In 1648 a pamphlet was published in England, with the title, " A Description of New Albion," by one Beauchamp Plantagenet, Esq., which assumed to narrate that in the year 1613 the English Captain Samuel Argall, returning from Acadia to Virginia, "landed at Manhattan 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 this Dutch population and this Dutch ruler were forced to submit to the tremendous power of Great Britain. The whole story is a sheer fabrication, and so crude as to be almost vulgar. Yet such is the continuing strength of old pseudo-historical statement that we still find in compendious historical reference works of generally authentic character mention of Argall's apocryphal feat of arms -- the " first conquest of New Netherland by the English," -- usually accompanied, albeit, by the discreet "(?)" conscientiously employed by such faithful compilers in cases of incertitude. In 1619 occurred the first known visit of an English vessel to the waters of Westchester County and Manhattan Island, which merits passing notice here for an interesting incident attaching to it. Captain Thomas Dermer, sent by Sir Ferdinand Gorges, of the Plymouth Company, to the Island of Monhegan on the coast of Maine, partly to procure a cargo of fish and partly to return the unfortunate Indian slave Squanto to his home, came sailing through Long Island Sound in his-

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ship's pinnace on a trip to Virginia which he had decided to make Martha's after dispatching his laden vessel back to England.theLeaving coast led me till "as Yh.evard, he shaped his voyage he narrates, coast began to fall away I came to the most westerly part where the my way 1 discovIn Sound]. the to southerly [the eastern entrance ered land about thirty leagues in length [Long Island], heretofore taken for main where I feared 1 had been embayed, but by the help of an Indian 1 got to sea again, through many crooked and straight passages.