“On this river there is great traffick in the skins of beavers, otters, foxes, bears, minks, wild cats, and the like. The land is excellent and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grape vines, and nothing is wanting but the labor and industry of man to render it one of the finest and most fruitful lands in that part of the world …”

Johan de Laet, Nieuwe Werldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (New World, or Description of West-India) Leyden, 1625.

 

The geography of New York City was the city’s supreme advantage. It surpassed Philadelphia as the nation’s principal port not because of the superiority of its people, but due to the superiority of its harbor, and its unimpeded access up the Hudson River to the rich agricultural lands to the west. The city’s natural setting was a blessing occasionally mentioned in a sermon or patriotic address but there was little knowledge of geology or of the processes which had led to the formation of the seemingly solid and immovable material upon which the city’s streets and buildings were built. Nor was there much inclination to explain how or why the coastal plain upon which New York was located had emerged from the sea. Until the work of Louis Agassiz in the 1840s, there was no notion that most of the city had been covered by the great Laurentide glacier only some 20,000 years ago. Traces of the past in New York are buried, hidden, and need deciphering.

Why did the Dutch come in the first place? In the 15th century, the European trading and mercantile powers extended their economic interests over much of the globe. The hope of finding gold, the great commercial value of the sugar produced on the Cape Verde islands, and the slave trade (which provided the labor force for the sugar plantations) were powerful motives for maritime activities, particularly after the conquistador Hernando Cortes encountered the Aztec empire in Mexico in 1519. The Spanish, with skills honed on the reconquest of Spain from the Moors (Granada, the last great Moorish territory in Spain, surrendered in 1492) led the way in plunder and conquest. Merchants in northern Europe were determined to muscle their way into this lucrative trade.

After the accession of Philip II of Spain as ruler of the 17 provinces of the Netherlands in 1555, the bitter and violent revolt against Spanish rule was extended outwards into direct attacks upon Spanish economic interests throughout the world. The Union of Utrecht in 1579 formed a Dutch Republic of seven provinces. When the Spanish reconquered Antwerp six years later, Protestant refugees, Flemish and Walloon, flooded north into the province of Holland, making it the leading commercial center of resistance. Although the combined fleets of Spain and Portugal were the largest in the world, Sir Francis Drake’s raid on the Spanish settlement at St. Augustine in 1586 showed that hungry, daring men might prosper at the expense of the Spaniards.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the successful military campaigns of Maurice, stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland, in 1590-94, sharpened the enthusiasm of the Protestant powers for the task of supplanting the Spanish in the New World and the Portuguese in the East. For this purpose the Dutch East India Company was formed in 1602 with a monopoly of the valuable spice trade. Four years later the English Crown gave to the Virginia Company a charter which included virtually the whole territory of North America.

At first it was only a handful of maritime districts on the west coast of England and in the Iberian peninsula which possessed the seafaring navigational skills, shipbuilding expertise, and capital resources needed to launch extended voyages of exploration and trade. But skilled mariners like Columbus, a Genoese by birth, who provided invaluable technical skills necessary for the extension of national power and commercial interest, could be hired by trading cartels or crowned heads. By the end of the 16th century, there was a flourishing army of explorers for hire. Henry Hudson was one such. An experienced navigator and trader, he was hired in 1607 by the Muscovy Company, an English trading cartel, to discover a northern route to the spice islands and to China, a voyage which was both dangerous and slow by the traditional route around the Cape of Good Hope. Hudson sailed north from Holland and reached the island of Spitzbergen, 80° north, in 1607. A year later he tried again, but found the route blocked by frozen seas. Still fervently believing in a route to the east beyond 83° north, he was hired in 1609 by the Dutch East India Company to try the northern route again. He reached as far north as Novaya Zembla in the Barents Sea, but failed once again to discover the Northeast Passage. Rather than abandon the voyage altogether, Hudson followed the advice of another English explorer-promoter, Captain John Smith, and turned the Halve Maen (Half Moon), a vessel of 80 tons, west to Newfoundland, and then followed the southerly route along the coast. At each estuary he paused, looking for an entrance to the fabled great northern route to the east. On September 2, 1609 Hudson entered the bay formed by the “Great River of the Mountains,” “as fine a river as can be found, wide and deep, with good anchoring on both sides.”

He was not the first European to visit the waters of New York. Giovanni da Verrazano, in the employment of the King of France, sailed from Dieppe in 1524 and briefly entered the Lower and Upper Bay of the Hudson. With their voyages, the European history of New York begins.