The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Then Francis summoned Giovanni da Verrazano. Born about 1480 near Florence, Italy, Verrazano already was in the French maritime service and had a reputation as a tough sea dog. In those days the king of one country often hired a navigator who was a citizen of another nation. Verrazano was the first explorer officially sent out from France. Publicly, he sought a Northwest Passage to the Orient. His real purpose was to stake out a claim by France to all America north of Mexico. On January 17, 1524, Verrazano sailed from the archipelago of Madeira. In March he made his first landfall near the site of the modern city of Wilmington, North Carolina, and then followed the Atlantic seaboard to New York Harbor. Afterward, in 1527, Verrazano embarked for Brazil, where he was killed and probably eaten by native Caribs.

  Francis I gave the name of New France to the North American territory discovered by Verrazano but did not immediately do anything to consolidate his claim. Charles of Spain acted faster. In 1525, the year after Verrazano touched at New York, the Spanish king sent a Portuguese navigator to explore the eastern shores of America. This man was a Negro, named Estéban Gómez. He reached the site of New York on January 17, 1526. Because this was the feast day of St. Anthony, Gómez named the Hudson River the San Antonio. Ice floes drifting downriver discouraged Gómez from pushing up into the interior. It isn’t likely he saw any Indians from the deck of his ship because none lived on Manhattan during the winter, merely camping there in the hunting and fishing seasons. In any event, Gómez did not find any gold or silver lying about, and precious metals were the prizes most coveted by the Spaniards.

  The third European explorer to see New York Bay and the one whose influence lasted the longest was Henry Hudson. An experienced English navigator, he was making his third transatlantic trip, this time for the Dutch. With the Portuguese trying to monopolize the sea route around Africa, the Dutch East India Company wanted Hudson to find the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient. He commanded the Half Moon, an eighty-ton flat-bottomed yacht, or galliot, mounting square sails upon two masts. His ship was smaller and his sailors less numerous than those under Verrazano. Hudson’s crew of twenty consisted of English and Dutch seamen inclined to quarrel with one another. The second mate, an Englishman named Robert Juet, kept the ship’s log—our prime source of information about this significant voyage.

  The morning of September 2, 1609, the Half Moon nosed into the Lower Bay of New York. Fog muffled the shore. Within a few hours, though, the rising sun cleared the mist. Gingerly steering northeast by north, Hudson and his men suddenly saw the land. The Upper Bay appeared to them as “a great lake of water.” Pouring into this lake—really a bay—was “a great stream,” the river that took Hudson’s name. At 5 P.M. that day they anchored. Gazing northward from the motionless ship, they could see the high hills of Manhattan. Hudson’s mate wrote that “this is a very good land to fall with and a pleasant land to see.”

  Henry Hudson was a careful mariner. For days he hovered about the Lower Bay, sending crew members out in boats to take soundings. Curious Indians appeared, and Hudson let some of them climb aboard the Half Moon. They “seemed very glad of our coming,” the mate noted. The Indians, who wore deerskins and copper ornaments, held out tobacco leaves, which Hudson’s men bought with beads and knives.

  The fourth day after the ship anchored, the captain again dispatched a party of five men in a boat to reconnoiter. Bored with shipboard life, these seamen were delighted to see flowers and grass and agreed that “very sweet smells come from them.” By then, however, some Indians had changed their attitude toward the strange palefaces. Warriors in two canoes attacked this one-boat expedition, and in the fight that followed an Englishman, named John Colman, was killed by an arrow shot into his throat. He was the first European to the on the shore of New York.

  On September 11, 1609, nine days after anchoring, Hudson sailed the Half Moon through the Narrows, the strait separating Staten Island and Brooklyn, and voyaged up into the river afterward named for him. He and his men were awed by the majesty of the Jersey Palisades, stretching 25 miles along the western shore and reaching in places a height of more than 500 feet. Hudson took soundings as he advanced. Bearing past mountains, skirting bends, and sometimes undergoing adventures with river Indians, he finally reached the site of the current city of Albany. He remained there four days, sending his boats 25 miles farther north, to no avail. This was, after all, only a river, not the fabled Northwest Passage. Disappointed, Hudson turned around and sailed back down the waterway.

