before. It was greater even, than its outward seeming, for it contained
within itself the forces which should control the future. This country
is made up of many elements, and has been molded to no small extent by
circumstances hardly to be foreseen; but it seems incontestable that it
would never have endured, and continued to be the goal of all pilgrims
who wish to escape from a restricted to a freer life, had not its
corner-stone been laid, and its outline fixed, by these first colonists
of New England. It has been calculated that in two hundred years the
physical increase of each Puritan family was one thousand persons,
dispersed over the territory of the United States; and the moral
influence which this posterity exerted on the various communities in
which they fixed their abode is beyond computation. But had the Puritan
fathers been as ordinary men: had they come hither for ends of gain and
aggrandizement: had they not been united by the most inviolable ties
that can bind men--community in religious faith, brotherhood in
persecution for conscience' sake, and an intense, inflexible enthusiasm
for liberty--their descendants would have had no spiritual inheritance
to disseminate. Many superficial changes have come upon our society;
there is an absence of a fixed national type; there are many thousands
of illiterate persons among us, and of those who are still ignorant of
the true nature of democratic institutions; all the tongues of Europe
and of other parts of the world may be heard within our boundaries;
there are great bodies of our citizens who selfishly pursue ends of
private enrichment and power, indifferent to the patent fact that
multitudes of their fellows are thereby obstructed in the effort to
earn a livelihood in this most productive country in the world; there
are many who have prostituted the name of statesmanship to the
gratification of petty and transient ambitions: and many more who,
relieved by the thrift of their ancestors from the necessity to win
their bread, have renounced all concern in the welfare of the state,
and live trivial and empty lives: all this, and more, may be conceded.
But such evil humors, be it repeated, are superficial, attesting the
vigor, rather than the decay, of the central vitality. America still
stands for an idea; there is in it an immortal soul. It was by the
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay that this soul was implanted; to inspire
it was their work. They experienced the realities, they touched the
core of things, us few men have ever done; for they were born in an age
when the world was awakening from the spiritual slumber of more than
fifteen hundred years, and upon its bewildered eyes was breaking the
splendor of a great new light. The Puritans were the immediate heirs of
the Reformation (so called; it might more truly have been named the New
Incarnation, since the outward modifications of visible form were but
the symptoms of a freshly-communicated informing intelligence). It
transfigured them; from men sunk in the gross and sensual thoughts and
aims of an irreligious and priest-ridden age--an age which ate and
drank and slept and fought, and kissed the feet of popes, and maundered
of the divine right of kings--from this sluggish degradation it roused
and transfigured the Englishmen who came to be known as Puritans. It
was a transfiguration, though its subjects were the uncouth, almost
grotesque figures which chronicle and tradition have made familiar to
us. For a people who were what the Puritans were before Puritanism,
cannot be changed by the Holy Ghost into angels of light; their
stubborn carnality will not evaporate like a mist; it clings to them,
and being now so discordant with the impulse within, an awkwardness and
uncouthness result, which suggest some strange hybrid: to the eye and
ear, they are unlovelier and harsher than they were before their
illumination; but Providence regards not looks; it knew what it was
about when it chose these men of bone and sinew to carry out its
purposes. Once enlisted, they never could be quelled, or seduced, or
deceived, or wearied; they were in fatal earnest, and faithful unto
death, for they believed that God was their Captain. They had got a
soul; they put it into their work, and it is in that work even to this
day.
It does not manifestly appear to our contemporary vision; it is
overloaded with the rubbish of things, as a Greek statue is covered
with the careless debris of ages; but, as the art of the sculptor is
vindicated when the debris has been removed, so will the fair
proportions of the State conceived by the Puritans, and nourished and
defended by their sons, declare themselves when in the maturity of our
growth we have assimilated what is good in our accretions, and
disencumbered ourselves of what is vain. It is the American principle,
and it will not down; it is a solvent of all foreign substances; in its
own way and time it dissipates all things that are not harmonious with
itself. No lesser or feebler principle would have survived the tests to
which this has been subjected; but this is indestructible; even we
could not destroy it if we would, for it is no inalienable possession
of our own, but a gift from on High to the whole of mankind. But let us
piously and proudly remember that it was through the Puritans that the
gift was made. Other nations than the English have contributed to our
substance and prosperity, and have yielded their best blood to flow in
our veins. They are dear to us as ourselves, as how should they not be,
since what, other than ourselves, are they? None the less is it true
that what was worthiest and most unselfish in the impulse that drove
them hither was a reflection of the same impulse that actuated the
Puritans when America was not the most powerful of republics, but a
wilderness. None of us all can escape from their greatness--from the
debt we owe them: not because they were Englishmen, not because they
made New England; but because they were men, inspired of God to make
the earth free that was in bondage.
