Long-Island was discovered in the year 1609, by Henry Hudson. He was an Englishman by birth, but was engaged by the East India Company of Holland to discover a passage to the East Indies in a westerly direction from Europe. He had been employed in the same service by the English, and had failed in his enterprise, and been dismissed from their employ. Upon which he was engaged by the Dutch, and fitted out with a vessel called the Half Moon. After coasting in his third voyage as far south as Virginia, he turned to the north again and saw for the first time the highlands of Neversink. On the 3d of September 1609, he entered the great bay between Sandy Hook, Staten-Island and Amboy. He observed among other things, that the waters swarmed with fish and some of very large size. On the 4th, he sent his men on shore, and relates that he found the soil of white sand and a vast number of plum trees loaded with fruit, and many of them covered with grape vines of different kinds. The natives are represented in general as manifesting all friendship, when Hudson first landed among them. But on one occasion shortly after his arrival, their bad feelings were from some cause not stated, excited. Hudson sent out a boat under command of one Colman to catch fish, and the Indians attacked the men. One of the arrows which they discharged, headed with a sharp flint stone, struck Colman in the throat and mortally wounded him. The sailors not being able to defend themselves, hastened back to the ship, carrying poor Colman dying with them. His body was taken on shore after his death and buried on the island which is now called Coney Island—a corruption of the original name Colman, which was given it by Hudson and his company, in commemoration of him who was buried there, and who was the commander of the boat which bore the first Europeans through the passage so familiarly known to us all as the Narrows. De Laet, a Dutch historian, says, that at this time the natives were clothed in the skins of elks, foxes and other animals. Their canoes were made of the bodies of trees; their arms, bows and arrows with sharp points of stone fixed to them. They had no houses, he says, but slept under the blue heavens: some on mats made of brush or bulrushes, and some upon leaves of trees. Hudson passed up the river which still bears his name, and left it to others to discover that the land on which he had touched, was an island. This was done by Adrian Block, in 1614. He sailed from New-Amsterdam, now New-York, through the sound to Cape Cod, and visited the intermediate coasts and islands. He appears to have been the first who ascertained that Long-Island was separate from the main land. Long-Island at this time, bore the name of Mattouwake, or Meitowak and Sewanhackey—the last of which, means the isle or land of shells, and was no doubt given to it in consequence of large quantities of seewant or shell money, being manufactured here.

The objects of the Dutch being at first chiefly of a mercantile character, but few settlements were made in the country by them. The first was established on an