  On October 4, 1609, he left New York, never to return. However, Hudson had landed here; this neither Verrazano nor Gómez had done before him. Furthermore, the Half Moon was the first ship ever to leave New York directly for Europe. Hudson landed at Dartmouth, but English authorities kept him—an English citizen—from taking his vessel back to her home port of Amsterdam, Holland. Dutch seamen sailed her there the following year. By then Hudson’s report of his voyage and discoveries had reached his employers.

  Although the Indians at New York City usually wore deerskins, upriver natives were clad in pelts of beaver and otter. Besides reporting this to the Dutch East India Company, Hudson had sent along furs as proof. Company directors were not impressed. They had ordered Hudson to find a passage to India, and he had failed. However, when word of Hudson’s findings leaked out, a group of Amsterdam merchants, more imaginative than the company officials, decided they had hit on a new source of revenue.

  The Dutch bought furs from Russia. In those days, when houses were scantily heated, furs were worn in Europe both indoors and out by men and women alike, so they were a desirable commodity. But the Russian emperor laid a duty on furs exported from his country. What’s more, the Dutch had to pay him in gold and other European currency. Hudson, however, got pelts of equal quality from the New World Indians for beads, knives, and hatchets. Instead of trading with Russia, the crafty Amsterdam merchants made up their minds to do business with the gullible savages in a land where duties and customshouses were unknown.

  In 1610 a brisk fur trade began between the Dutch and Indians. Dutch navigators and traders sailed again and again for the New World. There they entered the Connecticut River, pushed northeastward along the New England coast, cruised southward as far as Cape May, New Jersey, and advanced up the Delaware River to the mouth of the Schuylkill River. To this strip of the Atlantic seaboard, from New Jersey to Maine, they gave the name of New Netherland.

  Hendrick Christiaensen glimpsed the Lower Bay of New York while sailing in a heavily laden ship from the West Indies to Holland. Upon returning to his homeland, he urged his friend Adriaen Block to charter a small vessel and head for Manhattan to engage in this expanding fur trade. Here in the New World the two men loaded their ship with pelts and persuaded a couple of Indians to return to Holland with them. Exhibited from place to place, the aborigines created a sensation. Block wrote a long account of the riches in furs to be found across the seas.

  Several wealthy Amsterdam merchants now formed a partnership and outfitted two ships, placing Christiaensen in charge of the Fortune and Block in charge of the Tiger. These mariners sailed for New Netherland early in 1613. Three months later the merchants dispatched a third vessel, under Cornelis Jacobsen May. After passing Manhattan, Christiaensen continued upriver to the present site of Albany, where he built the first Dutch stronghold in America. This stockade, thirty-six feet long by twenty-six feet wide, he named Fort Nassau in honor of the stadholder of the Dutch republic, Maurice, Count of Nassau.

  While Christiaensen wintered near Albany, Block remained in the vicinity of New York City. Block’s ship, the Tiger, caught fire in the harbor and was destroyed. Indians fed Block and his crew throughout the rest of the winter. In the spring of 1614, Block put his men to work building a new ship, the first ever constructed at New York. He named this sixteen-ton yacht the Onrust, meaning restless, trouble, or strife. Loosely translated, the ship’s name has come down to us as the Restless.

  Then Block became the first w
hite man to sail up the East River and stagger through Hellegat, now known as Hell Gate, the narrow and treacherous channel between Wards Island and Queens County. Emerging in Long Island Sound, Block was astonished at this “beautiful inland sea.” Captain May, for his part, nosed along the southern shore of Long Island, proving that it was indeed an island.