CHAPTER FOURTH
FROM HUDSON TO STUYVESANT
There are two scenes in the career of Henry Hudson which can never be
forgotten by Americans. One is in the first week in September, 1609. A
little vessel, of eighty tons, is lying on the smooth waters of a large
harbor. She has the mounded stern and bluff bows of the ships of that
day; one of her masts has evidently been lately stepped; the North
American pine of which it is made shows the marks of the
ship-carpenter's ax, and the whiteness of the fresh wood. The square
sails have been rent, and mended with seams and patches; the sides and
bulwarks of the vessel have been buffeted by heavy seas off the
Newfoundland coast; the paint and varnish which shone on them as she
dropped down the reaches of the Zuyder Zee from Amsterdam, five months
ago, have become whitened with salt and dulled by fog and sun and
driving spray. Across her stern, above the rudder of massive oaken
plank clamped with iron, is painted the name "HALF MOON," in straggling
letters. On her poop stands Henry Hudson, leaning against the tiller;
beside him is a young man, his son; along the bulwark lounge the crew,
half Englishmen, half Dutch; broad-beamed, salted tars, with pigtails
and rugged visages, who are at home in Arctic fields and in Equatorial
suns, and who now stare out toward the low shores to the north and
west, and converse among themselves in the nameless jargon--the rude
compromise between guttural Dutch, and husky English--which has served
them as a medium of communication during the long voyage. It is a good
harbor, they think, and a likely country. They are impatient for the
skipper to let them go ashore, and find out what grows in the woods.
Meanwhile the great navigator, supporting himself, with folded arms,
against the creaking tiller, absorbs the scene through his deep-set
eyes in silence. Many a haven had he visited in his time; he had been
within ten degrees of the North Pole; he had seen the cliffs of
Spitzbergen loom through the fog, and had heard the sound of Greenland
glaciers breaking into vast icebergs where they overhung the sea; he
had lain in the thronged ports of the Netherlands, where the masts
cluster like naked forests, and the commerce of the world seethes and
murmurs continually; he had dropped anchor in quiet English harbors,
under cool gray skies, with undulating English hills in the distance,
and prosperous wharfs and busy streets in front. He had sweltered, no
doubt, beneath the heights of Hong-Kong, amid a city of swarming junks;
and further south had smelled the breeze that blows through the straits
of the Spice Islands. He knew the surface of the earth, as a farmer
knows his farm; but never, he thought, had he beheld a softer and more
inviting prospect than this which spread before him now, mellowed by
the haze of the mild September morning.
On all sides the shores were wooded to the water's edge: a giant
forest, unbroken, dense and tall, flourishing from its own immemorial
decay, matted with wild grape vine, choked with brush, wild as when the
Creator made it; untouched, since then. It was as remote--as lost to
mankind--as it was beautiful. The hum and turmoil of the civilized
world was like the memory of a dream in this tranquil region, where
untrammeled nature had worked her teeming will for centuries upon
silent centuries. Here were such peace and stillness that the cry of
the blue jay seemed audacious; the dive of a gull into the smooth water
was a startling event. To the imaginative mind of Hudson this spot
seemed to have been set apart by Providence, hidden away behind the
sandy reaches of the outer coast, so that irreverent man, who turns all
things to gain, might never discover and profane its august solitudes.
Here the search for wealth was never to penetrate; the only gold was in
the tender sunshine, and in the foliage of here and there a giant tree,
which the distant approach of winter was lulling into golden slumber.
But then, with a sigh, he reflected that all the earth was man's, and
the fullness thereof; and that here too, perhaps, would one day appear
clearings in the primeval forest, and other vessels would ride at
anchor, and huts would peep out from beneath the overshadowing foliage
on the shores. But it was hard to conjure up such a picture; it was
difficult to imagine so untamed a wilderness subdued, in ever so small
a degree, by the hand of industry and commerce.
