All of this country was included in the patent granted the Virginia Company, and it was for the mouth of the Hudson that the Pilgrims had sailed in the Mayflower.  The charge has since been made that their captain had been bribed by the thrifty Dutch to land them somewhere else, and at any cost, to keep them away from the neighborhood of the Dutch trading-posts.  From whatever cause, this was certainly done, and many years were to elapse before there came another English invasion.

In 1626, Peter Minuit, director for the Dutch West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians, giving for it trinkets and merchandise to the value of $24, and founding New Amsterdam as the central trading depot.  From the first, the settlement was a cosmopolitan one, just as it is to-day, and in 1643, it was said that eighteen languages were spoken there.

The most notable figure in this prosperous and growing colony was that of Peter Stuyvesant, an altogether picturesque and gallant personality.  Born in Holland in 1602, he had entered the army at an early age, and, as governor of Curacao, lost a leg in battle.  In 1646, he was appointed director-general of New Netherlands, and reached New Amsterdam in the spring of the following year.  So much powder was burned in firing salutes to welcome him that there was scarcely any left.  His speech of greeting was brief and to the point.

“I shall govern you,” he said, “as a father his children, for the advantage of the chartered West India Company, and these burghers, and this land.”

And he proceeded to do it, having in mind the old adage that to spare the rod is to spoil the child.  There was never any doubt in Stuyvesant’s mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular government seemed to him the merest idiocy.  “A valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor”—­the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and silver-banded wooden leg, he ruled the colony for twenty years with a rod of iron, fortifying it, enlarging it, settling its boundaries, keeping the Indians over-awed, the veriest dictator this continent ever saw, until, one August day in 1664, an English fleet sailed up the bay and summoned the city to surrender.

Stuyvesant set his men to work repairing the fortifications, and was for holding out, but the town was really defenseless against the frigates, which had only to sail up the river and bombard it from either side; his people were disaffected and to some extent not sorry to be delivered from his rule; the terms offered by the English were favorable, and though Stuyvesant swore he never would surrender, a white flag was finally run up over the ramparts of Fort Amsterdam.  The city was at once renamed New York, in honor of the Duke of York, to whom it had been granted; and the hard-headed old governor spent the remaining years of his life very comfortably on his great farm, the Bouwerie, just outside the city limits.