As Far as the Place of the Bad Woods
Chapter 1 of "The Ships"
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
After writing my memoir, ideas for three more books found their way into my consciousness—and I couldn’t shake them.
This is the first chapter of one of those books. It mixes well-researched genealogy and facts with imagined dialogue, as I strive to make the story come alive in a visceral way—to walk around in the world of the past.
I have two more chapters written and will continue to periodically publish a chapter, each time summarizing for the reader what they had read in the previous installment.
There is no way to ever “know” Maria Thorel.
It’s much too late for that because, you see, Maria was my 9th great-grandmother and was born in 1649 in Rouen, France.
I have 1,024 ninth great-grandmothers (as do we all1), so to be accurate I should say that she is “one of my ninth great-grandmothers,” all of them as unknowable as Maria Thorel. Not only are those other 1,023 ninth great-grandmothers unknowable as people, but the great majority of their names are still a mystery to me. But not Maria, whose last name may derive from the Middle English for “tower” or “rising.” If “Rising Maria” were alive today, she would be a whopping 376 years old. So what is the thread that connects Maria’s life, lived long ago, across an ocean, to mine—here, today, in America? Let’s see…
Maria’s birthplace, Rouen, is today the capital of the Normandy region in the northwest of France and has been a buzzing and lively city since at least since the 13th century. Many famous people—well…famous in France—hailed from Rouen, including poets, scholars, painters, and writers. You likely just “pronounced” Rouen in your head as you were reading this, but I bet you got it wrong: if said properly, there would be no English “r” or “n” sound in there at all.
Adding to the city’s allure, the famed River Seine flows right through Rouen’s center, on its way from Paris to the English Channel. But the city has also had its share of troubles: in the 1290s the poor mayor’s life ended in assassination, which led to riots, which in turn destroyed the wealthier parts of the city. About ten years later when the King of France decided he had a problem with the thriving Jewish community of five thousand or so residents, he expelled them all. Maria Thorel’s ancestors (and so, my ancestors) may have been in Rouen at the time of these troubles, but you can’t really blame them for the assassin (who was perhaps deranged?) or the rioters (perhaps justified?) and certainly not for the king’s cruelty (that mean king was King Philip IV; if you look him up, you’ll see that his record was, shall we say, “a mixed bag”).
In the mid-1660’s, rather than assassinations, riots, and cruelty, there was love in the air in at least one corner of Rouen. Maria Thorel and a man named Daniel Perrin were mutually smitten with each other.
Perrin was a Huguenot, that Protestant religious group which formed about 150 years before Maria and Daniel found each other. The Huguenots had experienced their ups and downs in France, but by the time my ancestors Daniel and Maria were on the scene, there were reasons to be concerned: the Catholic King Louis XIV was pretty determined to get protestants to switch teams. And he didn’t play nice…
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1664
It was a lovely spring day in 1664.
Despite the beautiful flowers and the birds singing their latest hits in Rouen, Daniel was starting to feel ill at ease there—and he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. It was starting to look like this king was never going to let up and Daniel didn’t like feeling there was no way of knowing what the unpredictable king might do next. What he did know was that the love of his life, Maria, was a much better decision-maker than he was, so it was time to share his feelings with her.
“Maria, ma chérie, j’étais à la boulangerie—…”
“Maria, my love, I was down at the bakery—you know, the one on the corner of Rue Du Bec and Rue Saint-Lô that has all those different-colored macarons?”
“Yes, they are delectable”, Maria responded. She could sense that he was building up to something more important and knew to give him the space to do so.
“I overheard Françot talking with another regular customer there—tall guy, long beard, always wears a funny hat?”
“Daniel…”
“Sorry. Anyway, he appeared quite excited and was saying something about a place called the ‘New Netherlands’, which was across the ocean and now occupied by the British. He also said that the Duke of Yore was…”
Maria could not help but correct, “Duke of York, Daniel. It is not ‘...of yore’, it is ‘...of York’.”
“Okay, fine. The Duke of Yor-kuh has been making noise about opening up some lan-duh that is west of the Hudson River—in America!”
Daniel wasn’t quite sure what he thought of this local gossip, but he suspected that Maria would be able to make sense of it all—she carried a wisdom in her that allowed her to separate the wheat from the chafe, so to speak.
Maria stood still in their small stone house and thought for a moment, staring blankly at the spring light pouring in through the east window, framed by large stones. The only movement that broke the stillness came from Maria’s arm, slowly stirring the contents of a large iron pot over a healthy fire.
