The price paid for the Island was a fair one, for the time, age, and place, for it was nothing but a little wild island on a coast almost unknown, of a continent entirely unknown. It was but one of hundreds and hundreds of small islands lying all along the Western shores of the Atlantic Ocean, with nothing to show it had any value at all except the prior occupation of one end of it as a trading post by the Dutch. And many of those same little islands in as out-ofthe-way places, may be purchased to-day for a price almost as low.

De Laet in his history of the West India Company gives a table of the annual exports and imports from, and into. New Netherland, from 1624 to 1635, from which it appears, that in 1626, the year of the purchase, but two ships came to, and went from. New Amsterdam, and that the value of the imports (supplies and goods) was 20,384 guilders, about 8,500 dollars, and that of the exports (furs and timber) were 45,050 guilders, about 14,000 dollars.*

It was simply as a station to collect furs from the Indians that Manhattan Island then had any value whatever. Such was the beginning of that "Province of New Netherland" in the year 1623, which 262 years later, in 1885, is the State and City of New York, the former with 5,000,000 of inhabitants, the latter with 1,250,000 people. And the island that was

3 Wassenaer, III. Doc. Hist. N. T., 47.