The Dutch East India company refused to search 1610. further for the north-western passage; but English merchants, renewing courage, formed a company, and Hudson, in "The Discovery," engaged again in his great pursuit. He had already explored the north-east and the north, and the region between the Chesapeake and Maine. There was no room for hope but to the north of Newfoundland. Proceeding by way of Iceland, where "the famous Hecla " was casting out fire, passing Greenland and Frobisher's Straits, he sailed on the second of August, 1610, into the straits which bear his name, and into which no one had gone before him. As he came out from the passage upon the wide gulf, he believed that he beheld "a sea to the westward," so that the short way to the Pacific was found. How great was his disappointment, when he found himself embayed in a labyrinth without end. Still confident of ultimate success, the determined mariner resolved on wintering in the bay, that he might perfect his discovery in the spring. His crew murmured at the sufferings of a winter for which no preparation had been made. At length the late and anxiously expected spring burst forth; but it opened in vain for Hudson. Provisions were exhausted; he divided the last bread among his men, and prepared for them a bill of return; and "he wept as he gave it them." Believing himself almost on the point of succeeding, where Spaniards and English, and Danes and Dutch, had failed, he left his anchoring-place to steer for Europe. For two days the ship was encompassed by fields of ice, and the discontent of the crew broke forth into mutiny. Hudson was seized, and, with his only son and seven others, four of whom were sick, was thrown into the shallop. Seeing his commander thus exposed, Philip Staffe, the carpenter, demanded and gained leave to share his fate; and just as the ship made its way out of the ice, on a midsummer day, in a latitude where the sun, at that season, hardly goes down and evening twilight mingles with the dawn, the shallop was cut loose. What became of Hudson? Did he die miserably of starvation? Did he reach land to perish from the fury of the natives? Was he crushed between ribs of

ice? The returning ship encountered storms, by which he was probably overwhelmed. The gloomy waste of waters which bears his name is his tomb and his monument.

The "Half Moon," having been detained for many months in Dartmouth by the jealousy of the English, did not reach Amsterdam till the middle of July, 1610, too late, perhaps, in the season for the immediate equipment of a new voyage. At least no definite trace of a voyage to Manhattan in that year has been discovered. Besides, to avoid a competition with England, the Dutch ambassador at London, that same year, proposed a joint colonization of Virginia, as well as a partnership in the East India trade; but the offer was put aside from fear of the superior "art and industry of the Dutch."

1611.

The development of a lucrative fur-trade in Hudson River was therefore left to unprotected private adventure. In 1613, or in one of the two previous years, the experienced Hendrik Christiaensen of Cleve" and the worthy Adriaen Block chartered a ship with the skipper Ryser," and made a voyage into the waters of New York, bringing back rich furs, and also two sons of native sachems. The states-general still hesitated to charter a West India company; but on the twenty-seventh of March, 1614, they ordained that private adventurers might enjoy an exclusive privilege for four successive voyages to any passage, haven, or country they should thereafter find. With such encouragement, a company of merchants, in the same year, sent five small vessels, of which the "Fortune," of Amsterdam, had Christiaensen for its commander; the "Tiger," of the same port, Adriaen Block; the "Fortune," of Hoorn, Cornelis Jacobsen May, to extend the discoveries of Hudson as well as to trade with the natives.

1614.

The " "Tiger" was accidentally burnt near the Island of Manhattan; but Adriaen Block, building a yacht of sixteen tons' burden, which he named the "Unrest," plied forth to explore the vicinity. First of European navigators, he steered through Hellgate, passed the archipelago near Norwalk, and discovered the river of Red Hills, which we

know as the Housatonic. From the Bay of New Haven he turned to the east, and ascended the beautiful river which he called the Freshwater, but which, to this hour, keeps its Indian name of Connecticut. Near the site of Wethersfield he came upon one Indian tribe; just above Hartford, upon another; and he heard tales of the Horicans, who dwelt in the west, and moved over lakes in bark canoes. The Pequods he found on the banks of their river. At Montauk Point, then occupied by a savage nation, he reached the ocean, proving the land east of the sound to be an island. After discovering the island which bears his name, and exploring both channels of that which owes to him the name of Roode Eiland, now Rhode Island, the mariner from Holland imposed the names of places in his native. land on groups in the Atlantic, which, years before, Gosnold and other English navigators had visited. The "Unrest sailed beyond Cape Cod; and, while John Smith was making maps of the bays and coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, Adriaen Block traced the shore as far at least as Nahant. Then leaving the American-built yacht at Cape Cod, to be used by Cornelis Hendricksen in the fur-trade, Block sailed in Christiaensen's ship for Holland.

