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.^

This story, often and often repeated, is not supported by any official document of the English, Virginia, or Dutch governments yet discovered to this day, and is believed by modern scholars to have been

^ This letter of Dermer reprinted from Purchas with a learned preface, is in I. N. Y. Hist. Soc. CoU. 2d Series, 343. Also in 2GMass. Hist. Coll., p. 63.

2 I. N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 2d Series, 335.

THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE MANORS.

based by " Plantageiiet " on Deimer's account of his voyages, somewhat dressed up. In 1613 the Dutch West India Coni[»any had not only not been incorporated, but it was not I'ornied till 1621. That eminent American historical scholar, the late Hon. Henry C. Murphy of Brooklyn, a great lawyer, a practiced statesman, in the Dutch language profoundly skilled, and who had been minister to Holland, after a thorough investigation of this story of Argyll's visit, placed in a note to his translation of Van dor Donck's "Vertoogh," or "Representation," of New Netherland, published in 1849, the following emphatic opinion, -- " This story is a pure fiction, unsustained by any good authority -- though some writers have heaped up citations on the subject -- and as fully susceptible of disproof as any statement of that character at that early period can be." '