|
Great explorers, Revolutionary generals, and—my forefathers?
By Ben Ellison — Spring 2006
Is there anything as timeless as the sea? Go out on the open Atlantic, and you're looking at essentially the same scene that, say, Henry Hudson saw when he sailed across in 1609. Now turn around and follow his track as he searched for the fabled Northwest Passage to the Far East. No matter what we've done ashore during the intervening centuries-and, oh my, we've done a lot-the waters still have essentially the same shape, the same surface, the same tides. That's why a cruising boat is a wonderful vantage point for contemplating history.
Behold the south end of Manhattan Island, circa 2005, as seen by my daughter Jesse and me from the flying bridge of the Luhrs 41 convertible Office Ours. We'd taken along a copy of a famous drawing that depicts the same spot as it looked in about 1650, when it was the tiny Dutch settlement of New Am-sterdam. The green of Battery Park now sits where a little plank dock and, er, a gallows once welcomed immigrants in rowboats. Successive generations have turned a few wooden homes, a fort, and a church into a fantastical mash-up of skyscrapers. To the left, about where a windmill once stood, the World Trade Center once reached upward.
We were awed. For one thing, we'd both read Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, a brilliantly written history of New Amsterdam that made the etching come alive. We knew the gallows was mainly meant to signify an orderly colony and that a newcomer would have found a hubbub of settlers speaking half a dozen languages and the freedom to start a new life. In fact, we knew the drawing purposely exaggerated the town's tidiness to make it more attractive to settlers. It was an ad, and wow, did it work!
We were also pumped up on family history. During the past couple of years, I'd learned enough about our genealogy to design this cruise around further research. I knew, for instance, that our ancestor John Ellison arrived at this very shore in about 1688, not long after his English brethren had taken over the island (sorry about that, Netherlands). And he'd done quite well; our first project was to locate a property he'd developed that ran from just outside the town's "North Gate" to the Hudson.
The gate, mind you, was in the wall that became Wall Street. As my dad had noted on the old family documents where I rediscovered this information, "I wish we still had some of that!"
OUR FIRST FIND
North Cove Marina was an excellent base for our explorations, though docking was slightly anxious, what with thousands of eyes possibly upon us in the World Financial Center. The Luhrs' big twin props did me proud, and we hustled off with my notes and the pile of old maps I'd purloined off the World Wide Web. There are more historic spots in lower Manhattan than you might realize, and they seem extra special for all the changes they've witnessed. Heck, the island itself is almost twice as wide here as it once was because developers filled in the rivers, often using what they dug out of skyscraper cellars.
We walked down Broadway, which somehow feels different when you know it started as a Native American trail. At its southern end now stands the "old" U.S. Custom House, which today appropriately hosts the National Museum of the American Indian. Nearby is the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the pleasantly unusual Fraunces Tavern Museum, good for both lunch and another old map that resolved the last street name mystery to locating the old family property.
>> Next page >>
Part 2: Hudson River Page
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8
|
