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."

This visit of Dermer to " certain Hollanders " was the first visit of an Englishman to Manhattan Island, and he was the first man of that race who trod its soil. Hudson never landed on the island, and they who first did so, and those whom Dermer found there, were Dutchmen. This voyage, however, was the basis of one of the most famous myths of American and New York history. Twenty-nine years after Dermer's visit, in the year 1648, there appeared in England a ])amplilet, under the nom de plume of " Beauchamp Plantagenet, Esq.," entitled, " A Description of the Province of New Albion," in which it is stated, that Capt. Samuel Argall, on his return to Virginia from Acadia in 1613, "landed at Manhatas Isle, in Hudson's river, where they found four houses built, and a pretended Dutch Governor under the West India Company of Amsterdam," and that he (Argall) forced the Dutch to submit themselves to the King of England and to the government of Virginia.^