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where Wall-street now runs, was presently erected as a CHAPTER protection for New Amsterdam.

XIII.

Several expeditions against the Indians were mean- 1643. while undertaken. Counselor La Montaigne, with a force Dec. of three companies, Dutch burghers under Captain Kuyter, English colonists under Lieutenant Baxter, and Dutch soldiers under Sergeant Cock, crossed to Staten Island. The Indians kept out of the way, but their village was burned, and several hundred bushels of corn were destroyed. The same party proceeded soon after in three yachts against the Indians near Stamford, who had committed great ravages. They landed at Greenwich, and marched all night through the snow, but found no enemy. Having returned in no good humor to Stamford, one of 1644. the Dutchmen got into an altercation, of a Sunday after- Jan. 2. noon, at Underhill's house, with Captain Patrick, the founder of Greenwich, at whose suggestion chiefly the expedition had been undertaken. Patrick resented a charge of treachery by spitting in the Dutchman's face. The Dutchman drew a pistol and shot him dead on the spot. This Patrick, it will be remembered, had accompanied Winthrop in the migration to Massachusetts, and had been employed, along with Underhill, to teach military discipline. "He was made a freeman," Winthrop tells us, "and admitted a member of the church at Watertown; but, being proud and otherwise vicious, he was left of God to a profligate life, which brought him at last to destruction by the hand of one of that people from whom he sought protection after he had fled from the yoke of Christ in the Massachusetts, the strictness of whose discipline he would neither bear in the church nor yet in the country."

The expedition, however, was not wholly unsuccessful. Four of the Stamford people volunteered to hunt up the

CHAPTER Indians, and, under their guidance, some five-and-twenty
XIIL of the boldest of the party surprised a small Indian village,
1644. killed several women, and made prisoners of an old man,
two women, and some children.
The Indian prisoner, to

earn favor, offered to show the way to the forts of the
Tappan Indians; and Baxter and Cock, with sixty-five
men, were presently sent on an expedition thither. They
found the Indian castles strong and well adapted for de-
fense, nine feet high, studded with port-holes, and built
of five-inch timbers, bound with heavy beams.
Indians were gone, and the forts were empty.
vaders marched some forty miles into the country, kill-
ed an Indian or two, took prisoners some women and
children, destroyed a little corn, set fire to the forts, and
returned to New Amsterdam,

But the

The in

Another expedition was directed against a tribe on Long Island, hitherto esteemed friendly, but recently accused of secret hostilities. The Dutch had given the name of Hemstede to the district inhabited by this tribe. La Montaigne sailed with a hundred and twenty men, Dutch soldiers under Cock, English led by Underhill, and burghers under Pietersen. Underhill, with eighteen men, marched against the smaller village, and La Montaigne, with the main body, against the other. Both parties were completely successful. They took the villages by surprise, and, with the loss of only one killed and three wounded, slew upward of a hundred Indians. But the victory was disgraced by atrocious cruelties on two Indian prisoners, hacked to pieces with knives in the streets of New Amsterdam.

Captain Underhill having been sent to Stamford to reconnoiter, was presently dispatched, with Ensign Van Feb. Dyck and a hundred and twenty men, in three yachts, upon a new enterprise against the Indians in that neigh

XIII.

borhood. He landed at Greenwich, and, after a tedious CHAPTER march in the snow, crossing on the way a rocky hill, and fording two rivers, silently approached the Indian village 1644. by moonlight. It was situate behind a mountain, which sheltered it from the north winds, and contained three rows or streets of wigwams. A large number of Indians, assembled to celebrate some festival, made a desperate resistance; but, after an hour's fighting, during which many Indians were slain, the village was set on fire, and all the horrors of the Pequod massacre were renewed. It was said that five hundred perished in the battle or the flames. Large fires were kindled, and the victors slept on the field. Fifteen had been wounded, but none killed. They reached Stamford the next day at noon, where they were kindly entertained by the English settlers, and, two days after, arrived at New Amsterdam, where a public thanksgiving was ordered.

