stantiate and justify our
rights and claims to the property of this province, and
insinuate that through the backwardness of their High
Mightinesses to grant such a patent, you apparently intended
to place the people here on slippery ice, giving them lands
to which your honors had no right whatever."

Governor Stuyvesant sent with this remonstrance a private letter to
the home government, in which he urged that the boundary question
should be settled by the national authorities of the two countries.
"It is important," he said,

"that the States-General should send letters to the English
villages on Long Island, commanding them to return to their
allegiance. And that the objections of Connecticut may be
met, the original charter of the West India Company should
be solemnly confirmed by a public act of their High
Mightinesses, under their great seal, which an Englishman
commonly dotes upon like an idol."

Scarcely were these documents dispatched when new and still more
alarming outbreaks occurred. Two Englishmen, Anthony Waters of
Hempstead, and John Coe of Middlebury, with an armed force of nearly
one hundred men, visited most of what were called the English
villages, convoked the people, told them that their country belonged
to the king of England, and that they must no longer pay taxes to the
Dutch. They removed the magistrates and appointed their own partisans
in their stead. They then visited the Dutch towns and threatened them
with the severest vengeance if they did not renounce all allegiance to
the Dutch authorities, and take the oath of fealty to the king of
England.

Only four weeks after this, another party of twenty Englishmen from
Gravesend, Flushing and Jamaica, secretly entered Raritan river, in a
sloop, and sailing up the river several miles, assembled the chiefs of
some of the neighboring tribes, and endeavored to purchase of them a
large extent of territory in that region. They knew perfectly well not
only that they were within the bounds which had been the undisputed
possession of New Netherland for nearly half a century, but that the
Dutch had also purchased of the Indians all their title to these
lands.

Stuyvesant, being informed of this procedure, promptly sent Ensign
Crygier, with an armed force, in a swift sailing yacht, to find the
English and thwart their measures. At the same time he sent Hans, a
friendly Indian, in whom he cou