The Island at the Center of the World Part 1

The Island at the Center of the World.

by Russell Shorto.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

This book would not exist without the work of Charles Gehring, who, as director of the New Netherland Project, has devoted thirty years to translating the ma.n.u.script Dutch records of the New Netherland colony. But published translations aside, for more than two years he has welcomed me into his works.p.a.ce, opened his files to me, offered advice, made introductions, and helped in dozens of other ways. Over Vietnamese lunches and pints of microbrew beer, on the Albany waterfront and along the ca.n.a.ls of Amsterdam, he has been my guide. My greatest thanks to you, Charly.

I also owe a debt of grat.i.tude to Janny Venema of the New Netherland Project, for similar help mixed with friendship. She spent days transcribing as-yet-unpublished ma.n.u.scripts for me. She gave me a primer in how to read seventeenth-century Dutch handwriting. She made the town of Beverwyck, long since swallowed up by the city of Albany, come alive for me.

Of the many others who helped me, I would like to thank Jeremy Bangs and Carola de Muralt of the American Pilgrim Museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, who gave me a sense of the texture of seventeenth-century Dutch life and a magnificent afternoon-long tour of their one-of-a-kind museum. Patricia Bonomi, professor emeritus of history at New York University, offered guidance as I set out on the project and encouragement as I approached the end. Peter Christoph of the New York State Library shared with me his reminiscences about his discovery of the Dutch ma.n.u.scripts and efforts to get them translated. Diane Dallal, archaeologist with New York Unearthed and the South Street Seaport Museum, helped me to visualize New Amsterdam amid the canyons of lower Manhattan. Firth Fabend, historian and author, helped on many fronts, especially in understanding how "Dutchness" changed in North America from the seventeenth century onward, and in a.s.sessing the colony's legacy. The Friends of New Netherland invited me to speak at their annual meeting in 2003, thus providing me a chance to air some of my ideas about the Dutch colony. Willem Frijhoff of the Free University of Amsterdam, distinguished historian and authority on New Netherland and its people, is a man of great generosity who offered brilliant, timely advice and encouraged me in my focus on Adriaen van der Donck. Elisabeth Paling Funk, Dutch-born scholar and authority on Washington Irving, helped me to disentangle history from myth, and translated some seventeenth-century poetry for me. Wayne Furman of the New York Public Library, as well as the staff of the library's New York History and Genealogy division, accommodated me throughout my research. I'm grateful to Joyce Goodfriend of the University of Denver, authority on early New York, for good conversation on history and historians, for advice and pointers, and for introducing me to Jack's Oyster House in Albany. Anne Halpern of the National Gallery of Art a.s.sisted with research on the portrait of Adriaen van der Donck. Leo Hershkowitz, professor of history at Queens College, who has written with equal elegance about both the Jews of New Amsterdam and Boss Tweed, knows New York history as few people on earth do, and gave me the benefit of his perspective. Maria Holden, conservator at the New York State Archives, gave me a primer on the Dutch doc.u.ments as artifacts: on paper, ink, and methods of preservation.

On a sun-dazzled Fourth of July morning on the terrace of the Stadscafe in the city of Leiden, Jaap Jacobs of the University of Amsterdam broadened my view of seventeenth-century American colonial history, helping me to see it not merely as foreshadowing later American history but as part of European history and the global power struggle between England and the Dutch Republic; I am also grateful for his elegant writings on New Netherland and on the concept of tolerance in the seventeenth century, and for conversation on the p.r.i.c.kly figure of Peter Stuyvesant, a biography of whom he is currently at work on. My thanks to Joep de Koning, probably the world's foremost collector of maps of New Netherland, for conversation, for insights, and for giving me a chance to roam among his one-of-a-kind collection; to Dennis Maika of Fox Lane High School, Bedford, New York, whose dissertation on and insights into the significance of the 1653 munic.i.p.al charter and the subsequent boom in the colony were instrumental in shaping my own thoughts; to Simon Middleton of the University of East Anglia, for pointers on early modern Republicanism in the Netherlands and for his encouragement as a fellow Van der Donck enthusiast; to Peter Neil, director of the South Street Seaport Museum; to Chip Reynolds, skipper of the Half Moon, Half Moon, for taking me aboard and giving me a feel of the ship; to Peter Rose, authority on seventeenth-century Dutch food, for culinary a.s.sistance; to Thomas Rosenbaum of the Rockefeller Archives, Pocantico Hills, New York, who afforded me access to that inst.i.tution's remarkable collection of seventeenth-century Dutch notarial records; to Ada Louise Van Gastel, for her work on Adriaen van der Donck and her encouragement; to Hanny Veenendaal of the Netherlands Center in New York City, for giving me a grounding in the Dutch language and for a.s.sisting in translations and in reading old Dutch doc.u.ments; to Greta Wagle, who welcomed me into the family of New Netherland aficionados, put me in touch with people, and has been generally delightful to know; to Gerald de Weerdt, curator of 't Behouden Huys Museum, Tersch.e.l.ling, the Netherlands, for sharing insights on Dutch seafaring; to Laurie Weinstein, Western Connecticut State University, who helped in my attempts to understand Dutch-English-Indian interactions; and to Thomas Wysmuller for discussions on Dutch history and for enthusiastic support. for taking me aboard and giving me a feel of the ship; to Peter Rose, authority on seventeenth-century Dutch food, for culinary a.s.sistance; to Thomas Rosenbaum of the Rockefeller Archives, Pocantico Hills, New York, who afforded me access to that inst.i.tution's remarkable collection of seventeenth-century Dutch notarial records; to Ada Louise Van Gastel, for her work on Adriaen van der Donck and her encouragement; to Hanny Veenendaal of the Netherlands Center in New York City, for giving me a grounding in the Dutch language and for a.s.sisting in translations and in reading old Dutch doc.u.ments; to Greta Wagle, who welcomed me into the family of New Netherland aficionados, put me in touch with people, and has been generally delightful to know; to Gerald de Weerdt, curator of 't Behouden Huys Museum, Tersch.e.l.ling, the Netherlands, for sharing insights on Dutch seafaring; to Laurie Weinstein, Western Connecticut State University, who helped in my attempts to understand Dutch-English-Indian interactions; and to Thomas Wysmuller for discussions on Dutch history and for enthusiastic support.

