About six miles from the renowned city of the Manhattoes, and in
that Sound, or arm of the sea, which passes between the main land
and Nassau or Long Island, there is a narrow strait, where the
current is violently compressed between shouldering promontories,
and horribly irritated and perplexed by rocks and shoals. Being
at the best of times a very violent, hasty current, its takes
these impediments in mighty dudgeon; boiling in whirlpools;
brawling and fretting in ripples and breakers; and, in short,
indulging in all kinds of wrong-headed paroxysms. At such times,
woe to any unlucky vessel that ventures within its clutches.
This termagant humor is said to prevail only at half tides. At
low water it is as pacific as any other stream. As the tide
rises, it begins to fret; at half tide it rages and roars as if
bellowing for more water; but when the tide is full it relapses
again into quiet, and for a time seems almost to sleep as soundly
as an alderman after dinner. It may be compared to an inveterate
hard drinker, who is a peaceable fellow enough when he has no
liquor at all, or when he has a skin full, but when half seas
over plays the very devil.
This mighty, blustering, bullying little strait was a place of
great Difficulty and danger to the Dutch navigators of ancient
days; hectoring their tub-built barks in a most unruly style;
whirling them about, in a manner to make any but a Dutchman
giddy, and not unfrequently stranding them upon rocks and reefs.
Whereupon out of sheer spleen they denominated it Hellegat
(literally Hell Gut) and solemnly gave it over to the devil. This
appellation has since been aptly rendered into English by the
name of Hell Gate; and into nonsense by the name of Hurl Gate,
according to certain foreign intruders who neither understood
Dutch nor English. May St. Nicholas confound them!
From this strait to the city of the Manhattoes the borders of the
Sound are greatly diversified; in one part, on the eastern shore
of the island of Manhata and opposite Blackwell’s Island, being
very much broken and indented by rocky nooks, overhung with trees
which give them a wild and romantic look.
The flux and reflux of the tide through this part of the Sound is
extremely rapid, and the navigation troublesome, by reason of the
whirling eddies and counter currents. I speak this from
experience, having been much of a navigator of these small seas
in my boyhood, and having more than once run the risk of
shipwreck and drowning in the course of divers holiday voyages,
to which in common with the Dutch urchins I was rather prone.
In the midst of this perilous strait, and hard by a group of
rocks called “the Hen and Chickens,” there lay in my boyish days
the wreck of a vessel which had been entangled in the whirlpools
and stranded during a storm. There was some wild story about this
being the wreck of a pirate, and of some bloody murder, connected
with it, which I cannot now recollect. Indeed, the desolate look
of this forlorn hulk, and the fearful place where it lay rotting,
were sufficient to awaken strange notions concerning it. A row of
timber heads, blackened by time, peered above the surface at high
water; but at low tide a considerable part of the hull was bare,
and its great ribs or timbers, partly stripped of their planks,
looked like the skeleton of some sea monster. There was also the
stump of a mast, with a few ropes and blocks swinging about and
whistling in the wind, while the sea gull wheeled and screamed
around this melancholy carcass.
The stories connected with this wreck made it an object of great
awe to my boyish fancy; but in truth the whole neighborhood was
full of fable and romance for me, abounding with traditions about
pirates, hobgoblins, and buried money. As I grew to more mature
years I made many researches after the truth of these strange
traditions; for I have always been a curious investigator of the
valuable, but obscure branches of the history of my native
province. I found infinite difficulty, however, in arriving at
any precise information. In seeking to dig up one fact it is
incredible the number of fables which I unearthed; for the whole
course of the Sound seemed in my younger days to be like the
straits of Pylorus of yore, the very region of fiction. I will
say nothing of the Devil’s Stepping Stones, by which that arch
fiend made his retreat from Connecticut to Long Island, seeing
that the subject is likely to be learnedly treated by a worthy
friend and contemporary historian[2] whom I have furnished with
particulars thereof. Neither will I say anything of the black man
in a three-cornered hat, seated in the stern of a jolly boat who
used to be seen about Hell Gate in stormy weather; and who went
by the name of the Pirate’s Spuke, or Pirate’s Ghost, because I
never could meet with any person of stanch credibility who
professed to have seen this spectrum; unless it were the widow of
Manus Conklin, the blacksmith of Frog’s Neck, but then, poor
woman, she was a little purblind, and might have been mistaken;
though they said she saw farther than other folks in the dark.
All this, however, was but little satisfactory in regard to the
tales of buried money about which I was most curious; and the
following was all that I could for a long time collect that had
anything like an air of authenticity.
[2] For a very interesting account of the Devil and his Stepping
Stones, see the learned memoir read before the New York Historical
Society since the death of Mr. Knickerbocker, by his friend, an
eminent jurist of the place.