HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
 

INTRODUCTORY  CHAPTER.

EARLY DISCOVERIES.

Manhattan Island. — Eaeliest Records of America. — The Icelanders. — The Fif-
TEENTH Century. — Venetian Commerce. — Christopher Columbus. — England. —
The Cabots. —The Portuguese. —Vasco da Gama. — The Fishermen op Brittany
and Normandy. — Newfoundland. — The Spaniards. — Verrazano. — Estevan
Gomez. — The English again. — The Dutch. — Belgium. — Usselincx and joiin
OF Barneveld. —The East and West India Companies.

TWO hundred and sixty-five years ago the site of the city of New-
York was a rocky, wooded, canoe-shaped, thirteen-mile-long island,
bounded by two salt rivers and a bay, and peopled by dusky skin-clad
savages. A half-dozen portable wigwam villages, some patches of to¬
bacco and corn, and a few bark canoes drawn up on the shore, gave
little promise of our present four hundred and fifty miles of streets, vast
property interests, and the encircling forest of shipping. What have been
the successive steps of the extraordinary transformation ?

If the lineage, education, experiences, aud character of a distinguished
personage are replete with interest and instruction, of how much greater
moment is the history of a city, which is biography in its most absolute
sense ? New York needs no introduction to the reader. It occupies an
individual position among the great cities of the world. It is unlike
any of its contemporaries. Its population is a singular intermixture of
■elements from all nations. Its institutions are the outgrowth of older
civilizations; its wisdom and public opinion largely the reflection of a
previous intelligence. All the ideas, principles, feelings, and traditions
which ever made their appearance have here found a common field in
which to struggle for existence, and the result, in so far as it is devel¬
oped, has naturaUy been " the survival of the fittest." It would not be
fair, however, to demand full fruits from so young a tree.    New York