New Jersey - the Dutch Years Part One

For tens of thousands of years the ancestors of the Delaware natives of New Jersey lived an itinerant way of life, following migratory herds of prey, fishing in fresh rivers and along the eastern coastline, and setting up bark-sided houses that could be easily dismantled and carried to the next location. Small-scale agriculture and their nomadic way of life saw the Delaware benefit from fertile soil, plentiful wildlife and abundant vegetation.

Enter the Dutch!

Henry Hudson in 1609. He sailed for the Dutch East India Company, exploring the East Coast including Delaware, Raritan, New York Bays and the Hudson River. Then came Adriaen Block who mapped out the coastline along Delaware, New Jersey, Long Island and New England. He gave this region the name New Netherlands. Block Island, Rhode Island is named after him.

Factorij or trading posts were being established at Commipaw, Hopoghan Hackingh (Hoboken) and Arresick (Paulus Hook) from 1617 onwards.

Small outposts were sprouting up in and around the Delaware River from 1624 to cater for a burgeoning fur trade. Cornelius Jacobsen Mey, after whom Cape May is named, arrived with thirty families who were to colonise the area and establish the province of New Netherland. Walloon settlers who had arrived on Nut (Governor's) Island were sent to a fort on an island previously called Murderer's island, renamed Prince's Island in honour of Prince William of Orange and now called Burlington Island. The settlement, Fort Wilhelmus, was located in the South or Delaware River. This would see the first European settlement in New Jersey.

Across the Hudson (Noorte) River from New Amsterdam and, on the banks of Upper New York Bay, the next permanent colony was a patroonship, a large parcel of land granted by the West India Company to a Dutchman called Micheal Pauw. This was in 1630 and was bought for a ridiculous sum that I outlined in my previous blog http://tinyurl.com/of5phbl  
Micheal Pauw was a burgermeester from Amsterdam and a director of the West India Company. It was in his vanity that Pauw latinised his surname and called the settlement Pavonia. Translated, this means peacock - rather an apt word!! Bought from the Lenape, this was the territory of the Turtle Clan or Unami.

Pauw's holdings eventually included Staten Isand, Bergen Point (which included eight miles of shoreline on both Hudson and Hackensack Rivers), Bergen Neck and Paulus Hook (including a ferry). Quite a hand to hold if you'd been playing Monopoly! His downfall came when he established a plantation, worked by African slaves, but failed to fulfil the company's condition of having at least fifty permanent settlers. Pauw was required to resell his acquisitions back to the West India Company.

Part Two - Anglo-Dutch squabbling!

For more Dutch audacity:

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Psychopaths - brilliant character material.

My marriage ended after 23 years, not in the way that relationships just do: corrosive boredom, disrespect or simply growing apart. One day I had a home with my husband, my two sons and four dogs, the next I was on the street, homeless, with two sons, three dogs and no money.

At 52, and with no income, close family or savings, it was a dire situation. When the bailiff arrived to evict us, my husband took himself and his dog to live in a pretty, riverside hotel a quarter of a mile down the lane. With all my belongings scattered about in front of my home, I watched in disbelief and shock as he ambled away from his family, with money in his pocket, a long and successful career in the music industry, many famous friends and a published book. He didn't look back once.

I suffered a complete nervous breakdown in the weeks and months that followed. It was very tough, not only on me, but also on my two sons. I had to have a beloved, traumatised dog put to sleep.

Later, papers and letters I found among my husband's discarded belongings revealed a hidden world. A man who had lived a life of fantasy, lies and deceit; a man so completely devoid of caring, responsibility and empathy that he could just walk away from his wife and sons without explanation. Two years later, I was granted a divorce on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour.

So, when I create a character who is cold, uncaring, manipulative and dark, it is based on my personal experience and is the truth as I know it.

Psychopathic behaviour, as an inspiration for fictional characters, is one that could immediately conjure up images of snarling lunatics such as Hannibal Lechter and Freddie of Nightmare on Elm Street. This is not always the case. Sometimes psychopaths can appear remarkably bland and boring, but the impact of their immoral and inhuman behaviour can be just as devastating as if they had taken a knife to someone.

As odd as it sounds, I consider myself fortunate to have had up-close and personal associations with many psychopaths of differing degrees in my life and it has given me insight into human behaviour and allowed me to create what I believe to be credible characters in my book, Manhattan Legacy.

Have I ever wanted revenge? Oh, yes. Who wouldn't? I would love to expose my ex-husband, shame him and let all his adoring fans know exactly what sort of person it is that they worship.

Next time I will tell you why I haven't gone there - yet. I will tell of specific events relating to well-known artistes, of callous treatment meted out to aspiring artistes and of other psychopaths who have affected my life and my writing.

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Explorer eaten by cannibals

Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano, passed by Cape Fear, North Carolina, on his ship, La Dauphine, in March, 1524. He reported to his sponsor, King Francis 1 of France, that he had found the entrance to the Pacific Ocean, an error that would influence maps of North America for hundreds of years to come.

Continuing his voyage northwards along the coastline of New Jersey,Verrazzano observed natives, the Lenni Lenape or Delaware, living beside what he took to be a large lake, but was, in fact, the entrance to the Hudson River. He sailed along Long Island and entered Narragansett Bay where he met with a delegation of Wampanoag natives.

For charting the Atlantic coast of North America between the Carolinas and Newfoundland, including New York Harbour, a bridge was named after him; the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York.

It's such a shame then that the explorer who had mapped out the coastline of New Jersey ended up being eaten by Caribe cannibals on one of the Lower Antilles in 1528!