A separate thank you to Firth Fabend, Charly Gehring, Leo Hershkowitz, Joep de Koning, Tim Paulson, Janny Venema, and Mark Zwonitzer for reading the ma.n.u.script and offering excellent comments and critiques. The book is greatly improved by their input, though of course any errors remain my own doing.

My thanks also to Coen Blaauw; Jose Brando, Western Michigan University; Marilyn Douglas, New York State Library; Howard Funk; Dietrich Gehring; April Hatfield, Texas A&M University; L. J. Krizner, the New York Historical Society; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University; Hubert de Leeuw; Harry Macy, editor of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record; Richard Mooney, New York Times New York Times editorial board, retired; the staff of the New York State Library and Archives; Hennie Newhouse, Friends of New Netherland; Don Rittner; Martha Shattuck; Amanda Sutphin, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; Martine Julia van Ittersum, Harvard University; Cynthia van Zandt, University of New Hampshire; Loet Velmans; David William Voorhees, of The Holland Society of New York and managing editor of editorial board, retired; the staff of the New York State Library and Archives; Hennie Newhouse, Friends of New Netherland; Don Rittner; Martha Shattuck; Amanda Sutphin, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; Martine Julia van Ittersum, Harvard University; Cynthia van Zandt, University of New Hampshire; Loet Velmans; David William Voorhees, of The Holland Society of New York and managing editor of de Halve Maen de Halve Maen; Charles Wendell, Friends of New Netherland; and James Homer Williams, Middle Tennessee State University.

Thanks also to my team. Anne Edelstein, my agent and friend, plucked the rabbit of an idea out of my brain and made this all happen. Laura Williams gave advice in the early going, and Emilie Stewart a.s.sisted in the endgame. Anne Hollister and Elisabeth King fact checked the ma.n.u.script with scrupulosity and style. Tim Paulson listened to my initial rambling, inchoate idea, pushed me to carry it forward, and was there along the way with smart counsel. Bill Thomas, my editor at Doubleday, championed the project from the beginning and managed throughout to support it with the excellent combination of overflowing enthusiasm and sharp critical judgment. Thanks also to Kendra Harpster, John Fontana, and Christine Pride of Doubleday. In London, Marianne Velmans, my editor at Transworld, brought her Anglo-Dutch perspective to bear, and critiqued the ma.n.u.script with great insight.

Finally, my wife, Marnie Henricksson, endured the years of this project, shared the good times of it with me and saw me through what were some definite not-so-good times. She is the love of my life and I owe her everything.

So much for the living. From time to time during the course of my work on this book I've had the flickering sense that the spirits of Adriaen van der Donck and Peter Stuyvesant were hovering somewhere nearby, the first, perhaps, interested at the notion of being plucked from historical oblivion, the second maybe at potentially being rescued from the status of historical cartoon. There is one other spirit I've felt as well, a less obvious one. I would like to express my grat.i.tude to the late Barbara W. Tuchman: for providing a model of a writer committed to history and narrative both; for being among the first popular historians to recognize, in her final book, The First Salute, The First Salute, the overlooked contribution of the Dutch to early American history; and finally and perhaps most importantly to me, for making a bequest to the New York Public Library in honor of her father, which resulted in the establishment of the Wertheim Study Room, where much of this book was researched. the overlooked contribution of the Dutch to early American history; and finally and perhaps most importantly to me, for making a bequest to the New York Public Library in honor of her father, which resulted in the establishment of the Wertheim Study Room, where much of this book was researched.

Prologue.

THE MISSING FLOOR.

If you were to step inside an elevator in the lobby of the New York State Library in Albany, you would discover that, although the building has eleven floors, there is no b.u.t.ton marked eight. To get to the eighth floor, which is closed to the public, you ride to seven, walk through a security door, state your business to a librarian at the desk, then go into another elevator and ride up one more flight.

As you pa.s.s shelves of quietly moldering books and periodicals-the budgets of the state of Kansas going back to 1923, the Australian census, the complete bound series of Northern Miner- Northern Miner-you may be greeted by the sound of German opera coming from a small room at the southeast corner. Peering around the doorway, you would probably find a rather bearish-looking man hunched over a desk, perhaps squinting through an antique jeweler's loupe. The hiddenness of the location is an apt metaphor for the work going on here. What Dr. Charles Gehring is studying with such attention may be one of several thousand artifacts in his care-artifacts that, once they give up their secrets through his efforts, breathe life into a moment of history that has been largely ignored for three centuries.

This book tells the story of that moment in time. It is a story of high adventure set during the age of exploration-when Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and Captain John Smith were expanding the boundaries of the world, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Galileo, Descartes, Mercator, Vermeer, Harvey, and Bacon were revolutionizing human thought and expression. It is a distinctly European tale, but also a vital piece of America's beginnings. It is the story of one of the original European colonies on America's sh.o.r.es, a colony that was eventually swallowed up by the others.

At the book's center is an island-a slender wilderness island at the edge of the known world. As the European powers sent off their navies and adventurer-businessmen to roam the seas in history's first truly global era, this island would become a fulcrum in the international power struggle, the key to control of a continent and a new world. This account encompa.s.ses the kings and generals who plotted for control of this piece of property, but at the story's heart is a humbler a.s.semblage: a band of explorers, entrepreneurs, pirates, prost.i.tutes, and a.s.sorted scalawags from different parts of Europe who sought riches on this wilderness island. Together, this unlikely group formed a new society. They were the first New Yorkers, the original European inhabitants of the island of Manhattan.

We are used to thinking of American beginnings as involving thirteen English colonies-to thinking of American history as an English root onto which, over time, the cultures of many other nations were grafted to create a new species of society that has become a multiethnic model for progressive societies around the world. But that isn't true. To talk of the thirteen original English colonies is to ignore another European colony, the one centered on Manhattan, which predated New York and whose history was all but erased when the English took it over.

The settlement in question occupied the area between the newly forming English territories of Virginia and New England. It extended roughly from present-day Albany, New York, in the north to Delaware Bay in the south, comprising all or parts of what became New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. It was founded by the Dutch, who called it New Netherland, but half of its residents were from elsewhere. Its capital was a tiny collection of rough buildings perched on the edge of a limitless wilderness, but its muddy lanes and waterfront were prowled by a Babel of peoples-Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Jews, Africans (slaves and free), Walloons, Bohemians, Munsees, Montauks, Mohawks, and many others-all living on the rim of empire, struggling to find a way of being together, searching for a balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression. Pirates, prost.i.tutes, smugglers, and business sharks held sway in it. It was Manhattan, Manhattan, in other words, right from the start: a place unlike any other, either in the North American colonies or anywhere else. in other words, right from the start: a place unlike any other, either in the North American colonies or anywhere else.

