lemen, as handy with
musket and cutlass as with helm and sheet, fond of easy, exciting
profits, and reaping where they had not sown. They would start legally
enough, for they began as privateersmen under legal letters of marque
in the wars. But the step was a short one to a traffic still more
profitable; and for a hundred years Jersey customs officers are said to
have issued documents which were ostensibly letters of marque but which
really abetted a piratical cruise. Piracy was, however, in those days
a semi-legitimate offense, winked at by the authorities all through the
colonial period; and respectable people and governors and officials of
New York and North Carolina, it is said, secretly furnished funds for
such expeditions and were interested in the profits.

Chapter XII. Little Delaware

Delaware was the first colony to be established on the river that bears
this name. It went through half a century of experiences under the Dutch
and Swedes from 1609 to 1664, and then eighteen years under the English
rule of the Duke of York, from whom it passed into the hands of William
Penn, the Quaker. The Dutch got into it by an accident and were regarded
by the English as interlopers. And the Swedes who followed had no better
title.

The whole North Atlantic seaboard was claimed by England by virtue of
the discoveries of the Cabots, father and son; but nearly a hundred
years elapsed before England took advantage of this claim by starting
the Virginia colony near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607. And
nearly a quarter of a century more elapsed before Englishmen settled
on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Those were the two points most
accessible to ships and most favorable for settlement. The middle
ground of the Delaware and Hudson regions was not so easily entered and
remained unoccupied. The mouth of the Delaware was full of shoals and
was always difficult to navigate. The natural harbor at the mouth of the
Hudson was excellent, but the entrance to it was not at first apparent.

Into these two regions, however, the Dutch chanced just after the
English had effected the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia. The Dutch
had employed an Englishman named Henry Hudson and sent him in 1609 in a
small ship called the Half Moon to find a passage to China and India by
way of the Arctic Ocean. Turned back by the ice in the Arctic, he sailed
down the coast of North America, and began exploring the middle ground
from the Virg