Why does this make me so unbearably sad?

"Initially it was what Denton called 'the sweetness of Air' that bewitched explorers and travelers. 'Dry, sweet, and healthy,' Adriaen van der Donck wrote. 'Sweet and fresh,' the missionary Jaspar Danckaerts noted...

It was the miraculous size and quantity and variety of things - the sheer prodigality of life - that left the most lasting impression. Travelers spoke of vast meadows of grass 'as high as a mans middle' and forests with towering stands of walnut, cedar, chestnut, maple, and oak. Orchards bore apples of incomparable sweetness and 'pears larger than a fist.' Every spring the hills and fields were dyed red with ripening strawberries, and so many birds filled the woods 'that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise, and the chattering.' Boats crossing the bay were escorted by schools of playful whales, seals, and porpoises. Twelve-inch oysters and six-foot lobsters crowded offshore waters, and so many fish thrived in streams and ponds that they could be taken by hand. Woods and tidal marshlands teemed with bears, wolves, foxes, raccoons, otters, beavers, quail, partridge, forty-pound wild turkeys, doves 'so numerous that the light can hardly be discerned where they fly,' and countless deer 'feeding or gamboling or resting in the shades in full view.' Wild swans were so plentiful 'that the bays and shores where hey resort appear as if they were dressed in white drapery.' Blackbirds roosted together in such numbers tha tone hunter killed 170 with a single shot; another bagged eleven sixteen-pound gray geese in the same way. 'There are some persons who imagine that the animals of the country will be destroyed in time,' mused Van der Donck, 'but this is an unnecessary anxiety."

* "Lenape Country and New Amsterdam to 1664," Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

Oh right. That last sentence: that's the sad part. He was so wrong. Van der Donck was so so inevitably wrong. Yes, this is the early New York being described, as the Dutch found it, as the Natives were used to it being, and as it will never be again.