USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume I > Part 5
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume I > Part 5
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The controversy over the actual discovery of Long Island cannot be dismissed without mentioning still another early explorer who is said to have visited these parts. Estevan Gomez, a Portuguese in the employ of the Emperor Charles V of Spain, explored the American coast in 1525. In November of that year, soon after the return of this explorer to Spain, one Oviedo published a brief account of Gomez's voyage. Having, according to this account, explored the North American coast from South Carolina to Cape Breton Island, Gomez, trained to his work by previous service as chief pilot with Magellan when that much more famous voyager rounded Cape Horn in 1519, kept a log on which he recorded the bays, rivers and capes which he observed. On his return to Europe, Gomez, it is reported, carried a cargo of American Indians, a procedure whichi, had it been followed by Verrazano, might have prevented the controversy which still exists over the authenticity of liis findings.
The Cabots are said by some writers to have sighted the south shore of Long Island in 1520. This and other claims, however, pale before that made in Payne's "History of America" which credits the Saga Torfin with relating how one Thorwald in the summer of 1003 came upon a large island lying from west to east the location of which approximated that of Long Island.
But whether a Viking, an Italian employed by France, a Portu- guese sailing for Spain, or an Englishman in the service of Holland first saw Long Island, it is quite certain that the latter, Captain Henry Hudson, was the first European navigator to make a landing thereon and to hold intercourse with its aboriginal inhabitants. The Half Moon hove to at the westerly end of the island's southern shore on the 3rd of September, 1609, just five months lacking a day after leaving the port of Amsterdam on the other side of the Atlantic.
The little ship of eighty tons burden, chartered by the Dutch East India Company, with a crew of only eighteen men, having crossed the ocean, skirted the American coast from Nova Zembla southward to Carolina, then turning northward eventually "came to three great rivers" which Thompson surmises were the Narrows, between Staten
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and Long Island; Staten Island Sound, and the Rockaway Inlet on Long Island, "which is laid down on De Laet's map (of 1630) as a river".
It was to the sands of Coney Island, on the following day, that members of Hudson's crew stepped ashore. According to the journal
Henry (not Hendryk ) Hudson
of Hudson's mate, Robert Juet, the waters teemed with fish and they "caught ten great Mullet, a foot and half long, and a Ray as great as four men could haul into the ship". As for the terrain, "It is the finest land for cultivation that ever in my life I have trod", and, going ashore on September 4th, it was found to be "full of tall oaks, and the land as pleasant to see, with grass and flowers as ever they had seen, and very sweet smelles came from them".
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During Hudson's brief stay here a member of his crew named John Colman was slain by the Indians and his body was buried at Sandy Hook on a sand pit since known as Colman's Point. De Laet, writing in 1630, described the Long Island Indians as having wel- comed Hudson with manifestations of friendship, while Juet wrote in his journal: "They seemed very glad of our coming and brought green tobacco and gave us of it for knives and beads".
These Indians who dwelt in what is now the southerly part of the Borough of Brooklyn (Kings County) were called the Canarsies. They and the other so-called tribes which then occupied Long Island are thoroughly dealt with in another chapter devoted exclusively to the subject. Suffice it to say that the Canarsies were a peaceable, friendly people who, according to Juet's on-the-spot report, went about "in deer skins, loose well dressed."
These were the people who first glimpsed the Half Moon from the shore of Gravesend Bay on September 3, 1609. They, the Can- arsies, were the westernmost of thirteen groups of so-called tribes which then inhabited as many sections of Long Island. The others, to use their anglicized names, were the Rockaways, Merricks, Mat- tinecocks, Massapequas, Nissequogues, Secatogues, Setaukets, Unke- chaugs, Corchaugs, Shinnecocks, Manhansetts and Montauks.
Hudson did not, it would seem, establish or even suspect the insular character of Long Island. No map of that day, although several had been made by previous explorers, showed this area to be other than a part of the mainland. A chart of 1529, credited to Verrazano's brother Hieronimo and said to have been based on the Florentine navigator's descriptive data, showed one small island which was designated on the map as Luisa, the name given in Ver- razano's alleged report to what is now known as Block Island.
