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"The Landing of Henry Hudson,"painted by Robert Weir in 1838; shows the Half Moon , the harbinger of a new era , in the Hudson , being greeted by River Indians . New York harbor became a seaport on the strength of the Indian trade that Hudson's voyage opened.
Early Encounters on the Hudson by Kevin Haydon Entering between two wooded headlands in the autumn of 1609, Henry Hudson arrived at the same spot as Giovanni da Yerrazzano had eighty-five years earlier. Hudson was following the advice of his friend Captain John Smith of the Virginia colony, who promised him "a sea leading into the western ocean, by north of the southern English colony," when he sailed his Dutch charge, the Halve Maen (Half Moon), 140 miles upriver until the water lost its saltiness and the passage narrowed and became shallow. News of Hudson 's failure to find the Northwest Passage to the lucrative Spice Islands was a cause of chagrin to his sponsors in Amsterdam , the powerful East India Company. They wondered that he should ever have speculated on such a route, it being against his orders to attempt anything quite as far south. But others in the profit-driven commodities markets of Amsterdam were not so hasty to judge Hudson's misadventure on the Great River, as he had named it. What Hudson had found lay recorded in the surprisingly detailed and accurate journals of Robert Juet, an officer aboard Halve Maen. Juet made many notations about the Hudson River Indians. One of them described them as dressed in "Mantles of feathers, and some in skinnes of diverse sorts of good Furres," and another described their eagerness to trade. A small group of Amsterdam fur traders found these descriptions tantalizing. A trading ship was despatched for the Great River with high hopes the very next year, 1610. Shut out from the French fur trade in the new colony of Canada, the Dutch hoped to bring home the booty from the back door of the French territories. Another five ships sa iled in 1613. So began the Dutch fur trade on the Hudson River. Flowing 320 miles from its source in Lake Tear of the Clouds in the rugged Adirondacks into what is in its lower reaches a saltwater fjord , this natural trade artery gave the enterprise a SEA HISTORY 58, SUMMER 1991
sudden jump-start. It stretched out as a long arm into the heart of beaver country . Just as it had served untold generations of Indian traders beforehand, the Hudson would serve centuries of European merchants, beginning with the fur traders, drawing commodities to markets from its own shores and those of the Mohawk River and Champlain areas, and later from the shores of the Great Lakes and the Western Pennsylvania farmlands . The first Dutch foothold on American soil was modest. A small fort, called Fort Nassau, a mere fifty-eight feet square and surrounded by a moat, was erected by the trading fleet of 1613, on Castle Island, 160 miles up the Hudson near presentday Albany. Among the men of this fleet was Adriaen Block aboard the Tyjgre (Tiger). It is from Adriaen Block that an interesting addendum comes to us: one of the first recorded examples of shipbuilding in America. While Block was taking on provisions in what is now Dey Street in Lower Manhattan, the Tyjgre caught fire and burned to the waterline. With the aid oflocal Indians, he and his crew built a replacement right there. The Onrust, meaning "Restless," was a much smaller vessel, only I 6 tons, 42 feet long with an 11-foot beam. In her he explored Long Island Sound, naming an island after himself. For three years the fur traders traded from tiny Fort Nassau, far upriver, with the surrounding tribes, the Mahicans and Mohawks, before abandoning it. In 1623 the newly formed West India Company re-established the outpost as Fort Orange. The West India Company plugged into the existing trade pattern. This was the key to their early success. Although each Indian village tried to be self-sufficient, the tribes had always welcomed traders offering flints, dried fish , canoes, tobacco, furs and skins. Unlike their English neighbors, the Dutch had not so much come to make a New World, as to trade with an established one. As they fanned out from their trading centers 19