Long before the canal, two Dutch travelers wrote down their colorful impressions of a marshland called Gowanus. Here’s what they found.
W.H. Bartlett’s “View from Gowanus Heights, Brooklyn” is from 1839, but it offers a sense of how sparsely populated the neighborhood was until relatively recently.
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
The Gowanus didn’t always stink of sewage. Once upon a time, it stank of regular old swamp, and was lush enough that to two overseas travelers it seemed like a cornucopia.
In 1679, Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter set off from the Dutch island of Texel to find a place to establish a community for their religious sect of Labadism, a variety of Lutheranism. Their first stop was New Amsterdam, and the even newer settlements across the East River — the town of Breukelen, “which has a small and ugly little church standing in the middle of the road,” and a tiny and dispersed hamlet to its south called ‘Gouanes.’
For a brief sense of how heavily populated the area was in the 17th century, one can look to transportation infrastructure as a proxy, and specifically the state of the ferries. In 1642, the Dutch West India company greenlit a boat to run between South Street Seaport and DUMBO, in today’s terms, and entrusted the Brooklyn landing to a man named Cornell Dircksen.
It wasn’t very high-tech, even by that era’s standards: in his book Gowanus, Joseph Alexiou writes that “travelers wishing to cross the river would go to the water’s edge, where a conch shell hung from the branch of an old tree. The conch call would summon [a] farmhand, who would leave his plough and retrieve a roughly hewn boat hidden under some nearby bushes.”
But back to the two Labadists, wandering through Gowanus a few decades after Dircksen launched the borough’s first ferry. Much of their observations centered on food, such as the milk, cider, fruit, tobacco, and especially the “miserable rum or brandy which had been brought from Barbados” and which local settlers — whose fortunes were in some cases made by forcing enslaved people to build tide mills along the creek — were hooked on.
The duo were treated to venison, oysters, and watermelons, and were struck by how bountiful the harbor was: Danckaerts saw “fish both large and small, whales, tunnies and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish, which the eagles and other birds of prey swiftly seize in their talons.”
The Dutch travelers went on to meet the oldest European woman on the continent, or so her children said, who owned a peach orchard among the plantations farther inland in Gowanus. The diarist described a pack of wild hogs that feasted on fallen peaches while the proprietor, originally from the city of Liège in current-day Belgium, offered the travelers cider as she expertly blew “plumes of blue smoke around her guests” with her pipe.
Danckaerts and Sluyter ricocheted about the bay, returned home to the Netherlands, and came back once more in 1680. It’s clear that they were taken with New York, yet they finally found luck for their designs in Maryland, where a local Dutch merchant granted them a plot of land.
But their settlement never grew larger than 100 people, and it dissolved completely by 1720. Luckily, their diaries — and descriptions of a marshy Gowanus teeming with wildlife — have had a much longer afterlife.
Have an idea for a intriguing person, place, or event in Brooklyn’s past? Email jdelaney@queensledger.com to have it featured in next week’s issue!
