XIII CHAPTER Montaigne, a Huguenot gentleman, Kieft having two votes. The Twelve Men desired that the number of 1642. counselors might be increased to five; they asked local magistrates for the villages; and offered several other suggestions, to which the director at first seemed to Feb. 18. lend a favorable ear, but he soon issued a proclamation, forbidding the board, "on pain of corporeal punishment,” to meet again without his express permission, such meetings "tending to the serious injury both of the country and our authority." Eighty men were sent March. against the hostile Indians under Van Dyck, ensign in the company's service; but the guide missed his way, the commander lost his temper, and the men returned without meeting the enemy. The Indians, however, were so alarmed that they asked for peace, promising to give up the murderer; but this promise they never fulfilled. A new difficulty presently arose. One of the Hackensacks, a tribe on the Hudson opposite Manhattan, had been made drunk by some colonists, and then robbed. In revenge, he killed two Dutchmen. The chiefs offered wampum by way of atonement, remonstrating, at the same time, against the practice of selling brandy to their people, as having been the cause of the present difficulty. Kieft, like Massachusetts in the case of the Pequods, would be content with nothing but blood. While this 1643. dispute was still pending, the Mohawks attacked the Feb. late hostile tribe about Tappan. They fled for refuge to the Dutch, who took pity on them, and gave them food; and they soon scattered in various directions, the greater part joining the Hackensacks. There had been all along at New Amsterdam a peace party, headed by De Vries, who counseled patience and forbearance, and insisted on the necessity of keeping on good terms with the In The XIII. dians; and a war party, led by Secretary Van Tienhoven, CHAPTER restless, passionate, and eager for blood. At a Shrovetide feast, warm with wine, Kieft was persuaded by 1643. some leaders of the more violent party to improve the present opportunity to punish the Indians so lately entertained at New Amsterdam for not having fulfilled their former promise to give up the murderer. In spite of the remonstrances of Bogardus, La Montaigne, and De Vries, two companies were fitted out, one of soldiers, under Sergeant Rodolf, the other of volunteers, headed by a chief instigator of the expedition, one of the late Twelve Men, Maryn Adriaensen, once a freebooter in the West Indies. There were two encampments of the Indians, against which these two companies proceeded, Feb. 25. "in full confidence," so their commission says, "that God would crown their resolution with success." Indians, taken utterly by surprise, and supposing themselves attacked by the formidable Mohawks, hardly made any resistance. De Vries tells us, in his Voyages, that, being that night at the director's house, he distinctly heard the shrieks of the victims sounding across the icy river. Warriors, old men, women, and children were slain without mercy, to the number of eighty or Babes, fastened to the pieces of bark which the Indian women use as cradles, were thrown into the water, and the miserable mothers, who plunged in after them, prevented by the Dutch party from relanding, perished with their infants. The wounded who remained alive the next morning were killed in cold blood, or thrown into the river. Thirty, however, were taken prisoners and carried the next day to New Amsterdam, along with the heads of several others. more. Some inhabitants of Long Island, with a like mad appetite for blood, asked permission to attack their Indian CHAPTER neighbors. These Indians had always been good friends XIII. of the Dutch, and Kieft refused permission; but advant1643. age was taken of some ambiguity in his answer, and an expedition was soon sent to plunder their corn, in the course of which two Indians were slain. Roused by these injuries, eleven petty tribes, some on the main land, and the others on Long Island, united to make war on the Dutch, whose scattered boweries now extended thirty miles to the east, twenty miles north, and as far south from New Amsterdam. The houses were burned, the cattle killed, the men slain, and several women and children made prisoners. The Indians, partially supplied with fire-arms, and wrought up to the highest pitch of rage and fury, were truly formidable. The terrified and ruined colonists fled on all sides into New AmMarch 1. sterdam. Roger Williams was there on his first voyage to England. "Mine eyes saw the flames of their towns,” he writes, "the frights and hurries