It seems that the French fur merchants undertook to build, about the year 1540, a château or castle, at the height of the navigation of the Grande River. As it appears, they selected a site for the building on the long, low island lying in the bay, on the west side of the river, near the present southern limits of the city of Albany. The walls of the castle and its protecting earthworks were almost completed when a great freshet inundated the island and damaged the structure so much that the French abandoned the occupation of the island. Jean Alphonse evidently refers to the abortive undertaking, when describing the situation of the Indian village at the mouth of the Grande River, he says: “North of it there is a bay, in which is a small island that is often subject to storms, [those causing freshets,] and cannot be inhabited.” The island bore the name of Castle Island for more than a century thereafter, but it is now known as Van Rensselaer’s Island.
The fact that the French had ascended the Grande River to the height of its navigation to trade with the Indians long before Henry Hudson explored it, is corroborated by still stronger testimony than that already presented. One of the earliest maps representing the territory of Nieu Nederlandt (New Netherland), or that part of New France which the French had called La Terre d’Anormée Berge, is the figurative chart presented to their high mightinesses, the Lords States General of the United Netherlands, on the eleventh of October, 1614, by a number of Dutch merchants, praying for a special license to navigate and traffic within the limits of this part of North America.[467] Upon this map, made in 1614, are inscribed “curious notes and memoranda concerning the natives of the country,” which the well-informed discoverer of the chart intimates were written by one of the Dutch companions of Henry Hudson, who accompanied the English navigator, on the voyage of 1609.[468] One of these explanatory notes contains the undeniable testimony that the French were the discoverers of the Grande River, and that they had been trading with the Mohawks long before the Half Moon sailed up the river. The plain language of the inscription makes all explanation of its meaning unnecessary: “But as far as one can understand by what the Maquaas [Mohawks] say and show, the French come with sloops as high up as their country to trade with them.”[469]
Among the things which were shown to the Dutch explorers by the friendly Mohawks to confirm what they had said concerning the French, were the conspicuous ruins of the unfinished castle. The sagacious Hollanders, not unlikely thinking that the dilapidated building might be repaired with little expense, and made useful to them as a trading house, should they be licensed by the government of the Netherlands to return there to trade for furs with the Indians, took measurements of its walls and outworks. These memoranda they also inscribed on the map of New Netherland. The castle, as described on the chart, was fifty-eight feet wide between the walls, and built in the form of a square, surrounded by a moat eighteen feet wide. The interior building was thirty-six feet long and twenty-six wide.[470]
Although the Dutch explorers never left any definite information that they were personally the builders of the fortification on Castle Island, yet by naming it Fort Nassau, in honor of the stadtholder, Maurice, prince of Orange and of Nassau, they permitted historians to infer that they had constructed it, even before they had been privileged by the government of the Netherlands to occupy the country.
As late as the year 1680, the Dutch residents of Albany were unenlightened respecting the nationality of the builders of the fort, some supposing that the Spaniards had erected it. This assumption was not generally credited, as there were no facts known that would verify the presence of the Spaniards in this part of the country. The two Labadist missionaries, Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, who visited Albany in 1680, thus speak of the fort on Castle Island, and of the conjecture concerning the people who had built it: “In the afternoon [Sunday, April 28th] we took a walk to an island upon the end of which there is a fort built, they say, by the Spaniards. That a fort had been there is evident enough from the earth thrown up, but it is not to be supposed that the Spaniards came so far inland to build forts when there are no monuments of them to be seen on the sea-coasts, where, however, they have been according to the tradition of the Indians.”[471]
FOOTNOTES
[1] The Hebrew for man is derived from the verb (אדם), to be red.
[2] Solon, one of the seven sages of Greece, was born about the year B. C. 639, and died about the year B. C. 558.
Herodotus, the Greek historian, writing in the fifth century before the Christian era, says: “When these were subdued, and Crœsus had joined them to the Lydians, all the learned men at that time, especially those of Greece, resorted to Sardis, which had then reached a high degree of eminence. Among them was Solon, an Athenian, who, having made a code of laws for the Athenians at their request, absented himself for ten years, having sailed away under pretense of seeing the world, that he might not be compelled to abrogate any of the laws he had established: for the Athenians could not do it themselves, as they were bound by the most solemn oaths to preserve inviolate, for ten years, the institutions of Solon. Therefore, having gone abroad for these reasons, as well as to see the world, Solon had visited Amasis, in Egypt, and went from there to Crœsus, at Sardis.”—Herodotus: Clio xxix, xxx.