USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 7
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settlements existed in New Hampshire and Maine. All the rest of the group of colonies which were thus beginning to take root on American soil were of later birth, and the young- est of them, Georgia, was not born until the one that the Dutch had founded was a hundred and ten years of age.
The Hollanders had chosen the finest seat for commerce on all this long and diversified coast. They had 'intruded,' said a paper called the Case of the Corporation for New Eng- land and written some thirty years later, upon the rights of King James in 'the very best part of all that large northern empire.'
Their voyage from Holland usually took six or eight weeks but often a much longer time. They made it by way of the Canary Islands and the Caribbees, sometimes touching at Guiana, passing northward between the Bahamas and Ber- muda toward Virginia, and then up along the coast - a circuitous route but one that avoided the fierce gales of the North Atlantic and supplied ports for stopping to provision or to refit.
As they approached Manhattan the lower bay offered them immediate shelter behind its projecting sandy arm or hoek. Thence, through a channel deep enough for the largest ships, they entered the great land-locked upper bay, one of the world's few perfect harbors. At the head of this bay lay a long narrow island, washed on one side by Hudson's Great River, on the other by the broad tidal strait, twenty miles in length, called Hellegat or the East River, and at the north separated but not set far apart from the mainland by a lesser strait, or branch of the larger one, seven miles long. This Harlem River, as the Dutchmen named it, in aspect like a slender winding stream, joined Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a little tributary of the Great River, and thus completed the insula- tion of Manhattan.
So was Manhattan placed and shaped - like a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world. And the river that laved its western bank, navigable to the northward
VOL. I. - E
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for more than a hundred and fifty miles, was second in im- portance, on all the North Atlantic coast, to none excepting the Frenchmen's River of St. Lawrence.
Securing the St. Lawrence the French had acquired the one great natural transcontinental highway, the only navigable river which gave access to the Great Lakes whence the head- waters of the affluents of the Mississippi, opening a water- route to the Gulf of Mexico, could easily be reached. Holding this highway the French not only controlled the fur-producing regions of the interior but were able eventually to set, from Acadia to the Gulf, a long line of outposts which threatened the English colonies with extinction or, at best, with per- petual confinement to a narrow strip of seacoast. There were drawbacks, however, to the immense utility of the St. Law- rence. The approaches to it were long and very dangerous, they were closed by ice during five months of the year, so was the river itself, and the lands that bordered upon it were difficult of cultivation.
On the other hand, the harbor of Manhattan was ad- vantageously placed midway between Newfoundland and Florida, and was very easy of approach. Although the Great River itself was ice-bound in winter, the lower bay was always open, the passage into the upper bay was always free, and for only a few days two or three times in a century were this bay and the channels around Manhattan frozen. Connected with the upper and lower bays by the straits around Staten Island was another bay of large size into which considerable streams debouched; and the Atlantic coast-line as well as the shores of Long Island Sound and the banks of the Great River were broken by many small harbors and by the mouths of many tributary streams and creeks - water byways highly advantageous to settlers in a wilderness. The soil was rich, its wealth in timber incalculable; and the climate, while colder in winter and hotter in summer than that of northern Europe, had neither the arctic rigor which tried the Canadian nor the enervating languor which tempted the southern colonist to rely upon slave labor, and was
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distinctly more temperate than the climate of New Eng- land.
Furthermore the Great River, cutting through the diagonal line of the great Appalachian mountain system, gave easier access to the interior of the continent than could elsewhere be found south of the St. Lawrence. When the Dutchmen set their first posts far up the river they commanded the end of the great Iroquois trail, a path about fifteen inches wide, beaten hard by Indian feet, running through the forests, and everywhere avoiding wet as well as open places, which led up the Mohawk Valley and beyond it to a point just above Niagara Falls. This trail passed through the only place on the continent whence waters flow toward the St. Lawrence, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, a watershed where affluents of Lake Ontario and of the Susquehanna, the Dela- ware, the Potomac, the Ohio, and the Hudson have their springs. As some of these nascent streams, connected by short portages, were navigable for canoes, bands of savages from regions as distant as the further shores of Superior easily brought their packs of pelts to the shores of the Great River. Therefore the fur trade flourished in New York long after it had died out in New England.
