But that was just on paper. As I said, the Dutch had already lost control of New Netherland and had little prospect of regaining it. “The Dutch figured, ‘If we got it back, how long would we keep it?’” Jan de Vries, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “The English were encroaching on all sides.”
Today, the difference in value of just the two islands at the center of the deal is vast. In 2022, the gross domestic product of New York County — another name for Manhattan — was $886 billion. Rhun, on the other hand, as the story in The Times tells, has no cars, no roads, no high school and no electricity in daylight hours. (It does have the Manhattan Guesthouse.) Its people make a living off harvesting nutmeg and fishing for tuna.
“It’s a subsistence economy,” Ian Burnet, an Australian geologist who has written books on the East Indies and has visited Rhun several times, told me. “Plenty of fish, fruit, vegetables.” A 14-year-old resident of Rhun quoted in The Times story — which I keep plugging, sorry — didn’t like the looks of Manhattan when he was shown a picture of it on a cellphone: “It looks like a very barren place,” he said, “because it has so many buildings.”
The difference wasn’t nearly as stark in 1667, when British and Dutch negotiators struck the Treaty of Breda. Nutmeg was in high demand, not only as a spice but (some believed) as an aphrodisiac and a cure for the plague. Manhattan was still mostly forested, with multiple estuaries along the shoreline. Whereas Rhun had nutmeg, the big business in Manhattan was trading with the Native Americans: beaver pelts and other natural resources in exchange for axes, knives, kettles, scissors, glass beads and other industrial products. Both nutmeg and beaver hats were the height of fashion in 17th-century Europe.
Already, though, there were signs that New York was destined to separate itself from other islands far from Europe. The Dutch and then the British had begun to make it a trading hub, “with ships cycling from Europe to South America and the Caribbean, and then to the North American harbor and so back home,” Russell Shorto wrote in his 2004 book, “The Island at the Center of the World.” In an interview, he said of Manhattan: “There was a grand notion that it would trade with the world. And it did.”