Northwestward, across the green miles of whispering leaves, the land
appeared to rise in long, level bluffs, still thronged with serried
trees; a great arm of the sea, a mile or two in breadth, extended east
of north, and thither, the mariner dreamed, might lie the long-sought
pathway to the Indies. A tongue of land, broadening as it receded, and
swelling in low undulations, divided this wide strait from a narrower
one more to the east. All was forest; and eastward still was more
forest, stretching seaward. Southward, the land was low--almost as low
and flat as the Netherlands themselves; an unexplored immensity, whose
fertile soil had for countless ages been hidden from the sun by the
impervious shelter of interlacing boughs. No--never had Hudson seen a
land of such enduring charm and measureless promise as this: and here,
in this citadel of loneliness, which no white man's foot had ever trod,
which, till then, only the eyes of the corsair Verrazano had seen, near
a century before--here was to arise, like Aladdin's Palace, the
metropolis of the western world; enormous, roaring, hurrying,
trafficking, grasping, swarming with its millions upon millions of
striving, sleepless, dauntless, exulting, despairing, aspiring human
souls; the home of unbridled luxury, of abysmal poverty, of gigantic
industries, of insolent idleness, of genius, of learning, of happiness
and of misery; of far-reaching enterprise, of political glory and
shame, of science and art; here human life was to reach its intensest,
most breathless, relentless and insatiable expression; here was to
stand a city whose arms should reach westward over a continent, and
eastward round the world; here were to thunder the streets and tower
the buildings and reek the chimneys and arch the bridges and rumble the
railways and throb the electric wires of American New York, the supreme
product of Nineteenth Century civilization, radiant with the virtues
and grimy with the failings that mankind has up to this time developed.
On the 23d of June, two years later, Henry Hudson was the central
figure in another scene. He sat in a small, open boat, hoary with
frozen spray; he was muffled in the shaggy hide of a white bear,
roughly fashioned into a coat; a sailor's oilskin hat was drawn down
over his brow, and beneath its rim his eyes gazed sternly out over a
wide turbulence of gray waters, tossing with masses of broken ice. His
dark beard was grizzled with frost; his cheeks were gaunt with the
privations of a long, arctic winter spent amid endless snows, in
darkness unrelieved, smitten by storms, struggling with savage beasts
and harried by more inhuman men. He sat with his hand at the helm;
against his other shoulder leaned his son, his inseparable companion,
now sinking into unconsciousness; the six rowers--the stanch comrades
who, with him, had been thrust forth to perish by the mutineers--plied
their work heavily and hopelessly; their rigid jaws were set; no words
nor complaints broke from them, though was slowly settling round their
valiant hearts. Overhead brooded a somber vault of clouds; the circle
of the horizon, which seemed to creep in upon them, was one unbroken
sweep of icy dreariness, save where, to the southeast, the dark hull of
the "Discovery," and her pallid sails, rocked and leaned across the
sullen heave of the waters. She was bound for Europe; but whither is
Hudson bound?
His end befitted his life; he vanished into the unknown, as he had come
from it. There is no record of the time or place of his birth, or of
his early career, nor can any tell where lie his bones; we only know
that his limbs were made in England, and that the great inland sea,
called after him, ebbs and flows above his grave. He first comes into
the ken of history, sailing on the seas, resolute to discover virgin
straits and shores; and when we see him last, he is still toiling
onward over the waves, peering into the great mystery. Possibly, as has
been suggested, he may have been the descendant of the Hudson who was
one of the founders of the Muscovy Company, in whose service the famous
navigator afterward voyaged on various errands. It matters not; he
lived, and did his work, and is no more; his strong heart burned within
him; he saw what none had seen; he triumphed, and he was overcome. But
the doubt that shrouds his end has given him to legend, and the thunder
that rolls brokenly among the dark crags and ravines of the Catskills
brings his name to the hearer's lips.
The Dutch had had many opportunities offered to them to discover New
York, before they accepted the services of Henry Hudson, who was
willing to go out of his own country to find backers, so only that he
might be afloat. Almost every year, from 1581 onward, the mariners of
the Netherlands strove, by east and by west, to pass the barrier that
America interposed between them and the Eastern trade they coveted. The
Dutch East India Company was the first trading corporation of Europe;
and after the war with Spain, during the twelve years' truce, the
little country was overflowing with men eager to undertake any
enterprise, and with money to fit them out. The Netherlands suddenly
bloomed out the most prosperous country in the world.
