INDIAN  VENGEANCE.
 

CHAPTER   VII.
 

INDIAN  VENGEANCE.

IxDiAN Vengeance. — The First Popular Assembly. — Kieft's Disappointment. —
Death of Peter Minuet. —Effort of the "Twelve Men" to Institute Re¬
forms. — The Governor's Proclamation. — The Dutch and English. — Discus¬
sion of the Boundary Question.—A Flaw in the Title to New Netherland.
— Religious Persecution.—The First Tavern.—The New Church. —Raising
Money at a Wedding. — The First English Secretary.— " The Year of
Blood." — The Blood Atonement. — The Shrovetide Dinner-Party. — The
Inhuman Massacre. — General Uprising of the Indians. — Overtures for
Peace. — The Hollow Truce. — The Second Representative Body. — A Page
OF Horrors.
 

BY  this time the effects of Kieft's imprudences with the Indians
were  fast becoming apparent.    The  Earitans  cajoled  him with
peaceful messages, but suddenly attacked De Vries's unprotected planta¬
tion on Staten Island, kiUed four of his planters and burned all i64i.
his buUdings.    FoUy begets foUy.    The governor no sooner heard  June.
how the Earitans had avenged their wrongs, than he determined upon
their extermination.    In an ostentatious proclamation, he offered
a  bounty of ten fathoms of  wampum for the head of any or
every one of the tribe, and twenty fathoms for each head of the actual
murderers.    Some of the Eiver Indians were incited by these bounties,
and attacked the Earitans.    In the autumn, a chief of the Haverstraw
tribe came one day in triumph to the fort, and exhibited a dead man's
hand hanging: on a stick, which he _ presented to Kieft, as the hand of
the chief who had killed the Dutch.

Meanwhile blood had been shed on the island of Manhattan.
An old man, Claes Smits, lived in a little house near Deutal Bay,
and worked at the trade of a wheelwright.    The nephew of the Indian
who was murdered near the Fresh Water Pond during Minuet's adminis¬
tration, and who, as a boy, bad sworn vengeance, went to the old man's
house under pretense of bartering  some beaver-skins for  duffels, and.