First Sails

On the night of the second of September, 1609, a ship four months into the wrong ocean saw a fire.

No land behind it. Just the fire, somewhere off the port bow, burning on a coast the men aboard could not yet see. They were English and Dutch, sailing a small ship called the Halve Maen for a company in Amsterdam that had paid them to find a way through to China, and they had failed at that so completely that they were now feeling their way up the New Jersey shore with no good explanation to bring home. The man keeping the journal^[1] wrote the fire down the way he wrote everything down — soundings, wind, the variation of the compass — and moved on to the next hour.

It is one line. It is also the first thing in the written history of this coast, and it is worth stopping on, because of what it is a record of. Before these men saw the hills, before they saw the beach or the inlet or the long low arm of sand curling north, they saw evidence of somebody else. The fire was somebody's. The land it burned on had not been empty for thousands of years.

The next morning the sun came up and they saw the hills. And at the end of that day, the man with the journal set down the sentence this coast has been quoting ever since.

Four days later, the same hand wrote down the death of a man named John Colman, killed by an arrow through the throat, and the burial of his body on a point of land that the crew named after him and that nobody has been able to find since.

The golden shore and the fresh grave, in the same week, in the same handwriting. That is the founding document of the written history of this place, and everything that follows in these chapters is downstream of it.

Start with what was here, because the ship did not arrive at an empty coast and no honest telling can begin with the ship.

The people living on this bayshore were Lenape. Lenapehoking, their homeland, ran across what is now New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, and the lower Hudson Valley — not a single nation in the European sense but many largely self-governing communities, connected by language, kinship, trade, and long habit.^[2] The community here, on the bluffs and the creeks between Sandy Hook and the river, were the Navesink. Their name is still on the water, still on the road signs, still on the lighthouse standing on the hill they lived beneath. Across the river, the peninsula they called Narumsunk is now Rumson. You cannot drive through this county without using their vocabulary.

What we know about how they lived here comes from two kinds of evidence, and it is worth being clear about both.

The first is what is in the ground. Shell middens — accumulations of oyster, clam, and mussel shell built up over generations — have been documented along this bayshore and up the river. The local historian Paul Boyd, who spent a career on the archaeology of this stretch of Monmouth County, found them spaced at roughly regular intervals along the shoreline and read that spacing as a pattern of settlement: communities placed about a day's walk apart, returning to the same beds season after season.^[3] One midden on the Navesink was recorded at thirty feet across and fifteen feet high. That is not a picnic. That is decades of the same families going back to the same water.

The estuary they were working is hard to imagine now. Raritan Bay and the Navesink sat at the eastern margin of an oyster system that covered something on the order of 350 square miles of the harbor^[4] — reefs so extensive that the ships coming in the following century sailed over them without much noticing. Behind the water, the hills held deer, turkey, bear, and beaver. The marshes held birds. Inland, the Minisink Trail ran from this coast up toward the Delaware Valley, one leg of a trade network that carried goods and news across the region long before any European wrote a word about it.

The second kind of evidence is European writing about Lenape people, and it should be handled with tongs. Nearly everything a European recorded here in the seventeenth century was written by a man passing through, with a commercial motive, no language in common with his subjects, and a stake in what he reported. Juet's journal, which is the spine of this chapter, is a good example: it is a superb record of depths and winds and a poor record of anything he had to interpret.

We are not going to pretend around that. What follows is a European account of a week on this coast, read as carefully as we can read it, with its gaps left visible.

Henry Hudson was not first. He was, at best, third, and the 85 years before him are the part of this story that usually gets cut.

On April 17, 1524, a Florentine sailing for the French crown brought a ship called La Dauphine into the lower bay. Giovanni da Verrazzano had been sent by François I to find the same passage everyone was looking for. He worked up the coast from the Carolinas, came in through the outer harbor, and anchored at the Narrows — viewing the lower and upper bays and, probably, the mouth of the river, without going up it.^[5] He was met by canoes. Thirty of them, by his account, full of people who came out to look at him.

