The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth
Published: New York, Farrar & Rhinehart, 1939

CHAPTER 3

"A Pleasant Land to See"

Giovanni da Verrazano—1524
On a July day of the year 1524 in the little French seaport of Dieppe, Giovanni da Verrazano, Florentine explorer, penned a letter to his employer, "his most serene and Christian Majesty" Francis I of France.

"We found a pleasant place below steep little hills," be wrote. "And from among those hills a mighty deep mouthed river ran into the sea. . . . We rode at anchor in a spot well guarded from the wind, and we passed into the river with the Dauphin’s one small boat."

The next few sentences told the rest of the simple incident. These men who had left Captain da Verrazano’s vessel, the Dauphin, had sailed half a league into the land--where the river made a pleasant lake about three leagues in compass--and there had heard a friendly shouting and had seen, rushing down the wooded banks, many people "clad in the feathers of fouls of divers hues." Some of the crowd had launched small craft, mottling the sunny surface with bright colors as feather mantled oarsmen rowed frantically toward the arriving boat. Then on a sudden ("as is wont to fall out in sailing") the foreigners felt upon their faces a contrary flaw of wind and to their great discontent they were forced to put about and retrace their course. Once aboard the Dauphin they had weighed anchor, spread sail, and dipping steadily eastward had vanished from the sight of the disappointed natives. Da Verrazano had come to the mouth of a river that would one day bear the name of an explorer yet unborn and had sailed away.

Henry Hudson's 3rd Voyage—1609
Eighty-five years and a few days after da Verrazano had written his letter to King Francis a little 80-ton Dutch yacht was beating northward along the low sandy seacoast of what is now New Jersey. Manned by a tough, quarrelsome English and Dutch crew, the shallow-bottomed, high-pooped little Half Moon was commanded by an experienced and distinguished English sea captain, Henry Hudson.

Hudson's Voyage

Hudson had been employed by the Dutch East India Company to try to find the Northeast Passage to China. There had been trouble between the Dutch and English members of his crew in northern waters and he had made peace by sailing southward as far as Virginia. Now, after a short stop at the mouth of the Delaware, Henry Hudson was following the coast line northward with curiosity.

On the heavy morning of September 2, 1609, the men on the Half Moon saw a great fire that seemed to hang in the sky, for no land showed beneath it. Later the sun burned away the mists and they saw land "all like broken Llands," and they sailed into a bay into which flowed a big stream.

The light of the sunny afternoon was mellowing and the evening calm had come as they dropped anchor in the quiet harbor. When the stars began to show through the clear air they saw to the north of them high hills, bluer than the deepening blue of the sky. "This is a very good land to fall with and a pleasant land to see," wrote English Robert Juet, an officer of the boat, at the end of that day.

The next morning, when the wind had cleared away the dawn murk, they weighed anchor and stood to the northward, finding the land "very pleasant and high and bold." They spent many hours in sounding and found anchorage near the mouth of the river. On September fourth they sent out a boat to fish and her men caught ten mullets and a ray so big that it took I four sailors to haul it in.

Some of the natives of the country came aboard clad in loose deerskins and feather mantles and carrying big green leaves of tobacco, yellow ears of maize, brown loaves of corn bread. About their necks hung ornaments of reddish copper and their tobacco pipes were of the same gleaming metal. When Captain Hudson returned their visit by going ashore soon thereafter "the swarthy natives all stood and sang in their fashion." He was delighted with their country. "It is as pleasant a land as one can tread upon," he wrote, and Robert Juet entered in his journal that the country was full of great and tall oaks.

An expedition of five men sent out to explore the river to the north reported that the lands in that direction "were as pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them." But on the way back to the ship these men, commanded by John Coleman, an Englishman, were interrupted in their aesthetic reveries by the swift attack of two boatloads of natives. Slowly John Coleman bled to death with an arrow deep in his throat. Two of his men were in agony, struck by the flying shafts. Darkness came and with it a driving rain. All night the four rowed aimlessly about on the black river with the dead body of their leader. It was ten o’clock in the morning before they were back on the safe high decks of the Half Moon.

After that they were careful. When, on the ninth of the month, two long canoes approached, their occupants badly disguising hostile intent with a pretense at barter, the sailors took two of them prisoner, dressed them in red coats to make them look ridiculous, and drove the rest away. The heat of early September, moist and breathless, had settled upon the river and the ship slowly sailed northward.

Exploration of the Hudson River

September 9, 1609—upriver
Day after day dawned into hot sunlight. On the fourteenth they glided past the pillared twelve-mile wall of the Palisades and through the lake that would someday be known as Haverstraw Bay. The shadows of the Hill of Thunder lengthened over their white sails as they turned into the channel of the highlands and saw, beyond the swirling waters of the narrow race, the Mountain Bear crouching in the blue heavens. "The land grew high," wrote Robert Juet. "The river is full of fish."

They lay at anchor among the mountains that night, and the next morning before they were under way their two captives squirmed out of a port and swam ashore. They waited until the wind had filled the Half Moon’s sails and she was moving indifferently upriver out of their sight before they shouted derisively at her.

