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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The Bowery Boys Podcast is going to Amsterdam and other parts of the Netherlands for a very special mini-series, marking the 400th anniversary of the Dutch first settling in North America in the region that today we call New York City.

But before they go, they're kicking off their international voyage with a special conversation -- with the man who inspired the journey.

Chances are good that if your bookshelf contains a respectable number of New York City history books, we imagine that one of those is The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America written by Russell Shorto.

The best-selling book re-introduced the Dutch presence in America to a new generation of readers and revitalized interest in New York City history when it was published in 2004.

Kevin Baker (a recent guest on our show), penning the original review for the New York Times, proclaimed, "New York history buffs will be captivated by Shorto's descriptions of Manhattan in its primordial state, of bays full of salmon and oysters, and blue plums and fields of wild strawberries in what is now Midtown."

And so before Greg and Tom begin their mini-series by speaking with Shorto about his classic book, his experiences in Amsterdam and his work with the New-York Historical Society, where he has curated a new exhibition New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam.

Russell also gives Tom and Greg some tips on places to go and advice on how to explore Amsterdam's old canals and corridors. Is it possible to find traces of New York City's past in that city's present?

And then -- immediately after the interview -- they head for the airport!

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Announcing an epic new Bowery Boys mini series -- The Bowery Boys Adventures in the Netherlands. Exploring the connections between New York City and that fascinating European country.

Simply put, you don't get New York City as it is today without the Dutch who first settled here 400 years ago. The names of Staten Island, Broadway, Bushwick, Greenwich Village and the Bronx actually come from the Dutch. And the names of places like Brooklyn and Harlem come from actual Dutch cities and towns.

Over the course of several weekly shows, we'll dig deeper into the history of those Dutch settlements in New Amsterdam and New Netherland -- from the first Walloon settlers to the arrival of Peter Stuyvesant.

But we'll be telling that story not from New York, but from the other side of the Atlantic, in the Netherlands.

Walking the streets of Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, searching for clues. Uncovering new revelations and new perspectives on the Dutch Empire, And finding surprising relationships between New York and Amsterdam.

For this series we visited Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, Haarlem and more places with ties to New York.

We kick off this mini series next week (June 7). talking with the man who literally wrote the book on New Amsterdam -- Russell Shorto (The Island at the Center of the World)

That's the Bowery Boys Adventures in the Netherlands. Coming soon.

June 7 The New Amsterdam Man
June 14 Adventures in the Netherlands Part One
June 21 Adventures in the Netherlands Part Two
June 28 Adventures in the Netherlands Part Three
July 4 Adventures in the Netherlands Part Four