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About a half-century on, the Dutch West India Company was running big sugar operations in northeast Brazil, and naturally began thinking that a California “New Netherlands” sounded pretty good.

It features the letter from a Dutch West India Company administrator, dated Nov. 5, 1626, announcing the notorious “purchase” of Manhattan from Native Americans for 60 guilders — an amount translated in the 19th century to an infamous $24.

Eventually, the Dutch West India Company became the largest trans-Atlantic slave trader, according to Karwan Fatah-Black, an expert in Dutch colonial history and an assistant professor at Leiden University.

The Dutch West India Company, meanwhile, was a significant force in the trade in enslaved people.

The Netherlands played a key role in the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people, primarily through the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company.