Because of its geography, its population, and the fact that it was under the control of the Dutch (even then its parent city, Amsterdam, was the most liberal in Europe), this island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America's sh.o.r.es, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world. It was no coincidence that on September 11, 2001, those who wished to make a symbolic attack on the center of American power chose the World Trade Center as their target. If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, then the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where it first took shape. Many people-whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue-like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it's an anomaly in the United States, almost a foreign ent.i.ty. This book offers an alternative view: that beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where America began.

The original European colony centered on Manhattan came to an end when England took it over in 1664, renaming it New York after James, the Duke of York, brother of King Charles II, and folding it into its other American colonies. As far as the earliest American historians were concerned, that date marked the true beginning of the history of the region. The Dutch-led colony was almost immediately considered inconsequential. When the time came to memorialize national origins, the English Pilgrims and Puritans of New England provided a better model. The Pilgrims' story was simpler, less messy, and had fewer pirates and prost.i.tutes to explain away. It was easy enough to overlook the fact that the Puritans' flight to American sh.o.r.es to escape religious persecution led them, once established, to inst.i.tute a brutally intolerant regime, a grim theocratic monoculture about as far removed as one can imagine from what the country was to become.

The few early books written about the Dutch settlement had a brackish odor-appropriately, since even their authors viewed the colony as a backwater, cut off from the main current of history. Washington Irving's "Knickerbocker" history of New York-a historical burlesque never intended by its author to be taken as fact-muddied any attempt to understand what had actually gone on in the Manhattan-based settlement. The colony was reduced by popular culture to a few random, floating facts: that it was once ruled by an ornery peg-legged governor and, most infamously, that the Dutch bought the island from the Indians for twenty-four-dollars' worth of household goods. Anyone who wondered about it beyond that may have surmised that the colony was too inept to keep records. As one historian put it, "Original sources of information concerning the early Dutch settlers of Manhattan Island are neither many nor rich [for] . . . the Dutch wrote very little, and on the whole their records are meager."

Skip ahead, then, to a day in 1973, when a thirty-five-year-old scholar named Charles Gehring is led into a vault in the New York State Library in Albany and shown something that delights his eye as fully as a chest of emeralds would a pirate's. Gehring, a specialist in the Dutch language of the seventeenth century (an obscure topic in anyone's estimation), had just completed his doctoral dissertation. He was casting about for a relevant job, which he knew wouldn't be easy to find, when fate smiled on him. Some years earlier, Peter Christoph, curator of historical ma.n.u.scripts at the library, had come across a vast collection of charred, mold-stippled papers stored in the archives. He knew what they were and that they comprised a vast resource for American prehistory. They had survived wars, fire, flooding, and centuries of neglect. Remarkably, he doubted he would be able to bring them into the light of day. There was little interest in what was still considered an odd backroad of history. He couldn't come up with funds to hire a translator. Besides that, few people in the world could decipher the writings.

Christoph eventually came in contact with an influential American of Dutch descent, a retired brigadier general with the excellent name of Cortlandt van Rensselaer Schuyler. Gen. Schuyler had recently overseen the building in Albany of Empire State Plaza, the central state government complex, for his friend, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Schuyler put in a call to Rockefeller, who was by now out of office and about to be tapped by Gerald Ford as his vice president. Rockefeller made a few telephone calls, and a small amount of money was made available to begin the project. Christoph called Gehring and told him he had a job. So it was that while the nation was recovering from the midlife crisis of Watergate, a window onto the period of its birth began to open.

What Charles Gehring received into his care in 1974 was twelve thousand sheets of rag paper covered with the crabbed, loopy script of seventeenth-century Dutch, which to the untutored eye looks something like a cross between our Roman letters and Arabic or Thai-writing largely indecipherable today even to modern Dutch speakers. On these pages, in words written three hundred and fifty years ago in ink that has now partially faded into the brown of the decaying paper, an improbable gathering of Dutch, French, German, Swedish, Jewish, Polish, Danish, African, American Indian, and English characters comes to life. This repository of letters, deeds, wills, journal entries, council minutes, and court proceedings comprises the official records of the settlement that grew up following Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage up the river that bears his name. Here, in their own words, were the first Manhattanites. Deciphering and translating the doc.u.ments, making them available to history, Dr. Gehring knew, was the task of a lifetime.

Twenty-six years later, Charles Gehring, now a sixty-one-year-old grandfather with a wry grin and a soothing, carmelly baritone, was still at it when I met him in 2000. He had produced sixteen volumes of translation, and had several more to go. For a long time he had labored in isolation, the "missing floor" of the state library building where he works serving as a nice metaphor for the way history has overlooked the Dutch period. But within the past several years, as the work has achieved a critical ma.s.s, Dr. Gehring and his collection of translations have become the center of a modest renaissance of scholarly interest in this colony. As I write, historians are drafting doctoral dissertations on the material and educational organizations are creating teaching guides for bringing the Dutch settlement into accounts of American colonial history.

Dr. Gehring is not the first to have attempted a translation of this archive. In fact, the long, bedraggled history of the records of the colony mirrors history's treatment of the colony itself. From early on, people recognized the importance of these doc.u.ments. In 1801 a committee headed by none other than Aaron Burr declared that "measures ought to be taken to procure a translation," but none were. In the 1820s a half-blind Dutchman with a shaky command of English came up with a ma.s.sively flawed longhand translation-which then burned up in a 1911 fire that destroyed the state library. In the early twentieth century a highly skilled translator undertook to translate the whole corpus only to see two years' worth of labor burn up in the same fire. He suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually abandoned the task.

Many of the more significant political doc.u.ments of the colony were translated in the nineteenth century. These became part of the historical record, but without the rest-the letters and journals and court cases about marital strife, business failures, cutla.s.s fights, traders loading sloops with tobacco and furs, neighbors stealing each others' pigs-in short, without the stuff from which social history is written, this veneer of political doc.u.mentation only reinforced the image of the colony as wobbly and inconsequential. Dr. Gehring's work corrects that image, and changes the picture of American beginnings. Thanks to his work, historians are now realizing that, by the last two decades of its existence, the Dutch colony centered on Manhattan had become a vibrant, viable society-so much so that when the English took over Manhattan they kept its unusually free-form structures, ensuring that the features of the earlier settlement would live on.

