Muir Web
TLS September 4 2009 from Peter Coates's review of Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta: The natural history of New York City : On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson, a British navigator in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, entered the river that now bears his name. He was searching for the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient, and continued upriver for over a hundred miles in his yacht, the Half Moon . Neat the site of Albany, New York State's future capital, the water became too shallow for further progress and Hudson finally accepted that this wasn't the way to Cathay. The consolation prize was the discovery of the island that the local people, the Lenape (a branch of the Algonquin Indians), called "Manna-hata" [In the Algonquin language, "Island of Many Hills"]. * One of [Sanderson's] project's most innovative contribution to historical ecology is the concept of the "Muir web". Named after one of Sanderson's heroes,...