Chronicles of America Volume 07 - Dutch and English on the Hudson

Geography is the maker of history. The course of Dutch settlement in America was predetermined by a river which runs its length of a hundred and fifty miles from the mountains to the sea through the heart of a fertile country and which offers a natural highway for transportation of merchandise and for communication between colonies. No man, however, could foresee the development of the Empire State when, on that memorable September day in 1609, a small Dutch yacht named the Halve Maene or Half M