The Wonder City Web Comic: The Great Whale of Coney Island, Chapter 5-Installment #2

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This week, Owen is having a strange dream. It opens with an island of trees against a skyful of stars. A young Lenape boy comes to the edge of the water and sees in its reflection a great city spring up behind him. Then almost immediately he sees this city caught in a fiery maelstrom of destruction so great that it physically knocks the boy backward. The dream switches to Owen falling in the water to find the whale that hit his sister and her voice calling out his name.

It should come as no surprise that the island is Manhattan before Dutch settlement and the city that he sees in the reflection is modern-day New York. The Lenape boy in Owen’s dream will be revealed at the beginning of the next book, but his name is Kapsee. He is named for the area in which he has his vision. Before the Dutch settled Manhattan, the Lenape used the southern tip of Manhattan as a seasonal trading ground in the spring and summer. One of the reasons why the trail we now call Broadway existed before the Dutch was for the Lenape people to get to Lower Manhattan to trade. The area roughly around Battery Park was a rocky water-covered shoal called Kapsee and was reported to be an excellent area for catching fish. You can also hear more about this on our Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam tour.

Tour of The Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam