Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great C(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：McCabe, James Dabney, 1842-1883

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great C试读：

PREFACE.

It is the desire of every American to see New York, the largest and most wonderful city in the Union.  To very many the city and its attractions are familiar, and the number of these persons is increased by thousands of new comers every year.  A still greater number, however, will know the Great City only by the stories that reach them through their friends and the newspapers.  They may never gaze upon its beauties, never enjoy its attractions in person.  For their benefit I have written these pages, and I have endeavored to present to them a faithful picture of the “Lights and Shadows” of the life of this City, and to describe its “Sights and Sensations” as they really exist.

This Great City, so wonderful in its beauty, so strange to eyes accustomed only to the smaller towns of the land, is in all respects the most attractive sight in America, and one of the most remarkable places in the world, ranking next to London and Paris in the extent and variety of its attractions.  Its magnificence is remarkable, its squalor appalling.  Nowhere else in the New World are seen such lavish displays of wealth, and such hideous depths of poverty.  It is rich in historical associations and in treasures of art.  It presents a wonderful series of combinations as well as contrasts of individual and national characteristics.  It is richly worth studying by all classes, for it is totally different from any other city in the world.  It is always fresh, always new.  It is constantly changing, growing greater and more wonderful in its power and splendors, more worthy of admiration in its higher and nobler life, more generous in its charities, and more mysterious and appalling in its romance and its crimes.  It is indeed a wonderful city.  Coming fresh from plainer and more practical parts of the land, the visitor is plunged into the midst of so much beauty, magnificence, gayety, mystery, and a thousand other wonders, that he is fairly bewildered.  It is hoped that the reader of these pages will be by their perusal better prepared to enjoy the attractions, and to shun the dangers of New York.  It has been my effort to bring home to those who cannot see the city for themselves, its pleasures and its dangers, and to enable them to enjoy the former without either the fatigue or expense demanded of an active participant in them, and to appreciate the latter, without incurring the risks attending an exploration of the shadowy side of the Great City.

To those who intend visiting New York, whether they come as strangers, or as persons familiar with it, the writer has a word to say, which he trusts may be heeded.  An honest effort has been made in this work to present the reader with a fair description of the dangers to which visitors and citizens are alike exposed.  For the purpose of performing this task, the writer made visits, in company with the police officials of the city, to a number of the places described in this work, and he is satisfied that no respectable person can with safety visit them, unless provided with a similar protection.  The curiosity of all persons concerning the darker side of city life can be fully satisfied by a perusal of the sketches presented in this volume.  It is not safe for a stranger to undertake to explore these places for himself.  No matter how clever he may consider himself, no respectable man is a match for the villains and sharpers of New York, and he voluntarily brings upon himself all the consequences that will follow his entrance into the haunts of the criminal and disreputable classes.  The city is full of danger.  The path of safety which is pointed out in these pages is the only one for either citizen or stranger—an absolute avoidance of the vicinity of sin.

Those who have seen the city will, I am sure, confirm the statements contained herein, and will acknowledge the truthfulness of the picture I have drawn, whatever they may think of the manner in which the work is executed.

                                    J. D. McC., Jr.

  New York,

      March 21st, 1872

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

On the morning of the 1st of May, 1607, there knelt at the chancel of the old church of St. Ethelburge, in Bishopsgate street, London, to receive the sacrament, a man of noble and commanding presence, with a broad intellectual forehead, short, close hair, and a countenance full of the dignity and courtly bearing of an honorable gentleman.  His dress bespoke him a sailor, and such he was.  Immediately upon receiving the sacrament, he hastened from the church to the Thames, where a boat was in waiting to convey him to a vessel lying in the stream.  But little time was lost after his arrival on board, and soon the ship was gliding down the river.  The man was an Englishman by birth and training, a seaman by education, and one of those daring explorers of the time who yearned to win fame by discovering the new route to India.  His name was Henry Hudson, and he had been employed by “certain worshipful merchants of London” to go in search of a North-east passage to India, around the Arctic shores of Europe, between Lapland and Nova Zembla, and frozen Spitzbergen.  These worthy gentlemen were convinced that since the effort to find a North-west passage had failed, nothing remained but to search for a North-east passage, and they were sure that if human skill or energy could find it, Hudson would succeed in his mission.  They were not mistaken in their man, for in two successive voyages he did all that mortal could do to penetrate the ice fields beyond the North Cape, but without success.  An impassable barrier of ice held him back, and he was forced to return to London to confess his failure.  With unconquerable hope, he suggested new means of overcoming the difficulties; but while his employers praised his zeal and skill, they declined to go to further expense in an undertaking which promised so little, and the “bold Englishman, the expert pilot, and the famous navigator” found himself out of employment.  Every effort to secure aid in England failed him, and, thoroughly disheartened, he passed over to Holland, whither his fame had preceded him.

