=First Description of the Hudson.=—­The official record of the voyage was kept by Robert Juet, mate of the “Half Moon,” and his journal abounds with graphic and pleasing incidents as to the people and their customs.  At the Narrows the Indians visited the vessel, “clothed in mantles of feathers and robes of fur, the women clothed in hemp; red copper tobacco pipes, and other things of copper, they did wear about their necks.”  At Yonkers they came on board in great numbers.  Two were detained and dressed in red coats, but they sprang overboard and swam away.  At Catskill they found “a very loving people, and very old men.  They brought to the ship Indian corn, pumpkins and tobaccos.”  Near Schodack the “Master’s mate went on land with an old savage, governor of the country, who carried him to his house and made him good cheere.”  “I sailed to the shore,” he writes, “in one of their canoes, with an old man, who was chief of a tribe, consisting of forty men and seventeen women.  These I saw there in a house well constructed of oak bark, and circular in shape, so that it has the appearance of being built with an arched roof.  It contained a large quantity of corn and beans of last year’s growth, and there lay near the house, for the purpose of drying, enough to load three ships, besides what was growing in the fields.  On our coming to the house two mats were spread out to sit upon, and some food was immediately served in well-made wooden bowls.”

“Two men were also dispatched at once, with bows and arrows in quest of game, who soon brought in a pair of pigeons, which they had shot.  They likewise killed a fat dog, (probably a black bear), and skinned it in great haste, with shells which they had got out of the water.”

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    Down whose waterways the wings of poetry and romance like magic
    sails bear the awakened souls of men.

    Richard Burton.

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The well-known hospitality of the Hudson River valley has, therefore, “high antiquity” in this record of the garrulous writer.  At Albany the Indians flocked to the vessel, and Hudson determined to try the chiefs to see “whether they had any treachery in them.”  “So they took them down into the cabin, and gave them so much wine and aqua vitae that they were all merry.  In the end one of them was drunk, and they could not tell how to take it.”  The old chief, who took the aqua vitae, was so grateful when he awoke the next day, that he showed them all the country, and gave them venison.

Passing down through the Highlands the “Half Moon” was becalmed near Stony Point and the “people of the Mountains” came on board and marvelled at the ship and its equipment.  One canoe kept hanging under the stern and an Indian pilfered a pillow and two shirts from the cabin windows.  The mate shot him in the breast and killed him.  A boat was lowered to recover the articles “when one of them in the water seized hold of it to overthrow it, but the cook seized a sword and cut off one of his hands and he was drowned.”  At the head of Manhattan Island the vessel was again attacked.  Arrows were shot and two more Indians were killed, then the attack was renewed and two more were slain.