1625

by Harald Johnson

1625 continues the amazing story of New York City’s birth.
Twelve years have passed, and Dancing Fish and his shrinking band of Manahates now face a new danger that threatens their very existence: land-hungry European settlers who plan to stay! NOTE: This book includes the first in-depth dramatization of the legendary purchase of Manhattan island by the Dutch from the Native Americans.

If you like historical fiction in the style of Ken Follett, James Michener, or Edward Rutherfurd, then you'll enjoy Harald Johnson's series of short books ("novellas") — based on true events — about the birth of New York City and the island at its center: Manhattan.

157 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 11, 2017

About the author

Harald Johnson is an author of both fiction and nonfiction, a publisher, and a lifelong swimmer—who actually swam nonstop around New York’s Manhattan island. His debut novel (NEW YORK 1609, 2018) was the first-ever to explore the birth of New York City (and Manhattan) from its earliest beginnings. He followed that with the three books of the NEANDER time-travel trilogy (2019, 2020, 2021), and then the modern suspense thriller EL NORTE (2022). THE TWILIGHTS is his sixth novel (and twelfth book).

Harald lives with his wife deep in the woods of central Virginia.

Reviews

[Winifred Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a smoothly written, entertaining story that takes place on the island of Manhattan when the Dutch were just beginning to settle there. The story is seen mostly through the eyes of Dancing Fish, an American Indian whose people spend the summers there. His father was European, and even though he didn’t know that until he was fifteen, he and his people believe this is why he seems different from the others of his tribe. He’s chafed at some of the strictures, and he’s often imagined new ways of doing things which, when he was younger, were ridiculed by the pure blooded natives. He also showed a talent for learning English and Dutch, even learning to read and write, when Henry Hudson took him as a guide in an earlier book of the series. In this book he’s about thirty, and his tribe has come to respect his innovations, as they’ve come to appreciate European tools. He’s become a leader of his people and is involved in the negotiations leading up to the Dutch purchase of the island.

I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the Dutch settlement, a crude and miserable attempt in Johnson’s portrayal, with many of the Dutch more interested in making and consuming alcohol than building a new colony. I thought the book captured the complexity of the Indians’ response to the Europeans, as they hunted more and more of the fur animals to trade for the new steel tools, and some of them became too fond of the Europeans’ alcohol. I’m sure it’s true that they didn’t know what to do about these newcomers, at first amused by their ignorance and assuming they wouldn’t stay. And since some of the tribes were warring with other tribes, the natives couldn’t respond in a unified way. I’m also sure they didn’t understand what the Dutch meant when they talked about purchasing the island. In fact, I wondered for a while why the Dutch bothered to “purchase” it. Then I realized this probably had more to do with establishing their claim in the eyes of the British and the French than it had to do with their relationship to the natives. But for much of the story, as Johnson says, he’s followed Ken Follett’s principle, that the events either did happen or could have possibly happened, and there’s apparently very little documentation of what really did happen on Manhattan in 1625.