The chief of the interior water-routes, the Oneida Portage- path, ran from the upper waters of the Mohawk by a portage only a mile in length, called the Great Carrying Place, to Wood's Creek which flows into Oneida Lake, and from this lake down the Oswego River to Lake Ontario. When the struggle between France and England grew acute in the New World this route, which flat-bottomed boats could take, was of the utmost importance; and the famous fort called Stan- wix, now enclosed in the city of Rome, was built to defend the Great Carrying Place.
The early Dutchmen were not much concerned with the fact that the same great break in the Appalachian barrier that gave access to the northwest afforded the chief natural pas- sage from Canada toward the south, by way of the Richelieu River, Lake Champlain, Lake George, another Wood's Creek,
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and Hudson's River. But to their descendants and the Eng- lish rulers of the province it was a fact of capital significance. After a while this route, the Grand Pass from New York to Montreal, became another main channel for the traffic in furs; and its existence made the frontier city of Albany, whence a navigable river ran down to the finest harbor on the coast, the strategical key to the English position in America, the pivotal point in all the wide region between the territories of France and of Spain. Because this point was in the province of New York, and because the harbor of Manhattan held a midway station on the English colonial seaboard, New York came to be called the pivot province of the king of England's domain.
While the geographical character of the province was thus highly advantageous in one way, a source of danger in another, in still another it proved unfortunate when, in English days, New York had been shorn of a great part of the territory that the Dutch had claimed. The high rocky hills that flanked the valley of the Hudson so limited the arable lands of the province that, largely for this reason although partly because of its less liberal government, it was quickly surpassed in population by Pennsylvania, and, in spite of its unrivalled harbor, its capital city could not keep pace with Philadelphia.
The beauty of the harbor of Manhattan and the fertility of its shores excited the admiration of every explorer. Ver- razano, if we accept the most generally accepted reading of his description of the coast, called it a 'most beautiful lake,' and said that he left with great regret a region which seemed so 'commodious and delightful.' Nearly a century later Juet wrote that it was 'as pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees' as any he had ever seen and that 'very sweet smells' came from it. De Laet quotes Hudson as say- ing that it was the finest land for cultivation he had ever trodden, and Van Meteren probably quotes him when he declares that the river was as fine a one as could be found 'with a good anchorage ground on both sides.'
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Although primeval forests for the most part clothed the land there were natural open spaces, especially near the water, and the aborigines had trodden out a network of paths, cut many trees to build their lodges, stockades, and canoes, cleared many acres to plant their beans and maize, their pumpkins, their tobacco, and their apple orchards, and burned the vegetation from wider areas. Magnificent trees of many kinds formed the dense forests and dotted the meadow-like openings, some of the most useful new to Euro- pean eyes - the tough hickories, for example, and the tulip tree which because of its lightness the Dutch called the 'canoe wood.' Nuts, wild grapes, and edible berries grew in a profusion and variety that amazed the newcomer almost as much as did the multitude of fish that swarmed in the bay and the flocks of wild fowl that clouded the air or islanded the water.
The divers names that the Hudson has borne testify to the varied nationality of those who explored it or lived beside it. Among its Indian titles were Cohohatatea, Shatemuck, and Mohican. It was the San Antonio of the old Portuguese cartographers, probably thus named by Gomez. It may also have been their Ribera de Montañas (River of the Mountains) for De Laet wrote in 1625 that while the Dutch generally called it the Great River others also called it Rio de Mon- taigne, and certain maps give its name in this curious bastard form. But it was not, as has been thought, the Rio Grande or the Rio de Gamas (Deer River) of the Portuguese, these being the Penobscot. The English knew it as Hudson's River and River Manahata. And as the Dutchmen's name for their northern fort was Oranje (the j as always in Dutch words pronounced like i) or in Latin Aurania, for two centuries the Canadian French spoke of the river as Rivière d'Orange or d'Auranie. On Champlain's map of 1632 it appears, more perplexingly, as Rivière des trettes.
