The Rise of Environmental Tourism

When Robert Juet gazed on the lower North River’s shoreline in 1609, he noted that “the mountains look as though they contain some metal or mineral, for some of them are almost barren of trees, and what few trees do grow there are blighted.” Further upriver he “found good land for growing wheat and garden herbs. Upon it were a great many handsome oak, walnut, chestnut, ewe and an abundance of other trees of pleasing wood. In addition, there was much slate and other good stone for houses.”¹ Sailing with Henry Hudson, Juet was among the first Europeans to view the river valley that would later bear his captain’s name, although the ways in which subsequent travelers interpreted that landscape would change dramatically over the next four centuries. Juet and other seventeenth-century Europeans saw the land through the lens of economic development. Every tree, mountainside, meadow, or water body existed as a resource to be exploited, a potential area for economic activity.

Two centuries later American and European tourists discovered new meaning for the dramatic landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and much of the Mid-Atlantic region. Their new view of nature as a source of deeper meaning and evidence of God’s grandeur led to later movements to preserve and protect scenery as a valuable part of American culture. By interacting with nature along transportation routes like rivers, railroads, and canals, tourists helped to define American ideals of the natural environment and how it should be used. In searching for places to see and respond to, tourists cultivated one of the earliest environmental ethics in American culture.

Like Juet, other European explorers coasting North America paid the most attention to the natural resources of the ocean, seashore, and navigable rivers. The Dutch identified the North River, later the Hudson River, and the South River, later the Delaware River, as the principal nautical features that merited further exploration. In his excellent recent history of New Netherland, Jaap Jacobs analyzes early Dutch travel accounts and promotional tracts, finding an emphasis on natural resources such as minerals, farmland, fish, and fur-bearing animals. Each of these, as well as the trees and crops that differed from what people knew at home in Holland, could be exploited for settlement and profit. The Dutch West India Company formed out of the competition among several Dutch trading companies to make money from the newly charted territory. It was an early joint stock company, and the environment provided the resource to be developed. Traders sailed up the Hudson River and the Connecticut River to exchange European goods with native peoples for beaver and other furs, bypassing the Delaware River at first because its entrance “is full of sandbars and shoals,” as Johannes de Laet noted in 1625. Dutch traders at Fort Nassau (near Camden, New Jersey) attempted to develop the Delaware River fur trade, as did Swedish rivals at Fort Christina (modern Wilmington, Delaware) before their defeat by the Dutch in 1655. Peltry proved less profitable than farming here, and the main areas of settlement remained near the North River. The natural protection of New York Harbor attracted the majority of settlers and made Manhattan, initially called New Amsterdam, the center of trade with the Atlantic world. Few settlers populated the 126 nautical miles between docks on Manhattan’s lower tip and the fur trading post at Fort Orange (present-day Albany, New York). The early Dutch view of the land as an economic resource guided the way they settled New Netherland.²

Throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, and for the majority of the eighteenth century, the Hudson River Valley existed as “fly over country,” or in this case “sail past country,” that most travelers barely noticed and where a few farmers eked out a precarious existence. Travelers hastened up the river to Albany, where commerce thrived, armies mustered to counter French ambitions to the north and west, and successful farmers, both tenant and landlord, made a modest living off the fertile soil. Carl Carmer first described this undeveloped country in his beautifully written...