“I know what you are thinking, Daniel,” Maria said, stirring the pot. “You want us to pack up all of our belongings, travel the ninety or so kilometres west to the port of La Havre, then find a ship that will take us across the ocean and away from all of our troubles, leaving behind centuries of Thorel and Perrin tradition to make a new life in some primitive land we have never seen.”
Daniel did not like the sound of this.
Was she making fun of him?
Was she going to be dead set against this plan?
How could he have thought this was a good idea?
But Maria continued, “Let us think about this logically, Daniel. How important is your belief in predestination? And what about being able to say your prayers in French and not that terrible Latin? Do people making those gaudy religious images still make your blood boil?”, she asked.
Daniel could already tell where Maria was heading with this line of questioning as Maria finished her thoughts: “If so, I’ve got to say…”
Daniel jumped up and gave Maria a big hug, almost knocking the iron pot and all of its contents into the fire.
In August of 1665, the University of Cambridge, in England, had to close its doors due to the “Great Plague”, leaving student Isaac Newton without classes to attend. Just one month before, a few hundred miles away in France, two sets of parents had stood at the docks and said their goodbyes to their children.
Margaritte and Jean Thorel, along with Pierre and Adrienne Perrin, had been there to watch as Maria and Daniel (not yet married) departed their homes in Rouen, making the long trip to La Havre to begin their overseas voyage, from which they would likely never return to their ancestral homeland.
When they arrived at that port city a week later and located the docks, the two of them quickly learned that there would be thirty other passengers boarding the ship Phillip with them. The Phillip wasn’t exactly a speedster—it was a sailboat—but the couple couldn’t reasonably wait the 150 years or so that it would take before the first steamships would be able to cut the difficult Atlantic crossing time down from 3-8 weeks to 2-4 weeks. There was also a catch: Maria and Daniel were to ride in the lower parts of the ship and be listed as “servants” (although some historical documents say that it was “for their own safety” and that they weren’t really servants in the traditional sense).
Fortunately for their descendants (and, eventually, for me), Maria and Daniel survived the forty-eight days in the sea and arrived in America exhausted, but thankful to be alive and free of the troubles they left behind back in France. Unfortunately, their arrival was not quite at the right port. The ship had sailed into the Chesapeake Bay instead of their intended landing at the mouth of the Hudson River. It had been driven off course by bad weather and by worse navigators. However, the crew was able to acquire some provisions and make some repairs while they were docked, continuing north and arriving at New York Bay on July 29, 1665.
Maria wondered if this was the right place for them. They had found their way across the ocean, then overland for a bit, and settled in the quaint, but busy, hamlet of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, which was just a few miles from today’s lower Manhattan2.
Elizabethtown had been “founded” the year before by English settlers, with the town’s center being built around the steady flow of the Elizabeth River, which empties into the Arthur Kill towards Staten Island. The original people to inhabit the land were the Lenni Lenape, many of whom would be killed by Dutch settlers, but even more by smallpox. The Lenape land was grabbed without compensation mostly by British colonizers, justifying their theft in their own minds by the judgment they would pass on a culture so different from their own.
At the time Daniel and Maria came to town, there were still members of the Lenape tribe who worked the land and raised families as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. Back home in France, Daniel and Maria had never encountered people even remotely like the Lenape, with their unique style of dress, their skin tone, the sound of their language, and their profound connection to the particular natural world found on this side of the Atlantic.
When Maria and Daniel were finally married on February 18, 1666, it was the “first recorded marriage in Elizabethtown” (well, of any non-native people). But still, there were lingering questions about their new home…
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1666
“Are you happy here?” Maria asked Daniel, as they walked the dusty road, leaving the small market in the town center behind them. “Do you think we have come to the right place?”
Daniel paused to struggle with a question that felt loaded like a musket and heavier than a blacksmith’s anvil.
“Well, we have indeed been able to practice our religion here. There is also a good amount of land and fresh water readily available. But this is true of many of the new towns here. I do worry about the people that lived here before us and whether they want us here. I am not sure we should be raising our children in such a place.”
“Yes,” agreed Maria, “and I have heard that many Huguenots have recently settled in the place the Dutch call ‘Staten Island.’ It is said that one in three people there speak French! Does that not sound magnificent?”
As usual, Daniel and Maria were in agreement, with Daniel adding, “When we first arrived, it was difficult to choose the right place to raise our children: this country is so big and we knew so little of it. Although we will never find an ‘American version’ of Rouen, this place called ‘Staten Island’ does sound like the right fit for us.”
