[1] From Wassenaer’s “Description of the first settlement of New Netherland.”  Printed in Hart’s “American History Told by Contemporaries.”  Wassenaer was a Dutchman, and wrote contemporaneously with the events he describes.  After Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River, Dutch ships were sent over to Manhattan Island to establish an agency for the collection of furs.  Rude cabins were pitched and lived in at the southern end of the island but these did not constitute a permanent settlement; they were a mere trading-post.  The trade became so profitable, however, that something more permanent was desired, and in 1623 the West India Company dispatched ships with thirty families as the nucleus of a colony to be established near the present site of Albany.  Not until two years later was it decided that the headquarters of the colony should be on Manhattan Island.  Two ships were then sent out to establish there a permanent and more extensive settlement.

THE SWEDES AND DUTCH IN NEW JERSEY AND DELAWARE

(1627)

BY ISRAEL ACRELIUS[1]

After that the magnanimous Genoese Christopher Columbus, had, at the expense of Ferdinand, King of Spain, in the year 1492, discovered the Western hemisphere, and the illustrious Florentine, Americus Vespucius, sent out by King Emanuel of Portugal, in the year 1502, to make a further exploration of its coasts, had had the good fortune to give the country his name, the European powers have, from time to time, sought to promote their several interests there.  Our Swedes and Goths were the less backward in such expeditions, as they had always been the first therein.  They had already, in the year 996 after the birth of Christ, visited America, had named it Vinland the Good, and also Skraellings Land, and had called its inhabitants “the Skraellings of Vinland.”  It is therefore evident that the Northmen had visited some part of North America before the Spaniards and Portuguese went to South America....

From that time until 1623, when the West India Company obtained its charter, their trade with the Indians was conducted almost entirely on shipboard, and they made no attempts to build any house or fortress until 1629.  Now, whether that was done with or without the permission of England, the town of New Amsterdam was built and fortified, as also the place Aurania, Orange, now called Albany, having since had three general-governors, one after the other.  But that was not yet enough.  They wished to extend their power to the river Delaware also, and erected on its shores two or three small forts, which were, however, soon after destroyed by the natives of the country.