Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 258 pages of information about Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam.

Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 258 pages of information about Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam.

The good old chief took the English captain ashore and led him into his palace.  It was a very humble edifice, constructed of bark so carefully overlapped as effectually to exclude both wind and rain.  It was from thirty to forty feet long and eighteen feet wide.  There was a door at each end, and ample light was admitted by an opening extending along the whole length, through which the smoke of the fires could escape.  The interior was finished with great care, and very smoothly.  Under certain states of the atmosphere and of the wind the smoke freely ascended, causing no embarrassment to those within.  The ground floor was neatly covered with mats, except in the centre where the fire was built.  The whole interior as Sir Hudson entered it, on a serene autumnal day, presented a very cheerful aspect.  One might easily be pardoned for imagining, in that hour, that the life of the American savage, free from care, was apparently far more desirable than that of the toil-worn European.

Sir Henry, with the few who accompanied him, was received with great hospitality.  Some Indians were immediately sent into the forest for a dinner.  They soon returned with some pigeons which they had shot with their arrows.  A nice fat puppy was also killed, skinned with a clam-shell, and roasted in the highest style of barbaric culinary art.  Thick mats were provided as seats for the guests at this royal festival.  Hudson was urged to remain all night.  He was evidently a man of very cautious, if not suspicious temperament.  He could not, or did not conceal, from the Indians his fears that they were meditating treachery.  These artless men, to convince him that he had nothing to apprehend, actually broke their bows and arrows, and threw them into the fire.  But nothing could induce Hudson to remain on shore through the night.  He describes the land here as very fertile, bearing abundantly, corn, pumpkins, grapes, plums, and various other kinds of small fruits.

Availing himself of a fair wind, he again spread his sails, and on the 1st of October, cast anchor at the mouth of Haverstraw Bay, in the vicinity of Stony Point.  He had scarcely furled his sails, when a large number of natives came paddling out from the shore in their little birch canoes.  They were entirely unarmed, bringing apparently in a most friendly manner, furs, fish and vegetables for sale.  Soon quite a little fleet of these buoyant canoes were gliding over the water.  One Indian, paddling beneath the cabin windows, and seeing hanging out certain articles pilfered a pillow and a jacket.  As he was making off with his treasures the mate caught sight of him, and seizing his gun mercilessly shot him dead.  A severe punishment for so trivial a crime in an untutored savage.

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Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.