1609年之前的纽约什么样

Manhattan 新旧曼哈顿对比图


曼哈顿的前世-新发现 1609年纽约原貌

蛮荒纽约
美国纽约市近几年最令人意外的　访客之一是名叫荷西的河狸，没有人知道牠　究竟是打哪儿来的。
根据猜测，牠是从北方的郊区威彻斯特郡顺着布隆克斯河游下来的。2007年一个寒冷的早晨，牠就这样出现在布隆克斯动物园的河岸上面，啃倒了几棵柳树、造了一个窝。
「那时你若问我布隆克斯出现河狸的可能性有多大，我会说是零。」野生动物保育学会（WCS）的生态学家艾瑞克‧桑德森说；该会总部就设在布隆克斯动物园。「纽约市已有超过200年看不到一只河狸了。」
在17世纪早期，当纽约市还是名叫新阿姆斯特丹的荷兰村庄时，河狸普遍遭到猎杀，因为牠们的毛皮当时在欧洲很流行。毛皮交易成长为有利可图的生意，因此该市的官方市徽上出现了一对河狸，且维持至今。但真正的河狸却消失了。
因此，当桑德森在WCS的同事史蒂芬‧沙特纳告诉他说，他在河边散步时发现有河狸存在的证据，桑德森才会感到怀疑。八成只是一只麝田鼠，他想。麝田鼠较能忍受高压的城市生活。但沙特纳和他爬过河流和动物园一座停车场之间的铁丝网围墙时，就在沙特纳描述的地点发现了荷西的窝。几星期后重返现场时，他们撞见了荷西本尊。
「当时正要天黑，」桑德森说，「我们站在河岸上聊天，忽然就看见了那只河狸。牠往我们这儿游过来，接着开始在河里绕圈圈。我们往后退了一点点，然后牠就用尾巴发出河狸的警报信号，啪啪拍打着水面。于是我们决定最好还是离开。」
河狸重返大苹果一事被保育人士和志工誉为一场胜利，他们已经花了超过30年时间恢复布隆克斯河的健康；那儿曾是废弃车辆和垃圾的倾卸场。荷西的名字是向荷西‧塞拉诺致敬而取的——他是来自布隆克斯的国会议员，多年来已争取超过1500万美元的联邦经费来支持布隆克斯河的净化工作。
对桑德森而言，荷西的故事还有其它意义。将近十年来，他都在WCS主持一项计划，旨在尽可能准确地拟想曼哈顿岛在纽约市生根之前的可能样貌。它被称为「曼纳哈塔计划」（根据勒纳佩族对「多丘之岛」的称呼），目的是要将时光倒转回1609年9月12日的那个午后，也就是亨利‧哈德逊和他的船员驶入纽约港并看见这座岛屿之前。桑德森判断，假如今天的人可以想象哈德逊当时看见的是什么样的自然奇景，那么或许会更加努力保护其它野地。「我想让人们爱上纽约的原始景观，」他说，「我想在一个人们通常认为没有任何自然的地方，呈现出大自然正常运作、完好无缺时会有多伟大。」

英文原文:
Of all the visitors to New York City in recent years, one of the most surprising was a beaver named José. No one knows exactly where he came from. Speculation is he swam down the Bronx River from suburban Westchester County to the north. He just showed up one wintry morning in 2007 on a riverbank in the Bronx Zoo, where he gnawed down a few willow trees and built a lodge.

"If you'd asked me at the time what the chances were that there was a beaver in the Bronx, I'd have said zero," said Eric Sanderson, an ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), headquartered at the Bronx Zoo. "There hasn't been a beaver in New York City in more than 200 years."

During the early 17th century, when the city was the Dutch village of New Amsterdam, beavers were widely hunted for their pelts, then fashionable in Europe. The fur trade grew into such a lucrative business that a pair of beavers earned a place on the city's official seal, where they remain today. The real animals vanished.

That's why Sanderson was skeptical when Stephen Sautner, a fellow employee at WCS, told him he'd seen evidence of a beaver during a walk along the river. It's probably just a muskrat, Sanderson thought. Muskrats are more tolerant of stressful city life. But when Sautner and he climbed around a chain-link fence separating the river from one of the zoo's parking lots, they found José's lodge right where Sautner had said it was. When they returned a couple of weeks later, they ran into José himself.

"It was just getting dark," Sanderson said. "We were standing on the riverbank shooting the breeze, when all of a sudden we saw the beaver. He swam right up to us, then he started doing circles in the river. We backed up a little, and he did that beaver alarm call with his tail, slap, slap against the water. So we decided we'd better take off."

The beaver's return to the Big Apple was hailed as a victory by conservationists and volunteers who'd spent more than three decades restoring the health of the Bronx River, once a dumping ground for abandoned cars and trash. José was named in honor of José E. Serrano, the congressman from the Bronx who'd pushed through more than $15 million in federal funds over the years to support the river cleanup.

For Sanderson, José's story meant something more. For almost a decade he has led a project at WCS to envision as precisely as possible what the island of Manhattan might have looked like before the city took root. The Mannahatta Project, as it's called (after the Lenape people's name for "island of many hills"), is an effort to turn back the clock to the afternoon of September 12, 1609, just before Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into New York Harbor and spotted the island. If people today could picture what a natural wonder Hudson had looked upon, Sanderson figured, maybe they'd fight harder to preserve other wild places. "I wanted people to fall in love with New York's original landscape," he said. "I wanted to show how great nature can be when it's working, with all its parts, in a place that people normally don't think of as having any nature at all."