If he wanted any help, he had to pay "exorbitant prices for their services," and yet he says he found some exceptions among them. After due reflection, he came to the following conclusion respecting "the origin of the inhabitants of Albany and its neighbourhood. Whilst the Dutch possessed this country, and intended to people it, the government took up a pack of vagabonds, of which they intended to clear the country, and sent them, along with a number of other settlers, to this province. The vagabonds were sent far from the other colonists, upon the borders toward the Indians and other enemies ; and a few honest families were persuaded to go with them, in order to keep them in bounds. I cannot in any other way account for the difference between the inhabitants of Albany and the other descendants of so respectable a nation as the Dutch."

Albany was settled by the Dutch, and is the oldest of the permanent

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European settlements in the United States. Hudson passed its site in the Half-Moon, in the early autumns of 1609 ; and the next year Dutch navigators built trading-houses there, to traffic for furs with the Indians. In 1614 they erected a stockade fort on an island near. It was swept away by a spring freshet in 1617. Another was built on the main : it was abandoned in 1623, and a stronger one erected in what is now Broadway, below State Street. This was furnished witli eight cannon loaded with stones, and was named Fort Orange, in honour of the then Stadtholder of Holland. Down to the period of the intercolonial wars, the settlement and the city were known as Port Orange by the French in Canada. Families settled there in 1630, and for awhile the place was called Beverwyck.