Near unto this we found a most dangerous cataract amongst small, rocky islands, occasioned

by two unequal tides, the one ebbing and flowing two hours before the other." This was Hellgate, and the place were the Indians " let fly" at them was in the neighborhood of Throg's Point. Such was the voyage of the first Englishman who ever sailed through Long Island Sound, and the first who ever beheld the southern and eastern shores of Westchester County. This was five years after the Dutch skipper Block had sailed through the same Sound from the Manhattans, and ten years after Hudson's discovery of " the Great River of the Mountains." Very singular it is, that fights with the Indians, both, on the Hudson, and on the Sound, and at points nearly opposite each other, were the beginning of civilization in Westchester County ; and that the first was with the Dutch and the second with the English, the two races of whites, which, in succession, ruled that county, and the Province and State of New York.'

Dermer spent the succeeding winter (1619-20) in Virginia, went back to New England the next summer, again visited Plymouth in June, and described its advantages for a town settlement in his letter of the 30th of that month, went again to Virginia, and there died.

On this return voyage from Virginia, Dermer, in the words of the " Brief Relation " of the Plymouth Company's proceedings from 1607 to 1622, "met with certain Hollanders, who had a trade in Hudson's river some years before that time, with whom he had a conference about the state of that coast, and their proceedings with those people, whose answer gave him good content."