They would not be hurried; they took their time to think it over, as
Dutchmen will; but at length they conceived an immense project for
acquiring all the trade, or the best part of it, of both the West and
the East. They studied the subject with the patient particularity of
their race; they outclassed Spain on the seas, and they believed they
could starve out her commerce. Some there were, however, who feared
that in finding new countries they would lose their own; Europe was
again in a turmoil, and they were again fighting Spain before New
Amsterdam was founded. But meanwhile, in 1609, quite inadvertently,
Henry Hudson discovered it for them at a moment when they supposed him
to be battling with freezing billows somewhere north of Siberia. When
he was stopped by Nova Zembla ice, he put about and crossed the
Atlantic to Nova Scotia, and so down the coast, as we have seen, to the
Chesapeake, the Delaware, and finally the Hudson. He told his tale in
glowing words when he got back; but the Dutch merchants perhaps fancied
he was spinning sailors' yarns, and heeded not his report till long
after.
Hudson, after passing the Narrows, anchored near the Jersey shore, and
received a visit from some Indians with native commodities to exchange
for knives and beads. They presented the usual Indian aspect as
regarded dress and arms; but they wore ornaments of red copper under
their feather mantles, and carried pipes of copper and clay. They were
affable, but untrustworthy, stealing what they could lay their hands
on, and a few days later shooting arrows at a boatload of seamen from
the ship, and killing one John Colman. Hudson went ashore, and was
honored with dances and chants; upon the whole, the impression mutually
created seems to have been favorable. An abundance of beans and oysters
was supplied to the crew; and no doubt trade was carried on to the
latter's advantage; we know that years afterward the whole of Manhattan
Island was purchased of its owners for four-and-twenty dollars. The
present inhabitants of New York City could not be so easily overreached.
Hudson now began the first trip ever made by white men up the great
river. How many millions have made it since! But he, at this gentlest
time of year, won with the magic not only of what he saw, but of the
unknown that lay before him--what must have been his sensations! As
reach after reach of the incomparable panorama spread itself out
quietly before him, with its beauty of color, its majesty of form, its
broad gleam of placid current, the sheer lift of its brown cliffs, its
mighty headlands setting their titanic shoulders across his path, its
toppling pinnacles assuming the likeness of giant visages, its swampy
meadows and inlets, lovely with flowers and waving with rushes, its
royal eagles stemming the pure air aloft, its fish leaping in the
ripples--and then, as he sailed on, mute with enchantment, the blue
magnificence of the mountains soaring heavenward and melting into the
clouds that hung about their summits--as all this multifarious beauty
unfolded itself, Hudson may well have thought that the lost Eden of the
earth was found at last. And ere long, he dreamed, the vast walls
through which the river moved would diverge and cease, like another
Pillars of Hercules, and his ship would emerge into another ocean. It
was verily a voyage to be remembered; and perhaps it returned in a
vision to his dimming eyes, that day he steered his open boat through
the arctic surges of Hudson's Bay.
For ten days or more he pressed onward before a southerly breeze,
until, in the neighborhood of what now is Albany, it became evident
that the Pacific was not to be found in northern New York. He turned,
therefore, and drifted slowly downward with the steady current, while
the matchless lines of the American autumn glowed every day more
sumptuously from the far-billowing woods. What sunrises and what
sunsets dyed the waters with liquid splendor: what moons, let us hope,
turned the glories of day into the spiritual mysteries of fairyland!
Hudson was not born for repose; his fate was to sail unrestingly till
he died; but as he passed down through this serene carnival of opulent
nature, he may well have wished that here, after all voyages were done,
his lot might finally be cast; he may well have wondered whether any
race would be born so great and noble as to merit the gift of such a
river and such a land.
He landed at various places on the way, and was always civilly and
hospitably welcomed by the red men, who brought him their wild
abundance, and took in return what he chose to give. The marvelous
richness of the vegetation, and the vegetable decay of ages, had
rendered the margins of the stream as deadly as they were lovely; fever
lurked in every glade and bower, and serpents whose bite was death
basked in the sun or crept among the rocks. All was as it had always
been; the red men, living in the midst of nature, were a part of nature
themselves; nothing was changed by their presence; they altered not the
flutter of a leaf or the posture of a stone, but stole in and out
noiseless and lithe, and left behind them no trace of their passage. It
is not so with the white man: before him, nature flies and perishes; he
clothes the earth in the thoughts of his own mind, cast in forms of
matter, and contemplates them with pride; but when he dies, another
comes, and refashions the materials to suit himself. So one follows
another, and nothing endures that man has made; for this is his
destiny. And at length, when the last man has dressed out his dolls and
built his little edifice of stones and sticks, and is gone: nature, who
was not dead, but sleeping, awakes, and resumes her ancient throne, and
her eternal works declare themselves once more; and she dissolves the
bones in the grave, and the grave itself vanishes, with its record of
what man had been. What says our poet?--
"How am I theirs,
When they hold not me,
But I hold them?"
