The Princess Amelia was a Dutch merchant ship of 600 tons (bm) built 1634, of 38 guns in the service of the Dutch West India Company.
During its 1647 arrival to and departure from New Netherland, it was commanded by Jan Claesen Bol, who was 28 at the time. The ship carried Petrus Stuyvesant, the new Director-General of New Netherland, his wife Judith Bayard, and Stuyvesant’s councilors to Manhattan, where they landed May 1647. During its time in port, Captain Bol sat in council with Stuyvesant and others in New Amsterdam.
When it sailed from Manhattan to Amsterdam on 16 August 1647, it was loaded with 200,000 pounds of dyewood from Curaçao and around 14,000 beaver pelts. It was also carrying 107 passengers and crew, including the recently fired Director Willem Kieft for his return to Amsterdam to defend himself against the charges leveled by among others, the Rev. Everardus Bogardus (the colony’s principal Dutch Reformed dominie), and banished colonists Jochem Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn, who would also have to answer charges of insubordination for their role in Kieft’s ouster. The passengers also included numerous Dutch West India Company soldiers who had recently arrived in Manhattan from Brazil and the Caribbean.
On 27 September 1647, Captain Bol mistook the Bristol Channel for the English Channel and ran the ship aground off Mumbles Point, Wales, near Swansea, Wales, (51.573°N 3.9992°W / 51.573; -3.9992) where the ship broke apart. Twenty-one of the 107 passengers survived, including Kuyter and Melyn, who later reported that Kieft had acknowledged his administrative mistakes before drowning. The Rev. Bogardus, Melyn's son, and most of the soldiers also drowned. Insurance claims and lawsuits over the loss claims lasted for years.
Early popular sources describe the event thus:
Kieft returned to Holland in a ship that was packed from stem to stern with the finest of furs. The ship was wrecked at sea. Kieft was drowned, and the furs were lost. In the same ship was Everardus Bogardus (the minister who had married Annetje Jans), who was on his way to Holland on a mission relating to his church. The people of New Amsterdam mourned for their minister, but there was little sorrow felt for the Governor who had plunged the colony in war by his obstinate and cruel temper.
Some of the furs on board came ashore in Swansea Bay and were sold off in their bundles for bargain prices. Kuyter and Melyn were found not guilty of insubordination and later returned to their families in New Amsterdam. Two cannon, small arms, and silver coins were salvaged from the wreck by Squire Mansel but were lost on Rhossili beach before they got to his home of Henllys, Llandewi, Gower.