The Riddle of Anthony's Nose

LOWER HUDSON VALLEY

The past is a long road winding back through the mists of time. Go back far enough, and history becomes hopelessly tangled with encroaching legend and folklore. In pursuit of local-interest stories in the history-rich Hudson Valley, a writer must sometimes venture into areas where the historian lifts his robes and stalks away.

One elusive tale surfacing from time to time argues that Esteban Gomez--and not Giovanni da Verrazano--discovered the Hudson River, which he named for St. Anthony. Upon close examination, this turns out to be as groundless as the story attributing the exhortation "Go west, young man" to Westchester's own Horace Greeley. For the record, it was John B.L. Soule, who first wrote, "Go west, young man." in 1851 in an Indiana newspaper, the Terre Haute Express. Greeley liked the advice so much he borrowed it for his editorials in the New York Tribune, enhancing it to "Go west, young man, and grow with the country."

That Gomez, a Portuguese sailing for the Spanish crown, explored the North American coast a year after Verrazano's 1524 voyage is not in dispute. No evidence exists that either penetrated farther upriver than the Upper Bay. Gomez may indeed have given the saint's name to our river; on later Spanish maps, a Rio San Antonio is shown at about this latitude.

Maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison, however, gives solid credit to Verrazano for the discovery of the river. In his fascinating and diligently researched work, The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America, Morison devotes an entire chapter to the exploratory voyages of Verrazano between 1524 and 1528.

Gomez, on the other hand, gets short shrift from Morison. He is mentioned--unflatteringly and only in passing--on six scattered pages--as fomenting a mutiny when a member of Magellan's history-making expedition, and as a teller of lies about Magellan. Morison says nothing about the 1525 voyage of Gomez.

Former Croton resident Bob Boyle put the controversy to rest in his 1969 book, The Hudson River. After acknowledging Verrazano's primacy in the discovery of the river, Boyle wrote: “Two maps showing the river were drawn in Europe in 1556 and 1569. However, these maps and the voyages of Verrazano, Gomez and the French rank as mere historical curiosities in terms of exploration and settlement. The true honor for the discovery of the river falls to the navigator after whom it is named, Henry Hudson.”

The Gomez story is occasionally embellished locally with the assertion that he reached the Hudson Highlands. As his ship sailed past the highest peak on June 13th, St. Anthony's feast day, he named it St. Anthony's Nose. According to legend, the name of this mountain, which today anchors the eastern end of the Bear Mountain Bridge, was later corrupted to Anthony's Nose.

Nice try--but no cigar. Anthony's Nose--or St. Anthony's Nose, if you insist--is not the highest mountain in the area. And the progression of this mountain's names went in the other direction--and then back again.

As a college student majoring in geology and an avid hiker, I came to know the Hudson Highlands "comme ma poche," as the French say. The major summits of the Highlands and their elevations in feet are, on the west side of the river, Storm King (1,340), Crow's Nest (1,396), Bear Mountain (1,284), and the Dunderberg Massif (1,120); on the east side, Breakneck Mountain (1,213) and Mt. Taurus (Bull Hill) (1,420).

All are taller and more impressive than Anthony's Nose, which barely reaches 900 feet. One consolation for proponents of this story may be that Anthony's Nose--part of which lies in Westchester--is still the highest point in both the town of Cortlandt and Westchester County, easily nosing out Dickerson Mountain on the old Valeria property.

But there's another reason why St. Anthony's Nose is an unlikely remnant name from earlier Spanish exploration: Without settlers and the reinforcement of frequent use, names applied to topographic features simply do not persist, no matter how formally bestowed.

In 1524, Verrazano named the Upper Bay "Santa Margarita," after the sister of King Francis I of France. The surrounding lands he called "Angouleme," for the king's original duchy. From that time until today, no one in what would become Brooklyn or Staten Island has ever used these two names.

The subject of our inquiry was first called Anthony's Nose early in the 17th century. Toward the end of the 18th century, it mysteriously became St. Anthony's Nose. Just as mysteriously in the 19th century, it became Anthony's Nose once again.

Let me settle all arguments: It was Dutch pilots sailing their "jachts" [sloops] on the river in the 17th century and naming every prominent natural feature useful for navigation who first called it Anthony's Nose.

Identifying a specific Dutchman as the Anthony of the nose is not easy. Early sources give that honor to Antoine de Hooges, an official of the colony of New Netherland at Fort Orange (Albany). Washington Irving recounted an often-repeated anecdote about the naming of the mountain in his whimsical 1809 work entitled Knickerbocker's History of New York. Irving insisted it was named for the prodigious and bejeweled nose of Anthony Van Corlear, Peter Stuyvesant's courier, dubbed "Anthony the Trumpeter."

