knowledge he had gained. The English
at length released the _Half Moon_, and she continued her voyage to the
Texel.

The discovery of Hudson was particularly acceptable to the Dutch, for the
new country was rich in fur-bearing animals, and Russia offered a ready
market for all the furs that could be sent there. The East India
Company, therefore, refitted the _Half Moon_ after her return to Holland,
and despatched her to the region discovered by Hudson on a fur trading
expedition, which was highly successful. Private persons also embarked
in similar enterprises, and within two years a prosperous and important
fur trade was established between Holland and the country along the
Mauritius, as the great river discovered by Hudson had been named, in
honor of the Stadtholder of Holland. No government took any notice of
the trade for a while, and all persons were free to engage in it.

Among the adventurers employed in this trade was one Adrian Block, noted
as one of the boldest navigators of his time. He made a voyage to
Manhattan Island in 1614, then the site of a Dutch trading post, and had
secured a cargo of skins with which he was about to return to Holland,
when a fire consumed both his vessel and her cargo, and obliged him to
pass the winter with his crew on the island. They built them log huts on
the site of the present Beaver street, the first houses erected in New
York, and during the winter constructed a yacht of sixteen tons, which
Block called the _Onrust_--the "Restless." In this yacht Block made many
voyages of discovery, exploring the coasts of Long Island Sound, and
giving his name to the island near the eastern end of the sound. He soon
after went back to Europe.

Meanwhile, a small settlement had clustered about the trading post and
the huts built by Block's shipwrecked crew, and had taken the name of New
Amsterdam. The inhabitants were well suited to become the ancestors of a
great nation. They were mainly Dutch citizens of a European Republic,
"composed of seven free, sovereign States"--made so by a struggle with
despotism for forty years, and occupying a territory which their
ancestors had reclaimed from the ocean and morass by indomitable labor.
It was a republic where freedom of conscience, speech, and the press were
complete and universal. The effect of this freedom had been the internal
development of social beauty and strength, and vast increment of
substantial wealth and power by immigr