Fur Trade.

When in 1609 Henry Hudson sailed his eighty-ton, three-masted carrack, The Half Moon, into New York Bay and up the river that would bear his name, he and the other eighteen or twenty men with him were looking for the Northwest Passage, a mythical water route through North America to the East Indies. Instead he and his men found a navigable river on whose banks lived native peoples "who had an abundance of provisions, skins, and furs, of martens and foxes." Thus the fur trade began early. Until 1621 when the Dutch West India Company was incorporated, the fur trade allowed individuals such as the West Indian mulatto Juan Rodrigues to come to the area and work for one firm, leave it and stay with the Indians, and sign on with another company that would pay him better once the winter...