This book reconstructs the manifold ways by which Dutch people of seventeenth-century New York took hold of the New World. As the author reminds us, the Dutch understood themselves to be republican, urban, mobile, mercantile, and amphibious; in short, properly Dutch. She shows how the Dutch possessed the land, traded over it, surrendered it to the English, and then lived out their lives balancing a "gaze" that the conquerors had for land against their own.