A History of New York

by Washington Irving

  p. 31 Christovallo Colon ... clumsily nick-named Columbus: Irving would return to the adventures of Christopher Columbus during his first visit to Spain in 1826, an appointment to the American Legation in Madrid. He would publish Life and Voyages of Columbus in 1828 and Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus in 1831.

  p. 32 Think you ... savages to exterminate: Throughout the History, Irving describes Manhattan before its discovery in prelapsarian terms. His surprisingly contemporary sensitivity to the original state of the island and his grave comments on the subsequent treatment by the Dutch of both its aboriginal inhabitants and its natural resources (see: “the RIGHT BY EXTERMINATION, or, in Other words, the RIGHT BY GUNPOWDER,” p. 47) provide a valuable and instructive counterpoint to the book’s broad satire that is often overlooked by contemporary readers.

  p. 37 jolter heads.... appellations: As the reader may have guessed, all of these “appellations” loosely translate as “stupid head.”

  p. 48 sailing in the air: Irving may have had hot-air balloons in mind: the first flight carrying humans was made in 1783, the year he was born. George Washington witnessed the first hot-air balloon flight (by the Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard) in North America on January 7, 1793.

  p. 56 New York Gazette edited by Solomon Lang: John “Solomon” Lang was the editor of the New York Gazette newspaper at the time of Irving’s writing; the newspaper was indeed famous for its devotion to shipping news, and little else. Lang would later be spoofed again in “Fanny,” Fitzgreene Halleck’s 1819 satirical ode to New York society, as “the sapient Mr. Lang. The world of him / Knows much, yet not one-half so much as he / Knows of the world ...”

  p. 63 cat-heads ... prodigious poop: Irving uses sailors’ slang to create an extended bawdy pun on the female form. Catheads are commonly defined as horizontal beams that extend from each side of a ship’s bow (or front) to raise and carry the ship’s anchor, while the “poop” is a term for the highest deck to be found at the stern (or back) of a vessel.

  p. 63 Gibbet Island: By the time of Irving’s writing, this island in New York Harbor had been rechristened Ellis Island after Samuel Ellis, who purchased it in 1785. It was not the first time the island had endured a name change, either: it had been called Gull Island by the Mohegan tribe, and Oyster Island by the Dutch settlers who harvested the bivalves there (once extremely plentiful—and safely edible—around New York City). The nickname “Gibbet Island” was given after a pirate named Anderson was hanged there in 1765. Irving returned to the subject of the pleasant little island with the gruesome history in October 1839, when he published a ghost story entitled “The Guests from Gibbet Island” in Knickerbocker magazine. The story was collected in the Book of the Hudson: Collected from the Various Works of Diedrich Knickerbocker, edited by Geoffrey Crayon, which G. P. Putnam published in 1849 in order to capitalize on Irving’s (and Knickerbocker’s) fame.

  p. 64 tremendous and uncouth sound ... miserably perished to a man: Irving once again addresses the “right by extermination” with Knickerbocker’s wry suggestion that the deaths of the Native American population of Communipaw is due only to the fatal cacophony of “low dutch.” Knickerbocker’s mention of the “Tammany Society of the day” refers to the St. Tammany Society or Columbian Order, a popular patriotic and charitable organization that originated in Philadelphia but was adopted by New Yorkers in 1786. The group, which held to republican and anti-elitist principles, made a fetish of Native American symbols and terminology, calling the chairman of the board of directors the “Grand Sachem” and his members “braves,” and parading through the city streets in Indian regalia on patriotic holidays. At the time of the History’s publication, the Tammany Society had already become a powerful political force in New York, but it had not lost its incongruous Native American associations.

  p. 64 carried the village of Communipaw by storm: Communipaw and Pavonia are now part of the city of Jersey City, New Jersey, population 240,000 in 2000.

  p. 69 great men and great families of doubtful origin ... descended from a god: This is not the first time Irving has lampooned the pretensions of New York’s nouveaux riches: in the pages of Salmagundi he often spoofed the pretensions of “modern upstarts and mushroom cockneys” who “violated” his contemporary city with their flashy clothes and carriages and their ignorance of the “venerable” social traditions observed by “true Hollanders ... and their unsophisticated descendants.”

  p. 72 Printer’s Devil: This is the first time that Irving includes a note from an ostensible “Printer’s Devil,” a nickname usually given to a printer’s apprentice. While Knickerbocker has supplied his own citations, and an unnamed “editor” contributes footnotes, the Printer’s Devil appears to have been requisitioned to provide supporting details or corrections specifically related to the geography or municipal history of New York City. The distribution of labor between Knickerbocker, his “Editor,” and his “Printer’s Devil” is left purposefully vague; the layering of these sporadic, sometimes nonsensical notes one upon the next ends by subverting (if not positively derailing) the confident, forward propulsion of Knickerbocker’s tale. Rather than clarifying and reassuring the reader, the History’s footnotes only render the text more opaque. Later nineteenth-century American writers, particularly Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe would adopt and improve Irving’s destabilizing technique in their fiction.

