![]() ![]() “The Indian traditions,” Diedrich Knickerbocker writes in A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, “affirm that the bay was once a translucid lake, filled with silver and golden fish, in the midst of which lay this beautiful island, covered with every variety of fruits and flowers but that the sudden irruption of the Hudson laid waste these blissful scenes, and Manetho took his flight beyond the great waters of Ontario.” 2 In 1609, many hundreds of years after Manetho migrated north, Henry Hudson happened upon the selfsame island and its remarkable properties seemed to have been restored. How the Town of New Amsterdam Rose Out of the Mud ![]() It is tantalizing but not a little disturbing to think that the attitudes and beliefs of over three centuries ago have been passed on, like DNA, in the hearts and minds of those who followed. “Perhaps in the beginning of American civilization can be found a clue to the incongruous mixture of naïve idealism and crude materialism that produced in later years a literature of beauty, irony, affirmation, and despair,” 1 Spiller writes. The wealth they derived from it confirmed their rightness. As Robert Spiller suggests in The Cycle of American Literature, the bounty they found affirmed their mission. They had come to the New World to exercise their religious freedoms. ![]() Many of the early settlers to these shores thanked God for this. The soil enriched by the river deposits was fertile. Here there was enough timber to build a thousand stockades and a million chapels. They flowed in their channels through the thick forest unimpeded except by the occasional logjam of giant fallen trees. Rivers were named for the tribes that lived by them: the Mohawk, the Susquehanna, the Iroquois, the Missouri, the Potomac. In its spring and summer abundance, the New World was like an answer to a prayer. Before Irving purchased it, the house belonged to 18th century colonialist Wolfert Acker, about whom Irving wrote his sketch “Wolfert’s Roost.” - Tarrytown, New York Washington Irving’s home – Sunnyside – is still standing, just south of the Tappan Zee Bridge. In the beginning, there were native peoples, swiftly identified by Europeans as savages, who traveled in eerie noiselessness among the trees, silently paddled the waters, and had attached names and legends to every odd-shaped rock or outcropping. They were all set deep in the virgin forest, so overgrown that the day was as dim as dusk because the crowns of the trees spread so close together. In the beginning, there were isolated lakes, swift-flowing streams, hidden cataracts, rocky promontories and mysterious glens. ![]()
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