No towns or villages had been planted, and of the few settlers introduced by the company, the greater part had returned, leaving a few isolated traders in the solitary forts -which served only as a rendezvous for lazy Indians. Had the Dutch filled the land with an energetic and determined race, seeking to build houses and churches and to found commonwealths, as the English were doing, they might have stemmed the tide of New England encroachment, which, a few years later, washed against the very shores of Manhattan Island. During the next j'car, 1639, there were considerable accessions to the number of actual settlers in New Amsterdam, but up to that time the history of New Netherland was merely the day journal of a trading company.

In 1640 the advance guard of New England

1 Trumbull's Conn., 13.

2 Trumbull, 14.

3 1 O'Callaghan, 177.

WHITE

pionoers had pushed westward to Byram River, and soon oft^anized a cluirch and a township, and devotinsf tlicnisclves heartily to their agricultural and domestic duties, created happy homes, and laughed at Dutch claims not hacked up by actual possession. The ])ossibility of annoyance, both by land and sea, to the unguarded towns along the Sound, and the dread, on the part of the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven, of greater quarrels than they could singly manage, brought about the formation of the New England Confederacy in 1G43, said by John (Juincy Adams to have been " the model and prototype of the North American Confederacy of 1774." At the first meeting of the Commissioners of the United Colonists, in September, 1()43, oneof the most urgent items of business was to answer a letter from Governor Kieft desiring an explicit declaration of the policy to be pursued in relation to the Dutch claims in Connecticut.