  p. 73 MANNA-HATTA: Irving’s use of “Manna-hatta” prefigures Walt Whitman’s euphoric cry at the end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” published in Leaves of Grass in 1855:

  Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!—stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

  Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!

  p. 81 ST. NICHOLAS: Irving’s treatment of the characteristics of St. Nicholas and the Dutch traditions surrounding his saint’s day (December 6) would inform “A Visit to Saint Nicholas,” the poem attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. First published anonymously in 1823, the titular “jolly old elf” keeps a “stump of a pipe ... held tight in his teeth.”

  p. 83 Peach War: The Peach War was an actual skirmish between Dutch settlers and Native Americans in 1655 that began with the killing of a young Native American girl who had stolen a peach from the orchard of colonist Henry Van Dyck. The Native American retaliation lasted three days, and was indeed as “bloody” as Knickerbocker here suggests. This battle took place during the governorship of Peter Stuyvesant, but Knickerbocker seems uncharacteristically unspecific as to the chronology, placing this last major hostility between the Dutch and the Native Americans in a vague and distant past.

  p. 99 Old MS: The note on the Fly Market may be interpreted as Knickerbocker’s answer to Samuel Mitchill’s treatment of the same in the Picture of New York:

  This part of the city ... was originally a salt meadow ... forming such a disposition of land and water as was called by the Dutch Vlaie, a valley or wet piece of ground; when a market was first held there, it was called the Fly, or Vlaie Market, the Valley or Meadow Market; from which has come the corruption of “Fly market” [sic]. This name certainly ought to be rejected and a better one adopted.

  In another instance of historiographical one-upmanship, Knickerbocker points out Mitchill’s mistake: that this “corrupted” name was originally Smits Vleye, or Smith Fly, not just “Vlaie Market,” and that it was once an Edenic field, home only to “flocks of vociferous geese.”

  p. 102 the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism: Knickerbocker’s suggestion that the cows of New Amsterdam were the first urban planners is topical as well as comic. In 1807 the Common Council of New York voted to authorize the entire island above present-day Houston Street to be surveyed and laid out in “streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out ... [but] not accepted by the Common Counci
l.” At the time of Irving’s writing, an engineer named John Randel Jr. and a team of “Commissioners of Streets and Roads” were in the process of designing and implementing the New York City street “grid” as it exists today, although the ancient and crooked streets of lower Manhattan (including those ostensibly laid out by the cows of the Kieft regime) would be allowed to keep their tipsy trajectories.

  p. 103 very efficacious in producing the yellow fever: Yellow fever was by no means an historical footnote for Irving’s New York-based readers, but an ongoing crisis in urban public health. As recently as 1805 an epidemic of the disease had necessitated a large-scale, enforced evacuation of Manhattan’s lower wards to the pastoral reaches of Greenwich Village, where the air and water were considered more healthful than in the congested neighborhoods south of Chambers Street.

  p. 103 yellow dutch bricks ... weather cock: Irving’s own Hudson Valley home, Sunnyside, would later be constructed along these exact lines.

  p. 106 called dough nuts, or oly koeks—a delicious kind of cake: While culinary historians and doughnut aficionados quibble over Irving’s interchangeable usage of “dough nut” and “oly koek,” his reference to the favorite fried confection is generally accepted to be the first in American literature, and a vote for the Dutch origins of the doughnut in general.

  p. 112 when the shad in the Hudson were all salmon: This refers to Samuel Mitchill’s attempt to publicly debunk the Reverend Samuel Miller’s claim (made on the basis of Robert Juet’s journal from the Half Moon) that salmon were once native to the Hudson River. Miller made this claim in a “Discourse” on Henry Hudson that he delivered to the New-York Historical Society in 1809, which Mitchill contested the same year in an open letter to the Society. “Salmon love clear and limpid water,” he argued, “and I should question much whether the ooze and mud of [the Hudson] was so agreeable to them.” Instead, the “Herring, the Shad, and the Sturgeon [are] the annual visitants to this stream,” Mitchill declared, referring Miller to “the Dutch word ‘salm’ or ‘salmpie,’ commonly in use to signify salmon, [but which] means also, in ordinary and loose conversation and composition, trout.” Irving’s mischievous, casual reference to this debate is particularly intriguing because it suggests that the writer was following the frustrations of the Society with exceptional interest and care. Mitchill’s anti-salmon letter was published as an appendix to Miller’s lecture in the Historical Society’s Collections ... For the Year 1809, but that volume was not published until 1810, months after Irving’s satire appeared. Irving embroidered his History with a host of such pointed details and references, whose seeming scholarly and scientific plausibility had the effect of calling the work of actual (nonmock) historians into question.

  p. 123 rambling propensity: This description of the “Yankey farmer” prefigures one of Irving’s next “Knickerbocker” creations, the Connecticut schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, who “tarries” in the Dutch village of Sleepy Hollow while courting the “country heiress” Katrina Van Tassel, dreaming all along of that very same journey into the wilderness with wife and worldly possessions in tow:

  Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath, and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where!

  p. 129 Struldbruggs: In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire, the “Struldbruggs” are referred to as the “Immortals,” those who are “born exempt from that universal Calamity of human Nature, have their Minds free and disengaged, without the Weight and Depression of Spirits caused by the continual Apprehension of Death.”

  p. 145 Ever Duckings: The real Evert Duyckinck was a friend of Irving’s who would later edit a volume of tributes to the author, published after his death, entitled Irvingiana (1860).

  p. 148 “dunder and blixum!”: These are variants on the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning.” The words would later appear as the names of a pair of St. Nicholas’s flying reindeer in the original 1823 publication of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” These two reindeer have more recently been referred to as “Donder and Blixen.”

  p. 152 Preserved Fish: While Knickerbocker, a Dutch partisan, is spoofing the New England custom of giving children tongue-twisting Old Testament or Quaker first names (which, when combined with English last names, could have unintentionally humorous results), there was a real New Yorker named Preserved Fish (1766-1846), a well-to-do shipping magnate whose name would have been familiar to Irving (and to his merchant brothers) in 1809.

  p. 170 Quid: A topical aside for Irving. “Quids” (also “Tertium Quids”) was a nickname given to various third-party factions who leveraged their influence in local, state, and national elections in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In New York City they are generally understood to have been the Republican faction that did not support the 1808 bid for the governorship of Dewitt Clinton, even after the Republican majority had endorsed him.

  p. 188 Tom Paine: It would have been impossible for Stuyvesant to read the work of Thomas Paine, who was born in 1737 and published his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, in 1776. Paine died in New York in June 1809, just six months before the History was published, so it is possible that Irving includes him in this litany of political philosophers as a kind of memorial homage.

  p. 202 long sided Connecticut schoolmaster: This is another prefigurement of Ichabod Crane, the lanky, Connecticut-born schoolmaster of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

  p. 240 Dirk Schuiler: In an 1851 letter to his friend Jesse Merwin, the model for schoolmaster Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving told him that the “character of Dirk Schuyler [sic]” came from Merwin’s tales of “John Moore, the vagabond admiral of the lake” at Kinderhook, and the pranks that Irving and Merwin pulled on Moore in 1808. The idea of an earlier Knickerbocker character being inspired by stories told by the living inspiration for a later Knickerbocker character has a kind of backward symmetry that the Dutch historian would applaud.

  p. 244 But trust me gentlefolk: Irving’s rhapsodic depictions of the “wildness and savage majesty” of the Hudson River inspired the poet William Cullen Bryant and the artists Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and William Guy Wall, who would come to be known as the foremost members of the Hudson River School of painting. Irving’s Hudson River writings would also help drive tourism to the region, and prompt the construction of several resorts, such as the Catskill Mountain House. Some of these vacation spots would later advertise their proximity to “Rip’s cabin” or other landmarks of Irving’s stories.

  p. 253 Van Winkles: In the story “Rip Van Winkle,” Knickerbocker will compare his hero unflatteringly to his martial ancestors, who “figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant, and accompanied him to the siege of Fort Christina.” This is also an opportunity for Knickerbocker to corroborate Seth Handaside’s remarks about his own Scaghtikoke ancestry.

  p. 267 Brummagem: An expression meaning “cheap and showy” as well as “counterfeit,” from a dialect form of Birmingham, the English city that was known in the seventeenth century as a center for the manufacture of counterfeit coins.

  p. 272 “Brimful of wrath and cabbage!”: The great Dutch poet here is Knickerbocker (Irving) himself: there is no previous usage to be found.

  p. 295 mushrooms of a day: Another reference to the New York nouveaux riches Irving lampooned as “mushroom upstarts” in Salmagundi.

  p. 296 true Hollands: Also known as Holland gin, a liquor distilled from rye and barley and flavored with juniper berries, that was originally manufactured in Holland.

  p. 302 hoe cakes, bacon, and mint julep: Like the poet Joel Barlow before him, who hymned “Hoe-Cake, fair Virginia’s pride!” in his poem “The Hasty Pudding,” Irving takes an interest in the foods of other American regions. Hoe
cakes, which are made from cornmeal and fried in oil, are not unlike the Dutch “dough nut” whose praises he prefers to sing.

  p. 332 compelled to learn the English language: Like Stuyvesant, some of Irving’s Dutch American contemporaries were still refusing to adopt the English language in their communities. Mitchill’s Picture of New York particularly notices the neighborhood of Flatbush, Brooklyn, for its poignant adherence to the Dutch language in the face of certain dissipation:

  The principal inhabitants of this county are descendants of the Dutch settlers, who first encroached upon the natives, in these parts. They have Dutch preaching in some of the religious meeting-houses, and many families learn no other language, until they are old enough to go abroad. But there are no Dutch schools, and, consequently, the language is on the decline.