Maud Goodwin - Dutch and English on the Hudson - A Chronicle of Colonial New York

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 protruded their black noses amidships held their threat of destruction even when they were not belching thunder and lightning. The forecastle with its neatly arranged berths must have seemed a strange contrast to the bare ground on which the savages were accustomed to sleep, and the brightness of polished and engraved brass tablets caught the untutored eyes which could not decipher the inscriptions. There were three of these tablets, the mottoes of which, being translated, read: Honor thy father and thy mother ! Do not fight without cause ! Good advice makes the wheels run smoothly !

Perhaps the thing which interested the Indians most was the great wooden block fastened to the deck behind the mainmast. This strange object was fashioned in the shape of a man's head, and through it passed the ropes used to hoist the yards. It was called sometimes "the silent servant," sometimes "the knighthead." To the Indians it must have seemed the final touch of necromancy, and they were prepared to bow down in awe before a race of beings who could thus make blocks of wood serve them.

Trusting, no doubt, to the impression which he had made on the minds of the natives, Hudson decided to go ashore. The Indians crowded around him and "sang in their fashion" – a motley horde, as strange to the ship's crew as the Half Moon and its company seemed marvelous to the aborigines. Men, women, and children, dressed in fur or tricked out with feathers, stood about or floated in their boats hewn from solid logs, the men carrying pipes of red copper in which they smoked that precious product, tobacco – the consolation prize offered by the New World to the Old in lieu of the hoped-for passage to Cathay.

Everything seemed to breathe assurance of peaceful relations between the red man and the white; but if the newcomers did not at the moment realize the nature of the Indians, their eyes were opened to possibilities of treachery by the happenings of the next day. John Colman and a boat's crew were sent out to take further soundings before the Half Moon should proceed on her journey. As the boat was returning to report a safe course ahead, the crew, only five in number, were set upon by two war-canoes filled with Indians, whose volley of arrows struck terror to their hearts. Colman was mortally wounded in the throat by an arrow, and two of his companions were seriously, though not fatally, hurt. Keeping up a running fight, the survivors escaped under cover of darkness. During the night, as they crouched with their dead comrade in the boat, the sailors must have thought the minutes hours and the hours days. To add to their discomfort rain was falling, and they drifted forlornly at the mercy of the current. When at last dawn came, they could make out the ship at a great distance; but it was ten o'clock in the morning before they reached her safe shelter. So ended the brief dream of ideal friendship and confidence between the red men and the whites.

After Colman had been buried in a grave by the side of the beautiful sheet of water which he had known for so short a time, the Half Moon worked her way cautiously from the Lower Bay through the Narrows to the inner harbor and reached the tip of the island which stands at its head. What is now a bewildering mass of towers and palaces of industry, looking down upon a far-extended fleet of steam and sailing vessels, was then a point, wooded to the water's edge, with a scattered Indian village nestling among the trees.

A Moravian missionary, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, set down an account from the red man's point of view of the arrival of the Half Moon . This account he claimed to have received from old Indians who held it as part of their tribal traditions. As such it is worth noting and quoting, although as history it is of more than doubtful authenticity. The tradition runs that the chiefs of the different tribes on sighting the Half Moon supposed it to be a supernatural visitor and assembled on "York Island" to deliberate on the manner in which they should receive this Manito on his arrival. Plenty of meat was provided for a sacrifice, a grand dance was arranged, and the medicine-men were set to work to determine the meaning of this phenomenon. The runners sent out to observe and report declared it certain that it was the Great Manito, "but other runners soon after arriving, declare it a large house of various colors, full of people yet of quite a different color than they [the Indians] are of. That they were also dressed in a different manner from them and that one in particular appeared altogether red, which must be the Mannitto himself."