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resting spot for the anonymous poor; Blackwell’s Island, which once housed a mental hospital for prisoners, as well as a city hospital; North Brother Island, where a hospital for the treatment of infectious diseases was “Typhoid Mary” Mallon’s home for nearly three decades; Ward’s Island, the site of more mental institutions; and Rikers Island, which is still a city jail, with nearly fifteen thousand inmates housed in ten buildings, one of the largest such facilities in the country.
    In upper New York Harbor, just a few hundred yards from the shore of New Jersey, sits Ellis Island. During the last Ice Age, a thick blanket of ice covered most of New York. When the glaciers beat a retreat some twelve thousand years ago, they left behind a big marshland dotted with pockets of high ground. The coastline was some hundred miles farther out in the Atlantic. Much of what is harbor and sea today was once dry land. A person could have strolled from today’s Ellis Island to neighboring Liberty Island to the high ground of Staten Island and not have gotten his feet wet.
    As the waters continued to rise, the harbor was formed and much of the high ground became New York’s islands. Today Ellis Island consists of around twenty-seven acres, but for much of its modern history it was little less than a three-acre bank of sand and mud—“by estimation to high water mark, two acres, three roods, and thirty-five perches”—that barely kept its head above high tide.
    Seals, whales, and porpoises once swam in the waters near the island. And then there were the oysters. New York Harbor and the lower Hudson River were once home to 350 square miles of fertile oyster beds, supplying more than half of the world’s oysters. They were prized as delicacies, while cheap and abundant enough to be a staple of the workingman’s diet. A 1730 map of New York harbor shows the entire Jersey shore section of the harbor to be “one gigantic oyster reef.”
    In deference to the edible treasures that could be found in the waters surrounding the sandy outcrop, European colonists named the tiny island in the harbor Little Oyster Island, while its larger neighbor was dubbed Great Oyster Island.
    Little Oyster Island would figure into a small piece of early New Amsterdam history. In 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, the director general of the West India Company and de facto ruler of New Amsterdam, was ordered by his bosses to create a municipal government. In February 1653, the new city government met in Fort Amsterdam.
    One of the first orders of business that day was a complaint from Joost Goderis, the twenty-something son of a minor Dutch painter. In late January, Goderis had gone in a canoe with a boy “for oysters and pleasure” at Oyster Island. Goderis was interrupted and accosted by Isaack Bedloo and Jacob Buys, who taunted Goderis by shouting: “You cuckold and horned beast, Allard Antony has had your wife down on her back.” Another man, Guliam d’Wys, taunted Goderis that he should let d’Wys have a “sexual connection” with Goderis’s wife, since Antony already had done so. When Goderis, whom one historian had deemed “excitable” and “ill-balanced,” confronted Bedloo at his house, he slapped him. In turn, Bedloo drew a knife and cut Goderis on the neck.
    Goderis decided to take his case before the new local government to restore the good name of his wife and the pride of his family. He also hauled in a number of other men, friends of the defendants, who reportedly had witnessed the incident. The witnesses refused to cooperate against their friends and the case dragged on for weeks. One of the men hearing the case was none other than Allard Antony, the alleged cuckolder himself.
    Goderis and the others have vanished into history, but Isaack Bedloo lives on. He became a wealthy merchant and later joined other prominent leaders of New Amsterdam in 1664 to convince Stuyvesant to turn over control of New Amsterdam to England. It was a