The states-general, in an assembly where Olden Barneveldt was present, readily granted to the united company of merchants interested in these discoveries a three years' monopoly of trade with the territory between Virginia and New France, from forty to forty-five degrees of latitude. Their charter, given on the eleventh of October, 1614, names the extensive region NEW NETHERLAND. Its northern part John Smith had that same year called NEW ENGLAND.

1615.

To prosecute their commerce with the natives, Christiaensen built for the company, on Castle Island, south of the present city of Albany, a truck-house and military post. The building was thirty-six feet by twentysix, the stockade fifty-eight feet square, the moat eighteen feet wide. The garrison was composed of ten or twelve men. The fort, which may have been begun in 1614, which was certainly finished in 1615, was called Nassau; the river

for a time was known as the Maurice. With the Five Nations a friendship grew up, which was soon ratified according to the usages of the Iroquois, and during the power of the Dutch was never broken. Such is the beginning of Albany: it was the outpost of the Netherland furtrade.

1616.

The United Provinces, now recognised even by Spain as free countries, provinces, and states, set no bounds to their enterprise. The world seemed not too large for their commerce under the genial influence of liberty, achieved after a struggle longer and more desperate than that of Greece with Persia. This is the golden age of their trade with Japan, and the epoch of their alliance with the emperor of Ceylon. In 1611 their ships once again braved the frosts of the arctic circle in search of a new way to China; and it was a Dutch discoverer, Schouten, from Hoorn, who, in 1616, left the name of his own beloved seaport on the southernmost point of South America. In the same year a report was made of further discoveries in North America. Three Netherlanders - who went up the Mohawk valley, struck a branch of the Delaware, and made their way to Indians near the site of Philadelphia found by Cornelis Hendricksen, as he came in the "Unrest to explore the bay and rivers of Delaware. On his return to Holland in 1616, the merchants by whom he had been employed claimed the discovery of the country between thirty-eight and forty degrees. He described the inhabitants as trading in sables, furs, and other skins; the land as a vast forest, abounding in bucks and does, in turkeys and partridges; the climate temperate, like that of Holland; the trees mantled by the vine. But the states-general refused to grant a monopoly of trade.

were

1618.

On the first day of January, 1618, the exclusive privilege conceded to the company of merchants for New Netherland expired; but voyages continued to be made by their agents and by rival enterprise. The fort near Albany having been destroyed by a flood, a new post was taken on Norman's Kill. But the strife of political parties still retarded the establishment of permanent settle

ments. By the constitution of the Low Countries, the municipal officers, who were named by the stadholder or were self-renewed on the principle of close corporations, appointed delegates to the provincial states; and these again, a representative to the states-general. The states, the true personation of a fixed commercial aristocracy, resisted popular innovations; and the same instinct which led the Romans to elevate Julius Cæsar, the commons of England to sustain Henry VII., the Danes to confer hereditary power on the descendants of Frederic III., the French to substitute absolute for feudal monarchy, induced the people of Holland to favor the stadholder. The division extended to domestic politics, theology, and international intercourse. The friends of the stadholder asserted sovereignty for the states-general; while the party of Olden Barneveldt and Grotius, with greater reason in point of historic facts, claimed sovereignty exclusively for the provincial assemblies. Prince Maurice, who desired to renew the war with Spain, favored colonization in America; the aristocratic party, fearing the increase of executive power, opposed it from fear of new collisions. The Gomarists, who satisfied the natural passion for equality by denying personal merit, and ascribing every virtue and capacity to the benevolence of God, leaned to the crowd; while the Arminians, nourishing pride by asserting power and merit in man, commended their creed to the aristocracy. Thus the Calvinists, popular enthusiasm, and the stadholder, were arrayed against the provincial states and municipal authorities. The colonization of New York by the Dutch depended on the struggle; and the issue was not long doubtful. The excesses of political ambition, disguised under the forms of religious controversy, led to violent counsels. In August, 1618, Olden Barneveldt and Grotius were taken into custody.

1618.

In November, 1618, a few weeks after the first acts of violence, the states-general gave a limited incorporation to a company of merchants; yet the conditions. of the charter were not inviting, and no organization took place. In May of the following year, Grotius, the first polit