Richard Burton.
The well-known hospitality of the Hudson River valley has, therefore, "high antiquity" in this record of the garrulous writer. At Albany the Indians flocked to the vessel, and Hudson determined to try the chiefs to see "whether they had any treachery in them." "So they took them down into the cabin, and gave them so much wine and aqua vitae that they were all merry. In the end one of them was drunk, and they could not tell how to take it." The old chief, who took the aqua vitae, was so grateful when he awoke the next day, that he showed them all the country, and gave them venison.
Passing down through the Highlands the "Half Moon" was becalmed near Stony Point and the "people of the Mountains" came on board and marvelled at the ship and its equipment. One canoe kept hanging under the stern and an Indian pilfered a pillow and two shirts from the cabin windows. The mate shot him in the breast and killed him. A boat was lowered to recover the articles "when one of them in the water seized hold of it to overthrow it, but the cook seized a sword and cut off one of his hands and he was drowned." At the head of Manhattan Island the vessel was again attacked. Arrows were shot and two more Indians were killed, then the attack was renewed and two more were slain.
It might also be stated that soon after the arrival of Hendrick Hudson at the mouth of the river one of the English soldiers, John Coleman, was killed by an arrow shot in the throat. "He was buried," according to Ruttenber, "upon the adjacent beach, the first European victim of an Indian weapon on the Mahicanituk. Coleman's point is the monument to this occurrence."
The "Half Moon" never returned and it will be remembered that Hudson never again saw the river that he discovered. He was to leave his name however as a[page 18] monument to further adventure and hardihood in Hudson's Bay, where he was cruelly set adrift by a mutinous crew in a little boat to perish in the midsummer of 1611.
The sea just peering the headlands through
Where the sky is lost in deeper blue.
Charles Fenno Hoffman.