Page:History of Hudson County and of the Old Village of Bergen.djvu/25

Rh unhappy punctuality. According to the records, "eighty soldiers on the night of February 27, 1643, under Sergeant Rodolph attacked the sleeping Indians and massacred all." From the Raritan to the Connecticut, red runners carried the news. There came an uprising of tribes so sudden and so terrible that almost over night the whole territory was swept clear of white men, "not a house was left standing and all Boueries were devastated."

The settlers who succeeded in escaping made their miserable way into New Amsterdam with the plaint: "Every place is abandoned. We wretched people must skulk with wives and little ones that are still left, in poverty together by and around the Fort at New Amsterdam."

What happened thereafter stands as a good memorial to the sober sense and the stout intelligence of these Dutchmen. In their misery, with the fruits of years of hard toil gone as in a whirlwind, they might have been excused for giving way to rage and hate. They might, as did many other pioneers in similar circumstances elsewhere, have cried for a war of extermination. They did not. These Holland men ran true to the Holland history of straight thinking. They complained to the States-General against the Director-General (or Governor, to use a common term for his office) and demanded his removal.

Holland was far away, Kieft did not lack friends, and governments move slowly. So it was 1646 before there was a decision; but when it came, it was the best that could have come, for the man who arrived in 1647 to govern the Colony was Petrus Stuyvesant—Petrus the hot-headed, Petrus the