In 1613, or thereabout, Christianson and Block visited the harbor and
got furs, and also a couple of Indian boys to show the burghers of
Amsterdam, since they could not fetch the great river to Holland. In
1614 they went again with five ships--the "Fortune of Amsterdam," the
"Fortune of Hoorn," and the "Tiger of Amsterdam" (which was burned),
and two others. Block built himself a boat of sixteen tons, and
explored the Sound, and the New England coast as far as Massachusetts
Bay; touched at the island known by his name, and forgathered with the
Indian tribes all along his route. The explorers were granted a charter
in the same year, giving them a three years' monopoly of the trade, and
in this charter the title New Netherland is bestowed upon the region.
The Dutch were at last bestirring themselves. Two years after, Schouten
of Hoorn saw the southernmost point of Tierra del Fuego, and gave it
the name of his home port as he swept by; and three other Netherlanders
penetrated to the wilds of Philadelphia that was to be. A fortified
trading post was built at Albany, where now legislation instead of
peltries is the subject of barter. At this juncture internal quarrels
in the Dutch government led to tragic events, which stimulated plans of
western colonization, and the desire to start a commonwealth on Hudson
River to forestall the English--for the latter as well as the Dutch and
Spanish claimed everything in sight. The Dutch East India Company began
business in 1621 with a twenty-four year charter, renewable. It was
given power to create an independent nation; the world was invited to
buy its stock, and the States-General invested a million guilders in
it. Its field was the entire west coast of Africa, and the east coast
of North and South America. Such schemes are of planetary magnificence;
but of all this realm, the Dutch now hold the little garden patch of
Dutch Guiana only, and the pleasant records of their sojourn on
Manhattan Island between the years 1623 and 1664.
Indeed, the Dutch episode in our history is in all respects refreshing
and agreeable; the burghers set us an example of thrift and steadiness
too good for us to follow it; and they deeded to us some of our best
citizens, and most engaging architectural traditions. But it is not
after all for these and other material benefits that we are indebted to
them; we thank them still more for being what they were (and could not
help being): for their character, their temperament, their costume,
their habits, their breadth of beam, their length of pipes, the
deliberation of their courtships, the hardness of their bargains, the
portentousness of their tea-parties, the industrious decorum of their
women, the dignity of their patroons, the strictness of their social
conduct, the soundness of their education, the stoutness of their
independence, the excellence of their good sense, the simplicity of
their prudence, and above all, for the wooden leg of Peter Stuyvesant.
In a word, the humorous perception of the American people has made a
pet of the Dutch tradition in New York and Pennsylvania; as, likewise,
of the childlike comicalities of the plantation negro; the arch
waggishness of the Irish emigrants, and the cherubic shrewdness of the
newly-acquired German. The Dutch gained much, on the sentimental score,
by transplantation; their old-world flavor and rich coloring are
admirably relieved against the background of unbaked wilderness. We
could not like them so much or laugh at them at all, did we not so
thoroughly respect them; the men of New Amsterdam were worthy of their
national history, which recounts as stirring a struggle as was ever
made by the love of liberty against the foul lust of oppression. The
Dutch are not funny anywhere but in Seventeenth Century Manhattan; nor
can this singularity be explained by saying that Washington Irving made
them so. It inheres in the situation; and the delightful chronicles of
Diedrich Knickerbocker owe half their enduring fascination to their
sterling veracity--the veracity which is faithful to the spirit and
gambols only with the letter. The humor of that work lies in its
sympathetic and creative insight quite as much as in the broad
good-humor and imaginative whimsicality with which the author handles
his theme. The caricature of a true artist gives a better likeness than
any photograph.
The first ship containing families of colonists went out early in 1623,
under the command of Cornelis May; he broke ground on Manhattan, while
Joris built Fort Orange at Albany, and a little group of settlers
squatted round it. May acted as director for the first year or two; the
trade in furs was prosecuted, and the first Dutch-American baby was
born at Fort Orange.