It remained for one Adrian Block, a Dutch navigator, in 1614 to discover that Long Island was not a peninsular jutting from the coast at some point eastward of where the Half Moon had dropped anchor five years before. Block evidently appreciated far more than had Hudson the potential importance of this part of the American conti- nent. In 1613 he set sail from Holland in a small vessel called the Tiger which, with several other vessels making the voyage, was owned by a group of Amsterdam merchants whose prime interest in such a venture lay in establishing trade with the natives of the New World.
No plan for colonization had by then taken shape in the minds of Block's employers nor had such a policy been sponsored by any of the several Dutch expeditions which had visited America up to that time. Judging from his subsequent actions however it is prob- able that Adrian Block was the first Dutch explorer to seriously con- sider the need of settlements here in order to establish Dutch sov- ereignty on a seaboard already sparsely settled, many leagues to the south, by English colonists.
On a previous voyage Block and one Hendrick Christiaenzen had obtained a large cargo of furs from the natives of this part of America and had taken with them back to the Netherlands two Indian youths. Given the names of Valentine and Orson, these swarthy mem-
.
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bers of an almost unknown race beyond the seas had by their presence in Europe awakened there much public interest in the western world.
On his second voyage, Adrian Block again acquired a rich cargo of furs but while the heavily laden Tiger lay at anchor off Manhat- tan Island preparatory to its return trip across the Atlantic, the vessel caught fire and with its cargo became a complete loss.
There is an unusual story attached to this catastrophe of pre- colonial days-a story unfolded more than three hundred years later by Leslie Elhoff, writing in the Long Island Forum.
When in 1916 a subway was being built through Greenwich street in lower Manhattan, some twenty feet below the pavement at Dey street, a laborer's pick struck a hard wooden beam. It proved to be part of a vessel of ancient design which had been burned. A young foreman by the name of James A. Kelly was called and he directed the careful removal of the sand encasing the relic which was found to be part of a ship's prow. Kelly, who had delved into local history, made further research and finally declared the find to be part of Captain Adrian Block's Tiger, burned in 1613.
A six-foot section of the prow was sawed off and presented to the Aquarium of the City of New York. In 1943 when the Aquarium was torn down, the relic was transferred to the Marine Department of the Museum of the City of New York where it may now be seen. According to Author Elhoff, the remains of the Tiger had been com- pletely buried by mud and sand before 1763 when the New York waterfront was filled in and extended westward from Greenwich street.
Throughout the winter of 1613-14, the crew of the ill-fated Tiger, stranded on Manhattan Island, after erecting several huts to house themselves, constructed another vessel. It is possible that much of the hardware and many of the fittings of the Tiger were salvaged and used in this new ship which Captain Block named the Onrust- (translated : Restless). James Fenimore Cooper has referred to this ship as "the first decked vessel built within the old United States". De Laet, writing in 1630, described it as a yacht, the dimensions of which were 38 feet keel, 441/2 feet on deck, 11 feet beam and of about 16 tons burden.
The Restless was built, it is generally believed, beside a creek which has long since been filled in to become the lower section of what is now Broad street, in the heart of down-town Manhattan. A short distance away at 45 Broadway, a tablet marking "the site of the first habitations of white men on the island of Manhattan" refers to the several huts which Adrian Block and his men erected there in 1613 to house them while building the Restless. The latter vessel was launched in the spring of 1614 and shortly thereafter became the first ship to negotiate the dangerous waters of the Hellegat (Hellgate), the narrow, rocky tide-way running between the northeasterly front of Manhattan and Long Island.
The Hellegat, named for a branch of the river Scheld in Europe's East Flanders, was described by Thomas Dermer who, five years after Block's passage, became the first Englishman to sail a vessel through its waters, as "a most dangerous cataract among small rocky islands,
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DISCOVERIES AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
occasioned by two tides, the one ebbing and flowing two hours before the other".
Passing into the Long Island Sound, Block explored the coast of Connecticut, discovered the Housatonic River, named the Norwalk Islands "the Archipelagoo", ascended the Connecticut River, naming it the Fresh River, and, returning to the Sound, proceeded eastward into Narragansett Bay which he named the Bay of Nassau.