Although Hudson and Juet spoke simply of the Great River the Hollanders soon named it for their stadholder Maurice of Nassau: Riviere van den Vorst Mauritius is its
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title on the parchment Figurative Map.1 They also called it the Nassau and, more commonly, the North River or the Great North River, partly because it flowed from the north, partly by way of contrast to the Delaware which they called the South River. North River and River Mauritius remained its customary appellations until English times. Then the prince's name gave way to the explorer's; but even to-day the Hudson is usually called the North River by the people who live near its mouth, and is indicated thus on city maps and in the naming of piers, ferries, and steamboat lines. Of course the stranger is puzzled, for he sees that the North River washes the western side of Manhattan, and he knows nothing of the old Dutch name of the Delaware.
It was the Dutchmen who gave the East River its present name although they usually called it Hellegat. Afterwards Hell Gate was applied only to its dangerously obstructed part. The English often called it the Sound, sometimes the South River as opposed to the North River. Long Island also remains as the Hollanders christened it, in spite of the fact that the English officially declared it to be Nassau Island. On Champlain's map of 1632 it appears as Isle de l'Ascension. The most commonly used of its Indian names was Matowack or Metoacs - very variously spelled by the whites who also long employed it. Staten Island, called by the natives Eghquous, Monacknong, and Aquetonga, the Dutch named for the parliament of their fatherland - Staaten Eylandt, the Island of the States - a title which they had already given to the far-away island that lies east of Terra del Fuego, bestowing it when, first of all Europeans to round the end of the continent, they christened Cape Horn. Our northern Staten Island was also called. Godyn's Island in honor of a director of the West India Company while Sandy Hook was
1 Brodhead narrates that the fly-boat Half Moon in which Hudson discovered for the Dutch the River of Mauritius was afterwards em- ployed in the East India trade, and in 1615 was wrecked on the shore of the Island of Mauritius, then owned by the Dutch.
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sometimes Godyn's Point. Governor's Island, the largest in the harbor, the Indians called Pagganck or Pecanuc, the Dutch Nooten Eylandt because of the nut trees it bore. The Narrows were Hamel's Hooftden (Hamel's Cliffs), named for another director of the Company. Coney Island was some- times called Coneyn's Eylandt which implies that Coneyn was a surname, and sometimes 'T Coneyn Eylandt which means Rabbit Island.
The name Manhattan, spelled in almost half a hundred ways in Dutch, French, and English writings of colonial times, has been very variously interpreted. 'People of the Whirlpool' and 'Place of Intoxication' are fanciful and foolish readings based upon perversions of linguistic analogies and disproved by the testimony of the earliest maps and descriptions. The soundest belief seems to be that Manhat- tan was derived from a mutable Algonquin term, meaning 'island,' which was by no means limited in its application to the one island that perpetuates it. Possibly, in the form that survives it meant 'Island of the Hills.' By the white men the name was sometimes applied in early days to the aborigines of the neighborhood, but Juet, the very first who set it down in writing, gives it a geographical meaning, saying 'on that side of the river that is called Manna-hata.' Which side he meant, whether the island itself or the opposite western bank, the context does not make clear. On the earliest Eng- lish map, the one called the Velasco or Simancas Map, the river bears no name, but 'Manahata' is written along its western and 'Manahatin' along its eastern shore. The paper Figurative Map, which does not show the island, puts 'Manhattes' on the mainland to the northeast of the harbor while the parchment map sets 'Manhates' on the island itself. De Laet wrote that the river was called by some 'the Manhattes River from the people who dwell near its mouth'; and Wassenaer called the island 'the Manhates' and 'the Manhattes,' and explained that it was occupied by 'a nation called the Manhates.'
