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

Read reviews of Manhattan Legacy on Amazon

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

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.

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

Read reviews of Manhattan Legacy on Amazon

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/

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. 

I would like to thank the Bowery Boys, http://theboweryboys.blogspot.co.uk/, for their excellent blogs - a treasure trove of New York history!

Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com

Read reviews of Manhattan Legacy on Amazon

You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords

Did you know that Wall Street, New York City was named after a real wall?

Wall Street Manhattan

A line drawing of a wooden palisade beside which 17th Century merchants, dressed in breeches, doublets and plumed hats, discussed trading affairs struck such a chord in my imagination that it would, thirteen years later, be the basis of a book, Manhattan Legacy, just published, about the early days of New York City and the settlers who would become the founders of the American nation we know today.

It came as quite a surprise to me that the Dutch were the first real European influence in the growth of New York. As an Englishwoman my education was heavily English-biased as you would expect, and, in doing the research for my novel, I was constantly surprised by the ingenuity, tenacity and tolerance of the Dutch settlers. They showed fortitude and bravery in the face of overwhelming obstacles - a perilous 3,000 mile sea crossing, disease, famine, hostile natives and the same warring European nations, but in the New world.

Despite this, they set about working for the West India Company, without complaint at the uncivilised working conditions, the long hours and paltry wages.

In 1652, when a new war broke out in Europe between England and Holland, fear of attacks from the English, whose territory lay on three sides of the Dutch colony, pushed the Governor of the colony, Pieter Stuyvesant, to address the issue of defence against hostilities. Stuyvesant called together the burgomasters and magistrates of the colony and set about discussing the building an effective defence for the town, not only for its citizens, but also for Dutch settlers, who had farms and homesteads outside the town’s boundaries.

In March 1653, it was decided that the woefully inadequate Fort of New Amsterdam was to have a makeover, a night watch would be set up and that the newly incorporated city should be walled and have a ‘wall street’. The cost to the Treasury was 4-5,0000 guilders, the cost being offset by tax levies on the Dutch according to the value of their estates.

The contract price for the wall alone was 3,166 guilders or $2,166.

Constructed of pales, 12 feet high, 18 inches in girth and with sharp points on top, the wall measured 180 rods (990 yards) beginning at the East River and ending at the North or Hudson River. This is a surprisingly short distance given that this spanned the entire width of Manhattan. Levelling and landfill have added extra girth since then. The wall was finished on 1st May 1653, the entire project taking less than two months to complete.

Since I began writing my novel in 2001 and researching this period in history, a significant event in Manhattan focussed the entire world’s attention on this tiny section of New York and, since then, surprising new information has surfaced about its early days.

I still find myself marvelling at how the response to a possible aggressor nearly four hundred years ago and the decisions taken to address have shaped the way the world is today.

I shall be sharing so many more interesting and varied facts about New Amsterdam, New York and the New World in future blogs.

My book, Manhattan Legacy, is set against a backdrop of slavery, pirates, Native Americans and the colonization of the New World by feuding European nations. It charts the lives of three different young men brought together by murder, rape, ideals and revenge.

Trading is the backbone of survival and the New World offers untold wealth, but that also brings with it greed and treachery.

Pioneering settlers sought freedom from religious persecution, European wars, poverty and social repression. A new beginning in the New World beckoned.

Pre-Wall Street this story is about the settlement of New Amsterdam and the beginnings of New York.

Read my novel Manhattan Legacy available on Lulu.com

Read reviews of Manhattan Legacy on Amazon

You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords