The Dutch West India Company in trading under their charter to the Guinea coast, interfered with the business of the Eoyal African Company of which he was the Governor. He complained of the Dutch on this account before the English Parliament, and, of his own authority as Lord High Admiral, sent a fleet to harass them on the coast of Africa. Therefore it was as a matter of revenge, as well as hoped for profit, thathe obtained from Charles the 2d on the 12th of March, 1664, O. S.,' only a year and eleven months after the date of the Connecticut Colony's Patent, a gift by patent of the whole of New Netherland, based on the sailing along its coast by the Cabots, in the reign of Henry VII., without proof of their having seen it, and though no actual possession of it was ever taken by them or anybody else, prior to the discovery, and actual settlement, by the Dutch, a hundred years and a little more afterwards. There was actual peace between the Dutch and English nations at the date of the patent, and at the time of the seizure by the latter, though war broke out soon afterward ; a fact which deepened the flagrancy of one of the most striking instances of the rapacity and wickedness of a strong people dealing with a weaker one, in all history.

Borrowing four vessels of the English navy, of which he was Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York sent an expedition under the command of Colonel Richard Nicolls, with Sir Robert Carr, George Cartwright and Samuel Mavericke as co-commissioners with Matliias Nicolls, subsequently Secretary for New York, and a few other English officers, in command of .about -150 men, to visit the Plantations in New England, and to " reduce " the Dutch Province of New Netherland " to an entire obedience to our government" as their instructions from the King expressed it.' These instructions, and the special communications from Charles 2d to Massachusetts and Connecticut in relation to the commission and its powers were dated the 23d of April, 1664, as well as his "Private Instructions" which were only to be considered by the commissioners between