The Mannahatta Project

Background
On a hot, fair day, the 12th of September, 1609, Henry Hudson and a small crew of Dutch and English sailors rode the flood tide up a great estuarine river past a long, wooded island at 40° 48’ latitude on the North American continent.  At the time, Hudson noted the land was “as pleasant as one need tread upon,” and his first mate, Robert Juet, wrote that the land was “as pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees, as ever they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them.”  Subsequent European visitors over the next decade found the island “a convenient place abounding with grass” and “a land excellent and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grape vines.”  This island was called Mannahatta by the Lenni Lenape people who lived there, or “land of many hills.”  It would later become known as Manhattan Island and would become as densely filled with people and avenues as it was once with trees and streams.

The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today.  The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted.  Most history books dispense of the pre-European history of New York in only a few pages.  However, with new methods in geographic analysis and the help of a remarkable 18th-century map, we will discover a new aspect of New York culture, the environmental foundation of the city.