He named the place Angoulême, after his king's former title, and the bay Santa Margarita, after the king's sister. Then the weather turned against him and he stood back out to sea, north toward Narragansett Bay, where he stayed a fortnight and wrote at length about the Narragansett people.

He was back in Dieppe by July 8 and wrote his report to the king the same day.^[6]

His letter to François I is the first European description of this harbor and of the people north of Florida.^[6] It is also, in its own quiet way, a document about theft. Earlier on that same voyage, somewhere on the Delmarva coast, Verrazzano's crew took a child — carried a boy away from an older woman to bring back to France, and by Verrazzano's own account tried to take a young woman too and were stopped only by the noise she made. He wrote it down in a letter to a king, as an incident worth reporting, in a voyage otherwise full of praise for the beauty of the land and the generosity of the people in it.

The following autumn another ship came. La Anunciada, fifty tons, built for the purpose, out of Corunna on the twenty-fourth of September, 1524, with twenty-nine men aboard.^[7]

Estêvão Gomes was a Portuguese pilot in Spanish service who had deserted Magellan's expedition four years earlier and been jailed for it. He was looking for the passage too. He entered this harbor and named the river for Saint Anthony.

Which direction he ran the coast is argued. Most reference books still say he worked south from Nova Scotia. The specialist literature says the opposite — that the north-to-south account traces to an erroneous statement by the seventeenth-century chronicler Antonio Herrera, that the evidence is overwhelmingly against it, and that Gomes almost certainly ran south to north, the same way Verrazzano had done a few months before. We follow the specialists and note the disagreement.^[7]

If that is right, then two ships under two crowns worked this same shoreline in the same direction, sixteen months apart, both looking for a way through, and both finding this bay instead.

He did not intend to come home with nothing. Somewhere on the coast of Maine or Nova Scotia, Gomes seized a large number of people to sell as slaves in Spain. At least fifty-eight of them reached Spain alive — which is a count of survivors, not of captives. Fifty-eight people, brought back across an ocean in a fifty-ton ship crewed by twenty-nine.^[7]

He made Coruña on the twenty-first of August, 1525, after ten months and twenty-seven days at sea.^[7]

The story that survives is that word of his arrival was garbled at court — that esclavos, slaves, was heard as clavos, cloves, and for a moment it was believed he had found the route to the Orient after all. It reads like a joke a chronicler made rather than an event, and we pass it on as that.

Charles V was reportedly appalled and ordered them freed.^[7]

They were not sent home.^[7]

What that voyage produced, besides the wreckage of fifty-eight lives, was a map. Diogo Ribeiro's world map of 1529 shows the Atlantic coast of North America running unbroken from Florida to Nova Scotia for the first time, and it labels this stretch of it Tierra de Esteban Gómez.^[8] That is how this coast entered the European mind: as the Land of Esteban Gómez, named for the man who took the captives.

And then, on paper, almost nothing for 84 years.

That silence deserves honesty rather than filler. It does not mean nothing happened. European fishing and trading vessels worked the northeast coast throughout the sixteenth century and left thin, scattered records; the men aboard them were not keeping journals for posterity. Whether any of them called here, what the Navesink learned about Europeans in those decades and from whom, and how much of that knowledge was in the room when the Halve Maen came through the Narrows — none of that is answerable from what survives. The written archive simply goes dark.

It matters, though, that the darkness is on our side of the ledger. The Navesink did not stop learning things in 1525 because Europeans stopped writing them down.

There is a reason the 85 years before Hudson get cut, and it isn't that nobody knew about them.

For most of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, American historians argued about whether Verrazzano's letters to François I were authentic at all — whether the Florentine had ever been here.^[5] In New York, Hudson's 1609 voyage settled in as the de facto beginning of European exploration, and Gomes was forgotten just as completely.