Also roughly charting the bays and inlets of Long Island's north shore, Block finally rounded Orient Point, thence sailed in a south- erly direction to Montauk Point, the easternmost tip of Long Island, and here made a landing. He named the latter point Visscher's Hoeck and its aboriginal inhabitants the Matouwacks.
It was Block who first mapped Long Island as such. From Montauk he sailed on a northeasterly course, passing and naming Block Island as he proceeded. Skirting and rounding Rhode Island, he eventually came to Cape Cod, some six years before the Pilgrims of the Mayflower had their first glimpse of America from off the easterly extremity of that "thin splinter of New England coast". Rounding the cape, Block continued northward as far as Nahant which lies a few miles northerly and easterly of the present city of Boston.
Returning down the New England coast, Block came upon the Dutch ship Fortune, commanded by Hendrick Christiaenzen, home- ward bound from Fort Orange (Albany) and, strange as it may seem, took passage on this vessel for the Netherlands. Under command of Cornelis Hendricksen, the Restless rounded Montauk point and spent the next two years in the vicinity of Long Island, exploring its adjacent waters and trading with the natives.
In his book, Keskachauge, published in 1924, Frederick Van Wyck referred to the crew of the Restless as follows: "It may be that Keskaechqueren (Canarsie) was the place where the Dutch wintered, under the protection of the great chief Penhawitz, for the purpose of disposing of their goods, in the winters of 1614-15 and 1615-16, and that the yacht made her headquarters in Jamaica Bay or, as seems more probable, in the Strom Kill", now known as Gerritsen Creek, in Brooklyn's Marine Park.
On October 11, 1614, Adrian Block, having reached the Nether- lands aboard the Fortune, appeared before the Lords of the United Belgic Provinces, in council assembled at The Hague, and submitted a chart of that portion of the American coast which his several voyages had encompassed. He urged immediate action on the part of the council in proclaiming Dutch sovereignty over the territory lying between Virginia, already settled by the English, and New France, which was claimed by the French. The council promptly followed Block's advice and the name of Nieuw Nederlandt was given to the extensive domain.
At the same time that Adrian Block was pleading his cause before the Lords of the United Belgic Provinces, Captain John Smith, hav- ing returned to England from exploring the American coast between the Penobscot River and Cape Cod, was urging Prince Charles to
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LONG ISLAND -- NASSAU AND SUFFOLK
assert English sovereignty over the territory. This was done and the country was named New England.
Meanwhile the United Belgic Provinces issued a three-year charter to a group of merchants organized as the United Netherlands Company to carry on trade in and with New Netherland. This com- pany sponsored a number of voyages to the Dutch province and although the actual establishment of the first permanent settlement on Manhattan Island is now generally believed to have been in 1624, following the founding of Albany by some months at least, there is evidence that several settlements were attempted before that time.
According to John Josselyn's Chronological Observations in America, Sir Samuel Argall, an English explorer, in 1614 routed the first few Dutch inhabitants of Manhattan, forcing their Governor (sic) to submit to the English Governor of Virginia. This could have referred to Adrian Block's temporary occupation. In more detail Beauchamp Plantagenet (supposedly the pseudonym of Sir Edmund Plowden), wrote in 1648 that Argall "landed at Monhattas Isle where they found four houses and a pretended Dutch Governor under the West India Company, who kept trading boats and trucked with the Indians". Argall, according to this author, "told them their commission was to expell them and all alien intruders on his Majesty's dominions and territories, this being a part of Virginia discovered by Henry Hudson, an Englishman".
Neither Brodhead nor H. M. Murphy gives credence to the fore- going but in her Early Long Island, published in 1896, Martha B. Flint declares: "That a few years later, Argall planned such an
* expedition is clear. * * In 1621, he purposed their expulsion, but learning how well the ground was occupied" the plan was abandoned.
According to his own report, the Englishman Captain Thomas Dermer, who in 1619, five years after Adrian Block's passage through Hell Gate, had also negotiated that turbulent strait, visited the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam during a subsequent voyage and asserted England's claim to the territory.
