island of Saint Martin—which the Spanish had taken from the Dutch. Peter thought they had few men. When Peter raised the Dutch flag the Spanish fired. A cannonball hit Peter. They lost the battle and Peter had his leg amputated. Stuyvesant returned to the Netherlands for convalescence, where his right leg was replaced with a wooden peg. Stuyvesant was given the nicknames "Peg Leg Pete" and "Old Silver Nails" because he used a wooden stick studded with silver nails as a prosthesis. The West India Company saw the loss of Stuyvesant's leg as a "Roman" sacrifice, while Stuyvesant himself saw the fact that he did not die from his injury as a sign that God was saving him to do great things. A year later, in May 1645, he was selected by the company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the New Netherland colony, including New Amsterdam, the site of present-day New York City. New Netherland Stuyvesant had to wait for his appointment to be confirmed by the Dutch States-General. During that time he married Judith Bayard, who was the daughter of a Huguenot minister, and hailed from Breda. Together, they left Amsterdam in December 1646, and, after stopping at Curaçao, arrived in New Amsterdam by May of 1647. Kieft's administration of the colony had left the colony in terrible condition. Only a small number of villages remained after Kieft's wars, and many of their inhabitants had been driven away and returned home, leaving only 250 to 300 men able to carry arms. Kieft himself had accumulated a fortune of over 4,000 guilders during his term in office, and become an alcoholic. Certain that righting New Netherland was the work which God had saved him for, Stuyvesant told its people "I shall govern you as a father his children," and began the task of rebuilding the physical and moral state of the colony. In September 1647 he appointed the Nine Men, an advisory council composed of representatives of the colonists, to help rebuild relationships with them, temper his rule with their guidance, and restore New Netherland to the kind of well-run place that the Dutch preferred. In 1648 a conflict began between him and Brant Aertzsz van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the patroonship Rensselaerwijck, which surrounded Fort Orange (present-day Albany). Stuyvesant claimed he had power over Rensselaerwijck, despite special privileges granted to Kiliaen van Rensselaer in the patroonship regulations