The couple was distracted and in deep contemplation, but when Daniel looked up, he noticed a small group of Lenape men were just feet away from them with fur pelts slung over their shoulders, talking animatedly. They were heading in the opposite direction on the dusty road, towards the town center. Unbeknownst to Daniel and Maria, one of them had learned a bit of French and had overheard part of their conversation about Staten Island.
The man spoke directly to Daniel: “Je m’appele Kwëti Chëmamës”.
Hearing a Lenape speak French surprised Daniel enough that his jaw involuntarily dropped an inch or so.
Kwëti Chëmamës3 and his brothers were from a family that had roots in the area going back thousands of years. Their ancestors knew the land well and had adjusted to many changes over the centuries. The men continued to speak to Daniel: some of it in French, but most in Lenape, so Daniel couldn’t piece together their meaning. The interaction felt awkward, so Daniel and Maria decided to find a polite way to abandon their translation efforts and continue on down the road.
As the couple walked away, Chëmamës turned to his brothers with a quizzical look in his eye.
“Why do you think they left, my brothers?”
Another of the men, a tall man with a seriousness about him, replied “I do not know. They seemed like pleasant people. But if they wish to walk our land and speak with us, they should learn to speak Lenape—it is a matter of respect.”
Chëmamës agreed and added “I was hoping that they would want to hear of the name our ancestors gave that island place they were discussing. Even as a child, I loved the sound of our name for the island. There is a weight to it, a story within the name. You can almost say it like a song. Aquehonga Manacknong,” he belted out in a sing-songy fashion.
His brothers were used to Chëmamës and his songs and his poetry, so they knew not to tell him how off-key he sounded and went ahead and joined in with him: “Aquehonga Manacknong! Aque. Honga. Manack. Nong.”
Chëmamës chortled, “‘Stah-ten i-land’? Ha! Their tongue is not so beautiful.”
At this point, Maria and Daniel were well out of earshot of the conversation. But if they had stayed, they would have learned from the men that the place that was only recently named “Staten Island” by the Dutch had long been known as “Aquehonga Manacknong.” It was given that name because it described the place so well. To the Lenape, the island had always been called the land that was “as far as the place of the bad woods”. And the name made for a nice little song.
Despite their congenial interaction with Chëmamës and his brothers (or were they just his friends? Daniel wasn’t quite sure), Maria and Daniel did indeed end up leaving Elizabethtown behind and relocating to nearby Staten Island (Aquehonga Manacknong!). They built a home at a spot that also had a pretty great-sounding name: Smoking Point. But neither of them realized at the time that they were actually the first Europeans to make a homestead on this land “after the Indians,” as one account described it.
The family would stay in the greater New York City area for generations to come (over 275 years) and so there are many more stories to tell. However, it is here that our timeline must accelerate a bit, because I hear Judah knocking at the door4 and feel I should answer.
C’est la vie.
In 1672, Maria gave birth to their son, also named Daniel Perrin, on Smoking Point. Little baby Daniel is one of my eighth great-grandfathers and one day his wife would give birth to one of my seventh great-grandfathers—but not just yet. Daniel (Senior) first had to meet Daniel Jr.’s mother, Mary Martin (just hearing that name–now don’t you want to meet “Miss Mary Martin”?).
I will spare you the suspense: Mary Martin (born in 1679 in Andover, Massachusetts) and Daniel Perrin Jr. did indeed meet, found each other reasonably suitable, got married, and (as couples do) had children, one of whom was named Peter Perine (notice the slight change in the last name). If you’re keeping track, Peter would be Maria and Daniel’s grandchild.
Peter, in turn, went on to raise children of his own, including—most importantly—a daughter born in 1727 named Dinah Perine (one of my sixth great-grandmothers), who was also born on Staten Island Or as Chëmamës would sing: Aque. Honga! Manack!! Nong!!!
Two things to note:
a) to be clear, saying “9th great-grandmother” is equivalent to repeating “great” 9 times, then saying “grandmother”
b) when you go back far enough, there can be some overlap in your family tree (shared ancestors on separate branches), so 1024 is actually the most 9th great-grandmothers I could possibly have (this concept is called “pedigree collapse”).
At the time, Manhattan was just a small walled-off city in the south of the island, which included a small securities trading site and, in fact, a slave market; the wall itself later became Wall Street
Kwëti Chëmamës means “One Rabbit” in the Lenape language. There was no such person (that I know of) in history, but it seemed like a reasonable name, using Lenape words.
Judah is the main character in Chapter 2