XIII.

CHAPTER The frontier boweries were again assailed by a new confederacy of seven tribes, some of them inhabitants of the 1643. main land and others of Long Island. The colony of Sept. Achter Cul, behind Newark Bay, was completely ruined.

To pre

So were Vredeland and Newtown. It was at this time that Mrs. Hutchinson was slain, with all of her family, except a grand-daughter taken prisoner. The Lady Moody's settlement at Gravesend was also attacked; but she had a guard of forty men, who repulsed the Indians. In this emergency the commonalty had again been Sept. 13. resorted to. A meeting of the inhabitants had been called by the director, and a board of "Eight Men" appointed to aid and advise in the conduct of the war. vent the English settlers from leaving the province, fifty or more were taken into the company's pay, the commonalty having agreed to meet a third of the expense. Underhill, one of the heroes of the Pequod war, whose former residence in Holland had made him familiar with the Dutch language, and who had lately removed to Stamford, was appointed to command the Dutch soldiers. Application was also made at New Haven, through Underhill and Allerton, a New England merchant who had removed from Plymouth to Manhattan, for an auxiliary force of a hundred and fifty men; but the people of that colony had not forgotten their expulsion from the Delaware; they doubted, also, the justice of the quarrel, and, on that ground, refused their aid. The "Eight Men," Det 24. in an appeal to Holland, give an affecting account of the wretched condition of the colony. The inhabitants, driven from their boweries, of which only three remained on the Island of Manhattan, were mostly clustered in straw huts about a ruinous and hardly tenable fort, themselves short of provisions, and their cattle in danger of starving. A palisade, kept up for the next fifty years,

where Wall-street now runs, was presently erected as a CHAPTER protection for New Amsterdam.

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Dec.

Several expeditions against the Indians were mean- 1643. while undertaken. Counselor La Montaigne, with a force of three companies, Dutch burghers under Captain Kuyter, English colonists under Lieutenant Baxter, and Dutch soldiers under Sergeant Cock, crossed to Staten Island. The Indians kept out of the way, but their village was burned, and several hundred bushels of corn were destroyed. The same party proceeded soon after in three yachts against the Indians near Stamford, who had committed great ravages. They landed at Greenwich, and marched all night through the snow, but found no enemy. Having returned in no good humor to Stamford, one of 1614. the Dutchmen got into an altercation, of a Sunday after- Jan. 2. noon, at Underhill's house, with Captain Patrick, the founder of Greenwich, at whose suggestion chiefly the expedition had been undertaken. Patrick resented a charge of treachery by spitting in the Dutchman's face. The Dutchman drew a pistol and shot him dead on the spot. This Patrick, it will be remembered, had accompanied Winthrop in the migration to Massachusetts, and had been employed, along with Underhill, to teach military discipline. "He was made a freeman," Winthrop tells us, "and admitted a member of the church at Watertown; but, being proud and otherwise vicious, he was left of God to a profligate life, which brought him at last to destruction by the hand of one of that people from whom he sought protection after he had fled from the yoke of Christ in the Massachusetts, the strictness of whose discipline he would neither bear in the church nor yet in the country."

The expedition, however, was not wholly unsuccessful. Four of the Stamford people volunteered to hunt up the

CHAPTER Indians, and, under their guidance, some five-and-twenty XIII. of the boldest of the party surprised a small Indian village, 1644. killed several women, and made prisoners of an old man, two women, and some children. The Indian prisoner, to

earn favor, offered to show the way to the forts of the Tappan Indians; and Baxter and Cock, with sixty-five men, were presently sent on an expedition thither. They found the Indian castles strong and well adapted for defense, nine feet high, studded with port-holes, and built of five-inch timbers, bound with heavy beams. But the Indians were gone, and the forts were empty. The invaders marched some forty miles into the country, killed an Indian or two, took prisoners some women and children, destroyed a little corn, set fire to the forts, and returned to New Amsterdam.

