The Canarsee natives took a wise decision in 1626: they traded for trinkets a now rather stylish plot: Manhattan (then called New Amsterdam). Legend states that the Carnarsee sold Manhattan to the Dutch Governor Peter Minuit for "24 dollars' worth of beads and trinkets." The island fondly dubbed "the center of the universe" by many New Yorkers is now worth a cool $1 trillion, estimates Matthew Mondanile of Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate firm.
According to history, on May 24, 1626, Minuit was credited with purchasing the island from the natives in exchange for trade goods valued at 60 guilders. The figure of 60 guilders comes from a letter by a member of the board of the Dutch West India Company, Pieter Janszoon Schagen, to the States-General in November 1626. Sixty guilders in 1626 had the approximate value of $1000 in 2006, according to the Institute for Social History of Amsterdam.
The transaction is often viewed as one-sided, usually to the benefit of the Dutch, though one popular history of Manhattan claims that Minuit actually purchased the island from the wrong tribe). In any event, there is no evidence that either the Dutch or the Indians believed they had swindled, or been swindled by, the other party to the deal. An 1877 embellishment of the myth claimed that the Dutch offered "beads, buttons and other trinkets," though there is no evidence for this]. A contemporary purchase of rights in nearby Staten Island, to which Minuit was also party, involved duffel cloth, iron kettles and axe heads, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, "Jew's harps", and "diverse other wares". (Link)
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