Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [22]
In desperation, the Iroquois turned south toward the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson valleys. Before 1600 they had subjected or driven off many of their original inhabitants. The Algonkian-speaking Mahicans who lived on the west side of the Hudson, near modern Albany, were the next in line. If they too succumbed—when they succumbed—all the peoples of the lower Hudson would be endangered in turn. With Europeans at their front door and Iroquois at their back, the Lenapes were doomed.
2
The Men Who Bought Manhattan
On the second day of September 1609, a three-masted Dutch carrack, the Halve Maen (Half Moon) dropped anchor off Sandy Hook. Her skipper, an English seaman named Henry Hudson, had started out six months earlier to find an Arctic shortcut to the Indies. Blocked by ice in the waters off Novaya Zemlya, and with his half-frozen crew threatening mutiny, Hudson then turned west and ran five thousand miles across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia. Since July, the Halve Maen had been scouting the coast between Cape Cod and Chesapeake Bay in search of the same northwest passage that Verrazzano failed to find eighty years before.
For more than a week Hudson and his men explored the Lower Bay, marveling at its wild beauty and fertility. Robert Juet, one of Hudson’s officers, said the surrounding hills were “as pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees, as ever they had scene, and very sweet smells came from them.” The inhabitants seemed “very glad of our comming, and brought greene Tabacco, and gave us of it for Knives and Beads,” Juet added. “They appear to be a friendly people,” Hudson himself reported, “but are much inclined to steal, and are adroit in carrying away whatever they take a fancy to.” That may explain why the situation suddenly turned ugly. A fight broke out, a crewman named Coleman was killed with an arrow through the neck, and Hudson decided to move on.
On September 12 Hudson guided the Halve Maen through the Narrows between Staten Island and Long Island. Crossing the Upper Bay, he warily purchased “Oysters and Beanes” from some “people of the Country” who paddled out to his ship in canoes, then entered the river that now bears his name—“as fine a river as can be found,” in the words of another contemporary report, “wide and deep, with good anchoring ground on both sides.” One week later and ninety miles upstream, near the present site of Albany, Hudson realized that he wasn’t going to reach the Pacific. He turned back, disappointed yet deeply impressed by what he had seen. “The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon,” he asserted, “and it also abounds in trees of every description. The natives are a very good people; for, when they saw that I would not remain, they supposed that I was afraid of their bows, and taking the arrows, they broke them in pieces, and threw them in the fire.”
Nor did he leave empty-handed. The “loving people,” in Juet’s words, “came flocking aboord, and brought us Grapes and Pompions, which wee bought for trifles. And many brought us Bevers skinnes, and Otters skinnes, which wee bought for Beades, Knives, and Hatchets.” That they made better hosts than the inhabitants of the seaboard was confirmed as the Halve Maen sailed down “that side of the River that is called Manna-hata” and dodged a hail of arrows fired by “savages” on the shore. (The meaning of “Manna-hata” has been debated ever since; the preferred translation nowadays is “hilly island.”)1
MIGHTY AMSTERDAM
Though Hudson’s reconnaissance was no more successful than that of Verrazzano or Gomez, it proved the more important because the political climate of Europe