The idea of a Dutch contribution to American history seems novel at first, but that is because early American history was written by Englishmen, who, throughout the seventeenth century, were locked in mortal combat with the Dutch. Looked at another way, however, the connection makes perfectly good sense. It has long been recognized that the Dutch Republic in the 1600s was the most progressive and culturally diverse society in Europe. As Bertrand Russell once wrote, regarding its impact on intellectual history, "It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation." The Netherlands of this time was the melting pot of Europe. The Dutch Republic's policy of tolerance made it a haven for everyone from Descartes and John Locke to exiled English royalty to peasants from across Europe. When this society founded a colony based on Manhattan Island, that colony had the same features of tolerance, openness, and free trade that existed in the home country. Those features helped make New York unique, and, in time, influenced America in some elemental ways. How that happened is what this book is about.

I CAME TO CAME TO this subject more or less by walking into it. I was living in the East Village of Manhattan, a neighborhood that has long been known as an artistic and countercultural center, a place famous for its nightlife and ethnic restaurants. But three hundred and fifty years earlier it was an important part of the unkempt Atlantic Rim port of New Amsterdam. I often took my young daughter around the corner from our apartment building to the church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, where she would run around under the sycamores in the churchyard and I would study the faded faces of the tombstones of some of the city's earliest families. The most notable tomb in the yard-actually it is built into the side of the church-is that of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colony's most famous resident. In the mid-seventeenth century this area was forest and meadow being cleared and planted as Bouwerie (or farm) Number One: the largest homestead on the island, and the one Stuyvesant claimed for himself. St. Mark's is built near the site of his family chapel, in which he was buried. Throughout the nineteenth century New Yorkers insisted that the church was haunted by the old man's ghost-that at night you could hear the echoed clopping of his wooden leg as he paced its aisles, eternally ill at ease from having to relinquish his settlement to the English. I never heard the clopping, but over time I began to wonder, not so much about Stuyvesant, who seemed too forbidding for such a verb, but about the original settlement. I wanted to know the island that those first Europeans found. this subject more or less by walking into it. I was living in the East Village of Manhattan, a neighborhood that has long been known as an artistic and countercultural center, a place famous for its nightlife and ethnic restaurants. But three hundred and fifty years earlier it was an important part of the unkempt Atlantic Rim port of New Amsterdam. I often took my young daughter around the corner from our apartment building to the church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, where she would run around under the sycamores in the churchyard and I would study the faded faces of the tombstones of some of the city's earliest families. The most notable tomb in the yard-actually it is built into the side of the church-is that of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colony's most famous resident. In the mid-seventeenth century this area was forest and meadow being cleared and planted as Bouwerie (or farm) Number One: the largest homestead on the island, and the one Stuyvesant claimed for himself. St. Mark's is built near the site of his family chapel, in which he was buried. Throughout the nineteenth century New Yorkers insisted that the church was haunted by the old man's ghost-that at night you could hear the echoed clopping of his wooden leg as he paced its aisles, eternally ill at ease from having to relinquish his settlement to the English. I never heard the clopping, but over time I began to wonder, not so much about Stuyvesant, who seemed too forbidding for such a verb, but about the original settlement. I wanted to know the island that those first Europeans found.

Eventually, I got in touch with Charles Gehring. I learned about the extraordinary doc.u.ments in his keeping, and about the organization, the New Netherland Project, he had founded to promote interest in this neglected period of history. In the fall of 2000, I attended a seminar he sponsored on the topic and encountered dozens of specialists who were exploring this forgotten world, unearthing pieces of it that hadn't seen the light of day in centuries. They were digging into archives from Boston to Antwerp and turning up hitherto forgotten journals, voyage diaries, and account books. Our understanding of the age of exploration was expanding under this new examination. In my interviews with Dr. Gehring and others, I realized that historians were fashioning a new perspective on American prehistory, and also that no one was attempting to bring all the disparate elements, characters, and legacies into a single narrative. In short, no one was telling the story of the first Manhattanites.

It turns out to be two stories. There is the small, ironic story that originally attracted me, of men and women hacking out an existence in a remote wilderness that is today one of the most famously urban landscapes in the world, who would shoulder their muskets and go on hunting expeditions into the thick forests of what is now the skysc.r.a.pered wilderness of midtown Manhattan. But going deeper into the material, you begin to appreciate the broader story. The origins of New York are not like those of other American cities. Those first settlers were not isolated pioneers but characters playing parts in a drama of global sweep-a struggle for empire that would range across the seventeenth century and around the globe, and which, for better or worse, would create the structure of the modern world.

Moving back and forth from the individual struggles detailed in the records to the geopolitical events of the day, you can sense the dawning of the idea that would lead to the transformation of Manhattan into the centerpiece of the most powerful city in the world. Of all the newly claimed regions whose exploitation was rapidly changing Europe-from the teeming cod fisheries off Newfoundland to the limitless extent of North America to the sugar fields of Brazil-this one slender island, sitting in the greatest natural harbor on the coast of a vast new wilderness and at the mouth of the river that would become the vital highway into that continent, would prove the most valuable of all. Its location and topography-"like a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world" is how one early writer described it-would make it the gate through which Europeans could reach the unimaginable vastness of the North American land ma.s.s. Possess it, and you controlled pa.s.sage up the Hudson River, then west along the Mohawk River Valley into the Great Lakes, and into the very heart of the continent. Later migration patterns proved this to a T; the Erie Ca.n.a.l, which linked the Hudson and the Great Lakes, resulted in the explosive growth of the Midwest and cemented New York's role as the most powerful city in the nation. In the seventeenth century that was still far in the future, but one by one, in various ways, the major players in this story sensed the island's importance. They smelled its value. Thus Richard Nicolls, the British colonel who led a gunboat flotilla into New York Harbor in August 1664 and wrested control of the island from Peter Stuyvesant, instantly termed it "best of all His Majties Townes in America."

So the story of Manhattan's beginnings is also the story of European exploration and conquest in the 1600s. And at the heart of the material I found a much smaller story: a very personal struggle between two men over the fate of a colony and the meaning and value of individual liberty. Their personal battle helped to ensure that New York City, under the English and then as an American city, would develop into a unique place that would foster an intense stew of cultures and a wildly fertile intellectual, artistic, and business environment.

