In about two months (September 12) it will be exactly 400 years since Henry
Hudson first “rode the flood tide up a great estuarine river on the North
American continent looking for a passage to Oriental riches.” Put
in more familiar terms, they sailed the Half
Moon (85
feet long, a complement of 20 Dutch and English sailors) into what is now
New York harbor and ultimately up the Hudson River as far as today’s Albany. Here’s
a picture of an exact-size replica built in 1989. For comparison, your
typical 18-wheeler on the highway is 80 feet long.
I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered what Hudson and his crew
saw, or more importantly what they thought of what they saw, when they first
espied what we now call Manhattan and what the local Lenni Lenape tribe called
Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.”
I do know how F. Scott Fitzgerald, far and away the most romantically
and effortlessly eloquent of all American authors, put it in an elegiac in The
Great Gatsby:
. . . gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once
pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a
transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence
of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate
to his capacity for wonder.
And now we have a scientifically faithful reconstruction, or
reimagination, of what “Mannahatta” looked like 400 years ago,
in the form of the “Mannahatta
Project: A Natural History of New York City.” This gives
you the idea:
The question for me is: What will it look like 400 years
hence? What would replacing the left half of this image with Manhattan
2409 give us?
Because, you know, in 2409 Manhattan–and London and Hong
Kong and a few other habitations uniquely gifted by circumstance–will
be very much with the human race, and the human race very much rooted there.
Just a moment’s perspective, is all.
