rman explorers came
to Venezuela also with a printing-press and with fifty miners to explore
the mountains. A number of German craftsmen accompanied the first
English settlers who came with Captain John Smith to Virginia. Soon
after Henry Hudson had discovered the river which bears his name,
Christiansen, a German, became the explorer of that stream. He also
built the first homes on Manhattan Island, 1613, and laid the
foundations of New Amsterdam and Fort Nassau, the present cities of New
York and Albany. Peter Minuit (Minnewit), the first Director-General of
New Netherland, was also a German, born in Wesel, on the lower Rhine.
He arrived in New Amsterdam on May 4, 1626, and one of his first acts
was the purchase of Manhattan Island, 22,000 acres, from the Indians
for trinkets valued at $24. He remained at his post till 1631, when he,
soon after, became the founder and first director of New Sweden, at the
mouth of the Delaware River. He lost his life in the West Indies during
a hurricane. His successor in New Sweden was another German, Printz von
Buchau, during whose regime, from 1643 to 1654, the colony became very
successful and thereby aroused the jealousy of the Dutch, who, while
Buchau was on a trip to Europe, attacked the colony and annexed it to
New Netherland. When New Netherland, in 1664, fell a prey to the
English, the colony had among its citizens numerous Germans, most of
them Lutherans. A native of Hamburg, Nicholaus de Meyer, became
burgomaster of New York in 1676. Another German, Augustin Herrman, made
the first reliable maps of Maryland and Virginia. J. Lederer, a young
German scholar, who came to Jamestown in 1668, was the first to explore
Virginia and part of South Carolina. Lederer's itinerary, written in
Latin, was translated by Governor Talbot of Maryland into English and
published 1672 in London; etc. However, it was at Germantown, at
present a suburb of Philadelphia, that Germans broke ground for the
first permanent German settlement in North America. A group of
Mennonites, 33 persons, landed October 6, 1683. They were received by
William Penn and Franz Daniel Pastorius, a young lawyer from Frankfort
on the Main. In Germantown Gerhard Henkel preached before 1726, and St.
Michael's Church was begun 1730 and dedicated by the Swede J. Dylander
in 1737. Pastorius had landed in America with several families on
August 20 of the same year in advance of the Mennonite emigrants, in
order to prepare for the