clouds which were gloriously transparent, and
others loaded with a verdant burden of clambering vines, bowing their
branches to the earth that was covered with flowers. On the gentle
declivities of the hills were scattered in gay profusion the dog-wood, the
sumach, and the wild brier, whose scarlet berries and white blossoms
glowed brightly among the deep green of the surrounding foliage; and here
and there a curling column of smoke rising from the little glens that
opened along the shore seemed to promise the weary voyagers a welcome at
the hands of their fellow-creatures. As they stood gazing with entranced
attention on the scene before them, a red man, crowned with feathers,
issued from one of these glens, and after contemplating in silent wonder
the gallant ship, as she sat like a stately swan swimming on a silver
lake, sounded the war-whoop, and bounded into the woods like a wild deer,
to the utter astonishment of the phlegmatic Dutchmen, who had never heard
such a noise or witnessed such a caper in their whole lives.

Of the transactions of our adventurers with the savages, and how the
latter smoked copper pipes and ate dried currants; how they brought great
store of tobacco and oysters; how they shot one of the ship's crew, and
how he was buried, I shall say nothing, being that I consider them
unimportant to my history. After tarrying a few days in the bay, in order
to refresh themselves after their seafaring, our voyagers weighed anchor,
to explore a mighty river which emptied into the bay. This river, it is
said, was known among the savages by the name of the Shatemuck; though we
are assured in an excellent little history published in 1674, by John
Josselyn, gent., that it was called the Mohegan;[23] and Master Richard
Bloome, who wrote some time afterwards, asserts the same--so that I very
much incline in favor of the opinion of these two honest gentlemen. Be
this as it may, up this river did the adventurous Hendrick proceed, little
doubting but it would turn to be the much-looked-for passage to China!

The journal goes on to make mention of divers interviews between the crew
and the natives in the voyage up the river; but as they would be
impertinent to my history, I shall pass over them in silence, except the
following dry joke, played off by the old commodore and his schoolfellow
Robert Juet, which does such vast credit to their experimental philosophy
that I cannot refrain from inserting it. "Our master and