It was a hot, fair day in September when Henry Hudson and a small crew of sailors entered New York Harbor. Hudson, an English captain working for the Dutch, was seeking a route to China. Instead he stumbled on “Mannahatta” or “The Island of Many Hills” as it was called by the Lenape Native Americans who lived there.
This is what the sailors would have seen that day, Sept. 12, 1609: a narrow green island jutting into the mighty river, heavily forested with rolling hills. Along the shoreline, tidal salt marshes filled with green and yellow swards of grass were pocketed between sandy beaches that ran from the Battery up to 42nd Street.
They would have noticed sinuous tidal channels snaking through themarshes, their mouths emptying into the Hudson. Altogether there were 66 miles of streams on Mannahatta, winding around the hills and fed by natural springs. Going farther up the island, they would have noticed tidal pools along the rocky shores of Washington Heights, and then the big point of land — where the George Washington Bridge is today — called Jeffrey’s Hook. If they’d tried to anchor there, they would have found it was 160 feet deep. Farther up they would have seen Spuyten Duyvil creek winding around the northern edge of the island before they sailed past what’s now Riverdale in The Bronx and up to Yonkers.
There was a lot of wildlife in the harbor. Hudson’s first mate, Robert Juet, kept a diary of his journey, which forms one of the only remaining accounts of the trip. In it he talks about catching a large ray that took four men to pull out of the water, it was so big. The Lenape would have encountered oysters a foot long, the size of a dinner plate, and lobsters a foot and a half long. More than 85 different species of fish — brought there by the confluence of the ocean tides and the river currents, including shad, herring, trout, sturgeon and eel — swam past the island up the Hudson River and in the interior streams during the annual rites of spring. In the harbor, whales, porpoises, seals and the occasional sea turtle also mingled.
Hudson’s crew didn’t stop on the island that day, but if they had, the sailors would have seen 55 different ecosystems on it, all living harmoniously, connected in ecological networks. That’s more ecological communities per acre than Yellowstone, more native plant species per acre than Yosemite, and more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There were more than 400 types of animals including wolves, mountain lions, black bears, beavers, mink and river otters.
We know the sailors traded with the Lenape somewhere along the shore, perhaps near the river crossing point called Sapokanikan, near today’s Gansevoort Street. The Lenape also exchanged goods with the people across the Hudson, in New Jersey. From the shore, the men onboard Hudson’s ship would have seen smoke coming up from the Lenape camps, including one in lower Manhattan around the Collect Pond, a freshwater pond where Foley Square is today. Another camp was on the Upper East Side around 90th Street.
As they sailed up to the northern tip of Manhattan, they would have come to Inwood Hill and seen more signs of Native American activity, including a bigger settlement called Shorakapok along Seaman Avenue.
Altogether, Mannahatta might have had 300 to 600 people living on it, about the number of people we can see today walking down one block in Midtown on a busy afternoon.
Today, Manhattan is one of the most transformed places on the face of the planet, and the worldwide human population is much larger than it was then (or has ever been). But I think in some ways we are redefining what it means to live in a city — one that doesn’t exclude the experience of nature but includes it instead. To me, that’s the real message of Mannahatta. This place has real ecological potential that we can either try to push away or embrace and conserve. A lot of the last 400 years have been about controlling nature and trying to get away from it, and the pendulum has swung so far in that direction that I think it’s starting to come the other way now.
Landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson is the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Mannahatta Project (themannahattaproject.org), a decade-long effort to map the ecology of Manhattan hours before Hudson arrived. The book “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City” is available now, and an exhibition is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through Oct. 12.