was selected for "a battery," and lines were drawn for a fort, which took the name of New Amsterdam. The town had already thirty houses, and the emigrants' wives had borne them children. In the want of a regular minister, two "consolers of the sick " read to the people on Sundays "texts out of the scriptures, together with the creeds."

No danger appeared in the distance except from the pretensions of England. The government of Manhattan sought an interchange of "friendly kindness and neighborhood" with the nearest English at New Plymouth; and by a public letter, in March, 1627, it claimed mutual "good-will and service,' pleading "the nearness of their native countries, the friendship of their forefathers, and the new covenant between the states general and England against the Spaniards." Bradford, in reply, gladly accepted the "testimony of love." children after us," he added, "shall never forget the good and courteous entreaty which we found in your country, and shall desire your prosperity forever." His benediction was sincere; though he called to mind that the English patent for New England extended to forty degrees, within which, therefore, the Dutch had no right "to plant or trade;" and he especially begged them not to send their yachts into the Narragansett.

"Our

"Our authority to trade and plant we derive from the states of Holland, and will defend it," rejoined Minuit. But, in October of the same year, he sent De Rasières, who stood next him in rank, on a conciliatory embassy to New Plymouth. The envoy proceeded in state with soldiers and musicians. At Scusset, on Cape Cod bay, he was met by a boat from the Old Colony, and "was honorably attended with the noise of trumpets." He succeeded in concerting a mutual trade; but Bradford still warned the authorities of New Amsterdam to "clear their title" to their lands without delay. The advice seemed like a wish to hunt the Dutch out of their infant colony, and led the board of nineteen to ask of the states general forty soldiers for its defence.

Such were the rude beginnings of New Netherland. The women and children of the colony were concentred on Manhattan, which, in 1628, counted a population of two hundred and seventy souls, including Dutch, Walloons, and slaves from

Angola. Jonas Michaelius, a clergyman, arriving in April of that year, "established a church," which chose Minuit one of its two elders, and at the first administration of the Lord's Supper counted fifty communicants. This was the age of hunters and Indian traders; of traffic in the skins of otters and beavers; when the native tribes were employed in the pursuit of game as far as the St. Lawrence, and the skiffs of the Dutch, in quest of furs, penetrated every bay and inlet, from Narragansett to the Delaware. It was the day of straw roofs and wooden chimneys and windmills. There had been no extraordinary charge; there was no multitude of people; but labor was well directed and profitable; and the settlement promised fairly both to the state and to the undertakers. The experiment in feudal institutions followed.

Reprisals on Spanish commerce were the alluring pursuit of the West India company. On a single occasion, in 1628, the captures secured by its privateers were almost eightyfold more valuable than all the exports from their colony for the four preceding years. While the company of merchant warriors, conducting their maritime enterprises like princes, were making prizes of the rich fleets of Portugal and Spain, and, by their victories, pouring the wealth of America into their treasury, the states general interposed to subject the government of foreign conquests to a council of nine; and, in 1629, the board of nineteen adopted a charter of privileges for patroons who desired to found colonies in New Netherland.

These colonies were to resemble the lordships in the Netherlands. Every one who would emigrate on his own account was promised as much land as he could cultivate; but husbandmen were not expected to emigrate without aid. The liberties of Holland were the fruit of municipalities; the country people were subordinate to their landlord, against whose oppression the town was their refuge. The boors enjoyed as yet no political franchises, and had not had the experience required for planting states on a principle of equality. To the enterprise of proprietaries New Netherland was to owe its tenants. He that within four years would plant a colony of fifty souls became lord of the manor, or patroon, possessing in absolute property the lands he might colonize.

Those lands might extend sixteen miles in length; or, if they lay upon both sides of a river, eight miles on each bank, stretching indefinitely far into the interior; yet it was stipulated that the soil must be purchased of the Indians. Were cities to grow up, the institution of their government would rest with the patroon, who was to exercise judicial power, yet subject to appeals. The schoolmaster and the minister were praised as desirable; but there was no provision for their maintenance. The colonists were forbidden to manufacture any woollen or linen or cotton fabrics; not a web might be woven, not a shuttle thrown, on penalty of exile. To impair the monopoly of the Dutch weavers was punishable as perjury. The company, moreover, pledged itself to furnish the manors with negroes; yet not, it was warily provided, unless the traffic should prove lucrative. The isle of Manhattan, as the chosen seat of commerce, was reserved to the company.

This charter of liberties was fatal to the interests of the corporation; its directors and agents immediately appropriated to themselves the most valuable portions of its territory. In June, 1629, three years, therefore, before the concession of the charter for Maryland, Samuel Godyn and Samuel Blommaert, both directors of the Amsterdam chamber, bargained with the natives for the soil from Cape Henlopen to the mouth of Delaware river; in July, 1630, this purchase of an estate, more than thirty miles long, was ratified at Fort Amsterdam by Minuit and his council. It is the oldest deed for land in Delaware, and comprises the water-line of the two southern counties of that state. Still larger domains were in the same year appropriated by the agents of another director of the Amsterdam chamber, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, to whom successive purchases from Mohawk and Mohican chiefs gave titles to land north and south of Fort Orange. His deeds were promptly confirmed; so that his possessions, including a later supplementary acquisition, extended above and below Fort Orange, for twenty-four miles on each side of the river, and forty-eight miles into the interior. In the same year he sent out emigrants to the colony of Rensselaerwyck. In July, 1630, Michael Pauw, another director, bought Staten Island; in the following November he became the patroon of Hoboken and

what is now Jersey City; and he named his "colonie" on the mainland Pavonia,

The company had designed by its charter of liberties to favor the peopling of the province, and yet to retain its trade; under pretence of advancing agriculture, individuals had acquired a title to all the important points where the natives resorted for traffic. As a necessary consequence, the feudal possessors were often in collision with the central government, while, to the humble emigrant, the monopoly of commerce was aggravated by the monopoly of land.

A company was soon formed to colonize the tract acquired by Godyn and Blommaert. The first settlement in Delaware, older than any in Pennsylvania, was undertaken by a company, of which Godyn, Van Rensselaer, Blommaert, the historian De Laet, and a new partner, David Pietersen de Vries, were members. By joint enterprise, in December, 1630, a ship of eighteen guns, commanded by Pieter Heyes, and laden with emigrants, store of seeds, cattle, and agricultural implements, embarked from the Texel, partly to cover the southern shore of Delaware bay with fields of wheat and tobacco, and partly for a whale fishery on the coast. A yacht which went in company was taken by a Dunkirk privateer; early in the spring of 1631 the larger vessel reached its destination, and just within Cape Henlopen, on Lewes creek, planted a colony of more than thirty souls. The superintendence of the settlement was intrusted to Gillis Hosset. A little fort was built and well beset with palisades; the arms of Holland were affixed to a pillar; the country received the name of Swaanendael; the water that of Godyn's bay. The voyage of Heyes was the cradling of a state. That Delaware exists as a separate commonwealth is due to this colony. According to English rule, occupancy was necessary to complete a title to the wilderness; and the Dutch now occupied Delaware.

On the fifth of May, Heyes and Hosset, in behalf of Godyn and Blommaert, made a further purchase from Indian chiefs of the opposite coast of Cape May, for twelve miles on the bay, on the sea, and in the interior; and, in June, this sale of a tract, twelve miles square, was formally attested at Manhattan.

Animated by the courage of Godyn, the patroons of Swaanendael fitted out a second expedition, under the command of De Vries. But, before he set sail, news was received of the destruction of the fort, and the murder of its people. Hosset, the commandant, had caused the death of an Indian chief; and the revenge of the savages was not appeased till not one of the emigrants remained alive. De Vries, on his arrival, found only the ruins of the house and its palisades, half consumed by fire, and here and there the bones of the colonists.

Before the Dutch could recover the soil of Delaware from the natives, the patent granted to Baltimore gave them an English competitor. Distracted by anarchy, the administration of New Netherland could not withstand encroachments. The too powerful patroons disputed the fur trade with the agents of the West India company. In 1632, to still the quarrels, the discontented Minuit was displaced; but the inherent evils in the system were not lessened by appointing as his successor the selfish and incompetent Wouter van Twiller. The English government claimed that New Netherland was planted only on sufferance. The ship in which Minuit embarked for Holland entered Plymouth in a stress of weather, and was detained for a time on the allegation that it had traded without license in a part of the king's dominions. Van Twiller, who arrived at Manhattan in April, 1633, was defied by an English ship, which sailed up the river before his eyes. The rush of Puritan emigrants to New England had quickened the movements of the Dutch on the Connecticut, which they undoubtedly were the first to discover and to occupy. On the eighth of January, 1633, the soil round Hartford was purchased of the natives, and a fort was erected on land within the present limits of that city, some months before the pilgrims of Plymouth colony raised their block-house at Windsor, and more than two years before the people of Hooker and Haynes, in 1635, began the commonwealth of Connecticut. Like the banks of the Hudson, the country had been first explored, and even occupied, by the Dutch; but should a loghut and a few straggling soldiers seal a territory against other emigrants? The English planters were on a soil of which the