32 APRIL 2018 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
Legends
EVERY ADVANTAGE OF NATURE
BY GREATER ASTORIA
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Imagine a place that had every advantage
of nature: a temperate, almost sub-tropical
microclimate which permitted a long
growing season, rains that fell in spring and
summer when most needed, woodlands
with trees of every description, soils of
good quality, and waterways so rich you
only had to dip a net into them and whose
only care you had to take, when drawing it
out, was not to rend it from teaming fish. By
comparison, to the south tobacco soon exhausted
Virginia’s tidelands and the swarms
of insects spawned by sweltering heat made
Carolinas’ swamps unhealthy. To the north,
the rocky meadows of New England helped
mold the flinty Puritans whose dreams of
Eden in the New World soon lapsed into
a culture of acrimony and exile.
Only in the eastern seaboard’s center,
fed by a series of inland ways – the Hudson,
the Sound, and the Post Road, did dozens
of peoples, cultures, and languages find
their way to New York Harbor. It was here,
at the natural center of a New World, a new
people were to arise.
It almost was not so. Jealous national
and regional politics hemmed in opportunities
for regional networks and trade. The
quick extinction of beaver sent the local
economy into a tailspin. Far off England,
cash-strapped from building a world-wide
trading empire, provided neither help nor
protection, but actually worsened the
colony’s plight with policies designed to
extract as much money out of the locals
as possible through imposition of severe
trade restrictions and import duties. Political
and social policies favoring the Anglo-Dutch
mercantile elite fed an undercurrent of
unrest and resentment.
The final straw to this unfolding disaster
was when gravely ill members of crews
jumped ship in New York introducing
yellow fever and malaria which quickly
spread to local marshes. Soon New York
would face the threat of lethal plagues
each summer. Panicked residents fled
the city leaving thousands dead and often
unburied. This cycle would continue well
into the nineteenth century.
When the Dutch recaptured the city
only a few dozen troops were on hand to
resist; hardly a shot was fired. Local saboteurs
had spiked the fort’s cannon. New
York had lost its will to live. When the
treaty was signed between the English
and Dutch, the latter smugly walked away
after pocketing, in exchange, Suriname, a
mosquito infested Latin American coast
that had a handful of sugar plantations.
The British government returned to
the ruined colony in 1674. Governor
Andros had little choice but to tacitly
comply with local merchants who had
turned to the dark economy of smuggling
and international piracy to keep the
city afloat. As long the British East India
Merchantmen were left alone, they had
the unstated approval of the Crown. New
York became a port of the buccaneers’
international trade network that spanned
the Barbary Coast, the Red Sea, and the
Caribbean. It was said that the block
and tackle from pirate Captain Kidd’s
ship raised the stone for Trinity Church
on Wall Street.
In this smoldering miasmatic swamp
a spark of the legendary New York spirit
flared. Governor Andros summoned the
merchants of New York together. He had
an idea. The future was in the marriage
of Manhattan’s waterfront and Long
Island City’s land.
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