At length the fierce Mohawks, bent on procuring tribute from the weaker tribes westward of the Hudson, came sweeping down like a gale from the north, driving great numbers of fugitives upon the Hackcnsacks at Hobock. !N'ow was the opportunity for the Dutch. A strong body of them, with some Mohawks, crossed the Hudson at midnight, in February, 1643, fell upon the unsuspecting Indians, and before morning murdered almost one hundred men, women, and children. Many were driven from the cliffs of Castle Point, and perished in the freezing

flood. At sunrise the murderers returned to New Amsterdam, with prisoners and the heads of several Indians.

A large proportion of the land at Hoboken is owned by the Stevens family, who have been identified with steam navigation from its earliest triumphs. The head of the family laid out a village on Hoboken Point, in 1804. It has become a considerable city. Members of the same family had large manufacturing establishments there ; and for several years before the Civil War had been constructing, upon a novel plan, a huge floating battery for harbour defences, for the government of the United States, and more than a million of dollars had already been spent in its construction, when the war broke out. It had been utterly shut in from the public eye, until a very short time before that event. Our space will allow nothing more than an outline description of it. It is a vessel

452 THE HUDSON.

seven hundred feet long (length of the Great Eastern), covered with plates of iron so as to be absolutely bomb and round shot proof. It is to be moved by steam engines of sufficient power to give it a momentum that will cause it to cut a man-of-war in two, when it strikes it at the waists.