Whether or not any of the above recorded incidents actually came to pass it is possible and probable that more than one Dutch expedition during these early years established headquarters on Man- hattan Island. It was an era of successful trading with the Indians, so much so that on June 3, 1621, the privileges of the United Nethier- lands Company were extended for a period of twenty-four years under the name of the West India Company. Not only was this reorganized company of private businessmen given almost complete sovereignty over New Netherland, but under the new charter its juris- diction to plant colonies for trading purposes was extended to include the length of North and South America as well as a portion of Africa. The company, capitalized at what today would represent more than five million dollars, although beholden to the States-General of the United Belgique Provinces, appointed its own director-general and he in turn swore allegiance to the West India Company rather than directly to the fatherland.
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DISCOVERIES AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
Sir Edmund Plowden, addressing Charles I of England shortly after the Dutch purchase of New Amsterdam from the Indians, wrote:
"Whereas there is a small place within the confines of Virginia-150 miles northward from the Savages and James Citty, without the Bay of Chesapeak, and a convenient Isle there to be inhabited called Manitie, or Long Island, in 39 degrees of Lattitude, and not formerly granted, * are willing, now at their own coste and chardges to aduenture, plant and settle there three hundred Inhabitants for the mak- ing of wine, saulte and Iron, fishing of Sturgeon and mullet * *
* Humbly beseeching your most excellent Majesty to make to your subjects the aduenturers a pattent of ve said Isle and 30 miles of ye coste adjoining to to be erected into a County Palatine called Syon."
To which petition King Charles quickly responded, granting Sir Edmund's request, appointing him governor "to be holden of our crown of Ireland under the name of New Albion" for the territory as a whole and referring specifically to "the said Isle Plowden, or Long-Isle". Thus did the English still further confuse not only the title to and sovereignty of Long Island but also its name.
As a matter of fact, the name Long Island came as naturally as Henry Hudson's reference to the discovery of the new-found-land far to the north. Even though officially designated as the Island of Nassau during the early years of European occupation, mariners of that day continued to call it the long island which lay to starboard of incoming ships sailing between Europe and the port of New York.
The Indians called it Paumanok, Seawanhaky, Weitanawack, Wampanamon, and by several other names of varied phonetic spelling and with variously interpreted nanings. To their fellow aborigines of the mainland, however, it was the long island to which many of them made nnual ;grimage in quest of wampum and fish and whale meat for nich they brought from their own country of rivers and mountains crude iron ore and flint and the hides of the larger fur- bearing animals.
In the words of Benjamin F. Thompson, referring to the earliest Dutch occupation of Manhattan Island, "the annals of this interesting period are in a considerable measure defective and unsatisfactory". It was a period in which the English, firmly established in Virginia and acquiring a stronger hold on New England, were operating what might be called in military parlance a pincers movement to crush and absorb any Dutch settlements which might and did spring up between them. Never had the English recognized the claim of the Netherlands to any part of this country. As early as 1606 King James had, by letters patent, granted to Sir Thomas Gates and others a vast stretch of territory which included what later became New Netherland, basing title on the discoveries of Sebastian Cabot, sailing in the service of England, whose explorations along the American coast extended from thirty to fifty-eight degrees north latitude.
Exactly one hundred years after Giovanni Verrazano visited the coast of Long Island, the first permanent white settlement was estab-
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LONG ISLAND-NASSAU AND SUFFOLK
lished in what was to become the state of New York. This was at Albany or, as its founders named it, Fort Orange. Here in 1624 some thirty families, comprised of Walloons (French Protestants) as well as Dutch, under the leadership of Cornelius Jacobsen May, captain of the Dutch ship New Netherland on which they had crossed the Atlantic, erected their homes. A few months later, still in 1624, a number of these families returned down the Hudson River and settled at the southerly tip of Manhattan Island. Captain May became the first director-general of the West India Company, serving very briefly, and was succeeded by one William Verhulst and he in turn by Peter Minuit who arrived at the newly established settlement, known as Fort Amsterdam, on May 4, 1626. The little Dutch com- munity had a population of 270 when Minuit came to represent the interests of the West India Company. One of his first official acts was to purchase from the Indian proprietors the island of Manhattan for the equivalent of sixty guilders, or $24. He named the island Nova Belgica or New Belgium which name soon gave way to New Amsterdam.
