The Romance of the Hudson -- Benson John Lossing

conflagration at the day of doom. Managers of river-craft who saw it at night believed that the great red dragon of the Apocalypse was loose upon the waters. Some prayed for deliverance; some fled in terror to the shore, and hid in the recesses of the rocks, and some crouched in mortal dread beneath their decks, and abandoned their vessels and themselves to the mercy of the winds and waves, or the jaws of the demon, The Clermont was the author of some of the most wonderful romances of the Hudson, and for years she was the victim of the enmity of the fishermen, who believe that her noise and agitation of the waters would drive the shad and sturgeon from the river.

The Clermont was small thing compared with the great river steamers now. Fulton did not comprehend the majesty and capacity of his invention. He regarded the Richmond, the finest steamboat at the time of his death, as the perfection of that class of architecture. She was a little more than one hundred feet in length, with a low dingy cabin, partly below the water-line, dimly lighted by tallow-candles, in which passengers ate and slept in stifling air, and her highest rate of spec was nine miles n hour. Could Fulton revisit the earth and be placed on one of the great river steamboats of our time, he would imagine himself to be in some magical structure of fairy-land, or forming a part of a strange romance; for it is a magnificent floating hotel, over four hundred feet in length, and capable of carrying a thousand guests by night or by day from New York to Albany at the rate of twenty miles an hour. Its gorgeously furnished parlor, lighted with gas 'mud garnished with mirrors and rich curtains, its cheerful and well-ventilated dining-room, and its airy bedrooms, high above the water, compose a whole more grand and beautiful than any palace dreamed of by the Arabian story-tellers. It is the perfected growth of the Indian's bark canoe.

Looking toward the Jersey shore as the steamboat sweeps out of her slip, you may see at the northern extremity of the village of Hoboken a bold rocky promontory, called Castle Point. There the Hackensack Indians had a fort and council-house, and there a sad tragedy was performed on a winter night in colonial times. There had been a bitter feud a long time between the New Jersey Indians and the Dutch on Manhattan, which the blood-thirsty Governor Kieft had fostered. Mutual violence often occurred, and each watched for an opportunity for revenge. The Hollanders found it in February, 1643. The fierce Mohawks, bent on extorting tribute from the tribes below the mountains, swept down from the Highlands at that time like a northern tempest, driving large numbers of the weaker tribes upon the Hackensacks at Hoboken. Kieft ordered a strong force of Hollanders to attack the fugitives there, At midnight the