  Some years before, Robert Juet, Hudson’s second mate, apparently was the first white man to write down the name Manhattan. In the Dutch, French, and English writings of colonial times, Manhattan was spelled almost fifty different ways. Historians disagree about the origin of the word. Some say the Indians who hunted and fished on the island called themselves the Manhattans. Others say they did not apply the name to themselves but called the place Manhattan. Still others claim it was the Dutch, not the Indians, who first used the name Manhattan. However, one thing is certain: The Indians who camped on Manhattan Island were of Algonquin stock. The word “Algonquin” pertains to a linguistic group of North American Indians. When the white men came to this continent, it was peopled with only about 800,000 to 1,000,000 Indians. Most lived along the Atlantic seaboard between New York and Boston.

  Socially, the Indians were grouped into families, clans, subtribes, tribes, and confederations of tribes. The Indians who hunted and fished on Manhattan, in the Bronx, and in Westchester County belonged to the Wappinger Confederacy. The Indians who lived on Staten Island and Long Island belonged to the Delaware Confederacy. A Delaware subtribe, called the Canarsie, occupied Brooklyn.

  Linguistically, there was much confusion. The Indians of North America spoke from 500 to 1,000 different languages, or more than all the languages spoken by Europeans. Unable to communicate verbally, some resorted to sign language. Although the various branches of the Algonquins spoke a language fundamentally the same, each tribe had its own dialect. The tribes that used the lower part of Manhattan had trouble understanding members of the tribe that frequented the upper reaches of the island. Some of the Indians on Manhattan had a war cry that sounded like this: Woach, woach, ha, ha, hack, woach!

  The various Algonquin tribes were hostile toward one another. Their common enemy, the Iroquois, lived in the upper Hudson Valley. North-south Indian trails generally were known as warpaths because the Indians spread out across America in east to west strips, and north to south travel brought rival tribesmen into contact with one another. East to west paths were called paths of peace. Manhattan was laced by several paths, but the principal one was a warpath stretching from the Battery northward to what is now City Hall Park. Such was the origin of Broadway.

  Manhattan’s twenty-two square miles was a happy hunting ground. For game the Indians had their choice of whitetail deer, beavers, red foxes, gray foxes, black bears, gray wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, minks, weasels, chipmunks, ducks, geese, and wild turkeys—to name just a few. A bountiful supply of fish flashed through the waters swirling among the more than fifty islands within the present city limits of New York. The place was a crossroads for migratory birds, flying southward in the fall and northward in the spring.

  All the area now embraced by New York City consisted of one vast forest. There were white oaks and red oaks, walnut trees and chestnut trees, maples and cedars, white pines and pitch pines, Norway spruces and yellow pines. At the base of the trees, huddled in tangled confusion, were grapevines and ferns, blackberry bushes and raspberry bushes, strawberries and mulberries.

  Manhattan lay on a latitude more than 700 miles south of London, more than 500 miles south of Paris, and about 70 miles south of Rome. Because of its geographical position, plus the tempering influence of the Atlantic, New York’s climate was relatively mild, although the difference between summer and winter was striking. October was the finest month of the year. In both spring and autumn the air took on the quality of champagne; this helps explain why Manhattan’s inhabitants crackle with energy.

  The island of Manhattan was bordered on the south by the Upper Bay, on the west by the Hudson River, on the north by the Harlem River, and on the east by the East River. The Hudson, one of the most noble rivers in America, formed in the Adirondack Mountains of upper New York State and flowed 315 miles to the Battery, at the lower tip of Manhattan. It was a mile wide at the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The Hudson was a tidal river, salt water flowing as far north as Albany. It also included a deep submarine canyon, extending from its mouth at the Battery 200 miles seaward. The East River was not a real river but a saltwater estuary, or tidal strait, that stretched between the Upper Bay and the eastern end of Long Island Sound, 16 miles to the northeast. When the first white men reached here, the Harlem River was not a continuous waterway linking the Hudson and East rivers. A traveler could ford the Harlem River at low tide by jumping from rocks to reefs at Spuyten Duyvil. Subsequent dredging and the construction of a channel made it possible for ships to travel between the Hudson and East rivers via the Harlem River.

