September 12th, 1609 — Geography is destiny. Late in the summer of 1609, an intrepid English navigator hired by the Dutch to find a faster route to the riches of the Orient steers his 80-ton ship, the Halve Maen — the “Half Moon” — off the surging currents of the North Atlantic, and into an immense sheltered bay.
The local inhabitants, who called themselves the Lenape, row out to meet him, trying to keep pace with the slightly stumpy square-rigged vessel as it makes its way across the bay — “eight and twentie Canoes, full of men women and children,” one of Hudson’s officers, Robert Juet, reports, “seeming very glad of our coming . . . wee Anchored, and saw that it was a very good Harbour for all windes, and rode all night. The people of the Countrey came aboord of us, making shew of love, and gave us Tabacco and Indian Wheat, and departed for that night; but we durst not trust them.”
The Lenape version of this historic encounter is somewhat different. “They sighted,” the historian Mike Wallace has written — citing oral traditions set down 150 years later — “a ‘large canoe or house’ moving across the water and decided that it belonged to the Supreme Being, ‘the great Manitto,’ who then appeared before them dressed entirely in red. After a preliminary exchange of courtesies, he offered them a toast and they all got happily drunk — whence the site came to be known as Mannahattanink, ‘the island or place of general intoxication.’ ”
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Mesmerized by the beauty of the bay, Hudson sails on to the mouth of the mile-wide river that flows into it from the north and that will one day bear his name; eventually pushing his tiny vessel 90 miles upstream, hoping it will lead him to China.
It doesn’t. But though he has failed to find the fabled Northwest Passage, he has stumbled upon something even better: one of the best and biggest natural harbors in the world — with San Francisco and Hong Kong, one of the three greatest deep water ports on earth — and the main entrance to the most abundant continent on the planet. Washed by three powerful currents at once, from the river, the ocean and Long Island Sound, it is a self-sustaining wonder — seldom bound by fog or ice and rarely in need of dredging.
Not long after, Hudson sets sail for home — a perilous three-month crossing made more miserable by an unruly and irritable Dutch and English crew. That winter, from London, he sends word to his Dutch employers in Amsterdam, spinning tantalizing tales of the rich bounty in fur, timber and crops to be harvested in the New World.
“The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon,” he writes his clients, the directors of the Dutch East India Company. “Were our own farmers to settle here, they would soon transform this wilderness into a Paradise where no man need ever go hungry . . . Never have I beheld such a rich and pleasant land.”
Hudson is not the first European to enter New York harbor — Giovanni da Verrazano has beaten him to the punch 85 years earlier, though he somehow fails to set foot on dry land before sailing onward. Hudson is, however, the first to grasp the immense potential of the remote and lonely harbor.
But if geography proves to be destiny for New York, so, too, in the end, will two other forces — both sponsored from the start by the Dutch themselves, and both, taken together, far stronger even than geography itself — the forces of commerce and diversity, or what would later be called capitalism and democracy.
To a remarkable degree, over the next hundred years, the principle forces of America itself will spring from the banks of the Hudson River.
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The colony begins. Early in the spring of 1624 the first boatload of colonists arrive to establish a permanent presence in the harbor — spurred on by Hudson’s glowing reports of a fur-trading paradise, and eager to beat out their arch rivals, the English, to the spoils of the North American continent. Most are not in fact Dutch, but French-speaking Belgian Huguenots, 110 men, women and children from 30 different families, eager to make a go of it in the New World.
The colony is a business proposition from the start — owned and operated from one end to the other by a giant corporation called the Dutch West India Company, the brand new Atlantic wing of a vast trading empire that stretches round the world.
In May 1626, with construction of a new company compound called Fort Amsterdam well under way at the southern foot of what would soon be called Breede Wegh — Broadway — company officials led by Peter Minuit move to buy the entire island of Manhattan from the Lenape for the sum of 60 guilders’ worth of “beads, buttons and other trinkets” — not the $24 of legend, but instead around $669.42. The Lenape, who have lived on the island since the end of the ice age, assume the arrangement is temporary.
