These Walloons, stanch Huguenots in religious profession, finding life intolerable in their native land, removed, like the sturdy English dissenters, to Holland, and there gladly embraced opportunity to obtain permanent shelter from persecution, as well as homes for themselves and their families, in the new countries of America. They were not Hollanders, and had nothing in common with the Dutch except similarity of religion; they did not even speak the Dutch language, but a French dialect. The ship which bore them, the " Xew Xetherland," was a fine vessel for those days, of 266 tons burden. It came by way of the Canaries and the West Indies, and was under the protecting escort of an armed yacht, the "Mackerel." The whole expedition was commanded by Captain Cornelius Jacobsen May, in whose honor Cape May, the northern promontory at the entrance to Delaware Bay, was named. He was constituted the governor of the colony, with headquarters in Delaware Bay. He at once divided the settlers into a number of small parties. Some were left on Manhattan Island, and others were dispatched to Long Island (where the familial- local name of the Wallabout still preserves the memory of the Walloons), to Staten Island, to Connecticut, to the vicinity of Albany, and to the Delaware or South I^ver-- although the families locating on the Delaware returned to the northern settlements after a brief sojourn. It does not appear that any of these first colonists were placed in Westchester County, or even within the northern limits of Manhattan Island. Arriving in May, with seeds and agricultural implements, they were able to raise and garner a year's crop, and consequently suffered none of the hardships which made the lot of the Puritans during their first winter at Plymouth so bitter. Although distributed into little bands, which might have been easily exterminated byorganized attack, they sustained, moreover, peaceful relations with the Indians.