Geo Query of the Week

As our esteemed speaker Harlan Green pointed out, there was a time that the Dutch ruled the seven seas and had outposts from Europe to North America, to Asia and beyond.  There are several cities that started off as “New Amsterdam” including New York City and Buffalo New York.  Even today there are two “New Amsterdams” in the United States; one in Indiana and one in Wisconsin.  So for the United States the answer is “Four”.

Throughout the rest of the world, from Brazil to Guyana to Canada to Suriname to Tonga and South Africa and including islands in the Indian and Arctic Oceans there is a total of twelve locations that go by either “Amsterdam” or “New Amsterdam”. This includes the city in Holland that goes by the name “Amsterdam”… which we learned meant “A Dam in the River Amstel”. The total number of places going by the name “Amsterdam” or some derivative thereof is sixteen (per Wikipedia).

If that’s not enough, it turns out that Murray and Ross might have been from “New Holland” in lieu of “Australia” if certain quirks of history had turned a different way.

More “Amsterdams” around the world:

A hamlet in Saskatchewan, Canada;      

A French island in the Indian Ocean;      

The capital of the Netherlands and by far the most famous city known as Amsterdam;

A Norwegian island in the Atlantic Ocean;

A town in Mpumalanga, South Africa; and,

An island of Tonga, once named Amsterdam.