The 400th anniversary of Albany’s first documented European settlement gives us an opportunity to clear up some inaccuracies surrounding its history. In particular, it is time to roundly debunk the stubborn myth that the French built the first European structure in Albany.
Several Wikipedia pages—”Albany“, “Castle Island,” “Fort Nassau“—claim that Albany’s first European structure was a fort on Castle Island built by French traders in 1540. The “Castle Island” page calls it a chateau and claims that the Dutch rebuilt the French fort, “which they called a castle[,] giving rise to the name of the island.” This is silly. There is no credible evidence of a French fort on Castle Island or anywhere in the region, and any account of a structure resembling a chateau is particularly absurd. So where did this myth come from?
The “Albany” page cites the Chronicles of Albany by Cuyler Reynolds. Reynolds – an early 20th-century Albany City Historian – did not cite his source, but its origin appears to be A.J. Weise’s 1884 book The Discoveries of America to the Year 1525. Weise began his argument for the French castle with a discussion of Norumbega, a mythical North American settlement that captivated New World explorers in the 16th and 17th-centuries. According to Weise, the French appellation La Terre de Normeberge is a corruption of La Terre de Anormèe Berge, a reference, he claimed, to the Palisades along the Hudson (349). Weise then turned to a 1545 manuscript in the National Library of France in which explorer Jean Alfonce described the Riviere de Norenbegue as salty to the height of forty leagues or eighty-eight miles (353). According to Weise, this “satisfactorily established” said river as the Hudson because it is brackish to a similar height. Modern scholarship, however, has largely refuted Weise’s claim.
It is now generally believed that the river often referred to as Norumbega was the Penobscot in Maine. David B. Quinn—a contemporary historian of the voyages of discovery and colonization of America—wrote that in 1542 the aforesaid Alfonce piloted a colonizing fleet to the St. Lawrence River (45). Sailing southward on his return voyage, Alfonce produced a sketch of the Penobscot River that he labeled Riviere de Norenbegue. Weise’s claim that Alfonce sailed up the Hudson is highly questionable.
Even if we accept his claim that Alfonce sailed up the Hudson as high as Albany, Weise failed to present any credible evidence of a French fort on Castle Island. He makes several specious claims to support his argument. For example, like the “Castle Island” Wikipedia page, Weise claimed that the Dutch did not build Fort Nassau. “[B]y naming it Fort Nassau,” he wrote, “[the Dutch] permitted historians to infer that they had constructed it…” (363). But it beggars the imagination to think that the Dutch went to great lengths to fool everyone by renaming the fort, then inexplicably named the island after the fort whose presence they were trying to conceal! As New Netherland Research Center Director Charles Gehring has surmised, the most likely origin of the name Castle Island is not a French chateau, but the Indian palisaded villages for which the Dutch used the word kasteel.
One final point: the castle that Weise described was substantial – fifty-eight feet wide between its walls. It is difficult to believe that such a sight would not have been noted by Robert Juet, Henry Hudson’s crewmate, as he sailed by in 1609. But his journal makes no mention of the structure.
As of this posting, I have not yet edited the Wikipedia pages describing the French fort. For any of you who may get to it first, I would suggest that, instead of deleting the references to the French fort, it would be more helpful to note their apocryphal nature and cite this page. This will allow both the myth and the truth to remain in the historical record for posterity. Thank you to Charles Gehring, Paul Huey, and Len Tantillo for a discussion that led to this post. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.
Illustration: 1614 Map by Adriaen Block.
Thank you, Stephen, for your fascinating and enlightening entry on Castle Island.
Your article on the French Fort reminds me of the fort in Liverpool, Onondaga County. It also was called the French Fort it over looked the lake. The first time I got to go inside the Fort I told my father that this could not be a French Fort because it looks just like the forts you see in cowboy movies of the time that was back in the 1940’s. I remember my father just smiled and keep on walking. What a disgrace that fort was to the history of Onondaga County. When I was back there in 1992 I was so happy to see a replica of the real fort.
In the Mud Creek that goes through Euclid between Route 31 and Verplank Road the French Army dumped Cannons. Back in the early 50’s Syracuse University made an effort to get them out but the Snakes and the Mud defeated them. You ought to check it out. With to days technology it should be easy. But the snakes will probably still be there they were big black water snakes.
