About five years elapsed after Hudson's discovery before a colony was
firmly fixed on Manhattan Island, which, when fairly started in 1614,
was a little palisade fort and four small log houses. The Dutch called
their possessions the Niew Netherlands, named the colony Nieu
Amsterdam, and the land across the East River was known as Nassau, the
earliest name of Long Island. Hudson was so impressed with the
Highlands and the Catskills, which he passed in exploring the river,
that he named it the "River of the Mountains," but this was changed
by the Dutch to Mauritius, in honor of Prince Maurice of Nassau. The
Indians along the banks called the river Shatemuc and Cahohatatea. The
English, shortly after the discovery, began calling it the Hudson
River, but later, it was generally styled the North River to
distinguish it from the Delaware or South River; and North River is
the name now generally used in New York. The Manhattan colony was of
slow growth, and the first Dutch Governor sent out was a Westphalian,
Peter Minuit, a thrifty old fellow, who, by again making good use of
"schnapps," bought the whole of Manhattan Island in 1626 from the
Indians for beads and trinkets valued at sixty guilders, about $25.
There were a thousand people there in 1644, making the original Dutch
aristocracy of the "Knickerbockers," this name being adapted later
from Irving, and they impressed their peculiarities upon the early
city; but their descendants have largely given place to a newer
aristocracy of wealth and an army of immigrants from all races. The
last Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived in 1647, and for
protection the colonists had then built a fence across the island
along what is now the line of Wall Street. An Indian scare a few years
later caused this to be replaced with a wall of cedar palisades, and
it ultimately developed into the city wall. Thus enclosed, the Mayor
of New Amsterdam was required to walk around the walls every morning
at sunrise, unlock the gates and give the keys to the commander of
the fort down at the Battery. When the Duke of York's English
expedition came over in 1664 and overturned the government of old
Stuyvesant, surnamed "Peter the Headstrong," and his Knickerbockers,
at the same time changing the city's name to New York, it had three
hundred and eighty-four houses, and in 1700 the population had
increased to about six thousand. The first English Governor was Sir
Edmund Andros.
The remote sources of the Hudson River are in Hamilton and Essex
Counties, in the Adirondacks, in northeastern New York State, the
highest at four thousand feet elevation above the sea, the head
streams being outlets for a large number of highland lakes. The river
flows over three hundred miles to the sea, and has few tributaries,
the largest being the Hoosac and the Mohawk. Its lower course is a
long tidal estuary, the tidal head being at Troy, from whence the fall
in level to the ocean is only about five feet. The estuary below
Manhattan Island expands into the noble New York harbor, enclosed
between Long Island on the east and Staten Island on the west, the
latter being the Indian Aquehonga, meaning the "high sandy banks." The
harbor entrance from the sea, at Sandy Hook, is eighteen miles below
the city. Inside Sandy Hook is the lower bay, of triangular form,
extending nine to twelve miles on each side, the Narrows, a deep
channel about a mile wide at the northeastern angle, opening into the
upper bay, which is an irregular oval, about eight by five miles. This
extends northward into the Hudson River, westward into Newark Bay, and
has the tidal strait of East River leading north to Long Island Sound,
on the eastern side of Manhattan. Within the bays and rivers around
New York there are over a hundred miles of available anchorage ground,
and the Government is now making a channel to the sea through Sandy
Hook bar, forty feet deep at low water.