Manhattan Before the Dutch

Pre-Colonial Landscape of New York Alive With Diverse Species

Sep 14, 2009

In September 1609, Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor and saw before him a narrow green island, whose lush landscape had changed little for many thousands of years.

A small group of Native American men, members of the Lenape tribe, canoed to the ship to welcome the newcomers. For thousands of years, the Lenape and their ancestors had hunted, fished and grown crops on the island they called "Mannahatta," or "Island of Many Hills."

New York City's Original Inhabitants

Estimates of the Lenape population vary from two hundred to twelve hundred, reflecting the island's use as a seasonal resource. The population may have swelled for spring, summer, and fall to take advantage of fish and bird migration, game hunting, planting and harvesting. Most of the Lenape may have returned to the relative shelter of the mainland or Long Island for the winter.

Topgraphic Variety of Mannahatta Leads to Ecological Diversity

The Dutch and the Lenape had found a land of varied topography that included rolling hills, sandy coastal plain, craggy cliffs and deep inland forests, supporting an extraordinary amount of ecodiversity. The key to the diversity of species, then and now, is Manhattan Island's position on top of a major estuary, a place where sea meets land. At the time of Henry Hudson's first arrival in what would become New Amsterdam (before being taken by the British and renamed New York), the sliver of island offered salt water, sandy beaches, salt marshes with brackish water, mudflats, tidal wetlands, many fresh water streams, springs, and ponds, cedar swamps, grassy meadows, and towering primeval forests of old-growth trees. The sheer variety of landscape created inviting habitats for animals as diverse as the right whale and the oyster, black bears and beavers, bald eagles and hummingbirds.

Animals of Fresh and Salt Waters

Off the southern tip of Manhattan, now known as the Battery, porpoises and harbor seals were frequently sighted. The island's fresh and salt waters teemed with sea bass, cod, eel, flounder, herring, bluefish, pickerel, and sturgeon, among many other fish. Shellfish and crustaceans, including lobsters, oysters, conchs, clams, mussels, and soft-shell crabs, made their homes in the tidal wetlands or further out in the harbor. Sea turtles came ashore to lay eggs, while box turtles and snapping turtles shared the freshwater ponds with frogs and water snakes.

Animals of the Land – Mammals

The narrow island's many woods, meadows, marshes, rivers, streams, and ponds were home to deer and elk, mice and voles, raccoons and skunks, weasels and fishers, river otters and beavers, rabbits and muskrats, squirrels and woodchucks, bats and moles, bobcats and mountain lions, gray fox and gray wolf, and even black bears, who were drawn in summer to the wild berries of Mannahatta. By 1609, humans, too, had been an integral part of the island's ecology for five to ten thousand years.

Animals of the Skies – Birds

The skies over Manhattan were literally darkened at times by huge migrating flocks of birds such as the now-extinct passenger pigeon. Other regularly occurring birds were bald eagles, peregrine falcons, merlins, and many types of hawks and owls, turkey vultures, hummingbirds and sparrows, a profusion of warblers, thrushes, egrets and herons, geese, ducks, coots, and rails, swallows, blackbirds and grackles, crows and ravens, woodpeckers and wrens, and a vast army of seabirds that included gulls and terns, cormorants and petrels, sandpipers and plovers, skimmers and curlews, whip-poor-wills and nighthawks.

New York's Central Park remains today one of the world's great bird-watching spots, thanks to Manhattan's perfect location as a resting spot for birds making the long migratory trek up or down the eastern seaboard.In recent years, some birds that had disappeared from the region have made spectacular comebacks. Peregrine falcons and red-tail hawks regularly nest on the ledges of skyscrapers or in the trees of the great parks.

After The Dutch Settlement

Following Henry Hudson's report of a New World paradise full of fish, game, timber and furs, settlers began to arrive and the inevitable process of landscape alteration had begun. Clearing and farming the land, massive trade in beaver fur, introduction of non-native plant and animal species, and soaring population growth would lead eventually to today's modern city of concrete and steel.

Shorto, Russell, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, New York: Doubleday, 2004

Sanderson, Eric W., Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, New York: Abrams, 2009

The copyright of the article Manhattan Before the Dutch in Colonial America is owned by Melissa Cooper. Permission to republish Manhattan Before the Dutch in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.