Sept 6, 1609 - The 1st recorded murder in New York "Typically, about half the homicides in New York City are solved within the first year. This one has remained a bit of a mystery for four centuries.The victim was John Colman, an Englishman, accomplished sailor, and second mate aboard the Half Moon (Halve Maen) in 1609, as Henry Hudson explored the harbor and Upper Bay. It is the first recorded murder in New York.The only existing account of the crime was gleaned from eyewitnesses by Robert Juet, aka Jouet, Hudson's first mate. After morning prayers on September 6, four crew members accompanied Colman in a sixteen-foot shallop on a reconnaissance mission from the Half Moon, anchored between Coney Island and Sandy Hook. They surveyed lands "as pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them." They sailed about six miles, possibly to Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, or even farther north to Upper New York Bay, where they "saw an open sea.Upon returning toward nightfall, "they were set upon by two canoes," one with twelve men and the other with fourteen. Colman was "slain in the fight," Juet wrote in his log, "with an arrow shot into his throat and two more hurt." (His chest may have been sheathed in armor, but he was struck in the neck by a stone arrow-head and bled to death.) The survivors drifted in the dark, their light having gone out in the rain (which also left them unable to ignite a small cannon, although they may have routed the marauders with musket fire). They returned to their ship by ten the next morning with the dead man, "whom we carried on land and buried and named the point" - probably some spot in Coney Island, Staten Island, Sandy Hook, or Keansburg, New Jersey (where a Colman's Point still exists)- “after his name.”Modern detectives say the perfunctory investigation, if not details of the murder itself, were suspect. The only account of the crime is secondhand, pieced together from a few witnesses among a largely Dutch crew, some of whom might have harbored a grudge against the Englishman. (Colman, in a letter to his wife, contemptuously wrote of the Dutch men: "Looking at their fat bellies, I fear they think more highly of eating than of sailing.")Colman had served Hudson as a trusted boatswain on an earlier voyage, but Juet was described by Hudson himself as mean-tempered, and later led a mutiny against the captain. Colman's body was hastily buried and has never been found. The arrow was recovered but vanished. The chief suspects were singled out because of racial profiling but were never questioned. No one was ever prosecuted. Just two days after the murder, Juet recounted, natives boarded the Half Moon to trade while the crew kept a careful watch to "see if they would show any sign of the death of our man, which they did not" (suggesting that they were either innocent or duplicitous or that the killers had come from a different tribe).The murder is memorialized in a mural in the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City and in a poem by Thomas Frost that hinted at Colman's disdain for the crew:"What! are ye cravens?" Colman said;For each had shipped his oar.He waved the flag: "For Netherland,Pull for yon jutting shore!"Then prone he fell within the boat,A flinthead arrow through his throat!
