ould have made them marry, give up trade and the
wilderness, and settle down to work.

[1] Winsor's "Cartier to Frontenac."

CHAPTER IV.

Henry Hudson's Discovery--Block Winters on Manhattan Island--The Dutch
Take Possession--The Iroquois Friendly--Immigration of the Walloons--
Charter of Privileges and Exemptions--Patroons--Manufactures Forbidden
--Slave Labor Introduced--New Sweden--New Netherlanders Want a Voice
in the Government.

When Henry Hudson managed, notwithstanding his detention in England by
King James, to send an account of his discoveries to Holland, the Dutch
were swift to avail themselves of the opportunities thus offered to
extend their trade to North America. The traders who first sought
Manhattan Island and Hudson's River, or the "Mauritius" as the Dutch
called the North River, were not settlers. Among them was the daring
navigator, Adrian Block, from whom Block Island is named, who gathered a
cargo of skins and was about to depart, late in the year 1613, when
vessel and cargo were consumed by fire. Block and his crew built
log-cabins on the lower part of Manhattan Island, and spent the winter
constructing a new ship, which they called the "Onrust" or "unrest"--an
incident and a name significant now in view of the commercial
pre-eminence and activity of the metropolis founded where those men built
the first habitations occupied by Europeans. Block sailed in the spring
of 1614 on a voyage of further discovery in his American built ship. He
passed through the East River and Long Island Sound and ascertained that
the long strip of land on the south was an island. He saw and named Block
Island, and entered Narragansett Bay and the harbor of Boston. His report
led the States-General to grant a charter for four years from October 11,
1614, to a company formed to trade in the region which Block had
explored, the territory "lying between Virginia and New France," being
called the New Netherland. When the charter expired, the States-General
refused to grant a renewal, it being designed to place New Netherland
under the jurisdiction of the Dutch West India Company as soon as that
company should have received the charter for which application had been
made. This charter, granted June 3, 1620, conferred on the Dutch West
India Company almost sovereign powers over the Atlantic coast of America,
so far as it was unoccupied by other nations, and the western coast of
Africa. The Company was organiz