Purchase price of Hudson County

In 1630, three Delaware natives "sold" the land of Pavonia or Hudson County to Dutch Burgermaster Michael Pauw for:

80 fathoms (146 m) of wampum, 

20 fathoms (37 m) of cloth, 

12 kettles, 

six guns, 

two blankets

one double kettle, and half a barrel of beer. 

These transactions were dated July 12, and November 22, and represent the earliest known conveyance for the area. 

Four years earlier, in 1626, these same Delaware natives had allegedly been responsible for 'selling' Manhattan Island to Pieter Minuit for 60 guilders before moving on to Pavonia.

4 interesting facts about New Jersey

The first American brewery was opened in Hoboken in 1642.

All New Jersey counties are classified as metropolitan areas - the only state in the USA to do so.

New Jersey is home to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island*.

Highlands, New Jersey, has the highest elevation along the entire Eastern Seaboard from Florida to Maine.

* This fact is particularly interesting as I'm sure most of us in the UK think these are in New York.

New Jersey - Ancient Heritage

Research for my novel, Manhattan Legacy, was a long and involved process during which I discovered so much about the beginnings of the United States of America in the 17th century. It took me on a fascinating journey and shook up a lot of my previously ignorant notions of America.
New Jersey is one such surprise. Far from being a place of rich housewives, Italians, Jersey Shore tourists and a strong accent, this State has an ancient history as rich and as fascinating as any in the world. An incredible heritage.

During the Jurassic Period, some 180 million years ago, New Jersey abutted North Africa. The Appalachian Mountains were a result of this head-on collision. Glaciers that formed during the Ice Age retreated to give rise to numerous swamps, rivers and gorges, including Glacial Lake Passaic formed from the melting waters of the Wisconsin Glacier and Glacial Lake Hackensack.

Around 10,000 years ago, the original peoples of America were feisty Paleo-Indians, survivors of inhospitable terrain and harsh weather. The Lenni Lenape, immigrants from the Mississippi Valley, were nomadic, big-game hunters, tracking wooly mammoths, giant sloths, sabre-toothed tigers and six-foot tall beavers across the icy wastelands of New Jersey an area called Scheyichbi by the Lenape. As the climate continued to become warmer, these prehistoric animals disappeared and, in their stead, was easier prey like white-tailed deer, raccoon and bear. The Lenape fished along the shoreline of New York Harbour using nets and fish hooks to collect clams, mussels and oysters and sea fish.

The Lenape of this region gradually became known as the Delaware. Their stone tools became more efficient and, with the advent of the bow and arrow, they began to settle in places for longer, built oval, bark-shingled houses and practised small-scale agriculture. They grew squashes, beans, maize and tobacco and gathered nuts such as walnuts, chestnuts and beechnuts.

With venison, oysters, clams, corn, sweet potatoes and walnuts on the menu, their diet would be the envy of some of today's more discerning diners.

By the time the first European explorers arrived in the 16th century there were 8,000 to 20,000 Delaware living in parts of Delaware, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Life was to change dramatically for New Jersey's Delaware natives when Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed along the New Jersey coastline in 1524.

It's an extraordinary thing to realise that, far from being a 'newly-established' country, the USA is home to one of the world's oldest peoples.

The European Invasion! Read part two in my next blog.

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How I survived rape, psychopaths and gangsters and wrote my first book, Manhattan Legacy

With the list of my academic and workplace history neatly recounted under the 'About Me' heading on my Blogspot, I can now add the real story: the one that allows me to write about harrowing subjects, such as rape, murder, abuse and rejection, with authority.

Born of a schizophrenic mother, I have always been ambivalent about relationships and how much I mattered in them. I was twelve when my mother was finally carried away, restrained, quite literally, by men in white coats. There were incidents during the previous three years when I'd been drawn into her different personas – she'd fantasize about my father being dead; she'd declare, taking her hands off the steering wheel, that my deceased Grandma was driving the car; she'd leave me to be accused of stealing from a shop when Grandma hadn't turned up to pay. She had one of her worst episodes - trying to kill herself by driving into a hedge - while I was at school and I'd arrived home just as she was being taken away for 'treatment'.

My mother had never wanted me and blamed me for sentencing her to life with a man she disliked. In those days divorce was not an option. Three months later after undergoing ECT and psychotic drug treatments she returned home, a stranger to me, needing forty-two pills a day and constant monitoring.

Four years later my father moved us to London, which was wonderful, overwhelming and frightening to a naïve girl from the backwaters of Hertfordshire.

My next nightmare was at the hands of a friend of my father, Sam*, tasked to introduce me to London life. I suffered rape and humiliation at the hands of this man and his friends.

I escaped my parents' acrimonious marriage breakdown by moving in with a much older man, an alcoholic with violent moods and from a totally different background, a true East Ender, born within the sounds of Bow Bells. This was Hackney and Dalston long before they became a chic place to live, with pubs that harboured thieves and murderers, gyms that fostered the planning of crimes and council flats that held parties to celebrate successes by the likes of the Krays and the Richardsons. I was witness to a brutal gangland killing, was beaten badly myself and lived in hovels. It took me four years to return to my mother.

My next escape arrived in the form of a charming, good-looking man, well known in music industry circles, a social animal seen at every important premiere, gig and club opening. It was only when I married him and committed myself to bringing up my two sons that I discovered the back story. I lived a weird life of deceit and lies for 23 years before he finally walked out, leaving us homeless and penniless. I suffered a nervous breakdown.

Quite a life so far. But as you can see, I can talk about the disturbing world of psychopaths, mentally disturbed people and physical and mental abuse with authority. I've only skimmed over the above details – there's far, far more to come. I plan to divulge the full story of my life in future blogs.

* Not his real name

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