Russell Shorto’s Island: How a single book “Recentered” the Dutch Foundations of America

I was born and raised in New York’s lower Hudson Valley. My birthplace of White Plains is located in the southern portion of modern day Westchester County, which is situated midway on a peninsula, between the mighty Hudson river to the west and the majestic Long Island Sound to the east; This at the place where the tip of lower mainland New York reaches the great Atlantic. New York is a land of water, from the Ocean to the Great Lakes. Its natural highways have attracted and facilitated a human presence for over nine millennia. The landscape leftover from the Ice Age was shaped and molded by this water, into the numerous valleys and shaded hollows of literary legend. Harvest festivals, a cornucopia of Fauna, Trolls, Headless Horsemen, and even a sleepy Dutchman of some renown, colored my childhood with fantastical folklore.

Let’s paint a picture of this land, starting at its most eastern point, the sandy bluffs of Montauk rise to face the Atlantic Ocean. At one hundred and twenty miles long and twenty-three miles wide, Long Island lives up to its namesake. Still in this day of modern roads and cars, it is about a four hour trip from end to end. The highways turn into quaint country lanes, as one moves further east from modern New York City, transporting the traveler back in time. The oyster beds, brackish bays filled with seabirds, swarming schools of Bluefish and Striped Bass, along with the great oceanic trenches filled with Tuna, can still be glimpsed if you know where to look. The island itself consists of alluvial glacier sand and rock deposits, barely rising above three hundred and eighty feet at its highest point. On the southern shore of Long Island lies a huge network of barrier islands and inlets that mediate the effects of the Atlantic. On the northern side of the island, the glacier left a huge depression which quickly filled with seawater. The Long Island Sound separates Long Island from the modern mainland portion of New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Sound is about ninety miles in length and varies widely in width between three to twenty-one miles. The western opening of the Sound connects to the East River and meets the Atlantic through what is known as the Verrazano Narrows. In the midst of this natural splendor sits a magnificent sheltered harbor, nestled between Long Island to the east and Staten Island to the southwest. To the north can be found a long hilly island, soon to be situated at the center of a new syncretic world. The Native peoples referred to this island as Manahatta.

The name is a Munsee-Lenape phrase meaning “Hilly Island” or possibly “ A thicket where wood can be found for bows.” The island of Manhattan is thirteen miles long and two miles wide. It is built of bedrock that falls away slowly down either side. The raised middle spine of the island is not consistent, and pre-contact would have revealed noticeable valleys, with numerous streams running into the East and Hudson rivers. The island’s southern tip and parts of both the lower east and west sides, have been considerably expanded by land reclamation efforts in modern times. As one moves north on the island, the elevation increases and the island narrows into a neck with towering cliffs above the Hudson. On its eastern side, powerful currents made passage up the East River a difficult proposition, but its lower stretches would provide excellent anchorage, it’s this location that would eventually be the site of bustling docks. At its most northern point the island is separated from the mainland by a tidal creek, now known as the Harlem River. Manhattan was a natural rocky fortress, protected by a treacherous watery moat. To complete the fortuitous geographic positioning of this island, a massive river bounded up the west side and filled in deep glacial canyons. Called the North, Orange, and eventually the modern-day Hudson, this provided a passage deep into the interior of the American Continent. As we move north on the Hudson toward the future Albany, we can see why it’s perfectly positioned as a gateway to the frontier. Here one could find the confluence of the Mohawk river and the western route onto the Great Lakes, through a portage at modern-day Rome, New York. At “The Great Carrying Place,” boats could move between Wood Creek, Lake Oneida, the Oswego River, and onto Lake Ontario. A little further north of the future Albany and one could find a fifteen mile portage northeast to Lake George and eventually to the St. Lawrence, via Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. To the north lies a large range called the Adirondack Mountains, in the shape of a five thousand square mile circular dome and it is here where the origins of the Hudson can be found. It was upon these waterways that the explorer Hendrick Hudson, mapped out what would become the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1609. It would flourish for 55 years, stretching from the shores of Long Island and up the great North River, to the trading post at Orange or modern-day Albany, New York, bounded in southwest by the Delaware River and northeast by the Connecticut River.

The colony’s central node of New Amsterdam would eventually develop into what Russell Shorto termed “The Island at the Center of the World.” A diverse town containing the seeds of both the cultural stream and economic model would come to define a future America. As both a Native New Yorker and former New York City APUSH Teacher, my life experience in terms of our “Hidden” Dutch heritage, was mainly grounded in the cultural legends accumulated and preserved through the works of Washington Irving. While honest in his intentions, anyone who reads these works will most likely yearn for some proper primary sources, the issue being our society lacked access to such documents from our foundational moments. The Dutch Colonial records were put on a prison ship in New York harbor, during the American Revolution. They were apparently transported to London and eventually returned to New York about a century later, only to be thought consumed in the 1911 Capital fire that swept through the archives in Albany. Owing to their obscure nature, the records were stored on the bottom of archival shelves and ended up being insulated by materials above. Thousands of these damaged primary sources have been deciphered and translated by Charles Gehring, in what developed into “The New Netherland Project.” This is a joint venture between the New York State Library and the Holland Society. 

