New York is all about water.
Reasonable people may disagree with this assertion. Surely New York is about trade, finance, power. Fashion, food, art, media, design. Fusions and factions. Wall Street and Broadway. Skyscrapers and boroughs.
Yes, but water flows beneath and around all of these. If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than those of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas; of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.
And yet, as varied as this shoreline is today, in past centuries, before hardscape and landfill, it was incomparably more jagged and meandering. The word littoral designates any space where land and water meet. Littoral zones are rich, fecund, life-fostering places. New York’s harbor once supplied oysters around the world. It once produced single oysters the size of a dinner plate.
At the time Nicolls’s ship approaches the harbor, it is still mostly a dream, that exploitation of the heart of the continent, but it’s one that lives in the minds of the Dutch.
Bivalves aside, the harbor might well be considered the birth mother of America. Maybe that sounds like an exaggeration. Think, though, of some of the resonant names that were processed at Ellis Island or at Castle Garden before it—names like Einstein, Carnegie, Houdini, Frank Capra, Frida Kahlo, Bob Hope, Emma Goldman, Joseph Pulitzer, Lucky Luciano. Then consider that those names stand for tens of millions of others and that the effects of migration multiply over time. Consider that 40 percent of Americans alive today are Americans because New York Harbor beckoned their ancestors. Consider that the harbor became not just a nest for nurturing a city but a conduit for the peopling of a continent.
When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, it made a continuous sea journey possible from any port in the world into that harbor, up the Hudson River, and westward into the Great Lakes and the heart of North America. Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. You could call these cities the offspring of New York Harbor. Consider that for a portion of the nineteenth century more people and goods came through New York than through all of the country’s other major ports combined.
Water was the reason for valuing this place before any Europeans arrived. Water was and is the primary element in Lenape culture. A version of the traditional water song, sung by Grandmother Clara Soaring Hawk of the Ramapough Lenape at an event I attended in 2024, goes like this:
We sing this song like a lullaby.
The song means the water is the life’s blood of our mother the earth.
Water is the life’s blood of our own bodies.
*
So we begin on the water. It’s August 26, 1664, a Tuesday, late in the summer of what has already been a very busy year for a man named Richard Nicolls as he stands on the deck of a wooden vessel making its way into this broad, tree-bristling amphitheater of a harbor. He is faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, he’s right where he wanted to be: hugging the coast of Long Island, approaching his objective. His problem is he’s alone: it’s just his one ship, gliding toward a vast, ornate waterscape that will soon become enemy territory. That isn’t the case yet because his country, England, and the Dutch Republic, which has had a colony on this stretch of the eastern seaboard of North America for nearly a half century, are at peace. But tensions at home have been building—fueled largely by English jealousy toward the much tinier nation that within a short span has become Europe’s economic powerhouse. This mission of his, as Nicolls knows perfectly well, will likely tip the two longtime rivals into war.
His full convoy, wherever the rest of it is, comprises 4 frigates, 450 men, and 92 cannons, “exceedingly well fitted with all the necessaries for warre,” as a knowledgeable observer put it. The packing of the holds with powder and shot, not to mention firelocks, matchlocks, carabines, saddles and bridles, bandoliers and bells and halberds, flintstones and hatchets and nails, and the manning of the expedition with seasoned soldiers, was the result of careful planning six months earlier in England. But then came a hard ten weeks’ crossing of the Atlantic, an eternity of puking and stinking soldiers pitching up and down with the swells, no doubt contemplating at times the likelihood, the mercy, of a watery grave. The ships became separated and continued to America one by one. Nicolls’s flagship limped into port on the Maine coast; the others found their way to Nantucket. Nicolls and his lieutenants eventually regrouped in Boston. The convoy then set out south for the Dutch colony of New Netherland, but the ships became separated yet again. So here he is, sailing alone toward his future.
It’s not giving much away to say that Nicolls will be the winner in the coming clash. He will set in motion a chain of historical events that will yield a landscape as familiar to us as the back of our collective hand: Coney Island, Central Park, Yankee Stadium, Saks Fifth Avenue, Katz’s Deli, Seinfeld, the Dakota, the Statue of Liberty. Yet for all that, history has mostly forgotten him. The otherwise outstanding Encyclopedia of New York City, to give one instance of the oversight, doesn’t even have an entry for Nicolls, never mind that he willed the city into being, named it, defined its original boundaries, and was the colony’s first governor.
Declaring a winner suggests that the story will have a loser. But while Peter Stuyvesant, Nicolls’s nemesis, is going to be beaten in the most obvious sense, it is possible to see that, in losing, he wins. And therein lies a major reason for New York’s eventual success.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
It’s a frigate, this ship of Nicolls’s, the kind of high-decked, three-masted, cannon-studded wooden vessel that set about conquering the globe in what military historians call the age of fighting sail. Its very name—the Guinea, an homage to recent grim successes on the so-called Guinea Coast of West Africa—signals that we are already knee-deep in moral compromise.
Back home in Europe, the English scientist Robert Hooke has just identified Jupiter’s Great Red Spot through his telescope. In the Dutch city of Delft, Johannes Vermeer is carefully positioning yet another of his costumed models at a table beneath a leaded glass window so that the light falls just so. People in London will soon begin filing insurance claims; Paris has started a public bus system; Amsterdam will shortly install street lighting. It’s a sophisticated world, and Richard Nicolls—multilingual, up-to-date on scientific advances, a friend of earls and countesses as well as of soldiers and commoners—is a man of that world.
But he’s not there. He’s scanning the horizon of an utterly alien environment: the approximately nine million square miles that constitute the New World of North America. The continent has long been the stuff of lore for Englishmen, whose own native wildernesses were largely tamed centuries before. John Smith, for one, summarized the position of his fellow Jamestown settlers in Virginia: “The woods are so wide, the rivers so broad, and the beasts so wild, and wee so unskilled to catch them.” A New Englander described the geography there as “a desart Wildernesse.” And those were the known landscapes. Farther west, rumor had it, were mountains and deserts of unimaginable, inhuman scope.
Englishmen of Nicolls’s day typically refer to America as a wilderness, but they know perfectly well that it is anything but an empty landscape. It is intricately peopled. Europeans have interacted with the Indigenous people—fought, traded, sparred, married—for decades now. Some have learned their languages. Some have attached names to their tribes and lands, committed those names to print, doing their best to spell them out as they have heard them. Sanhican. Naraticon. Canomaker. Mahikan. Minnessinck. Wapanoo. Pequatoo. Waoraneck. Tockwogh. Konekotay. Tappan. Wappinges.
Richard Nicolls has no experience of these peoples, but he knows they are out there: in longhouse villages or wigwams, wandering into Dutch towns to buy bread or to barter for muskets, as wise and duplicitous, as capable of generosity or lethality as any European. If all goes well, he will have to deal with many of them before long.
Nicolls has some awareness too of the fact that this harbor and the island that is his objective give unique access to the continent that lies beyond. This awareness on the part of the English is fairly new. When the European settlement of the continent began six decades earlier, the English thought about little but what was right in front of them. The Jamestown colonizers brought few necessities for the long-term settlement of Virginia but lots of picks and shovels: they believed America to be a literal gold mine. They were going to dig and get rich. The infamous starvation that followed was partially a result of that lack of foresight. The Pilgrims showed up on the Massachusetts coast fired by religious zeal but without a map, a reliable guide, or a plan of action. The friendship they formed with the Pokanoket tribe, climaxing with the famous celebration of thanksgiving, had less to do with openness toward Native culture than with desperation. (Their first interaction with the local tribe involved the Pilgrims stealing the Natives’ corn.)
The Dutch had come to the continent with a different sensibility. As a people whose very culture had been formed by water—the need to control it, to turn the problem of it to advantage—they approached their colony-building with a strategic awareness of geography. This stupendous harbor would be the heart of their New Netherland. The river that fed it was a broad highway into the interior. One hundred and fifty miles up it, another river valley fed into it. This one, the Mohawk, extended westward into the interior—toward vast bodies of water that the Haudenosaunee people told them of. The Great Lakes offered water access to an incomprehensibly vast region of possibility. At the time Nicolls’s ship approaches the harbor, it is still mostly a dream, that exploitation of the heart of the continent, but it’s one that lives in the minds of the Dutch who have made this region their home.
And now, belatedly, the English have cottoned onto this gem of geographic wisdom. That is one impetus for Nicolls’s mission. The English have realized that they will never get anywhere with this continent if they allow their archrivals to hold this, the key to it.
*
Wind, water; the snaps and sighs of the shrouds overhead; the creaking of a wooden ship’s bones.
Uncertainties surround Richard Nicolls. He has no idea what lies ahead in the harbor and even less of an idea how, should he accomplish his first task, to go about the second, which doesn’t concern these Dutch at all but his fellow Englishmen. He dares not speak openly of this mission. Indeed, on his person are two sets of instructions, one public, to be shown to whoever may ask to see it, and the other private. While he is to “informe all men” about the mission to take the Dutch colony, the private instructions make clear that “the ground and foundation” of his venture is to bring the wayward New England colonies under the king’s rule.
[Nicolls] has no idea what lies ahead in the harbor and even less of an idea how, should he accomplish his first task, to go about the second, which doesn’t concern these Dutch at all but his fellow Englishmen.
For all the precariousness about what lies ahead, he can take some comfort in certainties of the recent past: expressions of faith in him from the highest authority that came tricked out in pleasing fineries of expression echoing off palace walls:
Our trusty and well beloved Colonel Richard Nicolls…imployed by us…You are to use great dilligence [in]…the possessing…and reduceing that people to an entyre submission and obedience to us.
— Given at our Court at Whitehall the 23rd of Aprill 1664, in the Sixteenth yeare of our Reigne
It has been a long, slogging journey from England, and it’s now nearing its end. Having ridden west along the beachy spit variously called Rechaweygh or Rockaway (probably from the Munsee for “sandy place”), Nicolls and his crew glide across a five-mile stretch of open water that separates two long, sandy peninsulas: skinny outstretched arms that function as gateposts, welcoming vessels into the harbor. It’s a tricky passage, though. The eternal rush of water through the Narrows up ahead results in a continual buildup of silt around the more northerly of these two peninsulas, which snags the bottoms of unwary ships.
But the ship’s captain, Hugh Hyde, knows where he’s going: he’s making for the tip of the southern peninsula, which the Dutch here call Sant Punt and which the English call Sandy Hook. Captain Hyde is clear on his immediate destination because some of the men aboard the Guinea are New Englanders; they are well acquainted with these waters, as are their compatriots to the south in Virginia. By exploiting geography and their own business sense, the Dutch have made New Amsterdam a commercial hub, which draws trade and transport from the English colonies. This is another impetus for Nicolls’s mission: to take this trade for England.
The ship rounds the sandy nub of the peninsula, tucking itself into this outer reach of the harbor, and the waters go calm. The sensation, relative to the exposed nature of life on the open ocean, might induce relief in a casual sailor, a welcome letting-down of one’s guard, but Nicolls has no room for such luxury. In order to defend a trading empire that runs from Japan to the Caribbean, the tiny Dutch Republic has built one of the most fearsome naval forces in the world, with hundreds of warships. Nicolls knows too that the Dutch favor small vessels, which can more easily maneuver: they are well suited to spaces such as this waterscape of coves and crannies. So while the waters here in the outer harbor are dazzling in the summer sun, changing with the light minute by minute, from milky coffee to cobalt to gunmetal glinting with diamonds, Nicolls isn’t enchanted. His spies have told him that Dutch spies have tracked his progress: very shortly they will know that he is here. His intelligence also informs him that this harbor in which the Dutch capital lies is lightly fortified, but intelligence can be wrong. He could be sailing into a trap.
*
If Richard Nicolls is cautious, it is not because he’s the sort who shies from conflict. He gave himself over to a military life as a youth. He was leading a cavalry troop into battle at the age of eighteen. Eleven years before entering this harbor, he was part of an army laying siege to the French town of Mousson, for three nights enduring barrages of “hand grenades, fire works, and fire itself” raining down on them as they tried to erect a defensive wall. In the same action, an enemy cannon shot came whizzing through their encampment, piercing three barrels of gunpowder but failing to ignite them: an amazing occurrence that many who witnessed felt showed the hand of God.
These were campaigns of mud and rain, of horses and men competing to out-shriek one another in their agonized cries. In a battle at Étampes, 1,400 men were killed in a span of hours, not mowed down with merciful efficiency but hacked, gouged, stabbed with pikes, shot at close range, some even hammered to death by stones when a wall gave way and men on both sides took up pieces of it, lunged at one another, and began bashing in skulls.
Such experience was part of the reason Richard Nicolls was selected for this mission.
Hugh Hyde, Nicolls’s skipper, has chosen a good place both to wait for the other vessels and to keep an eye out for trouble. But the very primeness of the location likely leads Hyde to order the gunners to their stations. The Dutch of New Netherland have been known to post lookouts here, for it commands a view of the entrance to the harbor and thus of all approaches to Manhattan.
A sail appears, and sure enough, it’s Dutch. Fears of an attack, however, are quickly allayed. It’s only a sloop—single-masted, probably hauling cargo locally. But though it poses no instant threat to them, Nicolls does not want it alerting the Dutch capital of his presence. Captain Hyde orders his men into action. They run the ship down, presumably fire a warning shot, and before long its captain is aboard. He coughs up his name: Claes Verbraech. He has been in the Dutch colony for several years, is based at what they call the South River—the Delaware—and was en route from there to Manhattan. No doubt he was startled to find the guns of an English warship pointed at him.
With Captain Verbraech on ice and his vessel impounded, things go quiet again. The Guinea drops anchor and sets a watch. From this vantage Nicolls has a long, straight line of sight northward. Eight miles across the harbor, the body of water called the Narrows acts like a scope, focusing attention on what lies beyond: the inner portion of the harbor and the southern end of the island the Lenape long ago named after a type of wood that grew there, wood they favored for making bows. Manna-hatta.
The encounter with the sloop will surely have heightened Nicolls’s senses, set him on high alert. At his disposal at present are thirty-six cannons and a crack team of gunners. He has inflicted mountains of harm in the past and will do so again if need be. The world into which he was born was largely devoured by war and theologically fueled hatred during his youth and coming of age. He has spent much of his life since on horseback, a sword in his hand, doing his part to hack a new world into being. He is forty-one years old, has never been married, has no children. Most of the wealth he possesses is in cash or jewelry: light, transferable, a soldier’s savings. All he really has, at least as far as the records of history tell us, is an unwavering, lifelong commitment to a man named York.
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From Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America by Russell Shorto. Copyright © 2025. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
