The Epic of New York City (3 page)

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 white 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.