The Island at the Center of the World Read online

  Having convinced his crew to reverse course in mid-ocean, he had two options: to follow George Weymouth's journal, which suggested a true northwest passage, navigating the islands and ice floes of what is today northern Canada; or John Smith's notes, indicating that the passage was in fact not northwest at all, but southwest, straight through the North American continent. He followed Smith. After approaching Newfoundland, he hugged the coast southward for six weeks, until he came within ten miles of the Jamestown settlement of Virginia, and his friend. Then, abruptly, he stopped. He knew perfectly well where he was, for his English first mate recorded in his journal, “This is the entrance into the Kings River in Virginia, where our English-men are.” They were at the mouth of the Chesapeake, where the Chesapeake Bay Bridge now crosses. Hudson was aware that he was sailing for a Dutch concern, and likely wouldn't have felt welcome or comfortable sailing into the English settlement. He had probably sailed here to orient himself. After swinging farther south to Cape Hatteras Island, he headed north, and on August 28 came into Delaware Bay, the first European ever to do so. No sooner had he entered the bay than the crew sighted treacherous shoals and sand bars. The captain quickly determined that this river could not be the wide, deep channel that led to Cathay.

  And so they continued north: misty mornings, bloody sunsets, a stretch of coast like a long smooth cut; surf eternally pounding the belt of sand; wild silence beyond. They were aware that they were shouldering a new world, impossibly dark, utterly unknown, of imponderable dimension, and with no clear means of access.

  And then they felt something happening. Rounding a hooked point, they were startled at what they perceived to be three rivers; cliffs rose up—the land “very pleasant and high, and bold to fall withal.” They were in the outer reaches of New York Harbor, riding along the coast of Staten Island. Fish streamed thickly around them: salmon, mullet, wraith-like rays. They anchored and went ashore, marveling at primordial oaks and “an abundance of blue plums.”

  Then, just like that, people appeared. They came at them frankly, dressed in skins, peaceable, and with an air of dignity, offering corn bread and green tobacco. In 1801 the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder interviewed a Long Island Indian and published an account of Hudson's arrival from the Indian perspective. The story, supposedly handed down through generations of Delaware Indians, gibes with the account by Hudson's mate Robert Juet of the first encounter: peaceable, wary, curious. The Indian told of sighting “a large house of various colors” floating on the water (Dutch ships were indeed vividly painted with geometric motifs). As in Juet's version, the Indian story has the first meeting taking place on land, with several of the visitors, including their leader, rowing ashore. The Indian story adds that the leader of the newcomers is dressed in a “red coat all glittering with gold lace”—a nice and by no means incongruous addition to the portrait of Hudson.

  Out came the products. Hemp, dried currants, oysters, beans. Knives, hatchets, and beads. Over the next three days, as the ship explored an intricate mesh of islands, bays, and rivers, making the rounds of Brooklyn, Staten Island, and coastal New Jersey, there would be two violent encounters with Indians, which Juet claims were initiated by the Indians. People died. It's ironic that immediately upon entering the watery perimeter of what would become New York City, these two things take place: trade and violence.

  Hudson then sailed his small, three-masted wooden vessel into the coliseum-like interior of the harbor—“a very good harbor for all windes.” From his perch on the high poop-deck, looking down on his crew, he gave the order to proceed upriver. His heart must have quickened as the vista unfolded before him. “The River is a mile broad: there is very high Land on both sides,” wrote Juet—as likely a channel into the other side of the world as one could hope for. Upriver, they encountered more natives: “a very loving people . . . and we were well taken care of.” Hudson went ashore with them, visiting their circular house made of bark. “The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon,” he wrote. He and his men noted more offerings from the locals: furs.

  Then it ended. The river grew narrow and shallow: no ship could pass through; Asia did not lie over there. They turned south again: more skirmishes with the Indians of the southern reaches of the river. It's not certain if Hudson was aware that the land they “rode quietly” past one rainy night was an island—in the first written record of the name, Juet refers to “the side of the river called Manna-hata.” In any case, while Hudson dutifully noted the possibilities for trade—the grandness of the harbor and the river, the toehold they would provide onto the continent—his own gaze never left the horizon of his obsession. He headed for home, empty-handed.

  Strangely, Hudson did not sail straight to Amsterdam but put into port at Dartmouth, in England. He may have done so to disembark some of his English crew—once again there had been loud grumbling on the voyage; once again a crew had bickered among themselves while the captain kept his head in the clouds. At any rate, an international skirmish ensued on arrival. His contractual obligation was to submit all charts, logbooks, and notes to his employers in Amsterdam, but the English authorities tried to stop him; they detained Hudson bodily and got a look at at least some of his records. International spies were still following him. “Juan Hudson,” a Spanish spy wrote to Philip III less than a month after the Halve Maen pulled into Dartmouth, “has . . . arrived here in England and did not give a full report to his employers.” Eventually, Hudson managed to pass his log to Van Meteren, who sent it, along with a report, to Amsterdam.

