shores, and of the rivers flowing into it, had been explored as early as the year following. In the year following that, or in 1609, the fearless and intrepid navigator, Captain Henry Hudson, an Englishman, but then sailing under the flag of the United Netherlands, and in command of a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company, in seeking the capes of the Chesapeake with the view of touching at Jamestown for provisions, missed them, and bearing northward along the coast, in full view of the land and the long line of lofty forests in full leaf which then overshadowed the solitude of the unknown shore, on the 28th day of August in that year discovered for the first time in the annals of history the capes of the Delaware, which he entered about noon, and, after spending the rest of the day and night on the bosom of our bay, sailed early the next morning, and, still standing northward along the coast, in six days afterwards discovered and entered the Bay of New York. He lingered there for several weeks, and long enough to explore the surrounding shores and the Hudson River as high as the site of the city of Albany.

The report of his discoveries, which reached Holland before the close of the year, produced such an impression in Amsterdam and other cities, that steps were promptly taken by individuals on their own account as private ventures, to open a direct trade with the natives of these newlydiscovered regions, and commencing as early as 1610, they had established in five or six years two very considerable trading posts and settlements, the principal one on Manhattan Island, and the other on an island in the Hudson not far below the site of Albany; and as small forts of rude

and primitive construction were speedily erected for the defence of the posts and the stores and goods kept in them, the former was named Fort Amsterdam and the latter Fort Orange. In the mean while, the Delaware Bay and River had been explored as high as the mouth of the Schuylkill, and the Connecticut River had been added to the Dutch discoveries soon afterwards, and the Hudson and the Delaware had already been baptized in their conception and their language as twin rivers, by the name of the North and the South River, respectively. As early as 1620 the English had planted another colony at Plymouth, in Massachusetts, and from the date of the first occupation by the Dutch of the intervening country between that and Jamestown, in Virginia, they had persistently denied their title to it, or any part of it. In 1611, Lord Delaware, governor and captain-general of the Jamestown colony, before any intelligence of Hudson's discoveries had reached the colony, sailed thence in the month of March in that year for the West India Islands on account of his health, which was much impaired, and, encountering heavy head winds soon after leaving the capes of the Chesapeake, was driven northward, when the capes of a new and entirely unknown bay to any one on board the ship were discovered, and which they entered, and where they remained for a day or two, anchored under the lee of the southern cape awaiting a change in the wind, and which in honor of his lordship was then named Delaware Bay, and which it has retained ever since among the English. It is a little remarkable that, being so near the capes of the Chesapeake, and particularly with the activity and enterprise which had been so early

exhibited in the exploration of the shores of that bay, the discovery of ours should have been so purely accidental in both instances, and even more so in the second than in the first.

I do not deem it necessary for my purpose to notice the Dutch settlement or colony planted by Captain Cornelius Mey at Nassau on the Delaware River, near Gloucester Point, in 1623, because it was on the eastern side of the river and not within our limits, and could never have had any material bearing on the question involved between the Province of Maryland and the three lower counties on the Delaware which now constitute our State. Besides, I have reasons for believing that there were Dutch traders settled on the Hoorn Kill, now Lewes Creek, as early as 1622, although no colony or regular settlement transplanted from Holland had been founded there so early as that date. There was a permanent native settlement or Indian village on the banks of it when the bay was first discovered, and according to the description we have of the creek fifty years afterwards, it deserved to be called a river instead of a creek, with a fine roadstead within the mouth of it for the ships of that day of all burdens, and none like it for safety in all the bay, the right channel for sailing up the bay passing it, and only two leagues above Cape Henlopen; for being within so short a voyage of Fort Amsterdam, and as the sole object of those early Dutch adventurers was trade and traffic with the natives, chiefly in furs and peltries, and game of all kinds was then abundant in the surrounding regions, the opening of such a market would soon attract the notice and attention of the natives and the traders alike, and

draw them to that Indian settlement for such purposes. That a casual intercourse of that kind first sprung up at a very early period between that point on our shores and the Dutch traders on Manhattan Island and the Hudson, I think there can be no question, and which not only warrants the opinion I have expressed, that there were such settlers there as early as 1622 or 1623, but it accounts for the more important fact that the Hoorn Kill soon began to attract the attention of a class of gentlemen in Holland who looked to a larger business that might be established there with success and with much greater profits, as they imagined, than any trade with the natives there or on the Hudson could possibly afford to such as were engaged in it. And it was this that led such men of means as Messrs. Godyn, Blommaert, Van Rensselaer, De Vries, and a considerable number of others of like intelligence and means in Amsterdam and other cities in Holland, as early as 1629, to form a private company, or copartnership, to purchase all the salt-marsh skirting our side of the bayshore from Cape Henlopen to Bomby Hook Roads, for the purpose of establishing a whale-fishery on our bay, and in connection with it, and as a part of the enterprise, to plant a Dutch colony on the Hoorn Kill. They, or some of them at least, also probably aspired to the honor and dignity of becoming in time Dutch patroons on the shores of the Delaware, and they would have well deserved the full fruition of their ambition had they succeeded in the undertaking. But as Dutchmen generally move with care and caution in all great enterprises, I have no doubt they were a good while in gradually growing ripe for such a

grand oil speculation, and I have as little doubt that there were at that day a good many large fish in the Delaware Bay, and among them not a few whales of very respectable proportions. They had enjoyed the undisturbed possession of its waters for so many ages that such a thing was certainly possible. But I suspect that the Dutch traders I have spoken of, and the Dutch sailors who had become familiar with our bay prior to that time, had been so long indulging in stupendous fish-stories both as to the multitude and magnitude of them, as to have quite upset for the time the mental balance of those gentlemen. It is certain, however, that they embarked in the enterprise with the confident expectation of making a success of it, and De Vries, who had filled with credit to himself a post of respectability in the military service of the Netherlands, and had recently returned from a protracted residence in the East Indies, was selected and solicited to assume in person the management of the enterprise as the director-general of the colony. They also had sufficient encouragement in their undertaking and influence with the Dutch West India Company, which despatched three ships early in the spring of 1629 to Fort Amsterdam, to procure an order that on their arrival there one of them should proceed with an agent of theirs to the Hoorn Kill to complete the purchase of the salt-marsh mentioned from the Indians of the village. The ship arrived there as ordered in the latter part of May, and on the first day of June in that year the purchase was duly made, and the sale was afterwards acknowledged by a delegation of the Indians of the village before the director-general and council of the New Netherlands,