What if the Pilgrims landed in Manhattan as they intended?

raharris1973

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The Pilgrims who founded Plymouth were originally intending to land and settle further south, in Manhattan or the mouth of the Hudson. Say they did land there and did not get diverted by landing at Cape Cod when they were low on provisions and beer.

The Dutch had scoped out the area and founded a fort at Albany up the Hudson, but had not yet set up any permanent establishments or buildings on Manhattan.

Could the Dutch at this time have successfully contested sovereignty over the Plymouth settlers in the lower Hudson Valley? A Plymouth-in-Manhattan might end up as an autonomous community under Dutch rule. If it came to blows between England and Netherlands in the 1620s over control of the Hudson, I do not know for sure which side would win.

I could see anything from Dutch-ruled pilgrims, to Dutch armed Iroquois killing them off, to an English "New England" largely set up in the Middle Atlantic region instead of its historical location, which at the same time aborts New Netherlands, New Sweden and the Quaker-founded Pennsylvania, at least in their OTL locations.

Your thoughts on how things would go?
 
Holland was a stronger naval power than England at this point, so they could probably take it. The question is whether the Pilgrims would be willing to stay under Dutch rule. Iirc they had been living in Holland and moved precisely because they wanted to stay English and not be assimilated. So they might migrate to present-day CT or NJ, or even to the Chesapeake.
 
Could someone tell me why 'The Pilgrims' are so important? They were only a very few of the early settlers and many of them weren't even 'Pilgrims'.
 
Holland was a stronger naval power than England at this point, so they could probably take it. The question is whether the Pilgrims would be willing to stay under Dutch rule. Iirc they had been living in Holland and moved precisely because they wanted to stay English and not be assimilated. So they might migrate to present-day CT or NJ, or even to the Chesapeake.

Actually, it probably had more to do with the great big war that was starting up again.
 
Could someone tell me why 'The Pilgrims' are so important? They were only a very few of the early settlers and many of them weren't even 'Pilgrims'.

Unlike the Virginia settlers (who were Anglican), they were religious dissenters, who were persecuted in England but allowed to found their own colony. Their success led to the founding of other Puritan colonies. Note that in the modern United States, Anglicans (Episcopalians) are a very small minority among Protestants, so the Pilgrims more or less paved the way for the rest.
 
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