Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete eBook
Washington Irving
The same sad misfortune which has happened to so many
ancient cities will happen again, and from the same
sad cause, to nine-tenths of those which now flourish
on the face of the globe. With most of them the
time for recording their history is gone by:
their origin, their foundation, together with the
early stages of their settlement, are for ever buried
in the rubbish of years; and the same would have been
the case with this fair portion of the earth if I
had not snatched it from obscurity in the very nick
of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded
were about entering into the widespread insatiable
maw of oblivion—if I had not dragged them
out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster’s
adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever!
And here have I, as before observed, carefully collected,
collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, “punt
en punt, gat en gat,” and commenced in this
little work, a history to serve as a foundation on
which other historians may hereafter raise a noble
superstructure, swelling in process of time, until
Knickerbocker’s New York may be equally voluminous
with Gibbon’s Rome, or Hume and Smollett’s
England!
And now indulge me for a moment: while I lay
down my pen, skip to some little eminence at the distance
of two or three hundred years ahead; and, casting
back a bird’s-eye glance over the waste of years
that is to roll between, discover myself—little
I—at this moment the progenitor, prototype,
and precursor of them all, posted at the head of this
host of literary worthies, with my book under my arm,
and New York on my back, pressing forward, like a
gallant commander, to honor and immortality.
Such are the vain-glorious misgivings that will now
and then enter into the brain of the author—that
irradiate, as with celestial light, his solitary chamber,
cheering his weary spirits, and animating him to persevere
in his labors. And I have freely given utterance
to these rhapsodies whenever they have occurred; not,
I trust, from an unusual spirit of egotism, but merely
that the reader may for once have an idea how an author
thinks and feels while he is writing—a kind
of knowledge very rare and curious, and much to be
desired.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Beloe’s Herodotus.
HISTORY OF NEW YORK.
BOOK I.
CONTAINING DIVERS INGENIOUS THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHIC
SPECULATIONS, CONCERNING THE CREATION AND POPULATION
OF THE WORLD, AS CONNECTED WITH THE HISTORY OF NEW
YORK.
CHAPTER I.
According to the best authorities, the world in which
we dwell is a huge, opaque, reflecting, inanimate
mass, floating in the vast ethereal ocean of infinite
space. It has the form of an orange, being an
oblate spheroid, curiously flattened at opposite parts,
for the insertion of two imaginary poles, which are
supposed to penetrate and unite at the center; thus
forming an axis on which the mighty orange turns with
a regular diurnal revolution.
