This was five years after through the same Sound from the Manhattans, and ten years after singuHudson's discovery of the Great River of the Mountains. Very lar it is that fights with the Indians, both on the Hudson and on the Sound, and at 'points nearly opposite each other, were the beginning of civilization in Westchester County, and that the first was with the Dutch and the second with the English, the two races of whites which, in succession, ruled that county and the Province and State of New York."1 De Lancey's Hist, of the Manors (Scliarf, i.. 10).

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Notwithstanding the failure of the old New Netherland Company organized by Block, Christiansen, and their associates, to get its charter of monopoly renewed in 1618, that organization did not pass out of existence. To the New Netherland Company, moreover, belongs the honorable distinction of having made the first tangible proposal for the actual settlement of the country -- a proposal quite explicit and manifestly sincere. On February 12, 1(520, its directors addressed to Maurice, Prince of Orange, stadtholder or chief executive of the Netherlands, a petition reciting that " there is residing at Leyden a certain English preacher, versed in the Dutch language, who is well inclined to proceed thither [to New Netherland] to live, assuring the petitioners that he has the means of inducing over four hundred families to accompany him thither, both out of this country and England, provided they would be guarded and preserved from all violence on the part of other potentates, by the authority and under the protection of your Princely Excellency and the High and Mighty Lords States-General, in the propagation of the true, pure Christian religion, in the instruction of the Indians in that country in true doctrine, and in converting them to the Christian faith, and thus to the mercy of the Lord, to the greater glory of this country's government, to plant there a new commonwealth, all under the order and command of your Princely Excellency and the High and Mighty Lords States-General.