NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 69 
the orthography of the word as it appears on the early 
maps of the region. The spelling of even a mother- 
tongue was largely a matter of chance, individual pref¬ 
erence or peculiarity at the time these first maps were 
made; and what was one thing, at one time, under 
one man s pen, appeared in a slightly or very much 
altered dress, as the case might be, when another set it 
down. This being true of a familiar tongue, how is it 
to be expected that consistency should have marked 
the treatment of the strange sounds and gutturals which 
characterized the speech of the savage, whose phonetics 
even must have been largely guessed*? 
Juet, the journal keeper of Hudson’s first voyage, 
wrote the much disputed word the first time it was 
ever committed to paper; his rendering of it is 
Manna-hata.” He applies this very distinctly and 
unmistakably to the land, not to the men inhabiting 
i*- bert apparently to the mainland opposite the is¬ 
land; to what is now the New Jersey shore. The 
first English map seems to bear out this definite loca¬ 
tion of the name, for this has it written along the 
river s western bank—“Manahata”; but it confuses 
the question by presenting “Manahatin” along the 
eastern bank. Another map complicates it by show¬ 
ing “Manhattes” on the mainland to the north and 
no island at all, while still another confines the word 
to the island alone, and gives it as “Manhates”! 
