Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Thank You, Henry Hudson: America's Debt to the Dutch
LOWER HUDSON VALLEY
Four hundred years ago, a virgin North America stretched invitingly from ocean to ocean waiting to be explored. Its forests were so thick, one could have walked from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and beyond under a continuous green canopy of trees. Explorers--Columbus in 1492, John Cabot in 1497 and Verrazzano in 1524--had tentatively sailed the Atlantic coast, carefully observed by curious yet apprehensive native inhabitants. Adventurous cod fishermen, whose identities are lost to history but who may have been Portuguese, worked the prolific fishing grounds, called "banks," off Newfoundland. But no Europeans penetrated very deeply into the interior of the vast continent.
First Contact
On September 2, 1609, Henry Hudson, an English captain in the service of the Dutch East India Company, piloted his ship, the Dutch-built Halve Maen (Half Moon), into a broad bay and sailed northward a few miles until it narrowed to form the mouth of a mighty river. His vessel was tiny--only 65 feet in length and 17 feet in width. The crew is believed to have numbered sixteen.
Lured by its tides and brackish water, Hudson sailed 150 miles up this tempting waterway until its shallowness convinced him that he had not found the elusive Northwest Passage to the riches of the Far East. We are indebted to a journal kept by Robert Juet, a mate on the Halve Maen, for observations about the land. For example, after anchoring in the vicinity of what is now Peekskill, here is Juet's entry:
The people of the country came around and brought some small skins with them which we bought for knives and trifles. This is a very pleasant place to build a town. There is a good spot where ships may conveniently lie at anchor near the shore, and it is protected from all winds except those out of the east northeast. The mountains look as though they contain some metal or mineral, for some of them are almost barren of trees, and what few trees that do grow there are blighted. The people brought us a stone which like emery cuts iron or steel. Yet when powdered, and water added to it, made a color like glittering black lead. It is also good for painter's colors. At three o'clock they departed and we rode to anchor all night. [Note: Until comparatively recently, emery in commercial quantities was mined at two locations in the town of Cortlandt in Westchester County, N.Y.]
Henry Hudson has been badly served by history. We know almost nothing about him--except the information contained in the logs of his four memorable voyages between the years 1607 and 1611. Two years after his voyage of exploration of the river that now bears his name, he would be dead. A mutinous crew tragically cast him adrift with his young son and seven of his men on the bay named for him in the Canadian Arctic. Hudson's journals were sold at public auction in Amsterdam in 1821, and have never been seen since. Nevertheless, his glowing reports of the fertile soil, equable climate and abundance of furs and minerals in the Hudson Valley made the Dutch decide to exploit this land.
In 1617, they built Fort Orange as a fur-trading post on the present site of Albany, replacing an earlier fort on an island in the river that had been carried away by spring floods. Formed in 1621, the Dutch West India Company transported about 20 families, mostly French-speaking Walloons, to the new colony of New Netherland in 1624. They settled in a village called Beverwyck (Dutch for "beavertown"), near Fort Orange. Other Dutch settlements were begun along the river first explored by Hudson at Wiltwyck (Kingston), Kinderhoek, Kuxakee (Coxsackie), Pokeepsie, Colendonck (Yonkers), and at Schenectady on the Mohawk River.
What's in a Name?
The Dutch were practical about names, often adopting the native name for a place with only minor variations. The Mohawks had called the site of Schenectady Scheaenhechstede ("big flats"), so the Dutch merely simplified the spelling. Kuxakee ("hoot of an owl") became Coxsackie. The native's Pokeepsie ("reed-covered lodge by the little water place") later was modified only slightly to Poughkeepsie. The first substantial settlement on the island of Manhattan, called Nieuw Amsterdam, was begun in 1626, and a fort consisting of a blockhouse surrounded by a palisade of wood and sod was constructed there.
Curiously, for many years the river that would become the main artery of New Netherland went unnamed. Dutch cartographers inscribed it simply as Groote Rivier (Great River), and let it go at that. To the east was the Varsse Rivier (Fresh River, so designated because--unlike the Hudson--the tide did not penetrate very far). The English named this river the Connecticut. To the south was the Zuydt Rivier (South River), called the Delaware by the English.
