A History of New York (52 page)

 

p. 37
jolter heads.... appellations:
As the reader may have guessed, all of these “appellations” loosely translate as “stupid head.”

 

p. 48
sailing in the air:
Irving may have had hot-air balloons in mind: the first flight carrying humans was made in 1783, the year he was born. George Washington witnessed the first hot-air balloon flight (by the Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard) in North America on January 7, 1793.

 

p. 56
New York Gazette edited by Solomon Lang:
John “Solomon” Lang was the editor of the
New York Gazette
newspaper at the time of Irving's writing; the newspaper was indeed famous for its devotion to shipping news, and little else. Lang would later be spoofed again in “Fanny,” Fitzgreene Halleck's 1819 satirical ode to New York society, as “the sapient Mr. Lang. The world of him / Knows much, yet not one-half so much as he / Knows of the world ...”

 

p. 63
cat-heads ... prodigious poop:
Irving uses sailors' slang to create an extended bawdy pun on the female form. Catheads are commonly defined as horizontal beams that extend from each side of a ship's bow (or front) to raise and carry the ship's anchor, while the “poop” is a term for the highest deck to be found at the stern (or back) of a vessel.

 

p. 63
Gibbet Island:
By the time of Irving's writing, this island in New York Harbor had been rechristened Ellis Island after Samuel Ellis, who purchased it in 1785. It was not the first time the island had endured a name change, either: it had been called Gull Island by the Mohegan tribe, and Oyster Island by the Dutch settlers who harvested the bivalves there (once extremely plentiful—and safely edible—around New York City). The nickname “Gibbet Island” was given after a pirate named Anderson was hanged there in 1765. Irving returned to the subject of the pleasant little island with the gruesome history in October 1839, when he published a ghost story entitled “The Guests from Gibbet Island” in
Knickerbocker
magazine. The story was collected in the
Book of the Hudson: Collected from the Various Works of Diedrich Knickerbocker, edited by Geoffrey Crayon,
which G. P. Putnam published in 1849 in order to capitalize on Irving's (and Knickerbocker's) fame.

 

p. 64
tremendous and uncouth sound ... miserably perished to a man:
Irving once again addresses the “right by extermination” with Knickerbocker's wry suggestion that the deaths of the Native American population of Communipaw is due only to the fatal cacophony of “low dutch.” Knickerbocker's mention of the “Tammany Society of the day” refers to the St. Tammany Society or Columbian Order, a popular patriotic and charitable organization that originated in Philadelphia but was adopted by New Yorkers in 1786. The group, which held to republican and anti-elitist principles, made a fetish of Native American symbols and terminology, calling the chairman of the board of directors the “Grand Sachem” and his members “braves,” and parading through the city streets in Indian regalia on patriotic holidays. At the time of the
History's
publication, the Tammany Society had already become a powerful political force in New York, but it had not lost its incongruous Native American associations.

p. 64
carried the village of
Communipaw
by storm:
Communipaw and Pavonia are now part of the city of Jersey City, New Jersey, population 240,000 in 2000.

 

p. 69
great men and great families of doubtful origin ... descended from a god:
This is not the first time Irving has lampooned the pretensions of New York's nouveaux riches: in the pages of Salmagundi he often spoofed the pretensions of “modern upstarts and mushroom cockneys” who “violated” his contemporary city with their flashy clothes and carriages and their ignorance of the “venerable” social traditions observed by “true Hollanders ... and their unsophisticated descendants.”

 

p. 72
Printer's Devil:
This is the first time that Irving includes a note from an ostensible “Printer's Devil,” a nickname usually given to a printer's apprentice. While Knickerbocker has supplied his own citations, and an unnamed “editor” contributes footnotes, the Printer's Devil appears to have been requisitioned to provide supporting details or corrections specifically related to the geography or municipal history of New York City. The distribution of labor between Knickerbocker, his “Editor,” and his “Printer's Devil” is left purposefully vague; the layering of these sporadic, sometimes nonsensical notes one upon the next ends by subverting (if not positively derailing) the confident, forward propulsion of Knickerbocker's tale. Rather than clarifying and reassuring the reader, the
History's
footnotes only render the text more opaque. Later nineteenth-century American writers, particularly Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe would adopt and improve Irving's destabilizing technique in their fiction.

 

p. 73
MANNA-HATTA:
Irving's use of “Manna-hatta” prefigures Walt Whitman's euphoric cry at the end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” published in
Leaves of Grass
in 1855:

 

p. 81
ST. NICHOLAS:
Irving's treatment of the characteristics of St. Nicholas and the Dutch traditions surrounding his saint's day (December 6) would inform “A Visit to Saint Nicholas,” the poem attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. First published anonymously in 1823, the titular “jolly old elf” keeps a “stump of a pipe ... held tight in his teeth.”

p. 83
Peach War: The Peach War was an actual skirmish between Dutch settlers and Native Americans in 1655 that began with the killing of a young Native American girl who had stolen a peach from the orchard of colonist Henry Van Dyck. The Native American retaliation lasted three days, and was indeed as “bloody” as Knickerbocker here suggests. This battle took place during the governorship of Peter Stuyvesant, but Knickerbocker seems uncharacteristically unspecific as to the chronology, placing this last major hostility between the Dutch and the Native Americans in a vague and distant past.

p. 99
Old MS:
The note on the Fly Market may be interpreted as Knickerbocker's answer to Samuel Mitchill's treatment of the same in the
Picture of New York:

 

In another instance of historiographical one-upmanship, Knickerbocker points out Mitchill's mistake: that this “corrupted” name was originally
Smits Vleye,
or Smith Fly, not just “Vlaie Market,” and that it was once an Edenic field, home only to “flocks of vociferous geese.”

