Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/217

 its keys were turned over to the enemy. This happened first in August, 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls appeared in the bay, as deputy of the Duke of York, to whom Charles II. had granted all the territory between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay, and demanded the Fort's surrender. The claim of the English was nebulous to the last degree. As Freneau neatly put it,

"The soil they demanded, or threatened their worst, Insisting that Cabot had looked at it first."

But the flimsiest pretension, if vigorously backed, outvalues the strongest if less sturdily maintained; and Director Stuyvesant found his people unwilling to support him in defying the intruder. So down dropped the Dutch colors and up ran the British.

Precisely nine years later, however, what had formerly been called New Amsterdam, but was now New York, yielded itself to a little Dutch fleet without striking a defensive blow. Captain Colve's victory was so lightly won, indeed, that the English commander, Captain Manning, was courtmartialled for his apparent inefficiency, cowardice or treason, and the estates of the Governor, Colonel Lovelace, who, when the blow fell, was absent on affairs of