The Mannahatta Project.

It is remarkable, in the accounts of the earliest European visitors to the North American continent, how little interest some of these explorers seemed to take in the land they had just found. They hardly went ashore. As seamen--and seekers of clear passage to the Orient--they were more interested in the currents, tides, soundings, and shoals. The land, rich as it was, was at first not much more than an impediment. Of course, all that changed soon enough.

In early September, 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed their jacht, the Half Moon, through the Narrows at the head of New York's lower bay, the point beyond which, it is generally believed, Giovanni da Verrazzano had not progressed, eighty-five years before. This likely made the eighteen or so Englishmen and Dutchmen aboard the Half Moon the first Europeans to venture up the Hudson River and therefore the first to get a good look at the island known to the natives as Mannahatta. The only surviving account of this journey is the diary of one of Hudson's crew, Robert Juet (who, on another voyage, a year later, helped lead a mutiny, stranding Hudson, his young son, and seven others in a small boat near the Arctic Circle). Juet's records of wind directions and river depths are precise, but from his descriptions it's often impossible to decipher where exactly Hudson was on the river. Conjecture abounds, as do chauvinistic claims; various modern interpreters place a September 13th oyster feast at Spuyten Duyvil or Yonkers. At any rate, the crew sailed upriver as far as Albany, where shallow waters forced them to turn back: this wasn't the way to Cathay. On the trip downriver, a crew member shot and killed a native who had sneaked into Juet's quarters and stolen his pillow; in the ensuing melee another native tried to tip over their boat, "but," Juet wrote, "our Cooke tooke a Sword, and cut off one of his hands, and he was drowned." The next day, seven leagues south, the "Sauages" ambushed them. The sailors shot about ten of them, then took refuge in a bay that sounds as though it may have abutted Washington Heights: "Hard by it there was a Cliffe, that looked of the colour of a white greene, as though it were either Copper, or Siluer Myne: and I thinke it to be one of them, by the Trees that grow vpon it. For they be all burned, and the other places are greene as grasse, it is on that side of the Riuer that is called Manna-hata."

This is Juet's sole explicit mention of the island. We can only speculate now about what impression it made. Whoever drew the night watch may have observed an ill wind shifting from northwest to east, carrying the smell of early-autumn rot, or the faltering racket of crickets and katydids. (New York has always been noisy; Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist, visiting in 1748, noted, "Tree frogs . . . are so loud it is difficult for a man to make himself heard." Poor Kalm: he was also so disfigured by mosquito bites while here that he couldn't appear in public.) It may have seemed a menacing place; Hudson and his crew fled from it. Two days later, the Half Moon was beating back to England, and then eventually on to Holland, which had originally sent Hudson forth. In the coming years, the Dutch dispatched more ships and, in 1614, established the colony of New Netherland, with New Amsterdam, at Manhattan's southern tip, soon to be its teeming gateway and hub. The island began its accelerated transformation into a manipulated forest of asphalt and steel. Never again would it be so wild and raw, or so under-chronicled. The new inhabitants, once they got rid of the old ones, spilled far more ink than blood.

To Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the proliferation of documentation has been of great but not limitless use. The more people there were to do the observing, the less of the natural landscape there was to observe. Sanderson is in charge of a W.C.S. project called the Human Footprint, which seeks to assess and map the human race's impact on the surface of the earth. New York, perhaps, is the ultimate case. "It's hard to think of any place in the world ...