 

p. 102
the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism:
Knickerbocker's suggestion that the cows of New Amsterdam were the first urban planners is topical as well as comic. In 1807 the Common Council of New York voted to authorize the entire island above present-day Houston Street to be surveyed and laid out in “streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out ... [but] not accepted by the Common Council.” At the time of Irving's writing, an engineer named John Randel Jr. and a team of “Commissioners of Streets and Roads” were in the process of designing and implementing the New York City street “grid” as it exists today, although the ancient and crooked streets of lower Manhattan (including those ostensibly laid out by the cows of the Kieft regime) would be allowed to keep their tipsy trajectories.

 

p. 103
very efficacious in producing the yellow fever:
Yellow fever was by no means an historical footnote for Irving's New York-based readers, but an ongoing crisis in urban public health. As recently as 1805 an epidemic of the disease had necessitated a large-scale, enforced evacuation of Manhattan's lower wards to the pastoral reaches of Greenwich Village, where the air and water were considered more healthful than in the congested neighborhoods south of Chambers Street.

 

p. 103
yellow dutch bricks ... weather cock:
Irving's own Hudson Valley home, Sunnyside, would later be constructed along these exact lines.

 

p. 106
called dough nuts, or oly koeks—a delicious kind of cake:
While culinary historians and doughnut aficionados quibble over Irving's interchangeable usage of “dough nut” and “oly koek,” his reference to the favorite fried confection is generally accepted to be the first in American literature, and a vote for the Dutch origins of the doughnut in general.

 

p. 112
when the shad in the Hudson were all salmon:
This refers to Samuel Mitchill's attempt to publicly debunk the Reverend Samuel Miller's claim (made on the basis of Robert Juet's journal from the
Half Moon)
that salmon were once native to the Hudson River. Miller made this claim in a “Discourse” on Henry Hudson that he delivered to the New-York Historical Society in 1809, which Mitchill contested the same year in an open letter to the Society. “Salmon love clear and limpid water,” he argued, “and I should question much whether the ooze and mud of [the Hudson] was so agreeable to them.” Instead, the “Herring, the Shad, and the Sturgeon [are] the annual visitants to this stream,” Mitchill declared, referring Miller to “the Dutch word ‘salm' or ‘salmpie,' commonly in use to signify
salmon,
[but which] means also, in ordinary and loose conversation and composition,
trout.”
Irving's mischievous, casual reference to this debate is particularly intriguing because it suggests that the writer was following the frustrations of the Society with exceptional interest and care. Mitchill's anti-salmon letter was published as an appendix to Miller's lecture in the Historical Society's
Collections ... For the Year 1809,
but that volume was not published until 1810, months after Irving's satire appeared. Irving embroidered his
History
with a host of such pointed details and references, whose seeming scholarly and scientific plausibility had the effect of calling the work of actual (nonmock) historians into question.

 

p. 123
rambling propensity:
This description of the “Yankey farmer” prefigures one of Irving's next “Knickerbocker” creations, the Connecticut schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, who “tarries” in the Dutch village of Sleepy Hollow while courting the “country heiress” Katrina Van Tassel, dreaming all along of that very same journey into the wilderness with wife and worldly possessions in tow:

 

Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath, and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where!

 

 

 

p. 129
Struldbruggs:
In
Gulliver's Travels,
Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire, the “Struldbruggs” are referred to as the “Immortals,” those who are “born exempt from that universal Calamity of human Nature, have their Minds free and disengaged, without the Weight and Depression of Spirits caused by the continual Apprehension of Death.”

 

p. 145
Ever Duckings:
The real Evert Duyckinck was a friend of Irving's who would later edit a volume of tributes to the author, published after his death, entitled
Irvingiana
(1860).

 

p. 148
“dunder
and
blixum!”:
These are variants on the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning.” The words would later appear as the names of a pair of St. Nicholas's flying reindeer in the original 1823 publication of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” These two reindeer have more recently been referred to as “Donder and Blixen.”

 

p. 152
Preserved Fish:
While Knickerbocker, a Dutch partisan, is spoofing the New England custom of giving children tongue-twisting Old Testament or Quaker first names (which, when combined with English last names, could have unintentionally humorous results), there was a real New Yorker named Preserved Fish (1766-1846), a well-to-do shipping magnate whose name would have been familiar to Irving (and to his merchant brothers) in 1809.

 

p. 170
Quid: A topical aside for Irving. “Quids” (also “Tertium Quids”) was a nickname given to various third-party factions who leveraged their influence in local, state, and national elections in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In New York City they are generally understood to have been the Republican faction that did not support the 1808 bid for the governorship of Dewitt Clinton, even after the Republican majority had endorsed him.