of men, women, and children, and the present removal of all that could to March 4. Holland." A fast was proclaimed. The director, as sailed with reproaches and in danger of being deposed, was obliged to take all the settlers into the company's service for two months. Adriaensen the freebooter, leader of the volunteers in the first attack on the Indians, attempted an unsuccessful expedition, during which he had the mortification to see his own bowery ruined. Finding himself, on his return, stigmatized as a murderer for having instigated the massacre at Hackensack, in March 21. a violent fit of passion he attacked Kieft, pistol and cutlass in hand. But he was disarmed, and, in spite of the ef forts of his partisans to release him, was presently sent prisoner to Holland. The Indians, satiated with revenge, soon made advances toward a reconciliation, which the Dutch eager XIII. ly met. De Vries proceeded to Rockaway, where an in- CHAPTER terview was had with one of the principal hostile chiefs.. He was persuaded, with several of his warriors, to visit 1643. New Amsterdam, and a treaty of peace was speedily March 25. arranged. A month after, the Hackensacks and other April 22. tribes on the river came into the same arrangement. But the presents given were not satisfactory, and they went away in no very good humor. Shortly after this pacification, Kieft wrote to the Com- July. missioners for the United Colonies of New England, congratulating them on their recent union. He complained, however, of certain misrepresentations lately made to the Dutch embassador in London by Lord Say and Hugh Peters, the Massachusetts agent, and he desired to know whether the commissioners intended to uphold the people of Connecticut in their "insufferable wrongs," especially their treatment of the Dutch residents at the fort of Good Hope. The commissioners, at their next meeting, sent Sept. back, in reply, a whole batch of complaints on the part of Connecticut and New Haven, to which Kieft rejoined, vindicating the Dutch title to the shores of the Sound. While the director was engaged in this controversy, New Amsterdam was visited by Sir Edmund Plowden, whose grant of New Albion has been mentioned in a former chapter. But the "Albion knights," as they were called in the charter, had no means to enforce their pretensions, and the earl-palatine presently retired to Virginia, without any attempt at the conversion of the twenty-three kings of Charles or Delaware River, set forth in the patent as the great object of the grant. Meanwhile, the Indian war broke out anew. A tribe on the Hudson, north of the Highlands, which had taken no share in the former war, attacked and plundered a Dutch canoe coming from Fort Orange, laden with furs. CHAPTER The frontier boweries were again assailed by a new con XIII. federacy of seven tribes, some of them inhabitants of the 1643. main land and others of Long Island. The colony of Achter Cul, behind Newark Bay, was attacked by the Indians and completely ruined. It was at this time that Mrs. Hutchinson was slain, with all of her family, except a little daughter taken prisoner. The Lady Moody's settlement at Gravesend was also attacked; but she had a guard of forty men, who repulsed the Indians. Oct. In this emergency the commonalty had again been Sept. 13. resorted to. A meeting of the inhabitants had been called by the director, and a board of "Eight Men" appointed to aid and advise in the conduct of the war. To prevent the English settlers from leaving the province, fisty or more were taken into the company's pay, the commonalty having agreed to meet a third of the expense. Underhill, one of the heroes of the Pequod war, whose former residence in Holland had made him familiar with the Dutch language, and who had lately removed to Stamford, was appointed to command the Dutch soldiers. Application was also made at New Haven, through Underhill and Allerton, a New England merchant much employed in trade with New Netherland, for an auxiliary force of a hundred and fifty men; but the people of that colony had not forgotten their expulsion from the Delaware; they doubted, also, the justice of the quarrel, and, on that ground, refused their aid. The "Eight Men," affecting account of Oct. 24. in an appeal to Holland, give an the wretched condition of the colony. The inhabitants, driven from their boweries, of which only three remained on the Island of Manhattan, were mostly clustered in straw huts about a ruinous and hardly tenable fort, themselves short of provisions, and their cattle in danger of starving. A palisade, kept up for the next fifty years, |