The Big Oyster Read Free

Staten Island and Brooklyn—not yet seen the Upper Bay, the Hudson River, the Harlem River, and the East River that connects with Long Island Sound. He had not yet seen the lush, green, rocky island of ponds and streams in the middle of the estuary.
    Hudson sent a landing party ashore on Staten Island. It was late summer and the plum trees and grapevines were bearing fruit. Immediately upon landing, as though Hudson’s crew had been expected, as though invited, people dressed in animal skins appeared to welcome them. These people in animal skins saw that the leader of the people who arrived in the floating house wore a red coat that sparkled with gold lace.
    In what would become a New York tradition, commerce instantly began. The Europeans in red had tools, while the skin-clad Americans offered hemp, beans, and a local delicacy—oysters. The Europeans thought they were getting much better value than they were giving, but the Americans may have thought the same thing.
    Hudson and his men had no idea with whom they were trading. They reported that the people in skins were friendly and polite but not to be trusted. These people the Europeans distrusted called their land
Lenapehoking,
the land of the Lenape. The Lenape thought they knew their visitors. They were a people they called in their language
shouwunnock,
which meant “Salty People.” The grandparents of the Lenape who saw Hudson may have seen an earlier Salty Person, the Italian, Giovanni da Verrazano, sailing the coast with his crew for Francis I, king of France, in 1524. Verrazano had chosen to moor his ship off Staten Island, farther up than Hudson, in the narrow opening that bears his name and where Staten Island is now connected to Brooklyn by a bridge. Verrazano could see the second interior bay with its wide rivers and well-placed island and described the bay as “a pleasant lake.” He named it Santa Margarita after the sister of his patron, Francis. “We passed up with our boat only into the said river, and saw the country very well peopled. The people are almost like unto the others, and clad with feathers of fowls of divers colors. They came toward us very cheerfully, making great shouts of admiration, showing us where we might come to land most safely with our boat.”
    But soon shifting winds forced the Europeans, with great reluctance, to return to their ship and sail on. This was probably the first sighting of Salty People by the inhabitants of the harbor, although their grandparents may also have seen Ésteban Gomez, a Portuguese explorer who passed this way. An early Portuguese map suggests that Europeans, probably either Portuguese or Basque fishermen, may have sailed to this place at the time of Columbus. Some of those who now met Hudson and his crew may have heard of or even had contact with the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain, who only a few months earlier had traveled south from what is now Canada to the lake that is named after him. Jamestown, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, was just south of the Lenapes’ Delaware Bay and was already two years old when Hudson arrived in New York. By the time Hudson arrived, the Lenapes knew Salty People when they saw them. They had been coming for a long time with very little consequence.
    This group stayed longer than the others. They explored the upper harbor, then chose the river west of the island and sailed up what is now called the Hudson as far as what is now Albany. From there, it must have been clear that this narrowing river was not leading to China and they left.
    In the Lenape language,
lenape
translates as “the common man.” Sometimes they called themselves
Lenni Lenape,
which means “we, the people.” Europeans have labeled the language and the people Delaware. They were a loose confederation of populations living between the South River, the Delaware, and the North River, the Hudson. Until the twentieth century, it was believed that between