  The news of Hudson's river voyage passed through the sieve of Dutch political and business interests. To the sea-minded merchants on the Zandhoek and the Buitekant, Amsterdam's harborfront, monitoring the offloading of lighters packed with Spanish taffeta, German porcelain, Swedish copper, and East Indies spices while looking for the next business opportunity, hopes of a newfound passage to Asia were forgotten as they studied Van Meteren's report (published as an announcement to the world that the discovery was Dutch). There they learned of the discovery and charting of a water highway into the unexplored continent that was “as fine a river as can be found, wide and deep, with good anchoring ground on both sides.” It was a bonus that it was lightly inhabited by a “friendly and polite people.” What jumped out at them, however, were other words, sharp, money-laden nouns—“Vellen . . . Pelterijen . . . Maertens . . . Vossen . . .”—the report making a frank promise of “many skins and peltries, martins, foxes, and many other commodities.”

  And so the story comes back to the founding, half a century earlier, of the English fur trade with Russia. It had dwindled in part because the Russian slaughter had outstripped the beavers' sexual abilities. North America held a fresh, seemingly limitless supply. For some time, Dutch traders had tried unsuccessfully to insinuate themselves into the French fur trade farther north in Canada. That would no longer be necessary: they had their own foothold on the continent. The Dutch staked their claim to the territory Hudson had sailed and which the subsequent explorer Adriaen Block would chart—a swath encompassing three river systems, which would eventually become the Delaware, the Hudson, and the Connecticut, occupying a position on the eastern seaboard of North America to the north of the English territory that Walter Raleigh had named in honor of his virgin queen—and promptly forgot about the mariner himself.

  Which was fine because, after his prodigal return, the English wanted Hudson back. He kept his eyes on his prize, now tacking away from the epicenter of history. His obsession was unyielding, making him, finally, a man of the past: of the Renaissance dream of a voyage to far Cathay. He conned three fantastically wealthy young aristocrats into believing in the imminence of his discovery. Having ruled out John Smith's route, he now laid everything on Weymouth's indication of a passage to the icy north, through what was known as “the Furious Overfall” (the channel into Hudson Bay, now called Hudson Strait). The three funded him forthwith, he raised a crew and set off, without skip
ping a beat, the following spring. His calculations and his hunch pointed to it as inevitable: the passage had to be there.*1 He wouldn't take no for an answer. The world would have to kill him to stop him.

  Which is what happened. Hudson hadn't reckoned that his crew might not share his conviction and would do whatever necessary to save themselves. His arrogance was so supreme that he didn't see his end coming. Even as he was being lowered from the deck of his ship into the shallop, hands bound behind his back, dressed in “a motley gown” as one of the mutineers would later testify (for they took him at daybreak, as he stepped out of his cabin), he remained clueless. “What do you mean by this?” he asked in bewilderment, as they bound him and told him that he would soon find out. He had egged and cajoled and lashed the twenty-two men onward, month upon month, as they fought a losing battle against the pack ice, as the shrouds and sails froze above them, as the food ran out and the sightings of bears and seals out on the white strip of the horizon stopped, as they were reduced to clambering ashore and scavenging moss for sustenance. First their gums bled, then their teeth loosened. Toe by toe, frostbite ate its way into their flesh, so that many could no longer stand, their pallets crowding every available space on board. Finally, they could take it no more.

  Besides him, the small party loaded into the shallop comprised the most desperately sick and those that had remained loyal to him, including his son John, still a boy. At some point after they were set adrift—after the ship had moved away from them into open water, her topsails fattening in a fresh wind; after he had watched her hull evaporate into the white hoar of early morning, leaving their small vessel to the elements, without food, water, or source of fire, and three hundred thousand square miles of ice-choked sea around them—his iron will must have finally caved in. And he would have been left, then, before the cold ate its way into his blood and heart, to endure what must be any man's twin nightmares: watching his innocent child suffer and die because of his own folly, and contemplating the utter destruction of his life's ambition. At some point before his mind closed down, he would have acknowledged that his dream of discovery was to die here, as he would die.

  The irony of his end came when the surviving mutineers limped back to London, stood trial for mutiny and murder, and then were exonerated based on their outrageous but ingenious claim that, in fact, Hudson had found the northwest passage, and that they knew where it was. Rather than being hanged, then, the survivors found themselves inaugurated by King James, along with some of the most prominent men in London, as members of a new company, the “Company of the Merchants Discoverers of the North-West Passage,” with a charter to proceed through their newfound strait to commence trade “to the great kingdoms of Tartaria, China, Japan, Solomons Islands, Chili, the Philippins and other countrys . . .”

  The wave of history, which Hudson had ridden so effortlessly for a short while, rapidly engulfed him. He was destined to serve as a pollinator, to bring the spores of a culture not his own to new soil. Even before he froze to death in the southern reaches of what became Hudson Bay, on the Amsterdam waterfront a young man named Arnout Vogels was in a whirl of activity. Vogels, a thirty-year-old of adventure and drive, had been born in Antwerp to the south, and was one of those who fled troubles elsewhere in Europe to the safe haven of Amsterdam, in his case after Spanish forces invaded his hometown in 1585. He threw himself into business with the zest of one who has grown up amid war and knows how short life can be. He apprenticed in the fur business in the service of a trading company, but longed to strike out on his own. When the report of Hudson's discoveries spread through the dockside offices of Amsterdam's traders, Vogels moved fast. On July 26, 1610, as Hudson was making his way through the massive icy bay where he would meet his end, Vogels shook hands with Captain Sijmen Lambertsz Mau on a deal to trade in the new, virgin territory. The destination was vague still to most European minds, and so on the contract it was stated rather broadly: “West Indies, and nearby lands and places.” The term “West Indies” was still being applied to all American regions.