Later that year, a ship arrives from Angola, carrying the colony’s first 11 African slaves, who are soon put to work building the fort, and clearing land for white farmers.
Other settlements soon spring up around the harbor, including the village of Breuckelen across the harbor, named for a town back in Holland, and up along the East River, a sprawling plantation, owned by a Danish farmer, named Jonas Bronck. It is soon known simply as “the Broncks.”
Two decades after its founding, New Amsterdam’s unique commercial vocation begins to make itself felt — most fatefully, perhaps, in the diversity of its population. “On the island of Manhate and its environs,” one visiting clergyman reports, “there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there on the river, above and below, as the beauty and convenience of the spot has invited each to settle.”
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And yet, though bales of beaver pelts, along with otter, muskrat and mink, are soon being shipped back to Holland four times a year, the remote colony, 4,000 miles from the mother country, struggles to take hold. In the winter of 1643, the colony’s troubles deepen when its incompetent director, Willem Kieft, tries to tax the local Indians, then launches a brutal two-year-long war against them when they resist.
Two decades after being founded, the colony is already starting to fall apart — its population dwindling, drunkenness on the rise, and morale at an all-time low. Company officials count one tavern for every 20 citizens in the roisterous colonial town.
In 1647, determined to shore up the colony’s failing prospects, the company dispatches a new director general to New Amsterdam — a 37-year-old iron-willed, puritanical ex-soldier and minister’s son, who arrives that spring with strict orders to clean the colony up, and make it pay. Within weeks of his arrival, Peter Stuyvesant bans drinking on Sundays, outlaws knife-fighting in public, and imposes stiff fines for missing church, speeding on Broadway, and for adulterous intercourse with “heathens, blacks, or other persons.”
Launching a — for its time — massive new public works initiative, he has the city’s slave population build new streets, new port facilities, new canals and windmills, hundreds of row houses, an enormous new house for himself, and around the perimeter of town a 2,340 foot wall running all the way from the Hudson to the East River. It will become Wall Street.
By the late 1640s, the colony’s indigenous diversity — unchecked by the fierce religious commitments that would keep the populations of Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia homogeneous for generations to come — were beginning to increase dramatically.
“If nothing is done to stop it,” the Rev. Johannes Megapolensis writes, “this colony will soon become a Babel of Confusion . . . We have here Papists, Mennonites, and Lutherans among the Dutch; also many Puritans or Independents, and many Atheists . . . who conceal themselves under the name of Christians; it would create a still greater confusion if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here.”
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Stuyvesant himself sends back worried and irritable reports to Holland of a population too religiously and ethnically mixed to be governable. In 1654, when 23 Sephardic Jews sail into the harbor, seeking refuge from the religious persecution in Brazil, Stuyvesant swiftly petitions the Dutch West India Company to have them turned away.
To Stuyvesant’s immense vexation, the petition is overturned. Chiding him for his intolerance, the directors remind the staunch Calvinist bigot that he is running a business colony, not a religious establishment, and that for the sake of that business, no one should be turned away.
“The consciences of men ought to be free and unshackled,” the directors eloquently insist. “Such have been the maxims of . . . toleration by which . . . this city has been governed; and the result has been, that the oppressed and persecuted from every country have found among us an asylum from distress. Follow in the same steps and you shall be blessed.”
In the end, the Jews are allowed to stay, though not to worship openly. On Sept. 12, 1654, the first Rosh Hashana service in North America is held in private in New Amsterdam. It is the beginning of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest existing Jewish congregation in the New World.
It is also the beginning of the separation of church and state in America. In the centuries to come — as the Dutch give way to the English and the English themselves eventually give way to a new American Republic — the city’s greatest challenges, and greatest strengths, will prove to come, time and again, from the astonishing diversity bequeathed it by the surging commercial empire the Dutch had planted on the banks of Hudson’s river.
Ric Burns is a documentary filmmaker best known for his 17-and-a-half-hour series on the history of New York. His film on the history of the American whaling industry will be broadcast next spring on PBS.