While Stuyvesant was absent from New Amsterdam, a war party of 1,900 Algonquins passed through New Amsterdam, seeking to attack rival native groups at the eastern end of Long Island. Bangladesh Subway Map They stopped on Manhattan Island and rested in Hendrick van Dyck’s peach orchard. Inexplicably, van Dyck shot a native woman and so enraged the Algonquin that they redirected their enmity toward the Dutch, and the Peach War ensued.
The Native Countrys moved throughout New Amsterdam, breaking into houses and setting some buildings afire in a search for van Dyck. The chiefs attempted to calm the situation, but the colonists, emboldened by liquor, attacked the natives and drove them from the city. In the following days, the Algonquin burned and pillaged settlements along the Hudson, taking survivors as hostages. Stuyvesant hurried back to lead the Dutch forces against the natives. By the war’s end later that year, fifty colonists and approximately sixty Native Countrys were dead, five hundred head of cattle were missing, and thousands of bushels of corn had been destroyed.
To guard against future attacks, Stuyvesant banned the creation of outlying settlements, banned Native Countrys from New Amsterdam at night, and called for corporal punishment of those selling liquor to the native peoples. These measures ended native attacks on New Amsterdam, but such conflicts continued in other Dutch communities. The colonists fought wars with the natives from 1659 to 1660 and from 1663 to 1664. Tensions between New Netherland and New England had grown steadily as their settlements expanded. In 1650, Stuyvesant signed an agreement that placed the border between the two colonies at a line 10 miles east of the Hudson River. Although this line was generous to New England, English settlers soon began to move across it.
