etween the two broad rivers won his heart from the first, and
after every new adventure he returned to it, until, in 1747, he was
summoned to London, to enter Parliament and to be made Admiral of the
Red Squadron. The affection for the town seems to have been reciprocal,
for two years after his introduction to New York, the Common Council of
the city voted to him the "freedom of the city." Then, when he was
twenty-eight years old he married Susanna DeLancey, whose father,
Etienne DeLancey, was a Huguenot refugee, who, settling here, soon
changed the Etienne to Stephen, and married a daughter of one of the
Dutch Van Cortlandts. At first the young Warrens lived downtown, but in
later years, when wealth came as the result of treasure-seeking
adventure on the high seas, Peter bought lands in Greenwich Village, and
eventually there erected a great mansion.

Throughout the 1730's he was busy, but his opportunity did not come
until the end of that decade. In 1739 trouble broke out between Great
Britain and Spain. Five years later Captain Warren was fabulously rich.
Early in 1744 he had been made commodore of a sixteen-ship squadron in
the Caribbean. Before summer of that year he had captured twenty-four
French and Spanish merchant ships, had brought them to New York, turned
them over to his father-in-law's firm, "Messieurs Stephen De Lancey and
Company," and had pocketed the proceeds of the sale. His "French and
Spanish swag," is the way Thomas A. Janvier expressed it. Of the house
in Greenwich Village on land that is bounded by the present Charles,
Perry, Bleecker, and Tenth Streets, Janvier wrote: "The house stood
about three hundred yards back from the river, on ground which fell away
in a gentle slope towards the waterside. The main entrance was from the
east; and at the rear--on the level of the drawing room and a dozen feet
or so above the sloping hillside--was a broad veranda commanding the
view westward to the Jersey Highlands and southward down the bay to the
Staten Island Hills." After Sir Peter Warren went away the Manse became
the home of Abraham Van Nest, and stood there more than a century. Not
until 1865 did it entirely disappear.

In 1745 Warren played a part in the Siege of Louisbourg that won him
promotion to the rank of Rear Admiral of the Blue, and his knighthood.
New York, for his share in the exploit, voted him some extra land. In
August, 1747, he was in command of the "Devonshire" at the naval battle
of