Dorothy Creole
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Dorothy Creole was one of the first African women to arrive in New York. She arrived in 1627.[1] That year, three enslaved African women set foot on the southern shore of Manhattan, arriving in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam).[2] Property of the Dutch West India Company, these women were brought to the colony to become the wives of enslaved African men who had arrived in 1625. One of these women was named Dorothy Creole, a surname that she acquired in the New World.
Dorothy's world was one in which West Africans and Europeans had mixed and traded for more than two centuries. The Dutch had established trading posts in present-day Angola on the Slavenkust or Slave Coast to acquire slaves for their New World colonies.[3] It was also the year of the supposed sale of the island of Manhattan to the Dutch by native inhabitants for the equivalent of 24 dollars of trade goods. What is significant to Dorothy Creole's story is that by 1625, New Amsterdam was a place where Europeans, Native Americans and Africans had significant interaction.