Halve Maen
19th-century illustration of the Halve Maen
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 Dutch Republic
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| Name: | Halve Maen |
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| Completed: | 1608 |
Halve Maen (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɦɑlvə maːn]; English: Half Moon) was a Dutch East India Company vlieboot (similar to a carrack) which sailed into what is now New York Harbor in September 1609. She was commissioned by the VOC Chamber of Amsterdam in the Dutch Republic to covertly find a western passage to China. The ship was captained by Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of the Dutch Republic.
In 1909, the Kingdom of the Netherlands presented the United States with a replica of Halve Maen in order to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Hudson's voyage; the replica was destroyed in a 1934 fire. Eighty years later, the New Netherland Museum commissioned a second replica.
Halve Maen sailed from Amsterdam to the Arctic, turning westward to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, then sailed from Newfoundland to the south in search of the Northwest Passage.
In his 1625 book New World, which contains invaluable extracts from Hudson’s lost journal, Johannes de Laet, a director of the West India Company, writes that they "bent their course to the south until, running south-southwest and southwest by south, they again made land in latitude 41° 43’, which they supposed to be an island, and gave it the name of New Holland, but afterwards discovered that it was Cape Cod".
From there they sailed south to the Chesapeake Bay and then went north along the coast navigating first the Delaware Bay and, subsequently, the bay of the river which Hudson named the Mauritius River, for Holland's Lord-Lieutenant Maurits. Halve Maen sailed up Hudson's river as far as the present day location of Albany, New York, where the crew determined the water was too narrow and too shallow for farther progress. Concluding then that the river was also not a passage to the west, Hudson exited the river, naming the natives that dwelled on either side of the Mauritius estuary the Manahata. Leaving the estuary, he sailed north-eastward, never realizing that what are now the islands of Manhattan and Long Island were islands, and crossed the Atlantic to England where he sailed into Dartmouth harbor with the Dutch East India Company ship and crew.
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