tlers, and offering to find them corn and furnish eighty beaver
skins a year. Winthrop declined even to send an exploring party. In
the midsummer of 1633, Winslow went to Boston to propose a joint
occupation of the new territory by Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay; but
the latter still refused, doubting the profit and the safety of the
venture.

Three months later Plymouth undertook the work alone. A small vessel,
under command of William Holmes, was sent around by sea to the mouth
of the Connecticut River, with the frame of a trading house and
workmen to put it up. When Holmes had sailed up the river as far as
the place where Hartford was afterward built, he found the Dutch
already in possession. For ten years they had been talking of erecting
a fort on the Varsche River; but the ominous and repeated appearance
of New Englanders in the territory had roused them to action at last.

John Van Corlear, with a few men, had been commissioned by Governor
Van Twiller, and had put up a rude earthwork, with two guns, within
the present jurisdiction of Hartford. His summons to Holmes to stop
under penalty of being fired into met with no more respect than was
shown by the commandant of Rensselaerswyck to his challengers,
according to the veracious Knickerbocker. Holmes declared that he had
been sent up the river, and was going up the river, and furthermore he
went up the river. His little vessel passed on to the present site of
Windsor. Here the crew disembarked, put up and garrisoned their
trading house, and then returned home. Plymouth had at least planted
the flag far within the coveted and disputed territory.

In December of the following year a Dutch force of seventy men from
New Amsterdam appeared before the trading house to drive out the
intruders. He must be strong who drives a Yankee away from a
profitable trade; and the attitude of the little garrison was so
determined that the Dutchmen, after a few hostile demonstrations,
decided that the nut was too hard to crack, and withdrew. For about
twenty years thereafter the Dutch held post at Hartford, isolated from
Dutch support by a continually deepening mass of New Englanders, who
refrained from hostilities, and waited until the apple was ripe enough
to drop.

With respect to the claims of the Indians, the attitudes of the two
parties to the struggle were directly opposite. The Dutch came on the
strength of purchase from the Pequots, the conquerors and lords
paramount of