The Story of a 400-Year-Old Sketch Made by a Dutch Visitor to Downtown

This drawing, made in 1864, is the artist’s interpretation of a sketch, below, showing the lower portion of Manhattan that roughly begins at the southernmost part of Tribeca.

One day in October, 1679, a Dutchman named Jasper Danckaerts, who was visiting New York with a friend, made the rough sketch shown below.

The two men were members of the so-called Labadist sect, a European Protestant group devoted to simple living, and they were exploring the new continent to find out if the sect might possibly move here.

Nothing came of their exploration, but Danckaerts’ sketch, although admittedly crude, is of immense importance to us. Entitled “N york from the north side,” it is, among other things, the earliest view we have of the land that would later become the southernmost part of Tribeca.

Much of Manhattan, Danckaerts observed, “is good wood land” although the southern end “is entirely cleared for more than an hour’s distance.... There are many brooks of fresh water running through it, pleasant and proper for man and beast to drink, as well as agreeable to behold, affording cool and pleasant resting places…”

After the two men returned to Holland they published a “Journal of a Voyage to New York,” which included this view among many others.

The plan to move the Labadists here never materialized, and the volume might well have not been noted by historians if it had not been found two centuries later—in 1864—by a prominent citizen of Brooklyn named Henry Cruse Murphy.

A distinguished lawyer, Murphy had at various times been mayor of Brooklyn (then independent of New York), a U.S. Congressman and, in 1852, a candidate for U.S. President. He was also a published author of books on local history and one of the founders of the Long Island Historical Society (now the Brooklyn Historical Society).

It happened that in 1864 he was traveling in Holland and while strolling around Amsterdam found a copy of Danckaerts’ journal in a bookstore. Fluent in Dutch, he quickly saw that the book was valuable and bought it on the spot. Back in Brooklyn he proceeded to translate it and in 1867 had it published in the historical society’s official journal.

He also recognized that the sketch itself was poorly drawn and in some respects inaccurate, and so he had a friend and fellow historical society member named J. Carson Brevoort “rectify” it. The result was the elegant drawing shown at top, which an artist named Louis Oram lithographed.

The principal distortion in the 1679 sketch was the size of the church that was located in the city’s fort; Brevoort cut it down to size. The sketch also shows a whale spouting in the Hudson River, which Brevoort sensibly deleted, though he kept the sailing craft. He found Danckaerts’ rendition of open fields confusing and so he redrew them. He also added some cows if only perhaps because he and Murphy were certain they would have been found there.

Historians agree that the most likely spot from which Danckaerts made his drawing was a small hill that probably existed around today’s Duane Street. This means that the foreground in both drawings is surely the southernmost section of the large farm that had been owned earlier in the 17th century by Anneke Jans, the young Dutchwoman who in 1636, with her husband Roeloff Jans, was given a “patent” by the Dutch West Indies Company to farm an extensive tract northwest of the colony. Anneke is sometimes referred to as Tribeca’s first settler, and although Danckaerts’ sketch was made after her heirs sold the property, one can surmise that those cows are descendants of her own herd.

There is one more feature in both drawings that is worth noting.

The two windmills on the far left were located on the future Broadway just below what is now Chambers Street, and Danckaerts included a horse-drawn wagon between them. According to the historian I.N. Phelps Stokes, whose monumental “The Iconography of Manhattan Island” (published between 1915 and 1928) is a celebrated source for local historians, this was “the first representation that we know of a horse-drawn vehicle on Manhattan.”

Stokes also asked, “Can there be anyone so callous, and so lacking in romance, as not to feel a thrill of emotion before such contemporary pictures as the crudely drawn Labadist view of New York in 1679?”

This article originally appeared in the June, 2010, edition of The Tribeca Trib.