I’d just like to point out that I believe Castle Island/Van Rensselaer Island/Westerlo Island and hence Fort Nassau were located in the Town of Bethlehem from 1793 until the 1870s. Before that I believe it was simply part of Rensselaerwyck Manor. Just saying it was not Albany’s Castle Island until 1874-ish. Of course at the time that Fort Nassau was built none of these place names applied. Anyway, carry on with the debunking.
Thank you for the wonderful article. My 7X-great-grandfather Cornelis Finehout, was born at Fort Orange abt. 1646 and I very interested in the history of Albany and the Upper Hudson Valley. Keep up the good work.
I am also a decedent of Cornelis!
Hi,
Glad to have read your article and just wanted to point out that the Original People, the ones who met Hudson and subsequent Europeans in the upper so-called Hudson Valley, were the Mohican Indians, who, contrary to James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’, are still with us and currently centered on a reservation in east-central Wisconsin, where they are known as the Stockbridge–Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.
I am actually highly skeptical of the French Chateaux claim, although I sitll hold that there is only one way to find out one way or the other. But that publiahed remark of mine has heightened the discussion over Fort Nassau and I find that good. As for the term Kasteel is was first applied,
in print , at least by Nicolas Wassenaer writng in 1624 or 5 but refferring back to 1614. He wrote
That the Dutch built a ” kasteel” on the island which after took that name from the trading hous
built at the direction of Skipper Hendrick Christaensz and not after a French Castle. It wasn’t
named for any Indian village either. But that’s a singular oddity over the name , since normally
only large fortified Indian villages were called ” casltes ” by the Europeans anywhere in the NE
of North East of North America. Personally I suspect that Wiese and perhaps others misread
uppermost block of text on the Block Chart where it says something like ” Accoring to what we
can best understand of the Mohawk , they tell us that the French have been comming up as
far as their territory already in sloops to trade with them. This is by most historians thought
to refer to Lake ‘Champlain or lese to some area still occupied by the Mohawk of the upper
St. Lawrence itself. Remember that classic classroom test where a row of person start off
with the one first in the row instructed to tell a story out of hearing of the others and it so
get passed down the row to the last person. The usual result is that by the end of the row
the story hardly resembles what it started out as. Something like that may have happend
with Block’s block of text. Moreover consider this too, if all that isn’t enough to dispense
with a complete , impressive and majestic French Chateaux on the Hudson. Mossison in
his ” European Discovery of North America; Northern Voyages; indentifies ” Norubega ”
as a misreading of a word for The Penobscot River and the sub-continental realm of
Norembega as stemming from imaginations gone wild. But even so my own bottom
likne here is ” There’s only one way to find out .”
d
This myth or legend has existed in print for well over 100 years. Worst yet it has now made its way into the internet in numerous places. After four hundred years Fort Nassau’s history should be rediscovered, the site identified, and surveyed.
This fort is an important step of the local history as well as for the new world. Why wait any longer for discover? Too much of our history is hastily rediscovered only after the property is needed for development.
Fort Nassau for various reasons does lie in a mist much like Len Tantillo’s depiction. The truth right here in Albany beckons us to act now and as an aid to learning.
Would you support an archeological survey to locate and detail Fort Nassau?
I agree: a French fort in 1540 at Albany seems most unlikely. Often such unlikely tales start from some secondary writer with a bee in their bonnet, and in Weise I think you’ve nailed it. I’d add that in swallowing whole the derivation of /Norumbega/ from something that looks like French but isn’t now and wasn’t in the 16c or 17c either, marks Weise as a sloppy scholar at best. (That Fiske, who seems to have been much more careful — and who, unfortunately for this, was more widely read — seems to have grabbed it from there, is to no credit of Fiske.)
Noting the lack of evidence is not debunking. It’s reasonable to believe the fort was French because the first people to be called refugees, French Protestants or Huguenots, settled in Albany, specifically Fort Orange, first before Manhattan in 1620. The fort was well-known to the French. The Father of New Amsterdam, Jesse Deforest, was a Frenchman Huguenot who drew up the plans with the Dutch West Indies Company. New York was New France in the 1500s. Just saying “nu huh” doesn’t make that evidence and likelihood go away.