A few things about New Amsterdam

Sep 19, 2018 Letters

Dear Editor,
Yesterday’s Kaieteur News has an article, with the above headline, about the town of New Amsterdam.
Did it not occur to anyone at KN that this headline, as well as a similar statement in the body of the article had to be incorrect? Either New Amsterdam is NOT the oldest town, or the celebration must have been for more than 175 years.
Mr. Editor, did not Georgetown recently celebrate 175 years as a city? And Georgetown existed before it was declared a city. So when was the town of New Amsterdam established?
The article states, correctly, that originally a little village named New Amsterdam in 1733, sprang up around Fort Nassau about 56 miles up the Berbice River and that “in 1785, it was decided to abandon Fort Nassau and move to the neighbourhood of Fort St Andries at the confluence of the Berbice River and the Canje River, which is the site of the present day New Amsterdam.”
If we take the 1785 move as the beginning of New Amsterdam as we know it, that is 238 years ago- 127 years ago takes us to 1891, more than a century after 1785.
The article also states that the name New Amsterdam was chosen because most of the shareholders were from the province of New Amsterdam in Holland.
First of all, the name of the country is The Netherlands.
North and South Holland are two provinces of The Netherlands- there is no province of New Amsterdam in The Netherlands. There is Amsterdam, which is the capital city.
Hence “New” Amsterdam, which was the name of both the original Dutch settlement that is now the city of New York (there is no New York in England either; there is York) as well as that village around Fort Nassau which grew into the administrative capital of the colony of Berbice.
The Winkel slaves were originally owned by the Dutch West India Company, the organization, which colonized these lands. They were known as Company Slaves, (compare the term “Company Path” – an area between plantations reserved by the West India Company) and they were all artisans trained as carpenters, brick makers, blacksmiths, boat builders, blacksmiths, etc.
When the United Colony of Essequibo-Demerara and the Berbice colony were ceded to Britain by the 1815 Treaty of Vienna (that is, at the end of the Napoleonic War), they were then officially owned by the British Monarch, in turn George III, George IV and William IV. In 1831, they were called “King William’s slaves”.
“Winkel” is a Dutch word meaning “shop” or “store”, so the area may once have been where materials and tools were stored for use by the various artisans.
After their Emancipation, the land in what is now the ward of Winkel was given to these former slaves with the proviso that they and their descendants should continue to live there. My great grandfather, a Berbician, who married one such descendant from the Harris family, petitioned the Court of Policy, (the legislative body inherited from the Dutch colonizers), in the latter half of the 19th century, in order to establish his wife’s and their children’s rights to her family’s plot. (And I got that last bit of information from J. G. Cruickshank’s Scenes from the History of Africans in Guyana. I cannot give you the publisher as I do not have the book with me just now; but the great grandfather was a schoolmaster named C.B. Carto).
Pat Robinson Commissiong

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