The extraordinary success of the East India Company at that time and the enormous dividends it declared drew the general attention to the eastern, and not to the western world. A single vessel in 1610, the year after the return of the Half Moon, made a successful trading voyage to the "River of the Mountains," returning to Holland with a valuable cargo of peltries. Two Dutch navigators, Hendrick Christiaensen, or Corstiaensen, and Adrian Block, chartering a vessel commanded by Captain Ryser, next made a voyage to the new region. In the early part of 1613, Hendrick Corstiaensen, in the "Fortune," and Block, in the

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

Tiger, sailed again to the Manhattans, and explored the adjacent coasts and waters. Other vessels also visited the hay and river, and all returned with profitable cargoes of furs. No trouble was experienced with the natives, who were ready and willing to exchange their skins for the novel and attractive goods of Europe.

Block's vessel, the "Tiger," was accidentally burned in the Bay of New York in the autumn of 1613, and he therefore built another during the succeeding winter,^-- the first ever constructed by white men in the waters of New York. It was a small yacht of only sixteen to.as burden (English measure), which, with strange appropriateness, he named " the Onnist " -- the Restless. In this yacht, in the summer of 1614, Block sailed through Hellgate and explored Long Island Sound and the adjacent coast as far east as Cape Cod, discovering the Housatonic, and Connecticut rivers Narraganset Bay, and the island that still bears his name. He then first ascertained that Long Island was an island. The Connecticut river he ascended to a little above the present city of Hartford. He was the first European who sailed through the Sound, and the first white man who beheld the southern and eastern shores of Westchester County.