  Overnight, times had changed. The idea of a shortcut to Asia, once the height of fashion, suddenly seemed antique and retro to men of Vogels's generation. The future was nearer: just across the Atlantic. The Englishman Hudson had scouted it for enterprising Dutchmen to follow. There was no concern at this date of a competing claim from England: the English had established a shaky beachhead at Virginia, but their New England settlements were still years in the future. Hudson's venture on behalf of the Dutch predated the Pilgrims' landing by more than a decade. So the field was clear, and the refrains must have repeated in the minds of the Dutch traders: “skins and peltries, martins, foxes,” “a very good harbor for all windes.” And they had an image to summon in their minds as a goal, a key, a way into the heart of a virgin continent: “as fine a river as can be found . . . a mile broad”—a glistening highway to pure possibility.

  Chapter 3

  THE ISLAND

  Catalina Trico, a French-speaking teenager. Joris Rapalje, a Flemish textile worker. Bastiaen Krol, a lay minister from the farming province of Friesland. By tens and twenties they came in the years 1624 and 1625, pitching on the inhuman waves in yachts, galiots, ketches, pinks, and pinnaces, well-crafted but still frightfully vulnerable wooden vessels, banging around in the narrow and rheumatic below-decks, with pigs rooting and sheep bleating hollowly at every slamming swell, with the animal reek and their own odors of sickness and sour filth, each clutching his or her satchel of elixirs to ward off the plague, the devil, shipwreck, and “the bloody flux.” The very names of their ships—Fortune, Abraham's Sacrifice—signaled the two poles of hope and fear that governed them.

  Three months it took to follow Hudson, four if the winds failed. From Amsterdam the ships made their way across the wide inland sea called the IJ, with its treacherous shoals, to the windswept island of Texel, and then set off into the white hoar of the North Sea. They gave the Portuguese coast a wide berth and skirted the Canary Islands off North Africa, their captains with skill and luck avoiding predatory privateers and pirates (or not: some ships were taken by both). Then, riding the trades, they beat a long, forbidding arc southwest across the blue-gray wilderness of the Atlantic, swinging upward again north of the Bahamas and along the coast of the new land, the new world, keeping a sharp eye for the hooked peninsula that Hudson noted, and so into the enveloping embrace of the great harbor.

  There still lingered, fifteen years after Hudson's trip, and ten years after Shakespeare penned The Tempest based on accounts of a voyage to America shipwrecked on a supposedly bewitched isle (Bermuda), the notion that this might be the gateway to the riches of the sultry, pagan, exotically civilized East. It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years' time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs. But these were not explorers but settlers, and their immediate focus was here: the river, this new home. In the decade and a half since Hudson's find, scouts and traders had made good contacts with the Indians of what the Dutch were now calling the River Mauritius, after Maurits of Nassau, son of the assassinated hero William the Silent and now leader of the rebellion against Spain (though another name had already sprung up: as early as 1614, fur traders were paying homage to their forerunner by referring to “de rivière Hudson”). In their lean and silent canoes the “River Indians” (as the traders called them: they were variously of the Mahican and Lenni Lenape tribes) came to them from the north, the east, the west, from far out in the unknown vastness, bringing excellent furs in remarkable quantities. There was indeed business to be had, the traders reported. And so a consortium of smaller interests was formed to exploit it in a systematic way.

  The truce negotiated between Spain and the Dutch Republic during the year of Hudson's voyage was to last for twelve years. It ended promptly in 1621, and immediately the spear-rattling began among Dutch right-winger
s. A patriot-businessman named Willem Usselincx, a birdlike man roiling with religious zeal, had for years championed the idea of Dutch provinces in the New World that would be driven by both commerce and Calvinist fire. “It is obvious,” Usselincx argued in the series of meetings that led to the establishment of the West India Company, “that if one wants to get money, something has to be proposed to the people which will move them to invest. To this end the glory of God will help with some, harm to Spain with others, with some the welfare of the Fatherland; but the principal and most powerful inducement will be the profit that each can make for himself. . . .” The new lands, he stressed, were inhabited not by wild-eyed savages, but by intelligent natives among whom the Dutch could plant a colony. There were natural products there to be exploited, maybe gold and silver, as well as raw materials “which are the sinews of war.”

  The renewal of war with Spain fit in with this scheme: Dutch frigates of a privately owned company could be equipped with guns and carry out raids on Spanish ships in Caribbean and South American waters while also conducting trade in New World ports. Privateering—government-authorized piracy on enemy ships—was an accepted wartime activity.