In 1836, magazine publisher Freeman Hunt described a visit with Philip Van Cortlandt at the Upper Manor House in Cortlandt. Van Cortlandt, who had espoused the American cause in the Revolution and became a brigadier general, liked to be addressed by his military title. The following is from Hunt's Letters About the Hudson and Its Vicinity: “General V. is the owner of Anthony's Nose (on the river), as it is called. He gave me the origin of that name. Before the revolution, a vessel was passing up the river, under the command of a Capt. Hogans, when immediately opposite the mountain, the mate looked rather quizzically at the mountain and then at the captain's nose. The captain, by the way, had an enormous nose, which was not infrequently the subject of good-natured remark; and he at once understood the mate's allusion. ’What,’ says the captain, ‘does that look like my nose? Call it then if you please Antony's Nose.’"

The story was repeated on shore, and the mountain thenceforward assumed the name, and has thus become an everlasting monument to the redoubtable Capt. Antony Hogans and his nose. Antony Hogans is probably the Anglicization of Antoine de Hooges, a likely name conversion in a society moving from Dutch to English. Perceiving a nose in this rocky mass was not easy for some. Inveterate traveler James Kirke Paulding noted in his 1828 guidebook, the New Mirror for Travelers, "The most curious thing about it is that it no more looks like a nose than my foot."

To be a tracer of names on the land means following many false leads and dead-ends. Consider the famous "Turk's Face," a rocky feature on the ridge of Breakneck Mountain, itself sometimes called Turk's Face Mountain. A landmark for travelers on the Hudson about two miles north of Cold Spring, this rock formation bore a striking resemblance to a human face.

John Maude, an indefatigable English traveler, jokingly remarked about the Turk's Face during a voyage between Albany and New York City in 1800: “The profile of the Face Mountain so strongly resembles the profile of the human face, that I had for some time my doubts whether art had not assisted in improving the likeness. I have seen other blockheads which did not possess so sensible a countenance.”

In 1846, a rapacious quarryman blew Turk's Face to smithereens. With one mighty blast of black powder, Capt. Deering Ayers reduced 10,000 tons of picturesque scenery to a pile of rubble. Ayers blew himself to kingdom come a few years later while checking an explosive charge that failed to go off.

Conservationists of the period saw his violent end as justly deserved retribution. Despite the disappearance of the stone visage, the name Turk's Face Mountain persisted. Curiously, by the beginning of the 20th century, the long-vanished Turk's Face was being remembered as St. Anthony's Face, according to Wallace Bruce, author of a series of popular guidebooks to the Hudson River. References to it as St. Anthony's Face, of course, have led to inevitable confusion with Anthony's Nose.

The late Richard Lederer spent a good part of his life tracking the origins of the county's names. In his exhaustive The Place Names of Westchester County, he records that the name Anthony's Nose was used in the 1683 Indian deed to Stephanus Van Cortlandt.

In contrast, the first occurrence of St. Anthony's Nose I have encountered is in Charles Carroll's account of a passage through the Hudson Highlands by sloop in April 1776: “When we got into this strait the wind increased, and blew in violent flaws [sic]; in doubling one of these steep craggy points we were in danger of running on the rocks; endeavored to double [a nautical term meaning 'to sail around'] the cape called St. Anthony's Nose, but all our efforts proved ineffectual; obliged to return some way back in the straits to seek shelter; in doing this our mainsail was split to pieces by a sudden and violent blast of wind off the mountains.”

Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832), a member of the Continental Congress, was sailing up the Hudson with Ben Franklin on an unsuccessful mission to Canada to get the Canadians to join the American cause. Carroll later signed the Declaration of Independence and became a U.S. senator.

St. Anthony's Nose also appears in an aquatint etching by J.W. Edy, after a drawing by G.B. Fisher, titled View of St. Anthony's Nose in the North River, Province of New York, 1795. A print of this charming scene on the placid river is in the Milberg Collection of the Princeton University Libraries. More recently, an early name of the hamlet at the little-used Manitou railroad station was St. Anthonysville. Nevertheless, the derogative quality of the name St. Anthony's Nose has always been bothersome to this writer. Would any sincerely religious person disparage a gentle saint like St. Anthony of Padua? This Portuguese-born Franciscan monk and patron saint of the poor--according to legend--once preached to an attentive audience of fish.

St. Anthony's Nose has the same derisive, antireligious ring found in comparative references to the posterior part of a roast chicken or turkey. (Depending upon one's prejudices, this was "the parson's nose" or "the Pope's nose.")

In his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Eric Partridge notes the latter expression first appeared in the 1788 edition of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. This would agree timewise with the corruption of Anthony's Nose to St. Anthony's Nose. If derogation was the objective behind calling it St. Anthony's Nose, Charles Carroll's unwitting and unquestioning use of the term is ironic: Carroll, one of the richest men of his time, was a prominent Roman Catholic layman.

We should not conclude that the abandonment of the saint's name and the return to the use of Anthony's Nose on today's maps necessarily represents a setback for the good father. Think of it instead as another small victory in our never-ending battle against mindless bigotry.