Source: Dutch New York
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This video from Dutch New York explores the diverse ecosystem that Henry Hudson encountered when he arrived at “Mannahatta,” the name given by the native Lenape people to the island now known as Manhattan. Dr. Eric Sanderson, Director of the Mannahatta Project, explains that Manahatta's ecosystem was more diverse than Yosemite or Yellowstone National Parks and describes the landscape, flora and fauna of the island in Henry Hudson's day.
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When Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into New York Harbor in 1609, the only inhabitants of Manhattan were the Lenape (lun-NAH-pay) people, who had been living there for thousands of years. The Lenape (meaning “the people”) are part of the Algonquian nation. Known by other Algonquians as “the original people,” “grandfathers,” or "men of men," the Lenape were considered the earliest Algonquian tribe. This often gave them the authority to act as intermediaries in disputes among rival tribes.
The Lenape lived in an area they called Lenapehoking which means "land of the Lenape." Lenapehoking included all of New Jersey as well as parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. European settlers gave the Lenape the name Delaware Indians, after the European name for the river that runs through their land. There were three distinct groups of Lenape, each with their own dialect of the Algonquian language. The Munsee lived in the northern part of Lenapehoking, the Unami lived in the central part and the Unilachtigo lived to the south, near the Delaware Bay and the ocean. The Lenape living in what's now known as Manhattan called the island “Mannahatta” which means “island of many hills.” Very little is known about the sale of Manhattan to the Dutch, other than the fact that in exchange the Lenape received sixty guilders, or twenty-four dollars, a figure calculated by 19th century exchange rates. What is clear to scholars today is that within Lenape culture there was no concept of land ownership. While the Lenape readily traded with the Dutch, exchanging food, “wampum” (intricately carved beads made from shells) or beaver pelts for metal tools, blankets, brass kettles, and other goods, land was viewed very differently. The Lenape believed that land belonged to the Creator, and that it was there for the survival of all people. They considered the agreement with the Dutch to be a treaty or alliance of friendship, and looked at the money as a gift in exchange for sharing their land. In 1778 the Lenape became the first Native Americans to sign a treaty with the United States. Under the Treaty of Fort Pitt, the Lenape became allies of the Americans in their revolution against the British. In return, the Americans promised not to take any Lenape land, to protect them from the British and to allow them representation in Congress. That treaty was almost immediately broken, and since then the Lenape have been forced to give up their lands and relocate to the west. Today, the majority of surviving Lenape live in Oklahoma and Kansas, with a few groups remaining in Lenapehoking—in present-day New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.BARRY LEWIS: Now you are going to have to use your imagination. We’re on Manhattan Island just before Hudson arrived. We’re at the water’s edge, it’s Pearl Street today, and in back of us is a curving fresh water stream that emptied into the East River.
We can still see the curve of that stream in the layout of today’s Broad Street. That stream ran through a land mass here at the Southern end of Manhattan, much smaller than the one we know today. All in all, this must have been a truly remarkable place.
Dr. ERIC SANDERSON: If we imagine what Manhattan was like say when Henry Hudson sailed into the harbor, he would have come into a big, blue harbor, sparkling waters, forested hills, streams draining down out of Manhattan onto beaches and into the Hudson River shore. Probably big schools of fish, blue fish hunting other fish in the harbor, porpoises, maybe whales. Some of the maps have whales.
And of course, he interacted too with the Native Americans that were living on Manhattan and living in the region. He traded with them, he wrote about Turkish wheat, which was corn, maize, as we know it. So he would have found a very abundant place.
And for such a small island, Manhattan was more diverse, in terms of ecosystems than Yosemite, or Yellowstone or the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. There were black bears on the island, wolves and mountain lions.
There were big, old growth trees. American Chestnut was probably more than half the forests. The understory canopy was probably fairly open because of Native American fires, particularly along their trail system, that went up the East Side of Manhattan and near the places they were practicing horticulture.
We have to look really hard, in the modern landscape, to see signs of Manahatta, because they are not obvious to most people. They are there, if you look, and if you know what to look for. But they are few and far between, because of course, the Manhattan landscape is one of the most modified places on the face of the planet.
So oftentimes people ask me, when did the ecology of Manhattan change most? And I think a lot of times when people ask that they are thinking I’m going to say, when the street grid plan was adopted in 1811. Or they are going to say when we started building skyscrapers or something.
But actually I think the ecology changed most right after the Dutch settled on Manhattan in 1624, 1625. And there's a couple of reasons there.
One is, they changed the way the Native Americans did their business. So as soon as the Dutch came, that really changed the dynamics of the economy and the social aspects for the Native American, for the Lenape people living on Manhattan.
And they were a very important part of the ecology of original Manhattan. So that really fundamentally put the landscape on a different trajectory from what it had been for 10,000 years before that.
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