The Dutch commonly used the name in a plural form and
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gradually extended its significance. Augustine Herrman, whom Governor Stuyvesant sent on an embassy to Maryland in 1659, then explained:
They commit a grave mistake who will confine the general name of Manhattans . .. to the particular city, which is only built on a little island; ... it signifies the whole country and province, or at least the same particular place in the province: as, for example, it is fre- quent with many still at this day, to say - To go to the Manhattans, or, To come from the Manhattans - when they mean the whole province, as they do by the name of Virginia or Maryland, for the particular town itself is never named the Manhattans, but New Am- sterdam.
This broader significance died out when the English secured the province. In documents of the English colonial period Island of Manhattan and Manhattan Island serve as inter- changeable terms with the meaning they bear to-day. But until very recent times Manhattan Island was in local par- lance specifically applied to a knoll on the East River shore above the present foot of Rivington Street, containing about an acre of land and surrounded by creeks and salt marshes. Dockyards here established have left their name to the 'Dry Dock District.' A neighboring Presbyterian church was called the Church in the Swamp or the Manhattan Island Church.
There was one radical difference in the development of European colonies in the northern and in the southern parts of America. In all the Spanish and Portuguese settlements and also in the French West Indies there was a very general mingling of white and Indian blood. But the blood of the French in Canada was by no means so generally modified while that of the Dutch and the English was virtually un- affected by an aboriginal strain. The Dutch records assert that, especially in the early days of traffic and incipient colonization, many traders lived with Indian women, yet they mention few half-breeds, and no visible tinge of dark blood survived in the veins of the New Netherlanders. The
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memory of the red man, however, still broods over the land, preserved by his musical place-names, by the trend of the highroads which in many directions follow his forest paths, and by the products and inventions that he bequeathed to his supplanters - by his tobacco and pumpkins and maize, his maple sugar, his clam-bakes, his snow-shoes, toboggans, and bark canoes.
Farther south the most valuable of these gifts was tobacco; in New Netherland and New England it was maize. Only after long labor and a thorough clearing of the soil could the settler raise European grain. But as soon as he removed the underbrush and cut down the trees, or even girdled them to destroy the foliage and let in the sun, among the ragged trunks and the roots and boulders he could plant the quickly ripening maize. Moreover, as maize could easily be cultivated by hand labor and did not need to be threshed or winnowed, with fewer tools and far less toil the settler could get from an acre so planted twice as much food as any other crop would yield besides the fodder indispensable for his cattle; and by planting maize he was using the best method to loosen and prepare the soil for oats, rye, and wheat.
As maize was seldom exported it plays a small part in commercial records. But even in New Netherland, where quantities of grain were very soon grown, the early settlers greatly depended upon it; and its importance to New Eng- land could not be more clearly emphasized than it is by the fact that 'corn,' the Englishmen's generic term for edible grains, means to the modern American only the maize which, taking the country as a whole, is still his principal crop. Maize, 'Indian wheat,' or 'Indian corn' the colonials called it.
The many Indian tribes that occupied Manhattan, Long Island, and the shores of the bay and of River Mauritius were all Algonquins. This great race also embraced the New England and most of the Canadian tribes as well as the Delawares with whom the English of the southern colonies
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came in contact, and spread itself westward to the Mississippi and probably far beyond. But in the very heart of its vast territories another race had established itself, different in origin, character, and speech. The whole of what is now the State of New York except Long Island and the Hudson River Valley was occupied by a powerful confederacy of five tribes of the Iroquois race, banded together shortly before the coming of the white man through the efforts, as tradition relates with possible truth, of the Onondaga chieftain Hia- watha. They were the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. In this order their districts or 'can- tons' stretched from the shores of Lake Champlain and the neighborhood of Schenectady to the Genesee River. They lived in communal houses, very long and narrow, grouped within strong stockades. For this reason or because of the shape of the territory they occupied some of their own names for themselves meant 'Cabin Makers' or 'People of the Long House.'
