Live From New Amsterdam: The Last Slave Ship in New Amsterdam

In August 1664, only weeks before the English takeover of the region, the Dutch slave ship Gideon arrived in New Amsterdam with 290 enslaved Africans on board. The Dutch West India Company had contracted its captain to bring these captives to the colony to expand its enslaved labor force. In this program, historians Andrea Mosterman and Deborah Hamer discuss the Gideon’s voyage and what it tells us about slavery in and the slave trade with New Netherland.  

Andrea Mosterman is Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History at the University of New Orleans and author of Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (2021). She currently researches the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic slave trade with North America.

Deborah Hamer is Director of the New Netherland Institute, where she is responsible for initiatives aimed at identifying, preserving, digitizing, and translating Dutch language documents in repositories around the world. She is a historian of the Dutch Atlantic world and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Live From New Amsterdam is an ongoing series hosted by the New Netherland Institute and the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society. Through vibrant conversations with scholars and historians, each program will investigate new and exciting research related to New Amsterdam, New Netherland, and the lasting legacies of Dutch rule in New York.