38                              New York
 

CHAPTEE IV.

NEW AMSTERDAM BECOMES NEW YORK.    THE BEGINNING
OF ENGLISH RULE.   1664-1674.

The expedition against New Amsterdam had been or¬
ganized with the Duke of York, afterw^ard King James
XL, as its special patron, and the city was rechris¬
tened in his honour. To this day its name perpetuates
the memory of the dull, cruel bigot with whose short
reign came to a close the ignoble line of the Stuart
kings.

With Manhattan Island all the province of the New
Netherlands passed under the English rule; and the
arrogant red flag fluttered without a rival along the
whole seaboard from Acadia to Florida. Yet the set¬
tlements were still merely little dots in the vast wooded
wilderness which covered all the known portions of the
continent. They were strung at wide intervals along
the seacoast, or the courses of the mighty rivers, sepa¬
rated one from another by the endless stretches of
gloomy, Indian-haunted woodland. Every step in the
forest was fraught with danger. The farms still lay
close to the scattered hamlets, and the latter in turn
clung to the edges of the navigable waters, where travel
was so much easier and safer than on land. New
Amsterdam, when its existence as such ceased, held
some fifteen hundred souls (many of them negro slaves);
yet the sloops that plied from thence to Fort Orange, —