aders, though no regular
settlement was formed for some years.

In 1619 Thomas Dermer visited the Hudson and brought news to England
of the operations of the Dutch and the value of the fur trade.
Thereupon Captain Samuel Argall, with many English planters, prepared
to make a settlement on the Hudson, and when the Dutch government, in
June, 1621, chartered the Dutch West India Company, the English court,
on Argall's complaint, protested against Dutch intrusion within what
was considered the limits of Virginia. The States-General at first
evaded a reply, but finally declared that they had never authorized
any settlement on the Hudson.[16] The charter,[17] in fact, gave the
company only an exclusive right to trade for twenty-four years on the
coasts of Africa and America.

Nevertheless, the company proceeded to send over, in 1622, a number of
French Walloons, who constituted the first Dutch colony in America.
One party, under the command of Captain Cornelius Jacobson May, the
first Dutch governor, sailed to the South, or Delaware River, where,
four miles below the present Philadelphia, they erected a fort called
Nassau; and another party under Adrian Joris went up the Hudson, and
on the site of Albany built Fort Orange. Peter Minuit succeeded May in
1626, and bought from the Indians the whole of Manhattan Island, and
organized a government with an advisory council.

The population of New Netherland was only two hundred, and though
trade was brisk there was little agriculture. The company met this
difficulty by obtaining a new charter and seeking to promote
emigration by dividing up the country among some great patroons:
Samuel Godyn, Killiaen van Renssalaer, Michael Pauw, David Pieterson
de Vries, and other rich men. In 1631 De Vries settled Swaanendael, on
the South River, as the Dutch called the Delaware; but in a few months
the Indians attacked the place and massacred the settlers.[18] Soon
the patroons became rivals of the West India Company in the fur trade,
and in 1632 Minuit, who favored them, was recalled and Wouter van
Twiller was made governor. His accession marks the first real clash
between the rival claims of the Dutch and English.[19]

In 1632 Lord Baltimore obtained a patent for Maryland which included
all the south side of Delaware Bay and river; and a month later Sir
Edmund Plowden obtained a grant from the English king for "Long Isle
and also forty leagues square of the adjoining continent," including