Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy

Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy (* 1625 in Zierikzee; † 1664-1670 in Lewes (Delaware) ) was a Dutch Mennonite, the one based on utopian ideas colony founded in 1663 near present-day Lewes in Delaware Bay, which already in 1664 by the British was destroyed.

Life

Plockhoy belonged in the Netherlands to the liberal Mennonites and was influenced by the Fellows in Amsterdam (especially Galen Abrahamsz de Haan and England Adam Boreel ). He negotiated in 1657 and then in London obtained without concrete success with Oliver Cromwell for permission to establish a colony in America. In London, he published The Way to the Peace and Settlement of These Nations (1659 ) and A Way propounded to make the poor in synthesis and other Nations happy (1659 ) and he hattee there probably contacts the circle of Samuel Hartlib. No later than 1661, he is back in Amsterdam, where he developed utopian ideas of a new colony Nieuw Nederlands Franciscus van with the ends. 1661, he graduated in Amsterdam into an agreement with the Dutch government for a settlement on the lower Delaware. It appeared in 1662 in Amsterdam be Kort en Klaer ontwerp. The colonists should tolerate all religions, the children are taught in the Bible, languages ​​and natural sciences, but not after a certain champagne opinion. The colonists worked jointly, but also had private property and could leave the colony at any time. Widows, children and the sick received shares from the results of collaborative work. A guard was determined annually and laws have been enacted by the Community Assembly by a two - thirds majority. This could also exclude members with a two-thirds majority, the excluded but which received their earned share. With 41 colonists he founded in July 1663, a settlement near present-day Lewes on the Delaware Bay estuary near the former Dutch colony Zwaanendael, which was founded in 1631 and shortly afterwards destroyed by Indians.

1664 raided the British this and other Dutch settlements, for exact details are not known. Maybe Plockhoy died there or a few years later. His wife and his blind son Cornelis survived and the latter came in 1694 after German Town ( Pennsylvania).