The Empire State [antikvár]

First page: Ihe World Trade Center in New York Cily, (previous pages) Ihe Hudson River, and (facing page) woodland on the slopes of the Adirondack Mountains beside Lake George. Almost no one can fail to be impressed by the Hudson River Valley, but of cill the people whose enthusiastic reports have come dovwi to us through the years, Londoner Daniel Denton outdoes them all. After touring the area back in 1670, Denton wrote home that in his walks along the banks of the Hudson he never heard the lecist complaint of need in any of the towns and villages he passed through and noted that he was never once asked for as much as a farthing. Even the Indians were friendly, he said, and were eager to entertain strangers and to serve as guides. It was possible to sleep in the fields and woods, he claimed, "with cis much security as if you were locked in your own chamber," which must have pleased the innkeepers in those friendly towns and villages. Denton also alienated a doctor or two when he noted that the valley was uncommonly heeJthful. "Many people in twenty years' time don't know what sickness is," he reported. "They look upon it as a great mortality if two or tJiree die out of a town in a year's time." In his opinion, the Hudson VcJley was nothing less than Canaan itself, a land whose inhabitants "are blessed with peace and plenty, blessed in their country, blessed in their fields, blessed in the fruit of their bodies, in the increase of their cattle, sheep and horses, blessed in their basket and in their store." To wliich cinyone interested in luring visitors to the Hudson River Valley would have to say, "Bless you, Daniel Denton." But the valley speaks for itself, and even young Denton couldn't do justice to it. It has been compared to the Rhineland and to the fjords of Norway. The Dutch were right at home there, but it filled the friends of the Duke of York with nostalgia for the English countryside. Henry James said it reminded him of the hillsides of Italy, and Henry Hudson himself expected to see the palaces of the Cfiinese emperors just beyond the mountains. But for all the comparing that has been done, the valley still defies comparison. Hudson probably said it best when he recorded in his log that "This is a very good land to fall in with and a wonderfully fine country to see." Like most seventeenth-century explorers, Henry Hudson wasn't looking for North America, but a way around it. The Dutch controlled the sea lanes to the Orient around the tip of Africa, but they wmted to cover their bets if there was a Northwest Passage, and they hired Hudson to sail tlirough the Arctic, which he had done before, to see if he could find it. But once he was out at sea he turned west instead of north, to go hunting for a river his fellow Englishman, Captain Jofin Smith, told Mm about Hudson also had a map prepared eighty-five years earlier by the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano, who had sailed into the bay at the mouth of the river and noted that it was "a very pleasant situation among some steep fiills." Hudson sailed up the river as far eis Cohoes, where the Mohawk empties into it, before he reedized that he hadn't found the Northwest Passage, and then he headed for the open sea again. But he didn't steer his sfiip in the direction of Holland because he knew he'd be in trouble if he did. He had disobeyed his orders, which were quite specific that he should explore the Arctic and not the North American coast, and to add insult to injury he wound up in Cohoes instead of Cathay. The Dutch merchants weren't too pleased, and they waited a dozen years before taking possession of the river and the island at its mouth. In spite of Verrazano, whose expedition had been financed by the King of France, and the fact that a Portuguese explorer sailing in the service of Spain had long since ncuned the river "Rio de Gomez" in his own honor, they claimed it was theirs even if they had no use for the man who had found it for them. They pointedly refused to name the river for Mm and it was known as "North River" until the British drove them out in 1664 and began renaming tMngs. The name, wMch still appears on nautical charts, was meant to indicate the boundary of their colony, wMch extended into Delaware where another line was drawn at the "South River." They didn't knowthat the Delaware River also ran west of them, and they also didn't know what was at the northern end of their North River. Ironically, the French had a claim there, established by Samuel de Cheunplain, who discovered the lake that bears Ms name in the same year that Hudson arrived. The two explorers were less than a hundred miles from each other, but neither of them knew it. WMch was probably just as well for the relationsMp between France Lind Holland. Neither of the explorers knew much about geology, but many years later a scientist who did said that: "The State of New York is to the geologist what the Holy