New York’s River

He tells us of 18th-and 19th-century proto-scientists who, fascinated by the river’s beauty, explored and studied and recorded its geology, flora and fauna. It was an earlier event, however, that was to put the river on the world stage: Henry Hudson’s voyage into New York harbor on September 2, 1609. Like Columbus and others, Hudson, a Londoner, was searching for a shortcut to China and India, a northern passage. He had explored the shores of Greenland on two earlier voyages. In 1609, he took up the challenge of a prize offered by the Dutch East India Company to find a northern route to the lands of the east. Portuguese, Italian, and French sailors may have gotten to the river first, but Hudson was the first to record it. Probably thinking he was at the beginning of the northern passage, Hudson sailed north until he encountered the shoals above Albany. Hudson’s written account and others that followed described shores of fertile fields and forests.

His voyage occurred at a time when there was a large European market for beaver pelts, fur coats, hats, and felt. The French controlled the beaver-trapping trade in Canada. Dutch merchants saw an opportunity for taking over the lands south of it by using Hudson’s charts to settle the land he had found. During 1612-18 rival Dutch trading syndicates vied for dominance along the river. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was chartered to take over the fur trade and settled a small colony at Fort Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan Island. Peter Minuit, who traded $24 worth of trinkets for Manhattan in 1624, was the first (and usually considered the best) of the colony’s directors-general. Most were feckless or corrupt, or both. Four years later, the company granted a vast stretch of land upriver to a patroon named Kiliaen van Rensselaer. (Rensselaerwyck remained in the family more or less intact until the mid-19th century, when its tenant farmers rebelled and brought enough pressure to be given title to their farms.) The first Rensselaer, who never set foot in the New World, contracted with colonists to settle the land. Some brought slaves with them, the first from Curaçao and, later, arrivals from West Africa.

Lewis gives us a gripping narrative of the history of Nieuw Amsterdam, as New York City was first called, and the difficult life of planter-settlers upriver. As farms were established, there followed several years of clashes with native tribes, which finally ended in a peace agreement in 1645. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant arrived to take over as director-general. Even then, the 500-person colony on Manhattan was cosmopolitan. In addition to the Dutch, there were English, French, German, Swedish, and Polish speakers. And during Stuyvesant’s tenure he settled boundary disputes with the English (who claimed everything from Jamestown, Virginia, north) and took over, in a bloodless military expedition, the New Sweden colony that is now Delaware and part of southern New Jersey.

By the time Stuyvesant’s 17-year reign ended, the entire New Netherland colony had approximately 9,000 people. He had also driven the last of the native tribes from the Hudson Valley. It was all Dutch land–but only for a short time. In 1664 a British colonel named Richard Nicolls brought 400 soldiers on four ships into New York harbor. They outnumbered the Dutch troops three-to-one, and the defenders had little ammunition. Stuyvesant agreed to turn over the colony to the British. Thus, New Netherland and New Amsterdam became New York, and the river got its present name, the Hudson.

Over the next century, the Hudson Valley’s agricultural production increased steadily. New York City was woven into the trade patterns of the British Empire and the colony was aligned with Britain’s anti-French foreign policy. The crown continued to grant large land patents on the river’s banks to major families, such as the Livingstons, Phillipses, and van Rensselaers. Ambitious Robert Livingston married the widow of the Rensselaer patroon (she herself was a member of the prominent Schuyler family) and their descendants figured in the history of the Hudson River for the next two centuries. In recounting the role of the river in the American Revolution, Lewis covers well-known events, but relates them in a way that gives the reader the feeling of being on the banks of the Hudson, watching them unfold. George Washington’s leadership of the Continental Army, the British defeat at Saratoga, Benedict Arnold’s treachery–these and more are included.

It was in the 19th century that the Hudson was the site of a virtual explosion of American technology. Robert Fulton’s ingenuity and Robert Livingston’s money built the first steamboat. Small sloops–for years, the river’s primary carriers of people and goods–fought the intrusion, but steamboats won out and Fulton and Livingston soon had a monopoly on river transportation. In time this was broken by, among others, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who ran rival steamboat lines up and down the river and later made a great fortune in railroads. One day in 1825, Governor DeWitt Clinton and a group of dignitaries left Buffalo aboard the Seneca Chief to transit the new Erie Canal to the Hudson and New York City. The Erie opened a flood of agricultural commerce from the Great Lakes and manufactured goods from the Atlantic seaboard.

The Delaware-Hudson Canal soon followed, bringing Pennsylvania coal to New York. And after that came the railroads. The Hudson had become the “highway of commerce” for much of America.

As factories replaced farms along the river’s shores, they brought with them pollution. Industry used the river as a “sewer” (Lewis’s word), and at a time when natural resources seemed to be inexhaustible, and little was known of the side effects of industrial waste, such ignorance resulted in pollution, loss of fish, deforestation, and impure air. The 20th century brought multiple bridges across the river, along with highways and parkways, cutting into the forests and farmlands.

Tom Lewis writes nostalgically of the Eden-like scenes that captivated Thomas Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School. But he recognizes the realities of today, and rests his case on several instances of latter-day industrial clean-up, land conservation, and historic preservation. “The river’s future is its past,” he writes. Let us hope he is right.

Peter Hannaford is the editor of My Heart Goes Home: A Hudson Valley Memoir.