Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York
Maud Goodwin
Maud Wilder Goodwin
Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York
CHAPTER I
UP THE GREAT RIVER
Geography is the maker of history. The course of Dutch settlement in America was predetermined by a river which runs its length of a hundred and fifty miles from the mountains to the sea through the heart of a fertile country and which offers a natural highway for transportation of merchandise and for communication between colonies. No man, however, could foresee the development of the Empire State when, on that memorable September day in 1609, a small Dutch yacht named the Halve Maene or Half Moon, under the command of Captain Henry Hudson, slipped in past the low hook of sand in front of the Navesink Heights, and sounded her way to an anchorage in what is now the outer harbor of New York.
Robert Juet of Limehouse, one of the adventurers sailing with Hudson, writes in his journal:
At three of the clock in the afternoone we came to three great rivers, so we stood along to the northermost, thinking to have gone into it; but we found it to have a very shoald barre before it, for we had but ten foot water; then wee cast about to the southward and found two fathoms, three fathoms, and three and a quarter, till we came to the souther side of them; then we had five and sixe fathoms and anchored. So wee sent in our boate to sound and they found no lesse water than foure, five, six, and seven fathoms and returned in an hour and a half. So wee weighed and went in and rode in five fathoms, oozie ground, and saw many salmons, mullets and rayes very great.
So quietly is chronicled one of the epoch-making events of history, an event which opened a rich territory and gave to the United Netherlands their foothold in the New World, where Spain, France, and England had already established their claims. Let us try to call to our minds the picture of the Half Moon as she lies there in harbor, a quaint, clumsily built boat of forty lasts, or eighty tons, burden. From her bow projects a beakhead, a sort of gallery, painted and carved, and used as a place of rest or of punishment for the sailors. At the tip of the beakhead is the figurehead, a red lion with a golden mane. The ship's bow is green, with ornaments of sailors' heads painted red and yellow. Both forecastle and poop are high, the latter painted a blue mottled with white clouds. The stern below is rich in color and carving. Its upper panels show a blue ground picked out with stars and set in it a crescent holding a profile of the traditional Man in the Moon. The panel below bears the arms of the City of Amsterdam and the letters V.O.C. forming the monogram of the Dutch East India Company – Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie.
Five carved heads uphold the stern, above which hangs one of those ornate lanterns which the Dutch love so well. To add to all this wealth of color, flags are flying from every masthead. At the foretop flutters the tricolor of red, white, and black, with the arms of Amsterdam in a field of white. At the maintop flames the flag of the seven provinces of the Netherlands, emblazoned with a red lion rampant, bearing in his paws a sword and seven arrows. The bowsprit bears a small flag of orange, white, and blue, while from the stern flies the Dutch East India Company's special banner. It is no wonder that such an apparition causes the simple natives ashore to believe first that some marvelous bird has swept in from the sea, and then that a mysterious messenger from the Great Spirit has appeared in all his celestial robes.
If Hudson's object had been stage-setting for the benefit of the natives, he could not have arranged his effects better. The next day, when the ship had moved to a good harbor, the people of the country were allowed to come aboard to barter "greene Tabacco" for knives and beads. Hudson probably thought that the savages might learn a lesson in regard to the power of the newcomers by an inspection of the interior of the ship. The cannon which prot