One of the protagonists in this struggle, Peter Stuyvesant, has been portrayed by history as almost a cartoon character: peg-legged, cantankerous, a figure of comic relief who would do his routine, draw a few laughs, and then exit the stage so that the real substance of American history could begin. But much of what was known about Stuyvesant before came from records of the New England colonies. To New England, the Dutch colony centered on New Amsterdam was the enemy, and so history has accepted the portrait of Stuyvesant drawn by his greatest detractors. In the New Netherland records, by contrast, Stuyvesant comes across as full blooded and complex: a genuine tyrant; a doting father and husband; a statesman who exhibits steel nerves and bold military intuition while holding almost no cards and being surrounded by enemies (English, Indians, Swedes, foes from within his own colony, even, in a sense, the directors of his company in Amsterdam). He is a man who abhors unfairness-who publicly punishes Dutch colonists who cheat the Indians in business deals-but who, with the harshness of a hard-line Calvinist minister's son, tries to block Jews from settling in New Amsterdam. He is a tragic figure, undone by his own best quality, his steadfastness. But Stuyvesant didn't act in isolation. The colony's legacy revolves around another figure of the period, a man named Adriaen van der Donck, who has been forgotten by history but who emerges as the hero of the story and who, I think, deserves to be ranked as an early American prophet, a forerunner of the Revolutionary generation.

But if the colony's end points forward to the American society that was to come, its beginning is dominated by another figure-willful, brooding, tortured-who hearkens back to an earlier era. Henry Hudson was a man of the Renaissance, and Manhattan's birth thus becomes a kind of bridge between these two worlds. So the story begins far from the American wilderness, in the heart of late Renaissance Europe.

All that said, what originally captivated me about the Dutch doc.u.ments-that they offered a way to reimagine New York City as a wilderness-stayed alive throughout my research. More than anything, then, this book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all a.s.sociations of power, concrete, and gla.s.s; to put time into full reverse, unfill the ma.s.sive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened hills and filled gullies; to return streams from the underground sewers they were forced into, back to their original rushing or meandering course. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pin oak, sweetgum, ba.s.swood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marshes, mudflats, gra.s.slands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves.

And then to stop the time machine, let it hover a moment on the southmost tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that moment swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries.

And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizon. Sails.

PART I.

"A CERTAIN ISLAND NAMED.

MANATHANS"

Chapter 1.

THE MEASURE OF THINGS.

On a late summer's day in the year 1608, a gentleman of London made his way across that city. He was a man of ambition, intellect, arrogance, and drive-in short, a man of his age. Like our own, his was an era of expanding horizons and a rapidly shrinking world, in which the pursuit of individual dreams led to new discoveries, which in turn led to newer and bigger dreams. His complicated personality-including periodic fits of brooding pa.s.sivity that all but incapacitated him-was built around an impressive self-confidence, and at this moment he was almost certainly convinced that the meeting he was headed toward would be of historic importance.

He walked west, in the direction of St. Paul's Cathedral, which then, as now, dominated the skyline. But the structure in the distance was not the St. Paul's of today, the serene, imperial building that signifies order and human reason, with the spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment shining from its proud dome. His St. Paul's had a hunkering tower in place of a dome (the steeple that had originally risen from the tower had been struck by lightning almost half a century before and hadn't been replaced); it was a dark, medieval church, which suited the medieval market town that London still was in the early seventeenth century. The streets through which he walked were narrow, shadowy, claustrophobic, sloping toward central sewer ditches. The houses that lined them were built of timber and walled with wattle and daub-it was a city made chiefly of wood.

Since we know his destination and have some notion of the whereabouts of his house, it is possible to trace a likely route that Henry Hudson, ship's captain, would have taken on that summer day, on his way to meet with the directors of the Muscovy Company, funders of voyages of exploration and discovery. The widest thoroughfare from Tower Street Ward toward Cordwainer Street Ward was Tower Street. He would have pa.s.sed first through a neighborhood that, despite being within sight of the scaffold and gallows of the Tower itself, was an area of relatively new, "divers fair and large houses," as John Stow, a contemporary chronicler, described, several of them owned by prominent n.o.blemen.

On his left then came the dominating church of St. Dunstan in the East, and a reminder of his heritage. The Muscovy Company had not only funded at least two of Henry Hudson's previous sea voyages; going back through its history of half a century, it contained several Hudsons on its rolls. Among its charter members in 1555 was another Henry Hudson, who rose from a humble "skinner," or tanner, to become a wealthy member of society and an alderman of the City of London, and who may have been the explorer's grandfather. So our Henry Hudson was presumably born to the sea and to the company both, and inside the church he was now pa.s.sing, his Muscovy Company namesake lay, beneath a gilded alabaster stone inscribed: HERE LYETH H HENRY H HEARDSONS CORPS,.

WITHIN THIS T TOMBE OF S STONE:.

HIS S SOULE (THROUGH FAITH IN C CHRIST'S DEATH,).

TO G G.o.d IN H HEAVEN IS GONE.

WHILES THAT HE LIVED AN A ALDERMAN,.

AND S SKINNER WAS HIS STATE:.

TO V VERTUE BARE HEE ALL HIS LOVE,.

TO VICE HE BARE HIS HATE.

If in his walk the seaman chose to detour down the hill past the church, he would have come to the open expanse of the Thames, where the view west downriver was dominated by the span of London Bridge with its twenty stone arches, houses perched precariously along both sides of its course. Directly across the river, beckoning lowly and enticingly, lay Southwark, a wild outland and thus also the entertainment district, with brothels tucked into its alleys and, visible from here, the "bear bayting" arena, which provided one of the most popular distractions for the ma.s.ses. Beyond it stood the rounded wooden structure of the Globe Theater in its original incarnation. Indeed, somewhere over on the Southwark side at this very moment, amid the tradesmen, wh.o.r.es, "st.u.r.dye Beggers," and "Common Players in Enterludes" that populated the borough, Shakespeare himself-at forty-four a near-exact contemporary of Hudson, then at the height of his powers and fame as the leading dramatist of the day-was likely going about his business, sleeping off a night of sack at the Mermaid with his actor friends Richard Burbage and John Heminge, maybe, or brooding over the foolscap sheets of Coriola.n.u.s, Coriola.n.u.s, which was written about this time and which, coming on the heels of the great tragedies, may have felt a bit hollow. which was written about this time and which, coming on the heels of the great tragedies, may have felt a bit hollow.