Another expedition was directed against a tribe on Long Island, hitherto esteemed friendly, but recently accused of secret hostilities. The Dutch had given the name of Hemstede to the district inhabited by this tribe. La Montaigne sailed with a hundred and twenty men, Dutch soldiers under Cock, English led by Underhill, and burghers under Pietersen. Underhill, with eighteen men, marched against the smaller village, and La Montaigne, with the main body, against the other. Both parties were completely successful. They took the villages by surprise, and, with the loss of only one killed and three wounded, slew upward of a hundred Indians. But the victory was disgraced by atrocious cruelties on two Indian prisoners, hacked to pieces with knives in the streets of New Amsterdam.

Captain Underhill having been sent to Stamford to reconnoiter, was presently dispatched, with Ensign Van Feb. Dyck and a hundred and twenty men, in three yachts, upon a new enterprise against the Indians in that neigh

XIII.

borhood. He landed at Greenwich, and after a tedious CHAPTER march in the snow, crossing on the way a rocky hill, and fording two rivers, silently approached the Indian village 1644. by moonlight. It was situate behind a mountain, which sheltered it from the north winds, and contained three rows or streets of wigwams. A large number of Indians, assembled to celebrate some festival, made a desperate resistance; but, after an hour's fighting, during which many Indians were slain, the village was set on fire, and all the horrors of the Pequod massacre were renewed. It was said that five hundred perished in the battle or the flames. Large fires were kindled, and the victors. slept on the field. Fifteen had been wounded, but none killed. They reached Stamford the next day at noon, where they were kindly entertained by the English settlers, and, two days after, arrived at New Amsterdam, where a public thanksgiving was ordered.

Some of the hostile tribes now asked for peace, but others still continued the war. The Dutch West India Company, made bankrupt by the expenses of military operations in the Brazils, was quite unable to afford any assistance, and a bill for 2622 gilders, $1045, drawn upon it by the director, which some of the New England traders at Manhattan had cashed, came back protested. The director imposed an excise duty on wine, June 21 beer, brandy, and beaver. Though no aid could be obtained from Holland, unexpected but opportune assistance arrived from Curaçoa, in a body of a hundred and thirty soldiers lately expelled from Brazil, where the Portuguese had risen against the Dutch. The inhabitants of Curaçoa, who did not need, and had no means to maintain these soldiers, sent them to New Amsterdam; and July. their arrival enabled Kieft to dismiss, but "in the most civil manner," the English auxiliaries hitherto employed.

CHAPTER These soldiers were billeted on the inhabitants, and the

XIII excise duties were continued to provide them with cloth1644. ing. The Eight Men denied the right to levy these Aug. 4. taxes, and the brewers resisted; but Kieft insisted on Oct. 28. payment. Presently the Eight Men appealed to Hol

land in a protest complaining in emphatic terms of Kieft's conduct in the origin and progress of the war. The inhabitants also expressed their opinions with much freedom, and the schout-fiscal at New Amsterdam soon had his hands full of prosecutions for defamation of the director's character.

Rensselaerswyck, the only portion of the province which had escaped the ravages of this war, had received, 1642. two or three years before, an accession of settlers, among

them John Megalapolensis, a "pious and well-learned minister," to whom we are indebted for the earliest extant account of the Mohawks. Under the guns of the Fort Aurania, but within the jurisdiction of the patroon. a little village had sprung up near the bend of the river, and hence familiarly known among the inhabitants as the Fuyk, or Beversfuyk, but officially as Beverwyck, the present Albany. Here a church had been built, and here resided Van Cuyler, the president-commissary; also Van der Donck, graduate of the University of Leyden, schout-fiscal of the colony, and author of a Description of New Netherland.

Very jealous of his feudal jurisdiction, aspiring, in fact, to a substantial independence, the patroon would grant no lands unless the settlers would agree to renounce their right of appeal to the authorities at New Amsterdam. He was equally jealous of his monopoly of importation; but Van der Donck, unwilling to be esteemed the worst man in the colony," especially "as his term of office was short," was rather backward in en