Some of the hostile tribes now asked for peace, but others still continued the war. The Dutch West India Company, made bankrupt by the expenses of military operations in the Brazils, was quite unable to afford any assistance, and a bill for 2622 gilders, $1045, drawn upon it by the director, which some of the New England traders at Manhattan had cashed, came back protested. The director imposed an excise duty on wine, June 21. beer, brandy, and beaver. Though no aid could be obtained from Holland, unexpected but opportune assistance arrived from Curaçoa, in a body of a hundred and thirty soldiers lately expelled from Brazil, where the Portuguese had risen against the Dutch. The inhabitants of Curaçoa, who did not need, and had no means to maintain these soldiers, sent them to New Amsterdam; and July. their arrival enabled Kieft to dismiss, but "in the most civil manner," the English auxiliaries hitherto employed.

XIII.

CHAPTER These soldiers were billeted on the inhabitants, and the excise duties were continued to provide them with cloth1644. ing. The Eight Men denied the right to levy these Aug. 4. taxes, and the brewers resisted; but Kieft insisted on Oct. 28. payment. Presently the Eight Men appealed to Hol

land in a protest complaining in emphatic terms of Kieft's conduct in the origin and progress of the war. The inhabitants also expressed their opinions with much freedom, and the shout-fiscal at New Amsterdam soon had his hands full of prosecutions for defamation of the director's character.

A part of the English settlers at Stamford sought safety from the Indians by crossing to Long Island, where

they commenced a settlement at Hempstead, under a Nov. 16. Dutch patent, on the lands of the lately-exterminated 1645. tribe. The next spring some friendly Indians were taken April. into the Dutch service, and Kieft, having paid a visit to

Fort Orange, entered into a treaty with the Mohawks, by the terror of whose name the other hostile tribes were Aug. 30. induced to agree to a firm peace. In case of future difficulties, application was to be made for redress by the Indians to the Dutch director, and by the colonists to the Indian sachems. No Indian was to approach Manhattan armed, nor were armed colonists to visit the Indian villages, unless conducted thither by some Indian. Mrs. Hutchinson's captive daughter was to be given up on ransom. The treaty was approved by the assembled citizens of New Amsterdam, and a day of general thanksgiving was ordered. Advantage was taken of this peace to obtain some additional cessions on Long Island, and Oct. 16. Vlissengen, now Flushing, was granted to a company of Anabaptist refugees from Massachusetts.

Rensselaerswyk, the only portion of the province which had escaped the ravages of this war, had received, two or

XIII.

three years before, an accession of settlers, among them CHAPTER
John Megalapolensis, a "pious and well-learned minis-
ter," to whom we are indebted for the earliest extant ac- 1642.
count of the Mohawks. Under the guns of the Fort
Aurania, but within the jurisdiction of the patroon, a
little village had sprung up near the bend of the river,
and hence familiarly known among the inhabitants as
the Fuyk, or Beversfuyk, but officially as Beverswyk,
the present Albany. Here a church had been built, and
here resided Van Cuyler, the president-commissary; also
Van der Donck, graduate of the University of Leyden,
shout-fiscal of the colony, and author of a Description.
of New Netherland.

Very jealous of his feudal jurisdiction, aspiring, in fact, to a substantial independence, the patroon would grant no lands unless the settlers would agree to renounce their right of appeal to the authorities at New Amsterdam. He was equally jealous of his monopoly of importation; but Van der Donck, unwilling to be esteemed "the worst man in the colony," especially "as his term of office was short," was rather backward in enforcing the severe laws against irregular trade. This lukewarmness produced a violent quarrel between him and the zealous Van Cuyler. Van der Donck was even accused of secretly fomenting among the inhabitants a spirit of discontent against these regulations, represented "as an attempt to steal the bread out of their mouths" -a discontent which showed itself not only in a protest against Van Cuyler, signed "in a circle," but even in violent threats against that faithful officer's life.

In the midst of these contentions, Van Cuyler was informed that a party of Mohawk warriors, returning successful from an inroad into Canada, had brought with them several French prisoners. France and Holland were

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