Inured to abstemiousness by the rigors of his lot and but little disposed to sexual gratification, the Indian yet fell an easy victim, and speedily became an abject slave, to strong drink. It was not the taste rum which enbut the stimulating properties of the white man's thralled him. Hudson relates that when he first offered the intoxicating cup to his Indian visitors while at anchor in New York Bay, they one and all refused it after smelling the liquor and touching their lips to it. But finally one of their number, fearing that offense might be taken at their rejection of it, made bold to swallow it, and experienced great exhilaration of spirits in consequence, which led his companions to follow his example, with like pleasing effects. Robert Juet, the mate of the " Half Moon,'' gravely says in his journal : " Our master and his mate determined to try some of the cheefe men of the country, whether they had any treachery in them. So they took them down into the cabin, and gave them so much wine and aquse vitse that thev were all verv merie)'1 Rum, or rather distilled liquor of every i The name of Manhattan Island is popularly ahaehtanienk. which, in the Delaware Iansupposed to commemorate these joyous inebrie- guage, means ' the island where we all became have writers popular Most intoxicated.'" Heckewelder savs: " They called it Manties

J-0

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

kind, soon came to be valued by the savages above every other article ili.it they obtained from the whites, and it played a very important part both in promoting intercourse and in hastening their destruction. A chief of the Six Nations, in a speech delivered before the commissioners of the Tinted States at Fort Stanwix, in 1788, said: "The avidity of the white people for land and the thirst of the Indians for spirituous liquors were equally insatiable; that the white men had seen and fixed their eyes upon the Indian's good land, and the Indians had seen nothing and fixed their eyes on the white man's keg of rum.