The Dutch, who were more enterprising, and more hopeful than his own countrymen, lent a ready ear to his statement of his plans, and the Dutch East India Company at once employed him, and placed him in command of a yacht of ninety tons, called the Half Moon, manned by a picked crew.  On the 25th of March, 1609, Hudson set sail in this vessel from Amsterdam, and steered directly for the coast of Nova Zembla.  He succeeded in reaching the meridian of Spitzbergen; but here the ice, the fogs, and the fierce tempests of the North drove him back, and turning to the westward, he sailed past the capes of Greenland, and on the 2nd of July was on the banks of Newfoundland.  He passed down the coast as far as Charleston Harbor, vainly hoping to find the North-west passage, and then in despair turned to the northward, discovering Delaware Bay on his voyage.  On the 3rd of September he arrived off a large bay to the north of the Delaware, and passing into it, dropped anchor “at two cables’ length from the shore,” within Sandy Hook.  Devoting some days to rest, and to the exploration of the bay, he passed through The Narrows on the 11th of September, and then the broad and beautiful “inner bay” burst upon him in all its splendor, and from the deck of his ship he watched the swift current of the mighty river rolling from the north to the sea.  He was full of hope now, and the next day continued his progress up the river, and at nightfall cast anchor at Yonkers.  During the night the current of the river turned his ship around, placing her head down stream; and this fact, coupled with the assurances of the natives who came out to the Half Moon in their canoes, that the river flowed from far beyond the mountains, convinced him that the stream flowed from ocean to ocean, and that by sailing on he would at length reach India—the golden land of his dreams.

Thus encouraged, he pursued his way up the river, gazing with wondering delight upon its glorious scenery, and listening with gradually fading hope to the stories of the natives who flocked to the water to greet him.  The stream narrowed, and the water grew fresh, and long before he anchored below Albany, Hudson had abandoned the belief that he was in the Northwest passage.  From the anchorage, a boat’s crew continued the voyage to the mouth of the Mohawk.  Hudson was satisfied that he had made a great discovery—one that was worth fully as much as finding the new route to India.  He was in a region upon which the white man’s eye had never rested before, and which offered the richest returns to commercial ventures.  He hastened back to New York Bay, took possession of the country in the name of Holland, and then set sail for Europe.  He put into Dartmouth in England, on his way back, where he told the story of his discovery.  King James I. prevented his continuing his voyage, hoping to deprive the Dutch of its fruits; but Hudson took care to send his log-book and all the ship’s papers over to Holland, and thus placed his employers in full possession of the knowledge he had gained.  The English at length released the Half Moon, and she continued her voyage to the Texel.

The discovery of Hudson was particularly acceptable to the Dutch, for the new country was rich in fur-bearing animals, and Russia offered a ready market for all the furs that could be sent there.  The East India Company, therefore, refitted the Half Moon after her return to Holland, and despatched her to the region discovered by Hudson on a fur trading expedition, which was highly successful.  Private persons also embarked in similar enterprises, and within two years a prosperous and important fur trade was established between Holland and the country along the Mauritius, as the great river discovered by Hudson had been named, in honor of the Stadtholder of Holland.  No government took any notice of the trade for a while, and all persons were free to engage in it.

Among the adventurers employed in this trade was one Adrian Block, noted as one of the boldest navigators of his time.  He made a voyage to Manhattan Island in 1614, then the site of a Dutch trading post, and had secured a cargo of skins with which he was about to return to Holland, when a fire consumed both his vessel and her cargo, and obliged him to pass the winter with his crew on the island.  They built them log huts on the site of the present Beaver street, the first houses erected in New York, and during the winter constructed a yacht of sixteen tons, which Block called the Onrust—the “Restless.”  In this yacht Block made many voyages of discovery, exploring the coasts of Long Island Sound, and giving his name to the island near the eastern end of the sound.  He soon after went back to Europe.

Meanwhile, a small settlement had clustered about the trading post and the huts built by Block’s shipwrecked crew, and had taken the name of New Amsterdam.  The inhabitants were well suited to become the ancestors of a great nation.  They were mainly Dutch citizens of a European Republic, “composed of seven free, sovereign States”—made so by a struggle with despotism for forty years, and occupying a territory which their ancestors had reclaimed from the ocean and morass by indomitable labor.  It was a republic where freedom of conscience, speech, and the press were complete and universal.  The effect of this freedom had been the internal development of social beauty and strength, and vast increment of substantial wealth and power by immigration.  Wars and despotisms in other parts of Europe sent thousands of intelligent exiles thither, and those free provinces were crowded with ingenious mechanics, and artists, and learned men, because conscience was there undisturbed, and the hand and brain were free to win and use the rewards of their industry and skill.  Beautiful cities, towns, and villages were strewn over the whole country, and nowhere in Europe did society present an aspect half as pleasing as that of Holland.  Every religious sect there found an asylum from persecution and encouragement to manly effort, by the kind respect of all.  And at the very time when the charter of the West India Company was under consideration, that band of English Puritans who afterward set up the ensign of free institutions on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, were being nurtured in the bosom of that republic, and instructed in those principles of civil liberty that became a salutary leaven in the bigotry which they brought with them.

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