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had already done many times before, the crew of La Dauphine lowered the ship’s longboat and rowed out to see what they could see. They soon found themselves, Verrazzano said, in “a very beautiful lake”—the Upper Bay—where they were surrounded by several dozen small boats whose occupants, “clad with feathers of fowls of diverse colors,” greeted them “very cheerfully, making great shouts of admiration.” This happy encounter ended almost as soon as it began, however. A sudden squall forced La Dauphine to stand out to sea again, so Verrazzano decided to resume his search further to the north—“greatly to our regret,” he added, for this was a “hospitable and attractive” country, “and, we think, not without things of value.” He dubbed the “lake” Santa Margarita, in honor of the king’s sister, and the surrounding land Angouleme, the name of the king’s principal estate. (When the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened in 1964, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, in its wisdom, spelled the explorer’s name with one z rather than two.)

One year after Verrazzano’s brief visit, Esteban Gomez, a black Portuguese pilot who had sailed with Magellan, ventured a fair distance up the Hudson (which he named Deer River) before concluding it didn’t lead to China. Various French and English pilots are thought to have scouted the region as well in the years that followed. An Englishman supposedly crossed the Hudson in 1568 during an epic overland trek from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Marooned sailors and fishermen are rumored to have wintered along the Delaware or lower Hudson rivers in the late 1590s and early 1600s. On occasion, English and Spanish skippers raided the area to take slaves, an enterprise inspired by Gomez, who had seized fifty-seven New England Indians for sale on the Lisbon slave market.

But the most numerous and persistent successors of Verrazzano and Gomez were fur traders. Furs had always figured importantly in the European luxury trades; beaver in particular was highly prized for both its soft, deep pelt and its alleged medicinal properties. As Adriaen van der Donck would explain midway through the seventeenth century, beaver oil cured rheumatism, toothaches, stomachaches, poor vision, and dizziness; beaver testicles, rubbed on the forehead or dried and dissolved in water, made an effective antidote to drowsiness and idiocy.

Traditionally, most of the furs marketed in Europe came from Russia. Trapped in Siberia or along the shores of the Baltic, they were dressed and marketed in the ancient city of Kiev. But when French explorers and traders opened the St. Lawrence River valley in the 1580s, the influx of Canadian skins created a wider market in Europe and prompted rival traders to seek additional sources of supply elsewhere in North America. By 1600 exchanging beaver and other pelts for European wares had become routine for at least some Indian peoples along the Atlantic coast, the Lenapes undoubtedly among them. European trade goods from the 1570s have turned up in habitation sites well into the interior of New York State, and Dutch traders claimed to have “frequented” the lower Hudson Valley as early as 1598, “but without making any fixed settlements, only as a shelter in winter.”

Not all the Lenapes were anxious to do business with Europeans. Some must have heard stories of captives carried off into slavery. Others seemed unwilling to get into the spirit of a market economy. “They take many beavers,” Johannes de Laet remarked in 1615, “but it is necessary for them to get into the habit of trade, otherwise they are too indolent to hunt the beaver.” Even a half century later, Daniel Denton would note that many Long Island Lenapes still showed a marked indifference to material possessions. “They are extraordinarily charitable to one another,” he wrote, “one having nothing to spare, but he freely imparts it to his friends, and whatsoever they get by gaming or any other way, they share to one another, leaving to themselves commonly the least share.”

What the Europeans offered the Lenapes—blankets, brass kettles, iron