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 26^th 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!

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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 16^th, 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 16^th, 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.


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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.


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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.

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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!

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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

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You can buy Manhattan Legacy in various ebook formats on Smashwords