To remember why I wrote my book, I need to think back to when I first had the idea to commit to a novel. No particular subject had gripped me and I had already started many projects that are yet to be developed.
I was casually grazing through sites on the internet which, back in 2000, were slow to load and lacking much content, when I came across details of a book about Wall Street. The book was called The Great Game by John Steele Gordon, the acclaimed business historian. I read some of the sample material and found myself drawn into a riveting history of a little lane, originally called Het Cingel, in New Amsterdam that went on to change the nature of trading and commerce forever.
I bought the book, read to page 192, and then saw the picture that was to capture my imagination. It was a simple, woodcut illustration depicting a primitive palisade beside which two men in doublets, boots and breeches stood discussing the merits of a high wall. Above the two chatting men was a guard, musket over one shoulder, patrolling atop the four-foot high breastwork that supported the twelve-foot pales. It was 1653 and this was newly-built Wall Street in New Amsterdam, a Dutch colonial town on the tip of Manhattan Island, that would become the foundation upon which New York was built.
One of the men had a peg-leg and was pointing at the wooden defence with his walking stick. That man, the man responsible for ordering the construction of the wall as protection for the colony against attacks by natives and foreign enemies, was Governor Pieter Stuyvesant.
I researched 17th century history and, in particular, the period of history now known as the Golden Age of Discovery, finding not only warring nations in Europe, the beginnings of global slavery, religious intolerance and conflict, pirates, Native Americans, witch hunts, racial and gender inequality, countries fighting for territorial and maritime supremacy in the New World, but also the extraordinary birth of the first truly modern nation. This was novel-writing gold!
The characters in my first novel, Manhattan Legacy, live in that Age: they feel, smell, see and experience 17th century life. Mostly, though, my book is about how one individual can create and influence a series of events that have far-reaching consequences for many other people. The fact that the thousands of choices, decisions and laws made during that period still affect us today is a constant source of spine-tingling awe for me.
The surviving characters from my first novel will feature in my next and subsequent books.
Sunday, 7 December 2014
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
Why Give Thanks?
Part Two
Giving
thanks to God, whatever the religion or belief system, has been part
of every culture since time immemorial: for health, for victory over
rivals and for plentiful harvests. Special dates are set for these
Festivals and most are celebrated on an annual basis.
The
tradition of Thanksgiving in the United States has its roots in
English history. In 1536, during the reign of King Henry Ⅷ,
there were 95 Church holidays and 52 Sundays, when no work was
allowed and attending Church services was mandatory. After the
Reformation, this number was reduced to 27, with some Puritans
wishing to eliminate Christmas and Easter festivities, too!
The
'Holy Days' became Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving. Fasting
Days were to mark disasters and threats and Thanksgiving Days to
celebrate special blessings coming from God.
Puritans
and Pilgrims who emigrated from England took these traditions with
them to New England. Pilgrim holidays in Plymouth, Massachusetts in
1621 and 1623 and the Puritan holiday in Boston in 1631 are among the
first Thanksgiving Days recognised in American history.
Harvest
festivals did not become an annual affair in New England until the
late 1660's, when Dutch-held territories in the New World were seized
by the English. Thanksgiving proclamations were declared by both
State and Church until after the American Revolution and were
invariably on differing dates. An annual nationwide Thanksgiving date
was announced by George Washington in 1789 and it was to be known as
“a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by
acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of
Almighty God.”
In
1863, President Lincoln proclaimed that the last Thursday in November
was to be a day when all Americans, from Northern and Southern
States, joined together in unity to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately the Confederacy refused to recognise Lincoln's
authority and it was not implemented until the Reconstruction in the
1870's.
On
26th December 1941, President Franklin D Roosevelt signed
a joint resolution in Congress citing the fourth Thursday In November
as the national Thanksgiving Day.
It
is always with a sense of envy that I watch reports of Americans
celebrating this very important festival. People travel for hundreds,
sometimes thousands of miles to be reunited with their relatives on
this special day and reaffirm their love and care for one another and
their country.
In
England, we do not have any comparable occasion. The Scots have
Burn's Night, the Irish celebrate St.Patrick's Day and the Welsh have
St. David. St. George's Day, honouring our English Saint, is a
lukewarm, recently revived attempt at recognising England, but
somehow it only seems to be drunks and fanatics who enjoy it, nor do
our harvest festivals have quite the importance or relevance they
once had with the advent of supermarkets and all-year-round imported
foodstuffs. In a way it's very sad and not having our Day of
Thanksgiving doesn't allow us to embrace our past and acknowledge
those that built our country.
America
– your ancestors survived unimaginable hardships in crossing the
Atlantic, starvation, hostile environments, adversities we can only
wonder at, but your adventurous spirit and sense of nationality
prevailed - you should always give thanks for that!
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords
Tuesday, 25 November 2014
Why Give Thanks?
Part
One
It wasn't a great journey - 3,000 miles in a leaky, wooden galleon,
at the mercy of all the elements: thunderstorms, howling gales,
freezing snowstorms, maggoty meat, weevil-infested biscuits, soured
beer, no water, all within an atmosphere of stinking animal ordure,
human vomit and Death on constant call with his life-ending scythe.
Then, imagine stepping onto stable ground, the churning sea behind
you, ahead green meadows, flowers, fully clothed trees, the sweet
smell of brine-less air and tinkling streams of pure mountain water.
Yes, this is your first first day in the New World. Here you can
worship your God without fear of persecution, you can build a cabin
to house your growing family, till the land and grow your grain and
vegetables and live in freedom and happiness..
Paradise Arrived!
No, not really!
Where's your first meal coming from? Where is your shelter for the
first night? What do you do with your worldly possessions? Your seed
crops are spoiled from exposure to seawater on board ship. What
plants are poisonous? What wild animals are lurking in the forests
ready to kill you?
Henry Hudson described the island of Manhattan as “The
land is the finest for cultivation that I have ever in my life set
foot upon, and it also abounds in trees of every description.”
This
account, along with glowing reports from the French explorer, Samuel
de Champlain, had enticed all manner of people to the New World:
Pilgrims, Puritans and Calvinists, who sought religious freedom of
worship and settlers, who wanted a life away from the strictures of
poverty, punitive laws, robbing nobles and European wars.
The
truth of this new land, though, was not what the colonists had
expected - it was an alien territory of disease, the unbearable cold
of a mini Ice Age, no food and very little shelter. There was,
however, God's love, hope, a gritty determination to succeed and the
local natives, the Wampanoag.
The
Mayflower's
Pilgrims landed on December 16th,
1620 and set up home in a deserted Wampanoag village, Patuxet. It had
been abandoned four years earlier after an outbreak of the plague,
brought by earlier Europeans, had wiped out two-thirds of the tribe
in the region, which, pre-pestilence, had numbered between 50,000 and
100,000.
Although
the Wampanoag had noted the arrival of strangers, they had not
regarded the newcomers as a warlike threat as they were accompanied
by woman and children. The natives observed them through their first
winter, but kept their distance.
On
March 16th,
1621, Samoset, a member of the Moneghan tribe from Maine, visited
Patuxet. He returned the following day accompanied by a Wampanoag
native called Tisquantum or Squanto. It was this kindly man who
showed the Pilgrims how to plant corn, where and how to fish and what
nuts and berries were safe to eat. That same month the Pilgrims and
Ousamequin or Massasoit, the Pokanoket Wampanoag Chief, agreed a
treaty of mutual protection.
In the Autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims harvested their first crop, and
it was a fine yield. The Pilgrims sent four men 'on fowling' and,
according to an account by Pilgrim Edward Winslow, one of only two
sources of this historical event, they used guns to capture their
prey. On hearing the gunfire, Massasoit believed his settler friends
were under attack and showed up at Patuxet ready to give support.
The natives were invited to join in the harvest festivities, but
there were 90 natives and there wasn't enough food for all. Massasoit
sent his men out to hunt and they brought back five deer which they
presented to William Bradford, the English leader.
The ensuing feast lasted for three days. There was venison, seafood,
water-fowl, maize bread, pumpkin, squashes of all description and
possibly 'fowl' or turkey.
How did this small feast of sharing and giving thanks at Patuxet
become Thanksgiving, one of the greatest annual events in American
history? See Part Two of 'Why Give Thanks?' tomorrow, on the Eve of
Thanksgiving.
For more on 17th century Manhattan life read my novel, Manhattan Legacy, available as a print copy or eBook.
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
Tuesday, 28 October 2014
Who am I?
What do all these major geographical landmarks have in
common?
A powerful river, a city in New York, a small county in New
Jersey, a bridge linking Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx and Inwood in Manhattan,
an enormous bay - the second largest bay in the world after the Bay of Bengal -
and a Canadian strait connecting that bay to the Atlantic Ocean.
The answer is navigator, explorer and ship’s Commander,
Henry Hudson.
It took this Englishman to claim Manhattan Island, the jewel
in the crown of the New World, for the Dutch in September 1609.