Minuit divided the island into six bouweries or farms which remained the property of the company. He named as his secretary one Isaac de Razier and as members of his council Pieter Bylvelt, Jacob Elbertsen Wissink, Jan Janssen Brouwer, Syman Dercksen Pos and Reynert Harmenssen. Minuit occupied the office of director- general for six years, returning to Holland in 1632 aboard the ship Union which also carried five thousand beaver skins consigned to his company's home office at Amsterdam.
This same year Minuit was succeeded as director-general by one Wouter Van Twiller who was destined to become as much as anyone the real founder of Long Island as the white man's home, although in achieving this distinction his procedure was not notably different from what today would certainly constitute malfeasance in office. Before coming to America he had served at Nieukerke as a clerk in the employ of the West India Company. That he was a nephew of the influential pearl merchant and company director, Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, may have accounted for his promotion. He arrived in grand state at Fort Amsterdam in the spring of 1633 to assume the duties of his office.
Van Twiller's ship, an armored vessel of twenty guns and a crew of fifty-two, brought the first purely military detail ever to arrive in' New Netherland. It consisted of 104 soldiers, constituting a force sufficiently large, it was hoped, to maintain law and order within the colony and at the same time serve defensively against the possible aggressions of Indians, roving English adventurers, and pirates, all of whom were a constant threat if not an actual menace to the colony.
The term of Van Twiller, extending to 1637, a matter of only five years, was by no means unproductive, due more perhaps to chan- nels of trade developed by his predecessor than to his own efforts in that direction. Minuit had built up a thriving business for the West India Company chiefly in furs but also including logwood and a limited quantity of oil extracted from the carcasses of seals which each spring came down from the north in great droves. During the
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DISCOVERIES AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
years 1628, '29 and '30, the total exports of New Amsterdam amounted to 191,272 guilders while imports totalled 113,277 for the same period. From 1624 to 1635 some 90,000 pelts were included in outgoing cargoes which had a total value of 725,117 guilders.
Nevertheless, within two years after Van Twiller began the administration of his company's affairs in the new world, its financial condition was declared critical, partly due no doubt to the extensive building program which he inaugurated. Declares O'Callaghan in his History of New Netherland:
"Forts, mansions, and dwelling-houses went up in all directions for he had a large idea of the West India Com- pany's resources. Appearances possibly justified his impres- sions. That powerful association maintained, at this period, a force which gave it the character rather of an independent sovereignty, than of a chartered mercantile society. It owned one hundred and twenty vessels, ranging from three hundred to eight hundred tons burden, all fully armed and equipped; and employed between eight and nine thousand men.' "
The West India Company was not concerned with the western world alone. Its ships sailed the seven seas. Its investments were scattered over many parts of the globe. Its African and Asiatic trade was enormous. It dealt extensively with the West Indies and with South America from whence, incidentally, negroes were brought to New Netherland to supply slave labor in lieu of an inadequate supply of white immigrants.
At Fort Amsterdam, where he maintained his official head- quarters, Van Twiller erected the first church on Manhattan Island. He also built himself a gubernatorial mansion and expended a con- siderable amount of the company's funds on rebuilding and strengthen- ing the fort. He built trading posts in outlying parts of the province and a number of saw and grist mills where water power was avail- able. Van Wyck declares that "Van Twiller was apparently a good business man." Nevertheless, his employers were more concerned with maintaining an outlet for trade than building an empire. They looked upon many of the director-general's expenditures as gross extravagance.
Van Twiller, on the other hand, had vision, as evidenced by his acquisition of a considerable amount of real estate, including several islands in the East River and, finally, one of three large flats on Long Island. Aggregating some 7,600 acres, these flats were destined to become the village of Nieu Amersfoort, now a part of Brooklyn. The deeds for this property were the first ever recorded for Long Island. Two of these Indian deeds or, as they were then called, Dutch ground- grants, bore the date of June 16, 1636, while the third was dated July 16 of the same year.
The three adjoining parcels covered a fertile area known vari- ously to the Indians as Keskateuw, Keskachaue and Keskachauge. The westernmost flat, bordering on the bay, was recorded in the
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