It developed hopes, even, that New Amsterdam might be made a slave market for the neighboring English colonies.

A parcel sold at public outcry in 1661 brought an average price of 440 florins,[30] which so encouraged the authorities that larger shipments were ordered.

Of a parcel arriving in the spring of 1664 and described by Stuyvesant as on the average old and inferior, six men were reserved for the company's use in cutting timber, five women were set aside as unsalable, and the remaining twenty-nine, of both sexes, were sold at auction at prices ranging from 255 to 615 florins.
But a great cargo of two or three hundred slaves which followed in the same year reached port only in time for the vessel to be captured by the English fleet which took possession of New Netherland and converted it into the province of New York.[31] [Footnote 30: The florin has a value of forty cents.] [Footnote 31: This account is mainly drawn from A.J.Northrup, "Slavery in New York," in the New York State Library _Report_ for 1900, pp.

246-254, and from E.B.

O'Callaghan ed., _Voyages of the Slavers St.John and Arms of Amsterdam, with additional papers illustrative of the slave trade under the Dutch_ (Albany, 1867), pp.