It was not the sort of welcome that would typically inspire commemoration. Twenty-three men, women and children, exiled from their homes, arrive in the port of New Amsterdam. The ship's skipper demands his payment. But the travelers had been robbed by pirates on the high seas on an earlier part of their journey and stripped of most belongings. The courts authorize an auction in which their remaining goods are sold. The principal debtors are imprisoned. And Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director general of New Netherland, also appeals to his employers at the Dutch West India Company to deny them permanent...