It Happened Here -- First Contacts

He shouldn't have even been here!  The contract Henry Hudson signed with his employer, the V.O.C., the Generaale Vereenigde Geoctroijeerde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company was for him to sail northeast, around Novaya Zemlya and over the top of Russia to China.  Hudson had been turned back by ice twice before and previous explorers who had made the attempt had been lost when their ships were crushed in the ice.  Perhaps the English explorer  had decided all along to explore west instead of east, but he needed a ship, and with English investments tied up in saving their new colony in Jamestown, the Dutch were the only game in town.* So he told them what they wanted to hear; got his ship and made another attempt at finding a Northeast passage before heading across the Atlantic.  The directors of the V.O.C. would be furious, unless of course, he was successful in finding a passage to China, or making other significant discoveries.

Hudson, certainly, knew of John Smith's explorations up the wide rivers around Jamestown, the Chesapeake  and the Potomac. Perhaps there were other rivers, farther north that would connect to lakes and through portages to other rivers flowing to the South Sea (the Pacific).  A wholly navigable channel wasn't essential, only a feasible route,  one that avoided the dangers of the long voyage around South Africa's Cape of Good Hope, or the even more horrific western passage that Magellan had followed. The French had explored far up the St. Lawrence River before being stopped by rapids but rumors persisted of a great lake beyond those rapids and north of that, a salt sea that might lead to China. So after exploring what would become the New Jersey coast, Hudson was intrigued to find a large bay fed by a sizable river that led north, bordering an area the Indians called Mannahatta.

Hudson and his crew's experience with the Native American peoples on his trip up this river that would bear his name was mixed, due in part to his crew's expectations of trouble and a readiness to literally shoot first and ask questions later. Their first contacts were friendly enough with the Mi'kmaq people of what would become Nova Scotia who were familiar with French and Basque fisherman who regularly traded with them. But then Hudson's crew decided they needed trade goods if they were to have regular dealings with native peoples. (They had probably not brought any along because, remember, their planned route had been through the largely uninhabited arctic regions above Russia.)  Unprovoked, they attacked a Mi'kmaq village, drove its inhabitants from it and stole any trade goods and items of value they could find.  Their next significant encounter was in what would become New York Harbor. There they encounter native peoples eager to trade but a day later the ship's boat, out taking soundings was attacked by two large canoes and John Colman, one of the four Englishmen  on the expedition was killed with an arrow to his neck.  For the next several days groups of Indians approached the Half Moon to trade, apparently oblivious to the attack that occurred earlier.

At the mouth of Catskill Creek, Catskill

Some were driven away if the crew perceived any weapons or signs of hostile intent, while others were allowed to approach but not board the ship to trade Indian corn, pumpkins,  oysters and tobacco.

Rte 9J, south of Kinderhook

Around the mouth of the Catskill Creek, the Half Moon passed from Munsee into Mahican territory.  Eighty years later Indian villages would still dot the shores of the river.  Hudson had no inkling of the many tribes that lived along the "North" river or the complex inter-tribal relations between tribes, but perhaps for the first time as he journeyed north he began to sense differences.  He described these people as "loving" and agreed to invitations to go ashore. (Relationships may have also improved between himself and his Dutch crew who he could neither fully understand, nor did he trust. Hudson may have harbored suspicions that more than a few of them were former "sea beggars" or  dutch pirates, so previously he had avoided leaving his ship for fear of being marooned.)  At latitude 42 degrees, 18 minutes (about the location of Athens, NY or Stockport Creek) the Indians took him ashore in a canoe to a large circular hut in a village of some 60 Indians.  His hosts attempted to allay any fears he might have had by kindling a fire, breaking and burning several arrows in it, a sign of their peaceful intent. They dined on freshly killed pigeons, maize and a fatted dog.  Unlike later years when the village would have certainly been surrounded by a palisade of logs, Hudson makes no mention of such defenses.

NYS 23B, Leeds

A few years later such settlements fearful of Iroquois raids brought about by Dutch inspired competition for beaver pelts would have certainly been protected by a palisade and would be known to the Dutch as a Casteel, the English, an Indian Castle.

A few days later Hudson's ship began to run aground repeatedly in shallows and on sandbars.  Somewhere around Albany  Hudson anchored and sent his men out in the ship's boat to explore farther north and search for a channel.  How far

NYS 32, Waterford

they got is anyone's guess. The city of Waterford has claimed the honor of being the northernmost limit of Hudson's river explorations, but skeptics have noted that to reach Waterford they would have had to pass the thundering Cohoes falls near where the Mohawk River enters the Hudson River and Hudson's crew made no mention of the falls or any confluence of two rivers.

With the boat's return, Henry Hudson and his crew began their descent downriver and headed directly for Europe. But it was not Amsterdam they sailed for.  November 7th would see the Half Moon anchored safely in Dartmouth Harbor, England.  The Dutch would protest and demand back their ship and ship's log and all the charts and papers produced on the voyage. The English would surrender them after they gleaned every bit of information they could from Hudson's papers, and they strictly forbade the explorer from sailing again under any flag but England's. Hudson would begin again to lobby for a new expedition, one that would benefit from "secret information" he had learned on his last voyage but chose not to reveal in any of his logs or papers turned over to the authorities. In spring of 1610 Henry Hudson was on the voyage of his dreams, on an officially sanctioned expedition to find a northwest passage. In a little more than a year he would probably be dead, set adrift by a crew who had starved and overwintered at "Hudson's Bay" and concluded that if they didn't commandeer their ship, its captain would drive them until they all perished in the frozen north.

Marker of the Week -- Some old houses are special because of their architecture; some are special because of the famous people who inhabited them or the historic deeds that occurred on their grounds; and some are special because of what they (or, more precisely, their inhabitants) could have witnessed. The Northrup house in Athens commands a spectacular view of the Hudson River. Even after the trees, no doubt once cleared down to the shore, had grown back, that view was probably unobstructed from the upstairs windows.  Today, if they  so chose, it inhabitants could watch the tugs and oil barges shuttling back and forth between between New York City and the Port of Albany.  At the last quarter of the 19th and first decades of the twentieth centuries they could have watched the opulent Hudson River Day Liners churning their way up to Albany or at night, the Night Liners, ablaze with lights heading south to deliver their passengers at the start of a new day into "the City".  And before that there were several centuries of Hudson River Sloops, one and two masted schooners, designed to catch every fickle breeze blowing from the hills that surround the Hudson to bring passengers and all manner of cargo to destinations up and down the river.  And, of course, if they were watching from that grand pillared porch on  August 17, 1807, they could have seen the awkward, smoke belching first steamship North River laboriously  make its way up-stream from Robert Livingston's Clermont dock to Albany.                   

 Another NYSHM, no longer surviving, once marked the arrival of Fulton's paddle-wheeler,  in front of the D&H Building (SUNY Administration Building Plaza) Broadway, Albany.
                                                                   CLERMONT
                                                   NEAR THE FOOT OF MADISON
                                                    AVENUE ROBERT FULTON IN
                                                    AUG. 1807, COMPLETED THE
                                                            FIRST SUCCESSFUL
                                                         STEAMBOAT VOYAGE 


*Actually the French, too, had shown some interests in employing him, and perhaps Hudson used their interest in him to encourage the Dutch to action.