Still the fair hot weather continued. High above the ship lay the blue ramparts of Onteora, Land of the Sky, guarded by the night-squalling wildcats that were to give them their Dutch name. In sight of these high blue mountains Henry Hudson crossed in a native canoe to the eastern shore of the river with the old chief of a small tribe of forty men and seventeen women. The Indians were gathered to greet the white captain "in a house well constructed of oak bark and circular in shape. . . with an arched roof." There the Englishman saw great stores of corn and beans and outside, drying in the hot sun, "enough to load three ships besides what was growing in the fields." And there, sitting on a mat spread for him, he partook of a feast of pigeons, which bad just been shot, and fat dog, hastily killed and skinned with shells from the riverbank.

The river was getting shallower now. Any hope that Hudson may have had that he was discovering a passage to China had vanished. But each day was sunny and golden and the autumn colors were dimmed only by the valley mists that turned bold contrasts into pastel harmonies. The friendly, simple people of the river were happy to see the strangers and brought them grapes and corn, pumpkins and tobacco, and the precious skins of beaver and otter, to be traded for beads and knives and hatchets.

Great crowds of the natives came to see the white-winged ship and Henry Hudson, a little distrustful, invited some of the chiefs to his cabin where he plied them with wine and aqua vitae until "they were all merrie." But even much alcohol brought out no treachery in the group; At least one of them was too drunk to go ashore that night and his companions were obviously worried over his strange condition. When they returned to the Half Moon late the next morning, however, they were so pleased to see him safe and sound that they gave Henry Hudson presents of tobacco and shell beads, making a great ceremony of it. One of them delivered a florid oration and they "shewed him all the country round about" and there was a feast of venison, brought on board on an enormous platter.

That night, after fifteen days of sunny weather, a typical upriver shower swept upon them. In the midst of it at ten o’clock came the hail of the Half Moon’s small boat that had gone north in the morning to take soundings. Weary and wet, the crew reported that they had rowed eight or nine leagues to the end of navigable water and had returned.

September 23, 1609—Return downriver
At noon of the next day, September twenty-third, in air cleaned and cooled by the night’s rain, the explorers started on their return journey. Again each day was filled with sun but the autumn winds were brisker. Out of the south, on the twenty-fifth, came a gale so strong that there was no combating it; the Half Moon rode at anchor while her men went for a walk on the west side of the river "and found good ground for Corne and other Garden herbs with great store of goodly Oakes, and Walnut trees, and Chestnut trees, Ewe trees and trees of sweet wood in great abundance, and great store of Slate for houses, and other good stones."

All the rest of the month, while the reds and golds of the valley trees flamed in the air and made the water a kaleidoscopic mirror, they dropped steadily downstream, stopping here and there for pleasant converse and trade with the simple people of the shore. On the last day they were close to the gentle slopes that now hold Newburgh—"a very pleasant place to build a Town on"—and there in the afternoon they anchored, for the southeast wind was blowing a stiff gale between the mountains. The gaunt rocks cropping out from the high barren crests, the blasted trees that had found no sustenance on stony slopes, filled the wanderers with hopeful surmise that there might be valuable minerals in this region.

Violence Erupts
Their last three days on the river—the first three of October—saw an unhappy ending to their explorations. For hours a native in a canoe had kept hanging under the stern of the Half Moon. When he saw the opportunity he climbed up the rudder and into an open window in the stern. There he stole Robert Juet’s pillow, two of his shirts and two bandoleers and began the steep return to his craft. The first mate saw him and shot him dead. At once all the natives who had come aboard to trade leaped over the sides. Some struck out for shore, leaving their canoes behind. The white men put out a small boat to pick up the stolen articles and a swimmer tried with one hand to roll it over in the water. The crew’s cook grabbed a sword and cut the hand off.

The next day was spent in a running fight with natives bent on revenge. Two war canoes followed the Half Moon as it moved south, their occupants discharging volleys of arrows. Two of the attackers were killed by musket fire. Two more were shot when about a hundred of them waited at a point of land for the ship to pass. Another canoe lost five or six men before it withdrew and left the white men to sail down to peaceful anchorage beside the big island of Mannahatta at the river’s mouth.

There, in a lowering twilight, they saw a cliff "of the colour of a white greene as though it were either Copper or Silver Myne." A northeaster blew fiercely that night, hurtling great gusts of rain against the sides of the ship. The men had a hard time holding anchorage the next day against strong shifting winds and more rain.

"The fourth, was faire weather, and the wind at North North-west, we weighed and came out of the River into which we had run so faire. . . . And by twelve of the clocke we were cleere of all the Inlet. Then we took in our Boat, and set our mayne-sayle and sprit-sayle and our top-sayles, and steered away East South-east, and South-east by East off into the mayne sea."

Citation: Carmer, Carl. "A Pleasant Land to See." The Hudson. Rivers of America. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939. Chapter 3, 16-25.