Two things changed it. In 1909 a manuscript turned up in a library in Viterbo: the Cèllere Codex, one of three surviving copies of Verrazzano's letter, transcribed by his brother and annotated by Verrazzano himself, far fuller than any other version. It is now Morgan MS MA 776, on Madison Avenue, twelve miles from the water it describes.^[5] A letter signed by François I referring to Verrazzano's report surfaced as well. The authenticity argument was effectively over.

The other thing was a campaign. Verrazzano's name was pushed back into New York's account of itself by the city's Italian-American community — first around 1909, then again through the 1940s and 1950s — until it ended up on a bridge across the Narrows he anchored in.^[5]

So the order of arrival at this coast was settled partly by evidence and partly by who was arguing. An Englishman sailing for the Dutch became the beginning because a Florentine's letter was doubted and a Portuguese pilot's voyage was inconvenient. That is worth knowing before reading any account of who got here first, including this one.

Sunday the sixth. Fair weather in the morning. Henry Hudson sent John Colman out with four men in the boat to sound the other river to the north — the Narrows, twelve miles or so from where they lay. They found shoal water on the way and then good deep water at the mouth, eighteen and twenty fathoms, and a narrow river to the west between two islands. They rowed on a couple of leagues, saw open water beyond, and turned back. They reported afterward that the land was as pleasant with grass and flowers and fine trees as any they had seen, and that a sweet smell came off it.

On the way back they were set upon by two canoes, one carrying twelve men and one carrying fourteen.

Night came down and it began to rain, and the rain put out the slow match for their guns. In the fight John Colman was killed by an arrow shot into his throat, and two more men were hurt. It got so dark they could not find the ship. They rowed back and forth all night in a current so strong their grapnel would not hold the bottom.

Juet does not say why the canoes attacked. He does not appear to have wondered. That absence is the single largest hole in the founding document of this coast's history, and no amount of careful reading will fill it. What can be said is that by September of 1609 the people of this bay had 85 years of accumulated reason to be wary of ships, and that at least fifty-nine people had already been carried off the Atlantic coast by Europeans who wrote about it afterward in letters to kings.

That is chronology, not verdict. We do not know what happened in that boat.

Monday the seventh. Fair. At ten in the morning the boat found the ship and came alongside, and they brought their dead man with them. They carried him on land and buried him, and named the point after his name, Colman's Point.

Then they hoisted the boat in and built up her sides with waste boards, to give the men something to shelter behind. They rode all that night keeping good watch.

The name did not survive. Colman's Point appears on no modern chart, and four locations are argued for it today.

The first European buried on this harbor was given a place name within a day of dying and lost it inside a generation. There is something in that worth sitting with, on a coast that has spent four hundred years deciding what to keep.

The eighth through the tenth. The bay went armed and watchful. And the trade went on anyway, because it was worth something to both sides. That is the thing the story usually loses: after the killing, after the boards went up on the boat, people still came out and things still changed hands.

Friday the eleventh. Fair and hot. At one in the afternoon, with the tide making and a breeze out of the south-southwest, the Halve Maen weighed and went up the river.

The next morning, in Juet's account, 28 canoes came out full of men, women, and children — and he wrote that they came to betray the ship, and would let none of them aboard, and bought oysters and beans from them anyway.^[1] Twenty-eight canoes, and the officer's verdict is treachery. He gives no evidence for it. It is the same reflex that ran through the whole ten days.

Hudson went up the river as far as present-day Albany before the shoaling made it clear this was not the way to China. Then he came back down and went home, and this coast entered the account books of the Dutch Republic, and the century that follows in these chapters began.

The Lenape kept records too. They were not written, and the ones we can read now have come to us by a long and lossy road.

