r and farther into
the interior. The canoes of the traders penetrated the wide realms
watered by the upper channels of the Delaware. A trading-house was
also erected in the vast forest, upon the Jersey shore of the Hudson
River, where the thronged streets of Jersey City at the present hour
cover the soil.

We have now reached the year 1618, two years before the arrival of the
Pilgrims at Plymouth. Though the energetic Dutch merchants were thus
perseveringly and humanely pushing their commerce, and extending their
trading posts, no attempt had yet been made for any systematic
agricultural colonization.

The Dutch alone had then any accurate knowledge of the Hudson River,
or of the coasts of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island. In
1618 the special charter of the Company, conferring upon them the
monopoly of exclusive trade with the Indians, expired. Though the
trade was thus thrown open to any adventurous Dutch merchant, still
the members of the Company enjoyed an immense advantage in having all
the channels perfectly understood by them, and in being in possession
of such important posts.

English fishing vessels visited the coast of Maine, and an
unsuccessful attempt had been made to establish a colony at the mouth
of the Kennebec River. Sir Walter Raleigh had also made a very
vigorous but unavailing effort to establish a colony in Virginia.
Before the year 1600, every vestige of his attempt had disappeared.
Mr. John Romeyn Brodhead, in his valuable history of the State of New
York, speaking of this illustrious man, says:

"The colonists, whom Raleigh sent to the island of Roanoke
in 1585, under Grenville and Lane, returned the next year
dispirited to England. A second expedition, dispatched in
1587, under John White, to found the borough of Raleigh, in
Virginia, stopped short of the unexplored Chesapeake,
whither it was bound, and once more occupied Roanoke. In
1590 the unfortunate emigrants had wholly disappeared; and
with their extinction all immediate attempts to establish an
English colony in Virginia were abandoned. Its name alone
survived.

"After impoverishing himself in unsuccessful efforts to add
an effective American plantation to his native kingdom,
Raleigh, the magnanimous patriot, was consigned, under an
unjust judgment, to lingering imprisonment in the Tower of
London, to be followed, after the lapse of fifteen years,