  The lordly Hudson River emptied into a huge hourglass harbor to create the largest and best natural port in the United States and one of the few perfect harbors in the entire world. Except for bitterly cold days, the port of New York was free of ice and had far fewer fogs than those shrouding the harbor of San Francisco.

  Such was the region toward which the Dutch turned in great expectation. The first half of the seventeenth century was the golden age of the Netherlands, even though at first the Dutch provinces struggled to free themselves from Spain. Holland’s commerce expanded as never before. The Dutch were the Yankees of their day, shrewd, hardheaded, industrious, and ingenious. Forced to find their own way to the Orient, in a surprisingly short time they disputed command of the Indies with the Portuguese and then displaced them.

  So many Dutch companies traded with the Far East that at last the Dutch government, called the States General of the United Netherlands, found it necessary to merge all of them into one vast corporation. This was the Universal East India Company, chartered in 1602. It was a fabulous success. Four years after its organization it declared a dividend of 75 percent. By 1620 its original shareholders had realized a 425 percent profit on their investment. Under the terms of its charter, for 21 years the East India Company was to be the only Dutch firm with the right to trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and sail its ships through the Strait of Magellan. The corporation became one of the chief organs of Dutch imperialism. It was this company that had sent Henry Hudson to America in 1609, hoping he would discover a shorter route to India.

  In that same year of 1609 a twelve-year truce was concluded between the confederated states of the Netherlands and Spain. “At this moment,” said the French historian Taine, “Holland on the sea and in the world was what England was in the time of Napoleon.” This is to say, it was a great maritime and imperialistic power.

  With trade to and from the Orient running smoothly under the direction of one colossal company, the Dutch now organized another group to guide commerce between Holland and America—or New Netherland. This was the United New Netherland Company, formed by thirteen merchants of Amsterdam and Hoorn and chartered in 1614. (In the same year, when the name New Netherland formally was applied to a portion of the New World, the name New England was given to the territory lying north of it.) For three years directors of the new corporation were to enjoy exclusive rights to make trading voyages to the region between Virginia and Canada. At the end of this period, however, the States General refused to renew the charter, and the American trade was thrown open to all Dutchmen.

  The result was competition and confusion. This endangered the national interest, for the English chafed at the growing traffic of Dutch ships on the Hudson River. At last the English instructed their minister at The Hague, Holland’s capital, to remind the Dutch government of England’s claims in the New World. Under these pressures the Dutch government granted a charter on June 3, 1621, to a group of merchants, who had organized the Dutch West India Company.

  These businessmen hoped to regulate and protect the trade carried on
by the Dutch in both America and Africa. They intended to set up colonies on each of the two continents and their nearby islands. Frankly patterned after the Dutch East India Company, the new firm was divided into five branches, or chambers—one for each of the five Dutch cities. Of these, the Amsterdam chamber won the most power because it contributed the most money—four-ninths of the total investment. So it was this chamber that controlled New Netherland. However, the company’s nineteen directors, who governed the far-flung affairs of the entire firm, regarded New Netherland as something of a stepchild. They were intent on trying to capture Brazil from the Portuguese and colonizing Guiana and the West Indies.

  The West India Company got the exclusive right to trade on American and African shores, just as the East India Company alone could send ships to Asia. Never before in history, perhaps, had any private corporation been invested with such enormous powers. In fact, it became so influential that it almost constituted a government within the government. This was to have tremendous bearing on the affairs of the city soon to be planted in the New World.

  And most of the first colonists sent here by the Dutch were French-speaking people.

  Chapter 2

  FIRST SETTLERS ARRIVE

  THEY came in a great ship. There were 110 men, women, and children, representing thirty families, and they arrived in the New Netherland’s a vessel of unusual size for that age. The Mayflower, which had brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth three years earlier, was a ship of only 180 tons. The New Netherland displaced 260 tons. It took the Dutch emigrants almost two months to make the trip, for they sailed a roundabout course from Amsterdam past the Canary Islands and the West Indies to Manhattan. And although the passengers didn’t know it, they escaped an English man-of-war that had been ordered to sink them.