For this purpose, almost straightaway after the change in the Company’s charter, a convoy of forty English ships were dispatched to Africa where, as the historian Hugh Thomas wrote, they “conquered the Cape Verde Islands, and recaptured Cape Coast [eleven miles from Elmina] along with several other Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast, before crossing the Atlantic to seize New Amsterdam, in New Holland, in North America, a city soon after renamed after the leading shareholder in the Royal Adventurers, the duke of York.”