In a similar manner to many New Yorkers who wondered about the origins of our odd landmark names and feel disjointed within the historical national narrative, Shorto’s interest in New Netherland developed out of the mundane, as he recounts in this January 29th, 2023 article found in the New York Almanack. “I remember the moment my interest in New York’s Dutch roots was sparked. My daughter Anna (who is now in her twenties) was a toddler, and we lived in the East Village of New York City. The nearest open space for her to run around and play was the churchyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, on Second Avenue. The tombs of some of New York’s early inhabitants are there, flush with the ground. I liked the contrast of watching my vibrant young daughter play among the reminders of people long gone. One of those tombs is that of Petrus Stuyvestant, the last director general of New Netherland and surely the colony’s most famous resident. I knew at the time that New York was once New Amsterdam, that there was a Dutch presence at the beginning, but I knew almost nothing else about it. It was my own ignorance that spurred me. I asked some historian friends what they knew about the Dutch period. They shook their heads. It seemed to be a black hole. Was there such a paucity of records? Then someone suggested I contact Charles Gehring, who, it turned out, had been translating and publishing the records of the colony since 1974. (He is still at it, by the way.) I had three phone conversations with him in which my sense of American colonial history was transformed. I began to realize not only that the Dutch contributed mightily to American history, but also that one could tell the early story of European settlement in America not just by looking at the Puritans and Pilgrims of New England, as had traditionally been done, but by focusing on Manhattan. And that would result in a very different trajectory. American history wouldn’t start out as Anglo-centric, for one thing. The Dutch colony was a multi-ethnic, polyglot place – one that more closely resembles not only New York today but the U.S. as a whole.”

As a prospective College History student in 2004, I got my hands on a work that would change my life and inspire a future career in the historical field. Russell Shorto’s masterpiece was released at the same time that I was developing my own core historical thinking skills, to craft just such sweeping narratives. Firstly his work changed my spatial perspective, especially being situated in the Bronx neighborhood of Kingsbridge and along Broadway. I began to view the geographic boundaries of my world through a different lens, one that wasn’t Anglocentric and instead born of Dutch and Munsee-Lenape interactions. All of a sudden, my mental map received an entirely new syncretic foundation, which in and of itself transformed the way I view history as a whole. Taught from a young age to see our historical narrative flowing from a British source, Shorto’s work instead revealed the diverse beginnings that led to the creation of something wholly different. Another manner in which Shorto’s work informed my teaching was the revealing interactions with the Native Peoples and the Dutch role in the Slave trade. Through the documentation presented, one experienced multi-angled perspectives, forcing the reader to evaluate the definitions of words like “Bought, Deed and Ceded.” All seem like straight forward modern legal terms, but were anything but that in the early stage of First Contact. One is pushed to envision a different standard of land valuation and its societal uses. Combating the pernicious lie of Native abandonment of Manhattan, the reader is treated to a narrative that centers the indigenous peoples as crucial partners in the construction of this new society. Although sometimes partners, the reader is not shielded from the outrageous atrocities wrought by human nature or the convulsive set of escalating conflict between the Dutch and local Native peoples.

 As I mentioned, the exposure of New Netherland’s role in the development of Slavery here in America, is both the work’s most harrowing and informative contribution. Based on unique documentation highlighting the concepts of Half-Freedom and Petition Rights, Russell Shorto proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Manhattan played a foundational role in the expansion and institutionalization of the practice, via the Dutch plantation experiences in the Caribbean and South America. Within his work we can find early kernels of the now common “Atlantic Wide Basin” lens, which connects Africa to the Americas. Importantly, Shorto uses documentary evidence to humanize the enslaved and reinstate the agency they wielded to construct their own community. The role of Dutch women is also highlighted, with a special focus on their legal status and educational opportunities in the colony. This always provided me with a sense of what was lost in the transition to English rule and how I needed to reconfigure my expectations of female roles in early colonial North America.

Finally his work provided a link in the development of the democratic nature of future American politics, demonstrating the emergence of civil protected status, incorporation of settlements, petition modes, and advisory commissions that mitigated the worst inclinations of the powerful Governor-General. We are left with an image of Petrus Stuyvestant imploring his polyglot community of Dutch, English, Huguenots and Jewish residents to resist the English takeover that finally came in 1664, but Russell Shorto leaves us with some tantalizing clues that this was not a new beginning, but instead just the start of a cultural continuity that would form the very basis of the future American nation. It’s in this spirit of continuity, that The Friends of Philipse Manor Hall invite you to join Russell Shorto on March 8th, in order to witness the next chapter of this foundational narrative unfold, the transition to English rule in his new book “Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America.”