everything in this folder (including pics) from
https://mijngelderland.nl/inhoud/canons/nijkerk/arend-van-curler-1620-1667
[translated]

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Arend van Curler
1620 - 1667

Nijkerk has a twinning with Schenectady, a city in New York. Arend van Curler,
born in 1620 on the Nijkerk farm Corlaer, leaves for America in 1637. He
will work in 'Nieuw-Nederland' for his great-uncle Kiliaen van Rensselaer,
one of the founders of the West India Company. The WIC (1621-1792) is given
the exclusive right to trade in goods and enslaved Africans, on caprine
and colonization in the Americas.

In 1621 the WIC occupies a piece of land in North America, and founded a
colony: New Netherlands. Other European countries do this too. They compete
and fight each other, and engage the original inhabitants of America in
their struggle. They also take unknown infectious diseases from Europe. It
is estimated that only ten percent of the population that has lived in
America for millennia survives the centuries of colonization.

The WIC ships enslaved Africans to New Netherlands (and other colonies)
and forced them to work there to make the colony profitable. In this
transatlantic slave trade, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries,
European slave traders will be enslaved by a total of about 12 million,
of whom 600,000 on Dutch ships. Arend van Curler and his wife also have an
African 'little slave'; he is given the name Bassie Pieterse.

In 1662, Arend van Curler and other settlers live on the Mohawk River,
a branch of the Hudson River. Here they deal with the Mohawks in beaver
skins, and later they focus on agriculture. The settlement grows to the
current place Schenectady (a corruption of the Mohawkse 'skahnéhtati':
beyond the pine trees).


The reading tips:
Janny Venema, 'Arent van Curler: a Nijkerker hero in the New World', in:
Joris van Eijnatten, Fred van Lieburg and Hans de Waardt (eds.), saints or
heroes. Willem Frijhoff (Amsterdam: Publisher Bert Bakker, 2007) 183-197.

A.J.F. van Laer, archivist (ed.), Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts –
being the letters of Kiliaen by Rensselaer, 1630-1643, and other relating
documents to the colony of Rensselawyck (Albany: New York State Library,
1908). (In order to inspect the knowledge centre of Museum Nijkerk.)

Russell Shorto, New Amsterdam. Island in the heart of the world (Amsterdam:
Forum, 2004).


The rights
Museum Nijkerk, CC-BY-NC 

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