The best known is an account of the first arrival, taken down in the 1760s by John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary living among Delaware, Munsee, and Mahican communities that had by then been pushed west into Ohio. He said he had it from aged and respected men, and that he wrote it as it was given to him. It was published decades later, in the nineteenth century, in the collections of the New-York Historical Society.^[10]

In that account, people on the shore see something far out on the water and cannot make sense of it — a large object approaching, taken by some for a great house floating, and by some for the arrival of a spirit. Preparations are made. Meat is prepared. People dress for the occasion. When the newcomers land there is drinking, and gifts are given — beads, axes, hoes, stockings — and the visitors say they will return in a year, and will want a little land then, only enough to sow seed to raise herbs for their broth. In the telling, the newcomers come back, and the small parcel becomes larger, and the pattern is set. There is a wry detail that survives in the account: when the Europeans returned, they found the axes and hoes they had given being worn as ornaments around people's necks, having been given without any explanation of what they were for.

How much of that is a memory of 1609 is unanswerable. Heckewelder recorded it a century and a half after the event, through translation, among people who had by then lost their homeland and had every reason to tell the story as a story about how the losing began. The wry ending in particular reads as something shaped by hindsight, because it is: it is a story about a small request that was never small.

That does not make it worthless. It makes it a source with a problem, and every source in this chapter has one. Juet's problem is that he was an armed participant with a commercial stake and no language in common with anyone he described. Verrazzano's problem is that he was writing a report to a king who was deciding whether to fund him again. Heckewelder's problem is distance and translation and the fact that he was a missionary. The honest move is not to rank them but to say what each one is and let the reader weigh them.

What the two records agree on is small and real: ships came, people came out to meet them, goods changed hands, and both sides were watching each other extremely closely.

There is a coda to this that is easy to miss.

Robert Juet, who wrote the sentence about the very good land, sailed with Hudson again the following year on a fourth voyage north. That voyage ended badly. Juet was implicated in the mutiny that put Henry Hudson, his young son, and a handful of sick men into an open boat and cut them loose in the ice. Juet did not make it home either. He died at sea in 1611, before the ship reached England.

So the man who wrote the founding sentence of this coast's written history, and who four days later wrote down John Colman's death and the naming of a point that no longer exists, ended by helping set another man adrift to die. Everything we know about the first ten days of European presence on this bay, we know from him.

That is not a tidy inheritance. It is the one we have.

The land itself came out of the week unchanged. The hills he saw are the hills you can see from the Route 36 bridge on any clear evening. The water is the same water. What changed was that the place had entered a system of writing and mapping and claiming, and once a place is in that system, the argument over who owns it can begin. That argument is the next chapter: a deed, a purchase, thirteen shillings, and the long distance between what was said to have been sold and what was in practice kept.

This chapter has been about ten days in 1609 and the 85 years before them. It ends with a coastline entering a system of writing and claiming.

What that system did to the Navesink is Chapter 3 and everything after it — a deed, a purchase, thirteen shillings, and a long argument about what was sold. We are not going to summarise the end of it here in a paragraph, because it took a century and because we don't hold the right to tell it briefly.

Their name is still on the water, the road signs, and the lighthouse. That is not the same as still being here, and this project will not let the two get confused.

This chapter is built from the European written record, which is thin, biased, and all we have in writing. The main sources are Robert Juet's journal of the 1609 voyage, first published in Purchas's Pilgrimes in 1625; Giovanni da Verrazzano's 1524 letter to François I; the 1529 world map of Diogo Ribeiro; and the account of first arrival recorded by John Heckewelder in the 1760s and published in 1841. The archaeology of the Navesink bayshore draws on the published work of Herbert C. Kraft and of Paul D. Boyd, whose Atlantic Highlands: From Lenape Camps to Bayside Town remains the best local treatment of the subject.

We have not written this in partnership with Lenape descendant historians, and we are not going to imply otherwise. That means the sections about Navesink life here rest on published archaeology and on documents written by Europeans, with all the limits that carries.

If you know this material — through study, through family, through the Lenape communities whose history this is — and we have gotten something wrong, or flattened something that deserved better, we want to hear it. Corrections are credited and the chapter gets revised. That is not a formality; several sections above are marked open on purpose, and the questions we could not answer are stated in the text rather than smoothed over.

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