foot on," the natives so kind and gentle, that when they found he would
not remain with them over night, and feared that he left them--poor
children of nature!--because he was afraid of their weapons,--he, whose
quarter-deck was heavy with ordnance,--they "broke their arrows in
pieces, and threw them in the fire." On the following morning, with
the early flood-tide, on the 19th of September, 1609, the _Half Moon_
"ran higher up, two leagues above the Shoals," and came to anchor in
deep water, near the site of the present city of Albany. Happy if he
could have closed his gallant career on the banks of the stream which
so justly bears his name, and thus have escaped the sorrowful and
mysterious catastrophe which awaited him the next year!


CHAMPLAIN'S VOYAGE AND THE GROWTH OF COLONIES.

But the discovery of your great river and of the site of your ancient
city, is not the only event which renders the year 1609 memorable in the
annals of America and the world. It was one of those years in which a
sort of sympathetic movement toward great results unconsciously pervades
the races and the minds of men. While Hudson discovered this mighty
river and this vast region for the Dutch East India Company, Champlain,
in the same year, carried the lilies of France to the beautiful
lake which bears his name on your northern limits; the languishing
establishments of England in Virginia were strengthened by the second
charter granted to that colony; the little church of Robinson removed
from Amsterdam to Leyden, from which, in a few years, they went forth,
to lay the foundations of New England on Plymouth Rock; the seven United
Provinces of the Netherlands, after that terrific struggle of forty
years (the commencement of which has just been embalmed in a record
worthy of the great event by an American historian) wrested from Spain