S

A dreary winter came and went, and just as the first signs of spring
showed in the fields that closed about the fort, a ship sailed up the
bay, bringing a stranger to the province.

This was William Kieft, the new Governor of New Netherland.

He was a blustering man, who became very angry when anyone disagreed
with him, and who very soon was known as "William the Testy." He made no
effort to make the Indians his friends, and the result was that much of
his rule of ten years was a term of bloody warfare.

The affairs of the Company had been sadly neglected by Governor Van
Twiller, and Governor Kieft, in a nervous, testy, energetic fashion set
about remedying them. The fort was almost in ruins from neglect. The
church was in little better condition. The mills were so out of repair
that even if the wind could have reached them they could not have been
made to do their work properly. There were smugglers who carried away
furs without even a thought of the koopman, who was waiting to record
the duties which should have been paid on them. There were those who
defied all law and order, and sold guns and powder and liquor to the
Indians, regardless of the fact that the penalty for doing so was death.
For guns and liquor had been found to be dangerous things to put in
savage hands.

Governor Kieft rebuilt the houses, put down all smugglers, and set
matters in New Amsterdam in good working order generally. The patroon
system of peopling the colony had proven a total failure. So, soon after
Kieft came, the West India Company decided on another plan. They
furnished free passage to anyone who promised to cultivate land in the
new country. In this way there would be no patroons to act as masters.
Each man would own his land, and could come and go as he saw fit. This
brought many colonists.

[Illustration: The Bowling Green in 1840.]

At this time there were really only two well-defined roads on the Island
of Manhattan. One stretched up through the island and led to the
outlying farms and afterward became The Bowery; the second led along the
water-side, and is to-day Pearl Street. Bowling Green, although it was
not called Bowling Green then, was the open space in front of the fort
where the people gathered on holidays. In the fourth year of Governor
Kieft's rule, he conceived the idea of holding fairs in this open space,
where fine cows and fat pigs could be exhibited. These fairs attracted
so many visitors from distant p