Page:History of Hudson County and of the Old Village of Bergen.djvu/16

8 His ship was destroyed there by fire in 1614 and he built himself another in 1614. Their handful of men built those four houses, and for good measure a fort, Fort Amsterdam, on the land above what later was known as Castle Garden, and now is the site of the Aquarium. They sailed up the North River and established a trading post. Fort Orange, on an island below Albany. They sailed through Hell Gate, which even now is no place for timid navigators, though it is not one-tenth as dangerous as it was then. They explored the whole great Long Island Sound to Cape Cod. They looked thoroughly into that tract which afterward became the Rhode Island Plantations. They investigated the Connecticut River. And they started the opening up of New Jersey by establishing a trading post on the west side of the North River opposite lower Manhattan, following it some years later with a small redoubt.

They might have left records as romantic as the narrative of Captain John Smith, for they explored and traded everywhere, from Cape Cod to the Delaware. But they were not men of the pen. We are not sure even of their exact names. The few scattered records refer with generous freedom to Adrien Blok, Adrian Block, Hendrik Christæn, Hendrick Christianse and Hendrick Christansen. The best people in that time were more than liberal in spelling, and many of the most important official documents have a sprightly way of giving two or more quite different spellings to the same name.

All around the handful of Europeans were Indians. Seacoast Indians came in canoes through the marsh thoroughfares and from the high lands beyond the Raritan. Warrior Indians came down the river in war canoes from their forests,