The Twelve Years' Truce between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Empire expires, and both sides prepare to resume the Eighty Years' War.
The Dutch West India Company is founded.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and Wampanoags celebrate a harvest feast (three days), later regarded as the First Thanksgiving, noted for peaceful co-existence.
The Dutch mathematician and astronomer, Willebrord Snel van Royen (1580–1626), discovers the famous law of refraction, also known as Snellius' law.
The Dutch East India Company sends 2,000 soldiers, under the command of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, to the Banda Islands, in order to force the local inhabitants to accept the Dutch trade monopoly on the lucrative nutmeg, grown almost exclusively on those islands. The soldiers proceed to massacre most of the 15,000 indigenous inhabitants.
1624 - The Virginia Company charter is revoked in London and Virginia is declared a Royal colony. 1626 - Peter Minuit, a Dutch colonist, buys Manhattan island from Native Americans for 60 guilders (about $24) and names the island New Amsterdam.
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