Officially, the Dutch named the river Hudson discovered Mauritius, the Latinized form of the name of the Dutch prince, Maurice of Nassau; it was also called the Nassau Rivier. And from the name of the island or the native tribe, Manahatta, it was sometimes called Manhattans Rivier. Thanks to a legend of early Spanish discovery, another name found on maps of New Netherland was River of the Mountains, usually rendered in French. Eventually, to be consistent with geography and in contrast to the South River, it was called Noort Rivier by the Dutch and the North River by the English. The latter name stubbornly persists to this day.
The Dutch left us another legacy in the form of the names of topographical features. Many Dutch words for such features were much like English, so the transfer was easily done: kreek became "creek"; nek became "neck"; vlachte became "flat." Bosch, for "wood," became "bush." In parts of what was once New Netherland, a stand of maple trees is still called a "sugar bush."
Across from New Amsterdam, Breukelen (broken land), an early Dutch settlement whose name came directly from the Netherlands, metamorphosed first into Brookland and ended up as Brooklyn, perhaps ostentatiously aping the New England towns of Brookline and Lynn. On Long Island, Vlissingen, the name of a town in the old country, became Flushing; Vlachte-bosch and Midwout were transformed into Flatbush and Midwood. Greene-bosch, just outside of Albany, became Greenbush.
The Great River was the highway of commerce, and Dutch boatmen soon named every reach and point along its course. With time, hoek for "point" became "hook." The Dutch gat was sometimes translated as "hole" or "passage" and occasionally as "gate." Thus, we now say Sandy Hook and Hellgate, or gat was retained, as in Barnegat. Kill, the suffix meaning "stream," was common, as in Peekskill, Fishkill, Catskill and Cobleskill. But just as some people insist on referring to the Rio Grande River, we also find redundancies like Kill Brook (in Ossining), Bushkill Creek in Pennsylvania and the Wallkill River, a north-flowing river in Orange and Ulster counties, N.Y. In New Jersey, Achter Cul ("Back Bay") became Arthur Cul's Bay and then the totally confusing Arthur Kill.
The Dutch suffix bergh, signifying "mountain" or "hill," survives in somewhat altered form. Paradoxically, Collabergh, a hill on old maps of the area north of the Croton River has metamorphosed into "Colabaugh" as the name of a pond; Spitzenbergh, south of Blue Mountain, near Peekskill, is now redundantly called Spitzenberg Mountain. Dunderbergh, ("thunder mountain"), just south of Bear Mountain, was reputed to be the dwelling place of the Heer, described by Washington Irving as a Dutch-clad "bulbous-bottomed goblin" who touches off violent summer storms and plays pranks with the rigging of ships. This mountain's name also has lost a final letter and is now Dunderberg.
In the East River, Deutel Bogt, ("Wedge Bay," because of its shape) has become Turtle Bay. Kolck (a "pond") became "Kollick" and later "The Collect." After it was drained, the infamous Tombs prison was constructed on this site. Krom Moerasje ("little crooked swamp") was corrupted to Crommessie and eventually to the Gramercy of Gramercy Park.
The area that is now the Bronx was purchased from the Indians by the Dutch West India Company in 1639. Two years later, Jonas Bronck, a Dane, became the first white settler when he purchased 500 acres between the Harlem River and a stream that emptied into the East River, a tidal strait connected to Long Island Sound. Bronck's name was soon applied to the river boundary of his property, displacing the native name of Aquahung. It was only a short stretch before Bronck's name would be applied to the entire borough.
Many of the names of streets at the lower end of Manhattan Island betray their Dutch origins: New Street originally was Nieuw Straat; Maiden Lane was Maagde Paatge (Maidens Path); Broadway between Bowling Green and Park Row was Breedwegh. Upper Broadway was formerly the Bloomingdale Road--in Dutch days the area from 59th Street to 135th Street was called Bloemendael (vale of flowers) in remembrance of a town near Haarlem in the old country. Well into the nineteenth century, this section was still known as the Bloomingdale district.
