New York - The Novel

man’s map.
    White men had been coming there since the days of Christopher Columbus. At first they had been seeking gold, or trying to find a route to the Orient. One, Verrazano, who arrived in 1524, was known by name; others had been forgotten. And not always white men either: the Portuguese sea captain Gomez had been black. He’d come, grabbed nearly sixty of the local Indians to sell as slaves, then disappeared over the horizon. But it was the arrival of another man which had changed everything for the people of the great North River and its harbor.
    Henry Hudson had been an Englishman, employed by the rivalDutch, to find a shorter route to China by sailing east. Having had a look for this fabled North-East passage above Russia and decided it was useless, he’d ignored all his orders, doubled back across the Atlantic, and looked for a passage round the North-West instead. It was Hudson who had ventured into the bay below Manhattan, and gone up the big river for several days before concluding: “It isn’t the way to China.”
    “It may not lead to China,” he’d told his Dutch employers upon his return, “but the land is magnificent. And full of beavers.”
    And the people of northern Europe had an insatiable greed for beavers.
    “The beaver,” van Dyck would tell his children, “is a most useful creature. Beaver oil cures rheumatism, toothache and stomach pains. A beaver’s testicles, powdered and dissolved in water, can restore an idiot to sanity. Its fur is thick and warm.” But it was the soft pelt under the outer fur that men really desired. And why? Because it could be made into felt.
    Hats. Everyone wanted a felt hat, though only the richer souls could afford one. It was the height of fashion. The hatters who made them sometimes went mad, poisoned by the mercury that used to separate the felt from the fur. And perhaps, van Dyck admitted to himself, there was a certain madness in this—that a whole colony, an empire perhaps, could be founded, men risk their lives and kill in turn—all on account of a fashionable hat. But such was the way of the world. The coast of north-eastern America might have been colonized for the Atlantic fishing trade, but the great harbor of New Amsterdam and its big North River were settled because of the felt hat.
    And it was in gratitude to the intrepid explorer that van Dyck and fur traders like him would often refer to the big river not as the North, but as Hudson’s River.

    “There it is. New Amsterdam.” The Dutchman smiled to see his daughter’s shiver of excitement. Ahead, the southern tip of Manhattan jutted out into the harbor’s watery immensity. Seabirds wheeled over the small waves. There was a bracing saltiness in the air.
    Pale Feather gazed at the big sails of the windmill and the squat mass of the fort which presided over the open waterfront. As they rounded the tip of Manhattan, where the merchants’ gabled houses had gathered themselves, more or less, into rows, van Dyck pointed out some sights to her.
    “You see those houses near the fort? Your people had a camp therebefore the White Men came. They left such piles of oyster shells behind that we called it De Peral Straet—the street of pearls. That pale house belongs to Stuyvesant. It’s called the White Hall.”
    Passing the southern point, they turned into the long, broad channel that ran up the eastern side of Manhattan. Though not really a river, this waterway was known as the East River. Van Dyck indicated the land on the opposite bank.
    “Brooklyn.” The Dutch had named it after a place near Amsterdam.
    “My people’s land,” the girl said.
    “It was.”
    The wharf had been built on the east side of the point. The canoe made toward it. Several ships lay at anchor in the East River nearby. As they reached the landing, curious eyes were turned upon them.
    It did not take long to arrange for the pelts to be carried in a pair of large handcarts to the West India Company’s big storehouse. Van Dyck walked beside the carts, with Pale Feather moving lightly beside him. He nodded briefly to men he knew. There were all kinds of folk by the waterfront: sailors in open shirts, merchants in broad pantaloons, even a dominie, dressed in black and wearing a tall, conical, wide-brimmed hat. As they left the shore, he met a pair of Dutch merchants, Springsteen and Steenburgen, men of some substance, with whom it was necessary to pause for a moment to exchange greetings.
    “Your wife was