On this search for the Northwest Passage, Hudson's sailors mutinied, and put their great commander and eight companions ashore in an open boat in the bleak, ice-bound Hudson Bay.
For this cruel deed the spirits of the crew of Hudson's vessel were supposed to wander up and down the shores of the Hudson River, unable to find rest even in death.
In Washington Irving's fanciful tale of "Rip Van Winkle," Rip encounters a strange, ghostly company of seafaring men, and it is often supposed that Hudson's crew was intended by the author.
When Hudson went back to Holland after his voyage up the Hudson River, he told such wonderful tales of the friendliness of the Indians, the number of fur-bearing animals he had seen, and the wonders he had met with, that the Hollanders became much excited and determined to send out and claim the newly discovered country.
In 1610 a vessel was sent out, and the Indians proving friendly and the trade satisfactory, a colony was finally established in 1613 on the southern point of Manhattan Island.
This was near where the Battery now is.
The first permanent settlement was made in 1622, the Dutch having taken possession of the country around the Hudson River, calling it New Netherlands.
In 1626 the West India Company sent out a settlement under Gov. Peter Minuit.
He landed on the island of Manhattan, and soon entered into a trade with the Indians, buying from them the entire island of Manhattan, fourteen thousand acres in size, for twenty-four dollars' worth of scarlet cloth, brass buttons, and other trinkets.
The Dutch gave the island the name of New Amsterdam, and established on it a settlement consisting of a fort, a stone warehouse, and a cluster of log-huts.