As the early French missionaries at once perceived, they were the most ferocious, ambitious, and intelligent of the aborigines; and their station gave them full chance to profit by their energies. Commanding important routes from east to west and from north to south, and holding their congresses at a lake village in the valley of Onondaga, the strategically important place not far from the modern town of Syracuse whence forest paths and nascent rivers led in many divergent directions, they sent their war parties so widely and so suc- cessfully afield that they ruled or intimidated the other tribes from Maine to the Mississippi and southward to the Savannah and the Tennessee. Yet even in the days of their greatest strength and power, during the first half of the seventeenth century when they had procured firearms from the white men, they numbered not more than four thousand warriors, twenty thousand souls in all. Twice as many of their descendants, it has been computed, now survive in and near the State of New York.
For a time the Dutch and English called all these Iroquois
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by the name of the most easterly tribe - Mohawks or Maquas. Later they were known as the Five Nations, and as the Six Nations after the early years of the eighteenth century when the Tuscaroras, a kindred people driven from the Carolina border, were received into the confederacy.
Other branches of the Iroquois race lived in not far-distant regions : the Hurons or Wyandots in the triangle formed by the St. Lawrence and the northern shores of the Great Lakes, the Eries south of the lake that bears their name, the Andastes or Susquehannocks on the lower Susquehanna. These were all hostile to their powerful relatives in the Mohawk Valley. Between the Five Nations and the Hurons the feud was peculiarly bitter; and the fact that the Hurons allied them- selves with the northern Algonquins and the Canadian French was one reason why the Iroquois proper were ready to make friends with the Dutch and their English heirs. On the day in 1609 when Champlain led a handful of Hurons and Algon- quin Ottawas against the Mohawks at Ticonderoga, the in- ternational conflict really began which did not end until, after the lapse of a century and a half, the flag of France was driven from Canada. During all this time the Iroquois, by virtue partly of their geographical position, partly of their native superiority to the other aborigines, held the balance of power between the rival white nations. Here was another cause of the importance of Albany, another reason why New York became the pivot province of the English colonial domain. As in Albany centred the profitable traffic in furs, as to Albany the Canadians cast their eyes when they dreamed of conquering the English plantations, so to Albany the gov- ernors of the New England colonies and of Maryland and Virginia sent their agents or even came in person when Indian wars distressed their borders. Whether or not the Iroquois themselves had lifted the hatchet, peace could rarely be hoped for without their concurrence.
The Algonquins near Manhattan greeted the first white men with a wondering friendliness. Verrazano relates that
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they came close to the seashore, 'seeming to rejoice very much at the sight of us and ... showed us a place where we might most commodiously come a-land with our boat.' Hudson wrote that those along the river - the River Indians as the Dutchmen afterwards called them - were a 'very good people,' some near the Catskills a 'loving people.' Juet explained that while they were often very friendly and made a 'show of love' the white men dared not trust them. In fact, any trifling cause or vague suspicion changed the red man's mood of amicable curiosity to one of abject terror or murderous audacity. While the Half Moon was lying inside Sandy Hook and its boats were exploring the neigh- boring shores, suddenly for no discernible reason one of them was attacked by Indians in canoes, and a sailor named John Colman was killed by an arrow in his throat. His comrades buried him - the first recorded white man who found a grave near Manhattan - on Sandy Hook 'and named the point after his name, Colman's Point.' While Hudson was sailing up and then down the river, one day he would enter- tain on his ship the savages who brought beaver and otter skins, tobacco, venison, ears of Indian corn, beans, 'very good oysters,' and 'grapes and pompions' to exchange for knives, hatchets and 'trifles,' or his men would go among them on the shore where they found 'good cheer.' Another day he would think best to let no sailor land, no red man come aboard the ship. Once the cook of the Half Moon killed a savage whom he caught thieving; and on the down- stream voyage, when many canoes attacked the ship opposite the northern end of Manhattan, the white men shot several Indians. For the most part, however, relations were friendly, and before the Half Moon sailed away a number of red men had taken three steps toward civilization. They had seen the effect of firearms, they had got drunk, and they had learned to want European goods. Not content with their 'mantles of feathers' and 'good furs,' their belts and orna- ments of wampum beads, their bracelets, plaques, and 'great tobacco pipes' of 'yellow copper,' their curls and braids of
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