In the waning days of 1626, Walloon Pierre Minuit would find himself having gone, in less than two years, from unpaid volunteer, to the most senior official in the Dutch West India Company's latest and most nebulous projects on Earth - the remote outpost that Captain Adriaen Block had established as "New Netherland" a dozen years earlier.

And in the spirit of the Unleashed Lion, the pious and proud Minuit was a fitting apostle to this ambitious "Grand Design": building a 1000-ton man-of-war to conquer Spaniards, while simultaneously vowing to the Algonquin powers-that-be that he will never become his oppressor. 

All while balancing diplomacy with the Puritans 200 miles northeast. 

And with that, this unrelenting refugee of the Eighty Years War is ready to pilot this rag-tag, ad-hoc, so-called "colony" to a place where no man had gone before.

Episode 8 - The Grand Design.

Climb aboard -- 

--history is cool™ :)