Settled early, Yonkers was known as Colendonck, the colony of Adrian Van der Donck, the first lawyer and first historian of New Netherland. By reason of his position, he enjoyed the courtesy title of jonker, from which the city's name was derived. Farther north, Washington Irving claimed that Tarrytown was named by irate Dutch farm wives who complained that their husbands lingered too long at the village tavern after delivering their produce to the Philipse wharf. More serious historians insist that "tarry" is a corruption of tarwe, Dutch for "wheat," which became part of the name of the Tarrytowns, important shipping points for grain and agricultural products.
Despite the name, the inhabitants of the famous Pennsylvania Dutch country in eastern Pennsylvania were not Dutch; the word "Dutch" was a corruption of the word for the German language: Deutsch. Referring to someone as a "Dutchman" could mean that the person was from the Netherlands, or--more likely--from Germany.
The Dutch governed New Netherland until 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls at the head of a British fleet demanded the surrender of New Amsterdam. Autocratic old Peter Stuyvesant found himself with little support elsewhere in New Netherland and capitulated. The Dutch recaptured the colony--by then called New York--in 1673, but it was restored to the English by treaty. The terms of surrender were highly favorable to the Dutch. Land titles were confirmed, and toleration was granted to Dutch churches. Imposition of English political institutions was slow. In Albany and along the wharves in New York City the Dutch language persisted for generations.
Our Debt to Hudson and the Dutch
We owe a vast debt of gratitude to Henry Hudson for his discovery of the rich Hudson Valley and to the Dutch for many of our values and institutions. In 1579, the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands proclaimed their independence from Spain. This Union of Utrecht was the inspiration for both the American and the French Revolutions two centuries later. Taking their cue from this, in the village of Coxsackie on January 27, 1775, 225 residents--almost all with Dutch surnames--signed a "declaration of independence" calling for opposition to "the execution of several arbitrary and oppressive acts of the British Parliament." This action antedated the formal Declaration of Independence by more than a year.
Other legacies of the Dutch are our free public school system, the recognition of the legal equality of men and women, and a pervasive spirit of industriousness. So, thank you, Henry Hudson for venturing up this way. And a tip of the hat to those doughty Dutch burghers of New Netherland for their boldness, their spirit of rugged individualism and their entrepreneurial courage. We wouldn't be what we are today without them.
Four hundred years ago, a virgin North America stretched invitingly from ocean to ocean waiting to be explored. Its forests were so thick, one could have walked from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and beyond under a continuous green canopy of trees. Explorers--Columbus in 1492, John Cabot in 1497 and Verrazzano in 1524--had tentatively sailed the Atlantic coast, carefully observed by curious yet apprehensive native inhabitants. Adventurous cod fishermen, whose identities are lost to history but who may have been Portuguese, worked the prolific fishing grounds, called "banks," off Newfoundland. But no Europeans penetrated very deeply into the interior of the vast continent.
First Contact
On September 2, 1609, Henry Hudson, an English captain in the service of the Dutch East India Company, piloted his ship, the Dutch-built Halve Maen (Half Moon), into a broad bay and sailed northward a few miles until it narrowed to form the mouth of a mighty river. His vessel was tiny--only 65 feet in length and 17 feet in width. The crew is believed to have numbered sixteen.
Lured by its tides and brackish water, Hudson sailed 150 miles up this tempting waterway until its shallowness convinced him that he had not found the elusive Northwest Passage to the riches of the Far East. We are indebted to a journal kept by Robert Juet, a mate on the Halve Maen, for observations about the land. For example, after anchoring in the vicinity of what is now Peekskill, here is Juet's entry:
The people of the country came around and brought some small skins with them which we bought for knives and trifles. This is a very pleasant place to build a town. There is a good spot where ships may conveniently lie at anchor near the shore, and it is protected from all winds except those out of the east northeast. The mountains look as though they contain some metal or mineral, for some of them are almost barren of trees, and what few trees that do grow there are blighted. The people brought us a stone which like emery cuts iron or steel. Yet when powdered, and water added to it, made a color like glittering black lead. It is also good for painter's colors. At three o'clock they departed and we rode to anchor all night. [Note: Until comparatively recently, emery in commercial quantities was mined at two locations in the town of Cortlandt in Westchester County, N.Y.]
