Wall Street never cut a deal that good again: the whole of Manhattan purchased from the original Indian inhabitants for 24 dollars.

The only written testimony to the sale 400 years ago now headlines an exhibition opening Sunday on New Amsterdam, the impoverished Dutch colony that the English soon seized and turned into New York.

The rarely displayed letter — about the size of A3 paper and torn at the left hand corner — joins maps, books and documents from the Dutch National Archives on display at South Street Seaport Museum, in the old New York docks.

400th anniversary celebrations

The exhibition is part of celebrations marking the 400th anniversary since adventurer Henry Hudson explored Manhattan on behalf of Holland's trading powerhouse, the Dutch East Indian Company.

Yet it is the failure of Holland to hold on to that extraordinary piece of real estate, or even to foresee the island's importance, that overshadows Hudson's achievement.

"No one, absolutely no one, knew that this little settlement would one day become New York," Martin Berendse, director of the National Archives of the Netherlands, said at a preview of the exhibition.

A tenuous trading outpost

The yellowed texts, filled with ornate handwriting, depict a tenuous trading outpost that was light years from today's financial capital and gleaming city of more than eight-million people.

More than a decade after Hudson's 1609 breakthrough, there was still only a handful of settlers scattered in the forested region, living in uneasy partnership with the Indians, who sold the Europeans fur pelts in exchange for household tools and trinkets, like glass beads.

So unimportant was New Amsterdam to the worldwide Dutch trading empire that the famous 1626 document, dubbed 'the birth certificate of New York', only mentions the historic purchase in passing.

Purchased for 60 guilders

"They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders (approximately 24 dollars)," the report to Dutch officials reads, sandwiching this priceless information between accounts of settler children being born and a cargo of furs delivered.

Settlers spread well beyond Manhattan Island in tiny groups of five or 10, before retreating to the southern tip of Manhattan and the protection of a barrier along Wall Street.

Even in 1653, there were no more than 500 to 700 colonists, many of them not Dutch. "A rabble gathered from all manner of countries," wrote the colony's director Petrus Stuyvesant in a taste of the ethnic melting pot to come.

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AFP

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