Henry Hudson was born in London, England, during the
mid-to-late 1560’s. His family were wealthy merchants and his grandfather, also
Henry Hudson, was a founding member of the Merchant Adventurers, a trading
company which received a Royal Charter from King Edward in 1553, and which became
known as the Muscovy Company in 1555.
Hudson’s privileged background would have seen him educated
in cartography, navigation, mathematics and astronomy, all subjects that drew
him towards sailing and exploration.
A headstrong, courageous, bewhiskered man with dark hair and eyes, he
was married to a lady called Katherine and had three sons John, Richard and
Oliver.
Since the discovery of the riches of the Orient: Indian and
Chinese silk, spices, precious gemstones, porcelain and much more, competition
to find the quickest route to Cathay was intense. European nations fell over
themselves plotting and scouring maps, investing heavily in doubtful ventures:
monarchs, merchants and governments handed over substantial amounts of money to
trading companies in order to become even wealthier and more powerful.
The quest to find the coveted Northeast Passage, a northerly
route that would carve a pathway through to the Far East, was one fraught with
danger, skulduggery and murder. The theory behind the a possible passage was
that there existed a seaway that ran above the Artic Circle eastwards and ended
in China, its access only possible during three summer months when the sun
melted the northern ice packs.
Henry Hudson would attempt four of these explorative
ventures on behalf of merchant companies and, in doing so, would immortalise
his name.
Climactic conditions during the 17th Century were brutal.
Europe and America were in the throes of a Little Ice Age that had begun in the
13th Century, bringing winters so severe that rivers froze, frost fairs were
held on the River Thames in London, encroaching glaciers destroyed farms and
villages in Switzerland, the freezing winter of 1607-08 claimed the lives of
excessive numbers of settlers and natives in Maine and in Jamestown, Virginia
extreme frost was reported and Samuel de Champlain recalled bearing ice along
the shores of Lake Superior in June 1608.
So, not only was the quest for the Northeast Passage one of
national competition, laden with treachery and greed, it was also set against a
backdrop of sub zero temperatures, impenetrable pack ice, unrelenting
blizzards, frostbite and death.
The London Muscovy Company commissioned Hudson’s services
and on May 1st, 1607, he captained the 80-ton ship, Hopewell, with ten crewmen and a ship’s boy. By June, Hudson
had reached Greenland and travelled northwards along its coast, across the
Arctic Circle and a month later entered what Hudson called, ‘Whales Bay’.
Shortly after, he met with an impenetrable wall of ice and returned to Tilbury
Hope, England, in September 1607.
His next trek was funded by the London East India and
Muscovy Companies in 1608. Again, Hudson was Commander of Hopewell, but this time he would follow an easterly route
sailing above Russia. He sailed in April, but finding his path blocked by ice
packs he turned around and landed back in Gravesend, Kent in August.
In 1609, Hudson he accepted a commission from the Dutch East
India Company to once again find an easterly passage to the Indies. Leaving
Amsterdam in April on Halve Maen (Half
Moon), a three-mast carrack, he was thwarted once more by the inevitable
barrier of ice above the Arctic Circle. This time though he did not head home,
but rather took a westerly passage skirting Newfoundland and reaching Nova
Scotia in late July. This decision was based on reports from previous explorers
in the area, John Smith of Jamestown and Samuel de Champlain, citing Native
American knowledge of a western route to Cathay.
In August he arrived at Cape Cod, foreswore exploring the
entrance to Chesapeake Bay, and sailed north and found Delaware Bay. In
September he reached the estuary of the North River or Muhheakunnuk (Mohican
for ‘Great Waters constantly in Motion’) - now the Hudson River. After a
skirmish with local natives, in which a crewmember died, Hudson travelled
upriver as far as what would become Fort Orange or present day Albany. This
journey would give the Dutch territorial claim to the island lying off the
starboard side of Halve Maen - Manhattan
Island.
Hudson would say of the island:
“The land is the finest for cultivation that I have
ever in my life set foot upon, and it also abounds
in trees of every description.”
—Henry
Hudson
Hudson’s voyage ended back in England in November 1609.
Although he was detained by English authorities, who were upset at his working
for the Dutch, his log was passed over to the Dutch Ambassador for England and
handed to the Dutch East India Company officials in Amsterdam.
His final voyage in 1610 was under the English flag again.
Funding from the English East India Company and the Virginia Company saw him
take the helm of a new ship Discovery,
with a remit to find the Northwest Passage. Rounding the southern tip of
Greenland in early June he reached what is now known as the Hudson Strait and
entered Hudson Bay at the beginning of August. He did not find the illusive
passage to the Far East. November saw him trapped in ice in James Bay. Having
survived a bleak winter on land, the crew wanted to go home, but Hudson did
not. The crew mutinied and eventually Hudson, his son John and a few crewmen were
forced into a small boat, with inadequate provisions for their survival, and
that was the last that anyone saw of Henry Hudson. It was June 1611.
