8. The Grand Design

07/21/23 • 25 min

In the waning days of 1626, Walloon Pierre Minuit would find himself having gone, in less than two years, from unpaid volunteer, to the most senior official in the Dutch West India Company's latest and most nebulous projects on Earth - the remote outpost that Captain Adriaen Block had established as "New Netherland" a dozen years earlier.

And in the spirit of the Unleashed Lion, the pious and proud Minuit was a fitting apostle to this ambitious "Grand Design": building a 1000-ton man-of-war to conquer Spaniards, while simultaneously vowing to the Algonquin powers-that-be that he will never become his oppressor.

All while balancing diplomacy with the Puritans 200 miles northeast.

And with that, this unrelenting refugee of the Eighty Years War is ready to pilot this rag-tag, ad-hoc, so-called "colony" to a place where no man had gone before.

Episode 8 - The Grand Design.

Climb aboard --

--history is coolTM :)

All while balancing diplomacy with the Puritans 200 miles northeast.

And with that, this unrelenting refugee of the Eighty Years War is ready to pilot this rag-tag, ad-hoc, so-called "colony" to a place where no man had gone before.

Episode 8 - The Grand Design.

Climb aboard --

--history is coolTM :)

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James Golden

The coolest man -- and possibly the coolest head -- on talk radio today. 770 WABC's James Golden (aka: "Bo Snerdley").

This Friday, Oct 7 on Island Voices.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/island-voices/id1574898368

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9. "Mayken"

Tucked stealthly into this blind cove atop the Guajira Peninsula in Venezuela in 1627, the rugged privateer by the name of Marijn Adriaensen, for all his confidence and tenacity, could not possibly have prepared himself the nature of the particular "possessions" that he and his shipmates were about to wrest control of from their Iberian rivals.

After all, four years into this ambitious "Grand Design" committed young seabeggars like Adriaensen and his team were devout in their pursuit of enriching their beloved upstart Dutch Republic via the maneuvers of this war-machine of a Company that employed them. And while all is fair in love and war, the cargo that he and his crew would be taking from this approaching Portuguese vessel was neither silver nor gold, timber, nor salted fish. But rather, a frightened, but courageous teenage girl, and two hundred and twenty four of her fellow Angolans.

But then, fate plays a pervasive and intriguing supporting role in this overall epic story. And just as they had changed the trajectory of this massive Portuguese ship, so too, would these bold mariners alter the course of the lives of these captive people...because, thanks to Marijn Adriaensen and his crew, these Angolans would not be brought by the Portuguese to the selling block at Caragena, but rather, were now going Dutch, on a direct course for the wild and still quite untethered Island of Manhattan.

ISLANDTM Episode 9 - MAYKEN

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