BROOKLYN
In my last blog,
‘Who gave his name to the Bronx?’, I wrote about Jonas Bronck, a Scandinavian-born immigrant who settled in New Netherland, a colonial province
claimed by the Dutch in 1639 covering territories from the Delmarva Peninsula
to Cape Cod, including Manhattan Island, parts of New Jersey, Delaware and
Connecticut and small outposts in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
In 1646, the
Dutch West India Company granted a parish charter to the Dutch-settled town of
Breuckelen, naming it for the Dutch town of Breukelen in the province of
Utrecht in the Netherlands. Breukelen translates as ‘Broken Land,’ an apt
description of the waterlogged countryside surrounding Utrecht, which lies
between Rotterdam and Amsterdam in Holland. The small town of Breuckelen sat along the East River shoreline of
Long Island (Lange Eilandt).
Cornelius Dircksen
Hoogland was a Dutch farmer and innkeeper who, in the early 1630’s, owned 16
acres of land that stretched along the Manhattan Island coastline from Pearl Street northeastwards.
He soon realised that there was a need for transport across the East River from
New Amsterdam to Breuckelen for settlers, traders and natives and that he could
maintain a skeleton ferry service in addition to providing accommodation for those merchants and travellers. Cornelius established his new business at the
narrowest stretch of the river, a route historically used by the Native American
tribe the Lenni Lenape. As he was primarily a farmer, passengers were
required to blow through a shell horn that hung from a tree beside the ferry
site to summon him. The canoe carried two people in addition to the
ferryman and cost three stuyvers, (the equivalent of 6 cents at the time or 0.8
cents in current value). The fare was paid using wampum - a string of either nine purple beads or eighteen white beads. Corneluis employed a man to operate the service from the
Breuckelen side. It often took close to an hour to cross the turbulent East
River.
In 1642, Cornelius
upgraded his service, using larger sailing vessels and a regular timetable of
crossings, from 5am to 8 pm, approximating sunrise and sunset, and now owned 33
acres of land near Breuckelen. A year later he sold the Breuckelen landing to
Willem Jansen for 2,300 guilders, a decision he later regretted when a rival
tavern was established on Jansen’s land.
In 1667, at the end of
the second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch handed the territories of New Netherland
to the English in exchange for Suriname, a country on the north-eastern coast
of South America. Breuckelen was anglicized to Brooklyn. Brooklyn’s Dutch
provenance continues still with its motto, ‘Eendraght Maeckt Maght’, which, translated from Dutch, means ‘In Unity, There
Is Strength’ and was originally the motto of the
first United Dutch Republic in Europe founded in 1581.
Later in its history,
Brooklyn ranked as the third most populous city in America during the 19th
century. In 1883, ‘The New Colossus’, a poem by Emma Lazarus, referred to New
York Harbour as ‘the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame’. This ‘twin’ status
was underscored by the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in the same year. But
as the bridge offered a quicker, safer and cheaper means of crossing the East
River, the ferry service fell into decline and eventually closed for good in
1924.
These days Brooklyn’s twin
cities are farther afield: Anzio, Lazio in Italy (1990), Besiktas, Istanbul
Province in Turkey (2005), Leopoldstadt, Vienna in Austria (2007) and the
London Borough of Lambeth in London.
So, from its humble
beginnings as a nostalgic reminder for Dutch settlers in the 17th Century, it
has grown into a multi-national, multi-cultural Borough of New York City with
over 2.6 million people.
My novel, Manhattan
Legacy, has further mentions of
Brooklyn in the17th Century.
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords
With grateful thanks to the resources of http://theboweryboys.blogspot.co.uk/, http://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/, http://www.hollandsociety.com and http://www.olivetreegenealogy.com/
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