A difficulty with writing popular history is that often the sources don't give enough detail, tell us everything we'd like to know. Some authors will hedge, make conditional statements, like "George Washington would almost certainly have had a hurried breakfast or maybe none, before crossing the Delaware that morning", and some will simply fill out the scene. While Shorto's book is good reading, has good stuff in it, and covers a neglected part of American history, he did do a fair bit of embroidering and embellishing, willing to describe someone as staggering off a ship instead of just saying he disembarked. We do know that there were fancy ships in the period, like the Swedish Vasa, and scenes of Amsterdam harbor of the time also showed ships that had some painted decoration- it looks like some vermillion on the planking below the quarterdeck might have been a real fashion. But given Shorto's tendency to embroider and the tendency of the sources not to get into such descriptive details ( why should a 17th c. Dutch writer need to say Hudson's ship was brightly painted? Their audience would have seen ships) I doubt Johannes de Laet or another source states it explicitly . We don't even have a portrait of Hudson done during his life.