Devil on the Hudson

In the 17th century, thousands of Europeans crossed the ocean in search of fortune, power, or survival, facing a future as uncertain as the waters beneath them. Among them were two men on very different missions.

One was Peter Stuyvesant, the "pigheaded, stubborn, one-legged Dutchman," as the English would come to call him. The other: Cornelis Evertsen de Jongste, a short-tempered Zeeland admiral with a sharp instinct for war and trade. Both were driven by a single ambition: to impose order on the overseas territories and weaken the enemy wherever possible.

But theirs is not the only story.

Across the same century, countless Africans were forcibly taken from their homeland and sent across the ocean to build the very colonies others sought to control. One of them, Kofi Kumase - a man of mixed heritage in New Amsterdam - becomes the unexpected narrator of this story. On a summer day in 1673, he recounts what he knows of Stuyvesant to two Dutchmen, as events begin to unfold that will change the fate of the colony once more.

From the Caribbean, Evertsen advances with a growing fleet, driven not by orders, but by pride, and by a fierce, almost mythic hatred of the English. It is this fury that earned him a name still remembered in Dutch naval history:

Keesje den Duivel.The Devil himself.

The man who made sure that the Dutch regained lord and mastery of one of the most important parts of today's United States: New York.