The name Stuyvesant can be found everywhere in New York City -- in the names of neighborhoods, apartments, parks and high schools. Peter Stuyvesant, the last director-general of New Amsterdam, is a hero to some, a villain to others -- and probably a caricature to all.

What do we really know about Peter Stuyvesant?

In their last days in Amsterdam (before heading to other parts of the Netherlands), Tom and Greg spend their time getting to know Stuyvesant, thanks to their special guest Jaap Jacobs, the author of a forthcoming biography on the elusive and controversial figure.

And outside the mayor's residence in Amsterdam's exclusive Gouden Bocht (Golden Bend), they meet up with Jennifer Tosch of Black Heritage Tours (with tours in New York and Amsterdam) to investigate the story of New Amsterdam and the Dutch slave trade.

PLUS They stroll around New Amsterdam on a dark, stormy evening. No really! Well, it's the village of Marken where one can find the closest approximation of what New Amsterdam looked like.

AND A few more myths are dispelled. What actual date should New York City mark as its anniversary -- 1624, 1625, or 1626? Did a letter describing the so-called 'purchase of Manhattan' from the Lenape actually come from New Amsterdam? And was New Amsterdam, in fact, even its real name?

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Our adventure in the Netherlands continues with a quest to find the Walloons, the French-speaking religious refugees who became the first settlers of New Netherland in 1624. Their descendants would last well beyond the existence of New Amsterdam and were among the first people to become New Yorkers.

But you can't tell the Walloon story without that other group of American religious settlers -- the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts four years earlier.

All roads lead to Leiden, the university city with a history older than Amsterdam. Greg and Tom join last episode's guest Jaap Jacobs, the author of The Colony of New Netherland, to explore the birthplace of Rembrandt, the historic botanical garden and a site associated with Adriaen van der Donck (whose "patroonship," or manor, gives the city of Yonkers, New York, its name).

Then they visit with Koen Kleijn, art historian and editor-in-chief of history magazine Ons Amsterdam, who takes them on a journey through Amsterdam's history -- from the innovative story of its canals to the disaster known as Tulipmania, the 1630 speculative mania that set the stage for generations of stock-market shenanigans.

PLUS: A detour to Amsterdam Noord and a look at a miniature model of New Amsterdam, courtesy of the design and production team at Artitec. And while visiting Ian Kenny from the John Adams Institute, Tom and Greg come upon an old friend holding court in a fountain.

PLUS: Tom sustains an injury --- from a bitterballen!

The epic journey begins! The Bowery Boys Podcast heads to old Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, to find traces of New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement which became New York.

We begin our journey at Amsterdam's Centraal Station and spend the day wandering the streets and canals, peeling back the centuries in search of New York's roots.

Our tour guide for this adventure is Jaap Jacobs, Honorary Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the author of The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America.

Jaap takes us around to several spots within the old medieval city -- Centrum, including the Red Light District -- weaving through the canals and along the harbor, in search of connections to New York's (and by extension, America's) past.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Dutch settlement in North America, led by the Dutch West India Company, a trading and exploration arm of the thriving Dutch empire. So our first big questions begin there:

-- What was the Dutch Empire in 1624 when New Netherland was first settled? Was the colony a major part of it? Would Dutch people have even understood where New Amsterdam was?

-- What's the difference between the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company?

-- To what degree was New Amsterdam truly tolerant in terms of religion? Was it purely driving by profits and trading relationships with the area's native people like the Lenape?

-- The prime export was the pelts of beavers and other North American animals. What happened to these thousands of pelts once they arrived in Amsterdam?

-- How central were the Dutch to the emerging Atlantic slave trade? When did the first enslaved men and women arrive in New Amsterdam?

-- And how are the Pilgrims tied in to all of this? Had they always been destined for the area of today's Massachusetts?

Among the places we visit this episode -- the Maritime Museum, the Rijksmuseum, Amersham's oldest building Oude Kirk, the Schreierstoren (the Crying Tower) and many more

PLUS: We get kicked out of a cloister! And we try raw herring sandwiches.

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