From Wickquasgeck to Broadway

I have a fantasy of returning to ancient London and finding the way to my Camden home, just using the Thames and various hills and hollows for navigation. What fun it would be to track down the hunting grounds of Wardour Street ringing to the cry of ‘Soho!’, the exclamation used by hare coursers that lent its name to the area. How moving to dip your feet in the river Fleet, now running under Fleet Street, or swim in the Westbourne along West- bourne Grove.

You get the same sort of kick out of Russell Shorto’s heavy-going but authoritative account of the Dutch discovery of Manhattan (from the Indian word, mannahata — ‘hilly island’). Well, not entirely Dutch. The first white man to see New York, or New Amsterdam as it was to begin with, was the Englishman, Henry Hudson, working for a Dutch company. When he got to Manhattan, in 1609, he found an island covered in oak, chestnut, poplar, pine and blue plums, with great knuckles of protruding rock like those in today’s Central Park, the whole place rich in game and surrounded by water teeming with salmon, mullet and rays.