hought, for the
night; but he soon found means to escape by leaping his horse through
a forced opening, swimming the North River, and continuing his flight
through New Jersey until he reached the shore opposite Newcastle,
where he swam his horse across the Delaware and was safe.... Dr.
Spotswood, of Newcastle, told me that there was a tradition in his
town that the horse was buried there." Augustin Herman made the first
drawing of New Amsterdam, and early maps of Maryland and New England.
He was the first speculator in city real estate in America.

[Footnote 1: The Bohemia Manor is a tract of 18,000 acres of the best
land on the Delaware peninsula. It was granted to Augustine Herman,
Bohemian, whose tombstone, now lying in the yard of Richard Bayard, on
the site of Herman's park, bears date 1661. He received the manor for
making an early map of Maryland, and granted a part of the land to the
sect of Labadists. In the course of a century it became the homestead
of Senator Richard Bassett, heir of the last lord of the manor, and of
his son-in-law, Senator James A. Bayard, the first. Herman was the
principal historic personage about the head of the Chesapeake, and was
Peter Stuyvesant's diplomatist to New England as well as Maryland. The
argument he made for the priority of the Dutch settlement on the
Delaware was the basis of the independence of Delaware State. The
legend of his escape from New York is told in several local books and
newspapers, and it was the subject of one of his paintings, as he was
both draughtsman and designer. G. A. T.]

In 1876 I visited the relics of Herman on the Manor, and observed the
topography and foliage. I then undertook to put this legend into
verse, but struck a short, ill-accommodating stanza, in which I
nevertheless persevered until the tale was told. I found that Herman
had bought, in 1652, "the Raritan Great Meadows and the territory
along the Staten Island Kills from Ompoge, or Amboy, to the Pechciesse
Creek, and a tract on the south side of the Raritan, opposite Staten
Island" (see Broadhead, page 537). It at once occurred to me to put
the seat of Herman's capture by squatters on this property, and to
take Staten Island's bold scenery as a contrast to that of the head of
the Chesapeake, whence Herman had ridden. He could, besides, more
reasonably swim the Kills than the North River with a horse, as a
gentle prelude to swimming the Delaware.

One year before buying the above prope