhattan Island at the juncture of the East and Hudson rivers to, as Adriaen Van der Donck wrote, “possess all the lands comprehended between them as round about them…” 1 The fort served as military outpost as well as an administrative and commercial center. After the third WIC director Peter Minuit famously "purchased" Manhattan Island from the Lenape for 60 guilders in 1626 the company began relocating settlers to the area around the citadel forming the town of New Amsterdam.2 The town slowly grew with a mixture of not only Dutch settlers but Walloon, Huguenot, Frisian and English, and later African slaves and Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. The population was 270 in 1630, perhaps 400 in 1638 and nearly 700 by the time Peter Stuyvesant, the seventh and last director, arrived in 1648. Stuyvesant, among other things, set out to turn New Amsterdam into a proper Dutch town. He widened and lengthened streets, turned the refuse stream into a gracht(canal), built a pier and in 1653 constructed a “high stockade and small brestwork across the northern frontier” [now Wall Street]. All of this required surveys and maps which the Dutch were remarkably proficient at in the 17th century. View of New Amsterdam/New York, click for larger image Johannes Vingboons, View of New Amsterdam/New York, 1664. field%28DOCID+@lit%28awkb012367%29%29"; title="LOC" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px dotted rgb(153, 153, 153); font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 0, 177);">Library of Congress Jacques Cortelyou (ca.1625 – 1693) arrived in New Netherland from Utricht in 1652 and was commissioned by the provisional government as the surveyor general in 1657. On 7 June 1660 he was directed to survey and prepare a plan of New Amsterdam. Elaborating on several previous surveys he finished the task by October when his survey, along with a census prepared by Nicasius De Sille, was sent to the WIC directors in Amsterdam. Cortelyou’s original survey is now lost but sometime around 1665 a 18 × 25" ink and watercolor manuscript map was prepared from it by an anonymous draftsman. The manuscript ended up with the cartographer Johannes Blaeu (of Atlas Majorfame) who bound it into an atlas and sold it to Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The map was rediscovered in the de’ Medici's Villa di Castello near Florence in 1900, hence its Italian name – the Castello Plan. It is now in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana. The bird’s-eye view shows everything from Fort Amsterdam at what is now the site of the US Customs House to the Stockade (and a few buildings outside the fortification). It includes some 15 streets and 300 buildings as well as agricultural spaces. It is the earliest known plan of the city.
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Mappa di New York georeferenziata di Peter Ekamper
The map below is a Beta version of a vectorized and georeferenced redraft of the so-called Castello Plan of New Amsterdam in New Netherland. The map was copied by an unknown draughtsman from an original drawing by Jacques Cortelyou. Original image caption in Dutch: "Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amſterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt". (in contemporary Dutch:"Afbeelding van de Stad Amsterdam in Nieuw Nederland"; and English: "Picture of the City of Amsterdam in New Netherland")
The map was georeferenced approximately to US State Plane Coordinate System, New York 3104, Long Island Zone (1983, US Survey meters). |