fact, that more than a century should have passed away, after Cabot had
discovered the coast of North America for England, before any knowledge
was gained of the noble river on which your city stands, and which was
destined by Providence to determine, in after times, the position of the
commercial metropolis of the Continent. It is true that Verazzano, a
bold and sagacious Florentine navigator, in the service of France, had
entered the Narrows in 1524, which he describes as a very large river,
deep at its mouth, which forced its way through steep hills to the sea;
but though he, like all the naval adventurers of that age, was sailing
westward in search of a shorter passage to India, he left this part
of the coast without any attempt to ascend the river; nor can it be
gathered from his narrative that he believed it to penetrate far into
the interior.


VOYAGE OF HENDRICK HUDSON.

Near a hundred years elapsed before that great thought acquired
substance and form. In the spring of 1609, the heroic but unfortunate
Hudson, one of the brightest names in the history of English maritime
adventure, but then in the employment of the Dutch East India Company,
in a vessel of eighty tons, bearing the very astronomical name of the
_Half Moon_, having been stopped by the ice in the Polar Sea, in the
attempt to reach the East by the way of Nova Zembla, struck over to the
coast of America in a high northern latitude. He then stretched down
southwardly to the entrance of Chesapeake Bay (of which he had gained
a knowledge from the charts and descriptions of his friend, Captain
Smith), thence returning to the north, entered Delaware Bay, standing
out again to sea, arrived on the second of September in sight of the
"high hills" of Neversink, pronouncing it "a good land to fall in with,