In the 16th century, the converts to the new Calvinist religion in the southern Netherlands fought on the losing side in the revolution against Spain and the Catholic Church. Unsuccessful in their battle to win the right to worship as they wished in their homeland, where they were treated as criminals, they wandered stateless for decades and finally crossed the Atlantic in the company of Dutch entrepreneurs to populate important areas of the New World. These refugees from the southern provinces, whose new neighbors were Dutch, gradually forgot that they were not ethnically Dutch but Walloon and Flemish, from a part of the world that is now known as Belgium. This book is an effort to retell their frequently distorted and even suppressed story.
