Manhattan : seeds of the big apple

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“Two years before, if anyone had told her that she would leave her family and travel to the other end of the earth before she was twenty-five, Tennake would have thought that the poor soul had lost all wit. She loved the glorious golden city of Amsterdam, and would call Holland, “Fatherland” until the day she died. However, girlhood dreams did not always set the path of one’s future, as she now knew.”

So begins the tale of Tennake Nagel Waldron, a pregnant young woman in her twenties when she sails into the harbor at New Amsterdam with her half-Dutch, half English husband, Resolved Waldron, twenty years her senior, and his three children by a previous marriage. They have traveled from Holland, where Tennake left her family, staunch Calvinists all, to follow her husband to his post as Assistant Sheriff under the director of the settlement, Peter Stuyvesant. New Amsterdam is a bustling community surrounded by a wall—the very wall that defined the path of a street we now call “Wall Street.” The Waldrons were to build a home and a reputation there and persevere against Indian attacks and growing pains of the government, which included religious intolerance, disagreements about treatment of the many tribes surrounding the settlement, the whimsical decrees of Peter Stuyvesant and the looming threat of an English takeover.

This novel dusted away the cobwebs settled on this reader’s long-ago seventh grade social studies lessons, refreshing my memories of Dutch colonization in North America, adding much new information and painting faces and hearts on that history. Knowing that the courageous Tennake and Resolved Waldron—and many of the characters with whom they interact—were real people, and that the Waldron descendants were eventually to make their way to New York’s Adirondack Mountains, added an extra dimension to my enjoyment. Hukel’s Manhattan is educational and entertaining.

(2006, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN), (6 x 9, perfect bound paperback, 258 pp.) $15.95