Tower Street became Little Eastcheap, which in turn merged into Candlewick and then Budge Row. Hudson's business lay here, in an imposing building called Muscovy House, home of the Muscovy Company. The medieval look of the London of 1608 belied the fact that England's rise to global empire was under way, and one of the forces behind that rise lay through these doors. From the bravado of its formal name-the "Merchants Adventurers of England for the Discovery of Lands, Territories, Iles, Dominions, and Seigniories Unknown"-one might be excused for thinking it had been founded out of sheer, unstoppable exuberance. The original band of merchants and aristocrats who had formed it more than half a century earlier included many of the most distinguished men in London in the middle of the sixteenth century-the Lord High Treasurer, the Steward of the Queen's Household, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Lord High Admiral-as well as sundry other knights and gentlemen. But while global exploration, the great intellectual and business opportunity of the day, had brought them all together, no one considered the undertaking a swashbuckling adventure. It was desperation that drove them toward new horizons. The England of the 1540s had been a backwater, economically depressed, inward-looking, deep in the shadows of the great maritime empires of Spain and Portugal. Wool was the country's chief commodity, but English traders had been blocked from access to major European markets for more than a century. Economic stagnation was bound up with intellectual stagnation: while the Renaissance was in full flower on the Continent, English interest in the wider world was slim, and the few long voyages of exploration England had mounted were mostly led by foreigners, such as the Venetian John Cabot (ne Giovanni Cabotto). When it came to sea voyages, the English declined.

History traditionally links the rise of England in the period with the elevation of Queen Elizabeth to the throne in 1558. But one could trace it to 1547, when an intellectually voracious twenty-year-old named John Dee did something countless students since have done: spent his summer abroad and returned flush with new knowledge and insights. After an academic career at Cambridge in which he proved to be something of a mathematical genius, Dee traveled to the University of Louvain in what is today Belgium. The rich summer sun of the Brabant region might have been revelation enough, but Dee soon found himself in a lecture hall gazing at an object that was, to him, transcendent. The teacher was Gemma Frisius, a Flemish mathematician and charter of the heavens, and what Dee saw was a map astonishing in its level of detail, in the new lands it portrayed, even in its lettering. The Low Countries, he discovered, were miles ahead of his island in new learning.

Dee spent long candle-lit nights poring over Frisius's maps with a Flemish scholar named Gerhard Kremer. Kremer, an engraver by training, had, under the academic pen name of Mercator, begun to make a name for himself ten years earlier by creating a map of Palestine that rendered the Holy Land with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved. Mercator was a genuine Renaissance man-a master cartographer, an engineer of telescopes, s.e.xtants, surveying equipment, and other highly sensitive measuring devices, the author of a gospel concordance, promoter of the new italic typeface that made map print more legible-and in him Dee found a soul mate. In 1569, Mercator would publish the map that would give him his immortality, which rendered lat.i.tude and longitude as straight lines, the meridians of longitude evenly s.p.a.ced and the distance between the parallels of lat.i.tude increasing in size as one approached the poles. It would solve a c.u.mbersome problem of navigating at sea because with it sailors could plot and follow a straight course rather than have to constantly recalculate their position. (The Mercator projection is still a feature of navigational maps, although, even at that time, some mariners were as confused as later generations of schoolchildren would be by the distortions in size it caused.) In a nice foreshadowing of the complicated intermingling between the Low Countries and the British Isles that would shape the next century, when Dee returned to London he brought with him maps, measuring instruments, and globes, created by Mercator and Frisius, that would help spark England's rise to global prominence. What Dee's English colleagues found most intriguing about the maps and globes was an area most people would ignore: the top, the Arctic Circle. Frisius's map, oriented as if looking down from the north star, showed a distinct open channel cutting across the Arctic, which was self-confidently labeled in Latin Fretum trium fratrum. Fretum trium fratrum. The sight of the boldly indicated Strait of the Three Brothers must have made Dee's English friends gasp. The Holy Grail for all learned and adventuresome minds was the discovery of a short pa.s.sage to the riches of Asia. Finding it would repay investors many times over; for the English, it would vault their economy out of the Middle Ages and into the European vanguard. The legend of the Strait of the Three Brothers was confused even at that time, but it appears to have been based on the adventures of the Corte Real brothers, Portuguese mariners who explored the area around Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and who, in the minds of some, sighted, or perhaps even sailed, the fabled pa.s.sage to Asia before two of them vanished into Arctic oblivion. (Ironically, the Spanish also had a theory about this mythical strait, only they called it the Englishmen's Strait.) Now there it was on Frisius's map, thanks apparently to Frisius's contacts with Portuguese mariners. It was on Mercator's globe as well, labeled simply The sight of the boldly indicated Strait of the Three Brothers must have made Dee's English friends gasp. The Holy Grail for all learned and adventuresome minds was the discovery of a short pa.s.sage to the riches of Asia. Finding it would repay investors many times over; for the English, it would vault their economy out of the Middle Ages and into the European vanguard. The legend of the Strait of the Three Brothers was confused even at that time, but it appears to have been based on the adventures of the Corte Real brothers, Portuguese mariners who explored the area around Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and who, in the minds of some, sighted, or perhaps even sailed, the fabled pa.s.sage to Asia before two of them vanished into Arctic oblivion. (Ironically, the Spanish also had a theory about this mythical strait, only they called it the Englishmen's Strait.) Now there it was on Frisius's map, thanks apparently to Frisius's contacts with Portuguese mariners. It was on Mercator's globe as well, labeled simply fretum arctic.u.m, fretum arctic.u.m, arctic strait. As with most people in any endeavor, seeing the thing in print, seeing its coasts and coves delicately but decisively rendered, confirmed its reality. arctic strait. As with most people in any endeavor, seeing the thing in print, seeing its coasts and coves delicately but decisively rendered, confirmed its reality.

Fate, it seemed, had brought together the men, the means, and the time. The solution to England's twin crises of economy and spirit was out there. out there. So the nation's leaders formed a business circle, chipping in twenty-five pounds per share and raising a total of six thousand pounds. So the nation's leaders formed a business circle, chipping in twenty-five pounds per share and raising a total of six thousand pounds.

