Henry Hudson - CBS Sunday Morning

From uncharted waters to busy shipping lanes, the Hudson River has undergone some changes in the 400 years since the first European sailed it. We all know the name of that first intrepid captain, but not his face. Arthur Teichner explores that mystery. Does anybody have any idea what Henry Hudson actually looked like? There's no actual portrait we don't know, so in the 19th century they just made up an idea of what an explorer should look like. Here's about all most of us do know. 400 years ago in 1609, Henry Hudson sailed the half moon, which probably did look like this, into what is now New York Harbor. He continued on up what is now the Hudson River until he realized it could not possibly be the Northwest Passage, a shortcut from Europe to the riches of China and the Spice Islands. End of story? Hardly. So what he did is he returned home, and surely he himself considered that a failure. And what's interesting about Hudson, I think, is that a lot flowed from this voyage, a lot of history. Russell Shorter's bestseller about that history, The Island at the Center of the World, begins with Henry Hudson. Hudson was, I think, one of those men of the time who was kind of like a Steve Jobs or someone. He was on the cutting edge. Governments wanted him, companies wanted him, so he was much in demand. Which explains how Hudson, an Englishman, happened to be working for the Dutch East India Company when he made his great discovery. At the beginning of the 17th century, great empires were being built thanks to explorers like Hudson. It was globalization, except then there was no such thing as an accurate map of the globe. That what was going on in this era was not only exploration, but it was really the construction of knowledge. Sarah Henry and historian Jaap Jacobs are co-curators of an exhibition commemorating Henry Hudson's voyage at the Museum of the City of New York. Each map gets a little more correct. Exactly. You still have major mistakes. Hudson probably saw this map, probably saw copies of this map. It's the real thing from 1609. It's in the New York State Library in Albany. Charles Goering is head of the New Netherland Project there. So this was an assumption of what the world looked like. Yeah, this is looking right down at the North Pole. The idea was that the further north you went, the warmer it would become because the rays of the sun hit directly in the north. This was a theory that they had. That proved wrong. So after failing three times to find this northern route to Asia, Henry Hudson, defying his orders from the Dutch East India Company, turns around, sails across the Atlantic, and finds himself facing the island the local Indians called Manahatta, Island of Hills. This is an image of what Henry Hudson would have seen 400 years ago, September 12, 1609, when he sailed in New York Harbor and started in motion all the events that led to New York City as we know it today. Eric Sanderson is an ecologist. He spent 10 years working on the Manahatta Project. We've used old historical maps, archaeological sources, the historical sources, descriptions from the Dutch. Plus a little Hollywood-style animation to create an extraordinary profile of New York as it once was. Something like 350 bird species, about 80 different mammal species, 45 different reptiles and amphibians were living on Manahatta, and over 600 plants for sure, and maybe as many as 1,200. But here's the really cool part that you can see at the Museum of the City of New York or on the Manahatta Project website. Let's see what Times Square was like. You can pick out specific spots like Times Square and go back 400 years. Hudson's voyage in the half moon was the first documented European exploration of what we know today as the Hudson River, and much of what he would have seen would have been very similar to what we see before us today. Chip Reynolds captains a replica of the half moon, sailed by volunteers. We take great pains to ensure that all the items that you see aboard the ship, the barrels, the flags, the ropes and lines, the way we handle the sails are done in the same manner they were done 400 years ago, and of course we like to keep them neat and tidy as well. You want me to do this? Most of what's known about the voyage of the half moon is from the log kept by a crew member, Robert Jewett. This copy is in the New York State Library. Jewett methodically notes the very good harbor at the tip of Manahatta, trading possibilities, natural resources, encounters with Indians. One of the half moon's crew members was shot through the neck with an arrow and killed right down in lower New York Harbor. How they could transition from that experience to then writing about the loving people, and literally a day later they're right back into open warfare. And when Hudson came into this area he was not just blundering around. When you learned about Henry Hudson, did anybody tell you what happened to him? Still obsessed with finding that shortcut to Asia, he organizes another voyage to what is now Hudson Bay in Canada. His ship gets stuck in the ice for an entire winter. His crew mutinies. They send him adrift in a small boat and take off. Really the last recorded image of Henry Hudson is after he's been cast off with he and his son and the ship's carpenter and six other crew members that were suffering from scurvy that the mutineers didn't want to have to haul back to England. And that was the end of him, but not of what he set in motion. Within a couple of years Dutch fur traders were working the Hudson Valley. The colony of New Netherland was established by 1621. The village of New Amsterdam, eventually New York City, was founded in 1625. So where was the original real New Amsterdam? Well we're basically looking at it. It was just this small area in here which the element of it that remains is the street pattern of this, the financial district. That's right, Wall Street. The free-trading, multi-ethnic, upwardly mobile capital of what is thought of as American culture. And that's no accident because it was Dutch first. At a point in the 1640s when there were only about 500 people in New Amsterdam, there were 18 languages being spoken. Transplanted along with Dutch architecture were Dutch attitudes. The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was the melting pot of Europe. The Dutch, out of this need to bind these mixed peoples, they developed something new in Europe. This principle called tolerance. Right, once the English take over in 1664, the Dutch are sort of pushed into the background. Their influence on the American character forgotten. The evidence written in 17th century Dutch languished for generations in the collection of fire-scorched documents at the New York State Library. Charles Goering has spent 35 years translating these papers, so the story will get told. And this is a document that signed by Stuyvesant, written in his hand. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor with the wooden leg, who handed over New Netherland to the British in 1664. His is the one name from that period most Americans recognize other than Henry Hudson's. 400 years after Hudson inadvertently changed history, Americans are remembering the voyage he thought was a failure. Last night, Macy's huge 4th of July fireworks display took place on the Hudson River as a tribute to Henry Hudson, who died having no idea that he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.