Henry Hudson has been badly served by history. We know almost nothing about him--except the information contained in the logs of his four memorable voyages between the years 1607 and 1611. Two years after his voyage of exploration of the river that now bears his name, he would be dead. A mutinous crew tragically cast him adrift with his young son and seven of his men on the bay named for him in the Canadian Arctic. Hudson's journals were sold at public auction in Amsterdam in 1821, and have never been seen since. Nevertheless, his glowing reports of the fertile soil, equable climate and abundance of furs and minerals in the Hudson Valley made the Dutch decide to exploit this land.
In 1617, they built Fort Orange as a fur-trading post on the present site of Albany, replacing an earlier fort on an island in the river that had been carried away by spring floods. Formed in 1621, the Dutch West India Company transported about 20 families, mostly French-speaking Walloons, to the new colony of New Netherland in 1624. They settled in a village called Beverwyck (Dutch for "beavertown"), near Fort Orange. Other Dutch settlements were begun along the river first explored by Hudson at Wiltwyck (Kingston), Kinderhoek, Kuxakee (Coxsackie), Pokeepsie, Colendonck (Yonkers), and at Schenectady on the Mohawk River.
What's in a Name?
The Dutch were practical about names, often adopting the native name for a place with only minor variations. The Mohawks had called the site of Schenectady Scheaenhechstede ("big flats"), so the Dutch merely simplified the spelling. Kuxakee ("hoot of an owl") became Coxsackie. The native's Pokeepsie ("reed-covered lodge by the little water place") later was modified only slightly to Poughkeepsie. The first substantial settlement on the island of Manhattan, called Nieuw Amsterdam, was begun in 1626, and a fort consisting of a blockhouse surrounded by a palisade of wood and sod was constructed there.
Curiously, for many years the river that would become the main artery of New Netherland went unnamed. Dutch cartographers inscribed it simply as Groote Rivier (Great River), and let it go at that. To the east was the Varsse Rivier (Fresh River, so designated because--unlike the Hudson--the tide did not penetrate very far). The English named this river the Connecticut. To the south was the Zuydt Rivier (South River), called the Delaware by the English.
Officially, the Dutch named the river Hudson discovered Mauritius, the Latinized form of the name of the Dutch prince, Maurice of Nassau; it was also called the Nassau Rivier. And from the name of the island or the native tribe, Manahatta, it was sometimes called Manhattans Rivier. Thanks to a legend of early Spanish discovery, another name found on maps of New Netherland was River of the Mountains, usually rendered in French. Eventually, to be consistent with geography and in contrast to the South River, it was called Noort Rivier by the Dutch and the North River by the English. The latter name stubbornly persists to this day.
The Dutch left us another legacy in the form of the names of topographical features. Many Dutch words for such features were much like English, so the transfer was easily done: kreek became "creek"; nek became "neck"; vlachte became "flat." Bosch, for "wood," became "bush." In parts of what was once New Netherland, a stand of maple trees is still called a "sugar bush."
Across from New Amsterdam, Breukelen (broken land), an early Dutch settlement whose name came directly from the Netherlands, metamorphosed first into Brookland and ended up as Brooklyn, perhaps ostentatiously aping the New England towns of Brookline and Lynn. On Long Island, Vlissingen, the name of a town in the old country, became Flushing; Vlachte-bosch and Midwout were transformed into Flatbush and Midwood. Greene-bosch, just outside of Albany, became Greenbush.
The Great River was the highway of commerce, and Dutch boatmen soon named every reach and point along its course. With time, hoek for "point" became "hook." The Dutch gat was sometimes translated as "hole" or "passage" and occasionally as "gate." Thus, we now say Sandy Hook and Hellgate, or gat was retained, as in Barnegat. Kill, the suffix meaning "stream," was common, as in Peekskill, Fishkill, Catskill and Cobleskill. But just as some people insist on referring to the Rio Grande River, we also find redundancies like Kill Brook (in Ossining), Bushkill Creek in Pennsylvania and the Wallkill River, a north-flowing river in Orange and Ulster counties, N.Y. In New Jersey, Achter Cul ("Back Bay") became Arthur Cul's Bay and then the totally confusing Arthur Kill.
