Thirty-eight years after Henry Hudson, in 1609, first sailed the Half Moon up the majestic river named for him, Governor Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam harbor. Much had happened in those years. Now the Dutch colonists welcomed their new Governor, all the more because they hated the departing one.

Peter Stuyvesant had a wooden leg. Sometimes he stormed and stomped it on the floor. Sometimes he made mistakes. But he was a man of warmth and charm and honesty, and he loved this new land. For eighteen years he helped the Dutch colony grow. 

Anna and Russel Crouse, New Yorkers themselves, give the reader a dramatic picture of the peg-legged Governor. And they tell of life in the little settlement huddled round the Fort at the tip of Manhattan Island, from sun-up to when the kloppermann called out the hours of the night.

Then in 1664 the English came with a fleet. There were tears in Peter Stuyvesant's eyes. He had to surrender. New Amsterdam was renamed New York.

His last years Stuyvesant lived on the farm he loved—bouwerie, as the Dutch called it. And there he lies buried, in the small chapel in New York City where St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie now stands. He will always be remembered for the big part he played in the history of the New World's first city—at a time when there were only farms where towering skyscrapers now rise.

From the dust jacket