With the princ.i.p.als lined up and funds ready, it only remained to choose the likeliest route-either the one indicated on Frisius's map or one of several others that were now being put forth with equal confidence. The point was to find a northern pa.s.sage both because such a shortcut would render obsolete the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly on the Southern Hemisphere and because any northern peoples encountered along the way would be more likely buyers for English wool. That an Arctic sea route existed was beyond anyone's doubt. The universal belief among the intelligentsia in something we know to be a physical impossibility in wooden sailing vessels rested on several arguments, such as the one put forth by the Dutch minister and geographer Peter Plancius that "near the pole the sun shines for five months continually; and although his rays are weak, yet on account of the long time they continue, they have sufficient strength to warm the ground, to render it temperate, to accommodate it for the habitation of men, and to produce gra.s.s for the nourishment of animals."

The name by which the company became known gives away what happened on the first voyage it financed. A doughty mariner named Richard Chancellor took the northeast route, and while he failed to discover a pa.s.sage to the Orient, he became the first Englishman of the era to make landfall at Russia. The so-called Muscovy trade that ensued-in which the English found a ready market for their wool, and imported hemp, sperm oil, and furs from the realm of Ivan the Terrible-was so profitable that the search for a northern route to Asia was largely abandoned.

The company expanded, and the nation with it. Elizabeth ascended to the throne; Drake circ.u.mnavigated the globe; Shakespeare wrote. When, in 1588, Philip II of Spain launched an invasion fleet toward England, intending to bring the island into his empire and win its people back to Roman Catholicism, the undersized English navy shocked the world by crushing the Armada. The aftermath of the victory was one of those moments when a nation suddenly realizes it has entered a new era. Theirs wasn't a dark and chilly island after all, the English public was informed by their great poet, but a "precious stone set in the silver sea."

By the early 1600s, however, the wheel had taken another turn. The queen was dead, and the Russia trade had fallen off. Faced once again with financial crisis, the company's directors made a decision to return to their original purpose. They would resurrect the Renaissance dream, commit themselves anew to discovering a northern pa.s.sage to Asia.

The man they now turned to to renew the quest is not the protagonist of this story, but the forerunner, the one who would make it possible. In the ranks of legendary explorers, Henry Hudson has been slighted: not celebrated in his time by the English public as Francis Drake or Martin Frobisher or John Cabot had been, not given nearly the amount of ink that history has devoted to Columbus or Magellan. There is a logic of personality in this: Drake had defined manhood for an era, and the Italian Cabot had a f.e.c.kless charm (he was in the habit, after his celebrated return from the New World, of promising people he met in taverns that he would name islands for them), but when we come to Henry Hudson it is a dark and moody figure hovering behind the records, one seemingly more comfortable in the shadows of history. A new appreciation for the Dutch colony in North America, however, compels a reappraisal of the man whose fitful decision-making rerouted the flow of history.

Nothing is known of his early career, but the fact that he was a ship's captain indicates that he had had a lengthy one by the time we encounter him in 1608. It's reasonable to a.s.sume that he had served in the defeat of the Armada twenty years earlier, though we have no information on this. The Muscovy Company tended to start apprentices as boys and have them work through one or more aspects of the business: bureaucrat, "factor" (i.e., agent), or sailor. Thus, one Christopher Hudson, who rose to the position of governor of the company from 1601 to 1607 and whom some historians have thought was most likely Henry Hudson's uncle, had worked his way up in the sales and marketing line, serving as a company representative in Germany in his youth. Henry Hudson was in his forties when he stepped into the light of history, a seasoned mariner, a man with a strong and resourceful wife and three sons, a man born and raised not only to the sea but to the quest for a northern pa.s.sage to Asia, who, weaned from infancy on the legends of his predecessors, probably couldn't help but be obsessed by it.

The fire of obsession was fanned, in him as it was in the country, by a compatriot named Richard Hakluyt. Hakluyt was a consultant to the Muscovy Company, but more importantly he was a unique figure in his day: part journalist, part popularizer, part lionizer, above all a zealot for the internationalist cause in England. In the 1580s he began gathering log books, journals, and other records of voyages, and he published the whole lot of them in repeated waves-the main body under the t.i.tle The Principle Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, The Principle Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, which came out, with impeccable timing, shortly after the defeat of the Armada-creating a steadily building crescendo of popular enthusiasm for English adventures at sea. The result was to make England aware of itself in an international context, to see the European nations casting outward in a new age, an age of discovery. Hakluyt exhorted his countrymen to be proud that they were living in "an age wherein G.o.d hath raised so general a desire in the youth of this realm to discover all parts of the face of the earth." which came out, with impeccable timing, shortly after the defeat of the Armada-creating a steadily building crescendo of popular enthusiasm for English adventures at sea. The result was to make England aware of itself in an international context, to see the European nations casting outward in a new age, an age of discovery. Hakluyt exhorted his countrymen to be proud that they were living in "an age wherein G.o.d hath raised so general a desire in the youth of this realm to discover all parts of the face of the earth."

Thanks to Hakluyt, mariners now saw themselves in historical terms. Because of Hakluyt, Hudson-a determined and self-possessed man to begin with-openly hungered for a place on the list that included Columbus, Magellan, Cabot, Cortes, and Da Gama. And for Hudson there was only one brand of glory. He would be the one to locate at last-after the failures (glorious failures, but failures still) of Columbus, Cabot, Chancellor, Frobisher, Cartier, Verrazzano-the fabled ribbon of icy blue water, sail through it, emerge into the nutmeg-scented air of Cathay, and singlehandedly open the planet wide. He believed he would be the one.

He would be wrong in this. And yet, fate being what it is, his dream of achievement would come true-bounteously, far more strangely than he could have imagined. Fate would make him not just the somewhat ironic patron saint of a grand city that would rise in the future to the presumptuous t.i.tle of capital of the world, but, along with it, of a society that would become a model for the world of a distant century. A wavering but unbroken chain would stretch from him to a far-off hodgepodge: of skysc.r.a.pers and bodegas, dim sum and hip-hop, supers and subways, limos and egg creams and finance and fashion-the messy catalogue of ingredients that, stewed together over time, would comprise a global capital, twenty-first-century style. To the extent any individual could, he would be a fulcrum on which history would turn: from a world of wood and steel to one of silicon and plastic.

