How did peter minuit die

Peter Minuit (abt. 1580 - 1638)

PeterMinuit aka Minnewit

Born about in Wesel, Duchy of Cleves (Germany)

Son of Johann Minuit and [mother unknown]

[sibling(s) unknown]

Husband of Gertrude Raedts— married 20 Aug 1613 in Wesel or Kleve, Germany[uncertain]

[children unknown]

Died at about age 58in At Sea near Saint Christopher, Caribbean

Profile last modified | Created 25 Mar 2014

This page has been accessed 4,882 times.

Preceded by
___
Guvernor of New Sweden
1638-1638
Succeeded by
Måns Nilsson Kling

Biography

Peter Minuit is Notable.

Ancestry

The Minuit family originally came from Tournay, in modern Belgium. It is there that Pierre Minuit's great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother, Pierre Minuit and Isabelle Penant, owned a house called "le Chagrin," which was inherited by his children according to a succession record dated 12 December 1556. These children were Jehan (born in 1520), Jehanne (born in 1523), and Salomon (born in 1526). Salomon, the great-granduncle of Pierre Minuit, was hung for being a Ca

Peter Minuit   [1580-1638]

Peter Minuit was a Walloon whose protestant parents had moved from Doornik, Henegouwen in the southern Netherlands, which then included present-day Belgium, to Wesel in Germany, in order to escape from the Catholic Spanish colonials, who were not favorably deposed to those people who had left the Catholic Church to become Protestants. Minuit's birth year is not exactly known but it is somewhere between 1580 and 1589.

Peter Minuit married Gertrude Raedts on August 20, 1613. Gertrude came from a wealthy family which probably helped Peter in establishing himself as a broker. What products he dealt in is also not known, but it probably involved diamonds, because in a legal document, a will, drawn up in the Dutch City of Utrecht in 1615 he is described as a diamond cutter.

Peter Minuit joined the Dutch West India Company [DWI], probably in the mid 1620's, and was sent to New Netherland in 1625 to search for tradable goods other than the animal pelts which were then the major tradable product coming from New Netherland. He returned in the same y

Spartacus Educational

Peter Minuit was born in Holland in 1580. In 1624 Dutch merchants established a settlement that became known as New Netherland. The Dutch government gave exclusive trading rights to the Dutch West India Company.

Minuit was one of those who decided to settle in America and in 1626 became director-general of New Netherland. Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from Native Americans for $24 worth of trinkets, beads and knives. Over the next few years other colonists arrived a large settlement was established on Manhattan Island. The chief port on Manhattan was named New Amsterdam (later changed to New York).

In 1638 the Swedish government employed Minuit to help them establish a colony in America. Soon afterwards two vessels owned by the Swedish West India Company arrived with 50 colonists and established a small settlement in Delaware Bay. They named the town Christina in honor of Sweden's young queen. Peter Minuit died at sea in 1638.

By John Simkin (john@spartacus-educational.com) © September 1997 (updated January 2020).

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