We can only speculate now about what impression it made. This is Juet’s sole explicit mention of the island. For they be all burned, and the other places are greene as grasse, it is on that side of the Riuer that is called Manna-hata.” The sailors shot about ten of them, then took refuge in a bay that sounds as though it may have abutted Washington Heights: “Hard by it there was a Cliffe, that looked of the colour of a white greene, as though it were either Copper, or Siluer Myne: and I thinke it to be one of them, by the Trees that grow vpon it. On the trip downriver, a crew member shot and killed a native who had sneaked into Juet’s quarters and stolen his pillow in the ensuing melee another native tried to tip over their boat, “but,” Juet wrote, “our Cooke tooke a Sword, and cut off one of his hands, and he was drowned.” The next day, seven leagues south, the “Sauages” ambushed them. At any rate, the crew sailed upriver as far as Albany, where shallow waters forced them to turn back: this wasn’t the way to Cathay. Conjecture abounds, as do chauvinistic claims various modern interpreters place a September 13th oyster feast at Spuyten Duyvil or Yonkers. Juet’s records of wind directions and river depths are precise, but from his descriptions it’s often impossible to decipher where exactly Hudson was on the river. The only surviving account of this journey is the diary of one of Hudson’s crew, Robert Juet (who, on another voyage, a year later, helped lead a mutiny, stranding Hudson, his young son, and seven others in a small boat near the Arctic Circle). This likely made the eighteen or so Englishmen and Dutchmen aboard the Half Moon the first Europeans to venture up the Hudson River and therefore the first to get a good look at the island known to the natives as Mannahatta. In early September, 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed their jacht, the Half Moon, through the Narrows at the head of New York’s lower bay, the point beyond which, it is generally believed, Giovanni da Verrazzano had not progressed, eighty-five years before. The land, rich as it was, was at first not much more than an impediment. As seamen-and seekers of clear passage to the Orient-they were more interested in the currents, tides, soundings, and shoals. It is remarkable, in the accounts of the earliest European visitors to the North American continent, how little interest some of these explorers seemed to take in the land they had just found.

The markly duckling