The Dutch suffix bergh, signifying "mountain" or "hill," survives in somewhat altered form. Paradoxically, Collabergh, a hill on old maps of the area north of the Croton River has metamorphosed into "Colabaugh" as the name of a pond; Spitzenbergh, south of Blue Mountain, near Peekskill, is now redundantly called Spitzenberg Mountain. Dunderbergh, ("thunder mountain"), just south of Bear Mountain, was reputed to be the dwelling place of the Heer, described by Washington Irving as a Dutch-clad "bulbous-bottomed goblin" who touches off violent summer storms and plays pranks with the rigging of ships. This mountain's name also has lost a final letter and is now Dunderberg.
In the East River, Deutel Bogt, ("Wedge Bay," because of its shape) has become Turtle Bay. Kolck (a "pond") became "Kollick" and later "The Collect." After it was drained, the infamous Tombs prison was constructed on this site. Krom Moerasje ("little crooked swamp") was corrupted to Crommessie and eventually to the Gramercy of Gramercy Park.
The area that is now the Bronx was purchased from the Indians by the Dutch West India Company in 1639. Two years later, Jonas Bronck, a Dane, became the first white settler when he purchased 500 acres between the Harlem River and a stream that emptied into the East River, a tidal strait connected to Long Island Sound. Bronck's name was soon applied to the river boundary of his property, displacing the native name of Aquahung. It was only a short stretch before Bronck's name would be applied to the entire borough.
Many of the names of streets at the lower end of Manhattan Island betray their Dutch origins: New Street originally was Nieuw Straat; Maiden Lane was Maagde Paatge (Maidens Path); Broadway between Bowling Green and Park Row was Breedwegh. Upper Broadway was formerly the Bloomingdale Road--in Dutch days the area from 59th Street to 135th Street was called Bloemendael (vale of flowers) in remembrance of a town near Haarlem in the old country. Well into the nineteenth century, this section was still known as the Bloomingdale district.
Settled early, Yonkers was known as Colendonck, the colony of Adrian Van der Donck, the first lawyer and first historian of New Netherland. By reason of his position, he enjoyed the courtesy title of jonker, from which the city's name was derived. Farther north, Washington Irving claimed that Tarrytown was named by irate Dutch farm wives who complained that their husbands lingered too long at the village tavern after delivering their produce to the Philipse wharf. More serious historians insist that "tarry" is a corruption of tarwe, Dutch for "wheat," which became part of the name of the Tarrytowns, important shipping points for grain and agricultural products.
Despite the name, the inhabitants of the famous Pennsylvania Dutch country in eastern Pennsylvania were not Dutch; the word "Dutch" was a corruption of the word for the German language: Deutsch. Referring to someone as a "Dutchman" could mean that the person was from the Netherlands, or--more likely--from Germany.
The Dutch governed New Netherland until 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls at the head of a British fleet demanded the surrender of New Amsterdam. Autocratic old Peter Stuyvesant found himself with little support elsewhere in New Netherland and capitulated. The Dutch recaptured the colony--by then called New York--in 1673, but it was restored to the English by treaty. The terms of surrender were highly favorable to the Dutch. Land titles were confirmed, and toleration was granted to Dutch churches. Imposition of English political institutions was slow. In Albany and along the wharves in New York City the Dutch language persisted for generations.
Our Debt to Hudson and the Dutch
We owe a vast debt of gratitude to Henry Hudson for his discovery of the rich Hudson Valley and to the Dutch for many of our values and institutions. In 1579, the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands proclaimed their independence from Spain. This Union of Utrecht was the inspiration for both the American and the French Revolutions two centuries later. Taking their cue from this, in the village of Coxsackie on January 27, 1775, 225 residents--almost all with Dutch surnames--signed a "declaration of independence" calling for opposition to "the execution of several arbitrary and oppressive acts of the British Parliament." This action antedated the formal Declaration of Independence by more than a year.
Other legacies of the Dutch are our free public school system, the recognition of the legal equality of men and women, and a pervasive spirit of industriousness. So, thank you, Henry Hudson for venturing up this way. And a tip of the hat to those doughty Dutch burghers of New Netherland for their boldness, their spirit of rugged individualism and their entrepreneurial courage. We wouldn't be what we are today without them.
Labels: Dutch, Henry Hudson, Lower Hudson Valley