HIS FIRST VOYAGE was pure madness. While geographers debated whether the elusive pa.s.sage to Asia lay to the northwest, via Canada, or the northeast, around Russia, what Hudson attempted in his first command was something fantastically bolder and far more ridiculous than either of these, something that no human being had ever tried: to go straight up, over the top of the world. He was relying on an "established" theory, first proposed eighty years before by Robert Thorne, a merchant-adventurer who argued that in addition to finding the ice melt away as one neared the pole, that the lucky sailor who ventured across the top of the world would benefit from the "perpetual clearness of the day without any darkness of the night." Daylight may be handy, but to purposely steer a seventy-foot wooden boat, manned by a crew of twelve and powered only by wind, straight north on a direct course for the top of the world, defying the six-million-square-mile Arctic ice shelf, proposing to slice straight across it and come careening down the other side of the planet-the nerve of it beggars the imagination. No wonder that on the morning of April 19, 1607, Hudson and his tiny crew, including his young son John, whom he was probably in the process of training just as he had been trained, stepped out of the weak spring sunlight, shuffled into the dark ancient interior of the Church of St. Ethelburga just inside Bishopsgate (apparently successfully ignoring the tap houses crowding around the door of the church: the Angel, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, the Black Bull), took their places among the congregation, and beseeched the G.o.d of their forefathers to bless their endeavor. was pure madness. While geographers debated whether the elusive pa.s.sage to Asia lay to the northwest, via Canada, or the northeast, around Russia, what Hudson attempted in his first command was something fantastically bolder and far more ridiculous than either of these, something that no human being had ever tried: to go straight up, over the top of the world. He was relying on an "established" theory, first proposed eighty years before by Robert Thorne, a merchant-adventurer who argued that in addition to finding the ice melt away as one neared the pole, that the lucky sailor who ventured across the top of the world would benefit from the "perpetual clearness of the day without any darkness of the night." Daylight may be handy, but to purposely steer a seventy-foot wooden boat, manned by a crew of twelve and powered only by wind, straight north on a direct course for the top of the world, defying the six-million-square-mile Arctic ice shelf, proposing to slice straight across it and come careening down the other side of the planet-the nerve of it beggars the imagination. No wonder that on the morning of April 19, 1607, Hudson and his tiny crew, including his young son John, whom he was probably in the process of training just as he had been trained, stepped out of the weak spring sunlight, shuffled into the dark ancient interior of the Church of St. Ethelburga just inside Bishopsgate (apparently successfully ignoring the tap houses crowding around the door of the church: the Angel, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, the Black Bull), took their places among the congregation, and beseeched the G.o.d of their forefathers to bless their endeavor.

Even more remarkable than Hudson's decision to attempt such a voyage was that he survived it. Slicing through fog and ice, living on bear and seal (at one point the crew fell sick from rotten bear meat), surviving vicious storms and the horror of a whale attempting to surface under the keel of their ship, they made it above eighty degrees lat.i.tude, within six hundred miles of the North Pole, before Hudson noted drily, "This morning we saw that we were compa.s.sed in with Ice in abundance. . . . And this I can a.s.sure at present . . . by this way there is no pa.s.sage."

By any normal measure the voyage would have been considered a failure, but normalcy was out the window-it was now the seventeenth century, a vast new world was out there. Entrepreneurs and ships' captains knew that crossing one false path off the list was a form of progress. Far from considering his attempt a failure (for one thing, Hudson's report of "many whales" off Spitzbergen Island led to a ma.s.sive and lucrative whaling enterprise there in the following years, and, predictably, the decimation of the whale population), the company, immediately on his return in September 1607, signed him up to attack the problem again the next season.

Hudson spent the winter at his London home, plunging into his charts and letters from fellow mariners and geographers, warming himself at his own hearth and in the company of his family, laying plans, perhaps meeting with Hakluyt himself-the two had by now become friends-to discuss options. The following season sees him setting off straightaway-April 22, 1608-in the same Muscovy Company ship, the Hopewell, Hopewell, this time with a crew of fourteen, sitting in his closetlike captain's cabin, carefully putting pen to the page of his logbook as they pull away from the Thames-side docks, heart thrumming with the high adrenaline of setting-forth, as he records dutifully: "We set sayle at Saint Katherines, and fell downe to Blacke wall." this time with a crew of fourteen, sitting in his closetlike captain's cabin, carefully putting pen to the page of his logbook as they pull away from the Thames-side docks, heart thrumming with the high adrenaline of setting-forth, as he records dutifully: "We set sayle at Saint Katherines, and fell downe to Blacke wall."

He had a new course this time: northeast. It had been attempted by others, including his Muscovy Company predecessors, but the directors were still of the belief that to the north of Russia lay the best chance for reaching Asia. Hudson himself may have been doubtful-he had reason to believe the northwest was more likely-but he was willing to follow their wishes. Or so it seemed. The failure of his second voyage is less interesting than what happened on July 6, after he had concluded it was impossible to continue (on entering the strait that he had pinned his hopes on he writes with awe, "it is so full of ice that you will hardly thinke it"). Unable to find a way around the islands of Nova Zembla (today Novaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic), he was now "out of hope to find pa.s.sage by the North-east," and so proposed to alter course completely, tear up the mission directive from the company, and have a go at the northwest. After slaving for ten weeks against the raw elements of the Arctic, his crew, with good sense, balked at the idea of taking a detour straight across the Atlantic and into a wholly new wilderness. A near mutiny ensued; Hudson was forced to remove his gaze from the distant horizon of his obsession and focus instead on the human beings in front of him on the deck. He backed down. They returned to London.

No sooner did he arrive than he was busy readying himself for his next foray. He had momentum now: two voyages in two successive seasons; two routes down, and one to go. He was convinced that he was zeroing in on the pa.s.sage, that the puzzle that had occupied Europe for the length of the Renaissance was about to be solved. The answer, it now seemed certain, lay in the misty, all-but-unknown region that was only recently being labeled on maps as America.

At around this time-possibly before the 1608 voyage-he received letters from his friend and fellow explorer, the considerably larger-than-life John Smith, who had fought in Hungary against the Turks, was captured and sold into slavery in Istanbul, won the heart of his female captor, escaped to Transylvania via Russia, and trekked across North Africa-all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Not content with such a resume, in 1607, Smith spearheaded the founding of a colony in Virginia-what would be the first permanent European settlement on the North American coast (Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony, which broke ground in 1587, had vanished by the time relief forces arrived in 1590), where h