Hudson's Voyages and Discoveries
WE have already considered the incidents attending the discovery of the Hudson River and the country on its borders between its mouth and the site of Albany, in 1609. Let us now view the more prominent events connected with the establishment of a permanent settlement there.
In the year 1602, Dutch merchants in the India trade formed an association, with a capital of more than a million dollars, under the corporate title of "The Dutch East India Company." The government of Holland gave them the exclusive privilege of trading in the Eastern Seas between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan--that is to say, over all the Indian and South Pacific Oceans between Africa and America. The enterprise was so profitable that an application was made to the government, in 1607, for the incorporation of the Dutch West India Company to trade along the coast of Africa from the tropics to the Cape of Good Hope; and from Newfoundland to Cape Horn along the continent of America. But political considerations in connection with Spain deferred the issuing of a charter for such a company for several years. Meanwhile, the East India Company employed Hudson to make the voyage, which resulted in the discovery of a region in America far more valuable than any to which a northwestern passage to India would have led.
The report that the newly-discovered region abounded with bears, beavers, otters, and other fur-bearing animals, excited the keenest cupidity of the Dutch, for they had recently tasted the pleasures of a profitable fur trade which they had opened with Northern Russia. The Half-Moon, Hudson's discovery ship, had returned in the autumn of 1609. In the following spring she was fitted out with cheap trinkets and other articles suitable for traffic with the natives, and, with a part of her old crew, sailed from the Texel in the early summer for the "River of the Mountains." She was sent by private adventurers, some of them directors of the Dutch East India Company, to trade with the savages for peltries and furs. The island of Manhattan, at the mouth of the river, was so well adapted for commercial purposes that it was made the central point, where the treasures of the forests and the streams, gathered in the interior from the Delaware to the Housatonic and northward to the Mohawk, were collected for shipment to Holland.
Among the bold navigators who came from Holland to Manhattan was Adrien Block. His vessel was the Tigress. Late in the autumn of 1613, when she was laden with bear skins and was about to depart for Amsterdam, she accidentally took fire and was burned to a useless wreck. The Indians kindly offered the shelter of wigwams to the Dutchmen, but they, regarding them too frail to keep out the winds and snows, built for themselves rude log huts where the warehouses of Beaver street now stand, and went cheerily at work to construct a new vessel. Before spring, the oaks that sheltered black bears on the wooded slopes where the "bulls" of Wall street now contend with bruins in financial warfare, were converted into a trim-built and staunch yacht of sixteen tons. They named her Onrust--"Restless"--a title that seems prophetic of that unresting activity which now marks the island of Manhattan. The little hamlet then built, and the vessel there constructed, were the fruitful seeds of the great commonwealth of New York.
Early in the spring of 1614, Block sailed from Manhattan in the Onrust through the narrow, turbulent and dangerous strait of Hell Gate into Long Island Sound. He discovered and explored the rivers now known as the Housatonic, Connecticut, and Thames; anchored in the bay at New Haven; touched at Montauk Point on the eastern end of Long Island, and landed upon a small island further eastward which Verazzani had discovered almost a century before, but which has ever since borne the name of Block, given to it by his countrymen. He then visited the shores of the main and the islands from Narragansett Bay around to Nahant beyond Boston Harbor. There he found the inhabitants numerous; for the plague, already mentioned, that swept along the coast three or four years later, had not yet appeared. They were "extremely well-looking, but timid and shy of Christians." There the Onrust fell in with the Fortune, commanded by Block's friend, Hendrick Christiansen, who was about to sail for Holland. Block left his own vessel in charge of another navigator and sailed for Amsterdam with his friend, to report to his employers.
Block's report further stimulated the commercial enterprise of Dutch merchants, and they hastened to avail themselves of an ordinance which the States-General or government of Holland had recently passed. It provided that whoever shall, from this time forward, discover any new passage, haven, lands, or places, shall have the exclusive right of navigating to the same for four voyages. The merchants concerned in Block's discoveries hastened to form an association, and took immediate steps to profit by the privileges offered by that ordinance. They employed an expert draughtsman, probably under the direction of Block, to construct a map of the newly-discovered regions, and appointed a deputation to go to the Hague, the seat of government, to obtain the special license to trade in these regions without interference.