What an ignominious death for such a brave, intrepid
explorer.
Check out my novel, Manhattan Legacy, for further reading on 17th century life.
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords
For a really interesting look at Henry Hudson through original documents collated in 1860 check out the University of Pittsburgh's archives on the subject:
https://archive.org/details/henryhudsonnavig27ashe
Check out my novel, Manhattan Legacy, for further reading on 17th century life.
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords
For a really interesting look at Henry Hudson through original documents collated in 1860 check out the University of Pittsburgh's archives on the subject:
https://archive.org/details/henryhudsonnavig27ashe
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Post 9/11 renaissance
In England we saw the harrowing event of 9/11 unfold through news media and it was with utter shock and disbelief that we watched the images of the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the doomed Flight 93. It was an endless stream of unparalleled horror.
In 2000 I started research on an historical novel that is set in New Amsterdam in the 17th century and I became engrossed with the history and geography of Manhattan Island. Back then the Internet and its search engines were in their infancy and information was very difficult to come by, particularly the early Dutch history of New York. Since 9/11 there has been more research and heightened interest in the precious heritage of New York and its early settlers.
It was with a great smile and a feeling of warmth that I read the news of an 18th century shipwreck that had been unearthed at the site excavation site at Washington and Liberty Streets. The vessel is thought by experts to be a brigantine and she would probably have been employed hauling timber from New England and transporting sugar and molasses from Barbados back to New York City. It is extraordinary to think that not only was this small ship possibly helping to build 18th century New York, that it was later sacrificed to support landfill for further city expansion, but that it can now be seen as an enduring symbol of the 21st century renaissance of the World Trade Center.
To get a feel of how New York has risen from the swamps and salt marshes throughout the centuries and how this amazing city has overcome wars and terrorist attacks, take a trip up to the recently opened Observatory atop One World Trade Center and witness New York's growth through the ages by watching the animated time lapse shots in all five elevators as you travel up to the 102nd deck.
The rebuilding attests to the amazing resilience of the American people to withstand any threat or action from would-be aggressors and is a poignant testimony to their brave ancestors.
I have published my historical thriller set in mid-17th century Manhattan, but I don't feel that this is the day to promote it - this Day is for those who died needlessly and those who survived bravely, victims of an horrific and barbaric act of terrorism.
Tuesday, 12 August 2014
Which NYC Borough is twinned with London Borough of Lambeth?
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/
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Who gave his name to The Bronx?
The Bronx
The names of villages, towns and cities can tell so much
about their history.
In the UK, we are taught from an early age, to identify and
understand the origins and meanings of the names of our counties, towns,
villages and cities. Mostly, they come from Anglo Saxon, Roman, Norman or Viking
roots, so we know that the suffixes ‘ham’ means a village, ‘ford’ a shallow
river crossing, ‘wick’ a hamlet, ‘caster/chester’ a Roman camp, ‘ton’ a farmstead
or manor and so on.
While researching the names and origins of towns and
villages in the New World for my book, Manhattan Legacy, a novel set in 1640’s New Amsterdam, I became intrigued by the names that
settlers had given to their colonies, towns and landmarks.
The Bronx is a case
in point. Jonas Bronck was a Scandinavian-born immigrant who arrived in New
Netherland in 1639. Initially, he leased land north of New Amsterdam from the West India Company and bought further tracts of land from local tribes. He ended
up with 500 acres on which he grew tobacco, farmed cattle and forged good
trading relations with the Lenape natives.
Jonas Bronck called his homestead Emaus, a New Testament reference to a place called Emmaus, where Jesus appeared before two of his followers after his resurrection.
Bronck’s farm was bounded by a freshwater river that the Lenape called Aquehung
to the east and a small river running through the centre of Manhattan Island
that later became known as the Harlem River to the west.
The Aquehung became known locally as “Bronck’s river,” and
was eventually called the Bronx River.
The definite article in name, The Bronx, is possibly the possessive form of the Bronck family, as in ‘belonging to The Broncks,’, but it might also be
attributed to the style of referring to the rivers of the area.
So, a large area of a major city was named after a Swedish
farmer who died nearly four hundred years ago. If only he’d known….
More to follow on Brooklyn, Nut Island (Governor’s Island),
Pearl Street and much more.
Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com
You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords
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