Chronicles of America Volume 07 - Dutch and English on the Hudson

In September 1609, a small Dutch yacht named the Half Moon slipped past the low sandy hook of the Atlantic coast and entered a great river flowing from the mountains to the sea. The men aboard could not have imagined that their soundings would chart the future site of the world's most consequential city. This is the story of how the Dutch, drawn by the promise of profit from fur and grain, carved a colony from the wilderness along the Hudson, building a commercial empire that would make New York the gateway to America. Through the lens of a river and its people, Goodwin traces the collision of Dutch pragmatism with English imperial ambition, the turbulent decades of transition under Peter Stuyvesant, and the final conquest of 1664 that handed the colony to English hands. The geography itself, the river as natural highway, the fertile valleys, the strategic harbor, determined everything. This is origin story as prophecy: the making of the Empire State was written in the water before a single wall was built.