Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [72]
NEW ORANGE
Stung by his failure to defeat the Netherlands in the second Anglo-Dutch War, Charles II had begun preparations for a third. In 1670 he signed a secret accord with Louis XIV of France that committed both nations to combine forces against the Dutch. All he lacked was a plausible excuse to open hostilities, and that came in the spring of 1672, when English and Dutch naval forces clashed in the Channel. Within days, both England and France had declared war. Rallied by the young Prince William of Orange, the Dutch fought back (one of their first victims was Colonel Richard Nicolls, felled by a Dutch cannonball as he stood next to the duke of York on the deck of an English warship). Before the year was out, they had dispatched a heavily armed squadron to raid English and French possessions in America.
In the spring of 1673, led by Admiral Cornelis Evertsen—whose derring-do on the high seas had earned him the nickname of “Kees the Devil”—the Dutch squadron attacked British possessions in the Caribbean, seizing a fortune in sugar and slaves. Evertsen then headed for Virginia and Maryland. In midsummer he entered the Chesapeake, capturing or destroying numerous English ships and making off with thousands of hogsheads of tobacco. His next target was New York.
At the end of July 1673 the Dutch squadron dropped anchor off Sandy Hook just below the Narrows. Some Dutch farmers from New Utrecht made their way out to Evertsen’s flagship to complain “about the hard rule of the English.” They also said that Governor Lovelace was away on business in Connecticut, that Fort James was in no condition to repel an invasion, and that the town would welcome the Dutch. Evertsen decided to attack.
On the twentieth, while Dutch saboteurs spiked the guns on the East River shore near City Hall, Evertsen brought his frigates within range of the fort and ordered its temporary commander, Captain John Manning, to surrender. “We have come to bring the country back under obedience to their High Mightinesses the Lords States General,” he announced. When Manning stalled, Evertsen bombarded the fort and landed Captain Anthony Colve with six hundred marines on the Hudson shore near the present site of Trinity Church. Cheered on by “demonstrations of joy” among the Dutch populace, Colve and his marines advanced down Broadway and took possession of the fort without firing a shot. With “enemy in our Bowells,” Manning glumly explained, resistance was impossible. Evertsen promptly renamed the city New Orange in honor of Prince William. He also declared that the entire colony would again be known as New Netherland and designated Captain Colve its governor-general.
New Amsterdam formerly called New York, 1673, issued shortly after the Dutch reoccupation. Note the soldiers marching along the waterfront. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Evertsen sailed off in September to attack Newfoundland, leaving Colve to continue the work of restoring Dutch control—with the assistance of prominent men like Cornelis Steenwyck and Nicholas Bayard, whose patriotism seems to have overcome their close ties to the English. He restored the old Dutch forms of government, administered oaths of loyalty, collected taxes, strengthened the city’s defenses against an expected counterattack, and faced down the English villages of Long Island. For good measure, he confiscated the property of leading English officials and merchants; when Lovelace foolishly returned to town, Colve clapped him in jail on the complaint of some Dutch merchants who said