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Authors: Russell Shorto
Tags: History
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continent: “as fine a river as can be found . . . a mile broad”—a glistening highway to pure possibility.
Chapter 3
THE ISLAND
C atalina Trico, a French-speaking teenager. Joris Rapalje, a Flemish textile worker. Bastiaen Krol, a lay minister from the farming province of Friesland. By tens and twenties they came in the years 1624 and 1625, pitching on the inhuman waves in yachts, galiots, ketches, pinks, and pinnaces, well-crafted but still frightfully vulnerable wooden vessels, banging around in the narrow and rheumatic below-decks, with pigs rooting and sheep bleating hollowly at every slamming swell, with the animal reek and their own odors of sickness and sour filth, each clutching his or her satchel of elixirs to ward off the plague, the devil, shipwreck, and “the bloody flux.” The very names of their ships
—Fortune, Abraham's Sacrifice—
signaled the two poles of hope and fear that governed them.
Three months it took to follow Hudson, four if the winds failed. From Amsterdam the ships made their way across the wide inland sea called the IJ, with its treacherous shoals, to the windswept island of Texel, and then set off into the white hoar of the North Sea. They gave the Portuguese coast a wide berth and skirted the Canary Islands off North Africa, their captains with skill and luck avoiding predatory privateers and pirates (or not: some ships were taken by both). Then, riding the trades, they beat a long, forbidding arc southwest across the blue-gray wilderness of the Atlantic, swinging upward again north of the Bahamas and along the coast of the new land, the new world, keeping a sharp eye for the hooked peninsula that Hudson noted, and so into the enveloping embrace of the great harbor.
There still lingered, fifteen years after Hudson's trip, and ten years after Shakespeare penned
The Tempest
based on accounts of a voyage to America shipwrecked on a supposedly bewitched isle (Bermuda), the notion that this might be the gateway to the riches of the sultry, pagan, exotically civilized East. It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years' time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs. But these were not explorers but settlers, and their immediate focus was here: the river, this new home. In the decade and a half since Hudson's find, scouts and traders had made good contacts with the Indians of what the Dutch were now calling the River Mauritius, after Maurits of Nassau, son of the assassinated hero William the Silent and now leader of the rebellion against Spain (though another name had already sprung up: as early as 1614, fur traders were paying homage to their forerunner by referring to “de rivière Hudson”). In their lean and silent canoes the “River Indians” (as the traders called them: they were variously of the Mahican and Lenni Lenape tribes) came to them from the north, the east, the west, from far out in the unknown vastness, bringing excellent furs in remarkable quantities. There was indeed business to be had, the traders reported. And so a consortium of smaller interests was formed to exploit it in a systematic way.
The truce negotiated between Spain and the Dutch Republic during the year of Hudson's voyage was to last for twelve years. It ended promptly in 1621, and immediately the spear-rattling began among Dutch right-wingers. A patriot-businessman named Willem Usselincx, a birdlike man roiling with religious zeal, had for years championed the idea of Dutch provinces in the New World that would be driven by both commerce and Calvinist fire. “It is obvious,” Usselincx argued in the series of meetings that led to the establishment of the West India Company, “that if one wants to get money, something has to be proposed to the people which will move them to invest. To this end the glory of God will help with some, harm to Spain with
Chapter 3
THE ISLAND
C atalina Trico, a French-speaking teenager. Joris Rapalje, a Flemish textile worker. Bastiaen Krol, a lay minister from the farming province of Friesland. By tens and twenties they came in the years 1624 and 1625, pitching on the inhuman waves in yachts, galiots, ketches, pinks, and pinnaces, well-crafted but still frightfully vulnerable wooden vessels, banging around in the narrow and rheumatic below-decks, with pigs rooting and sheep bleating hollowly at every slamming swell, with the animal reek and their own odors of sickness and sour filth, each clutching his or her satchel of elixirs to ward off the plague, the devil, shipwreck, and “the bloody flux.” The very names of their ships
—Fortune, Abraham's Sacrifice—
signaled the two poles of hope and fear that governed them.
Three months it took to follow Hudson, four if the winds failed. From Amsterdam the ships made their way across the wide inland sea called the IJ, with its treacherous shoals, to the windswept island of Texel, and then set off into the white hoar of the North Sea. They gave the Portuguese coast a wide berth and skirted the Canary Islands off North Africa, their captains with skill and luck avoiding predatory privateers and pirates (or not: some ships were taken by both). Then, riding the trades, they beat a long, forbidding arc southwest across the blue-gray wilderness of the Atlantic, swinging upward again north of the Bahamas and along the coast of the new land, the new world, keeping a sharp eye for the hooked peninsula that Hudson noted, and so into the enveloping embrace of the great harbor.
There still lingered, fifteen years after Hudson's trip, and ten years after Shakespeare penned
The Tempest
based on accounts of a voyage to America shipwrecked on a supposedly bewitched isle (Bermuda), the notion that this might be the gateway to the riches of the sultry, pagan, exotically civilized East. It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years' time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs. But these were not explorers but settlers, and their immediate focus was here: the river, this new home. In the decade and a half since Hudson's find, scouts and traders had made good contacts with the Indians of what the Dutch were now calling the River Mauritius, after Maurits of Nassau, son of the assassinated hero William the Silent and now leader of the rebellion against Spain (though another name had already sprung up: as early as 1614, fur traders were paying homage to their forerunner by referring to “de rivière Hudson”). In their lean and silent canoes the “River Indians” (as the traders called them: they were variously of the Mahican and Lenni Lenape tribes) came to them from the north, the east, the west, from far out in the unknown vastness, bringing excellent furs in remarkable quantities. There was indeed business to be had, the traders reported. And so a consortium of smaller interests was formed to exploit it in a systematic way.
The truce negotiated between Spain and the Dutch Republic during the year of Hudson's voyage was to last for twelve years. It ended promptly in 1621, and immediately the spear-rattling began among Dutch right-wingers. A patriot-businessman named Willem Usselincx, a birdlike man roiling with religious zeal, had for years championed the idea of Dutch provinces in the New World that would be driven by both commerce and Calvinist fire. “It is obvious,” Usselincx argued in the series of meetings that led to the establishment of the West India Company, “that if one wants to get money, something has to be proposed to the people which will move them to invest. To this end the glory of God will help with some, harm to Spain with
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