ir seafaring habits and
the pursuit of whales led them along the coast and into Delaware Bay.
The Puritans of New Haven made persistent efforts to settle the southern
part of Jersey, on the Delaware near Salem. They thought, as their
quaint old records show, that if they could once start a branch colony
in Jersey it might become more populous and powerful than the New
Haven settlement and in that case they intended to move their seat of
government to the new colony. But their shrewd estimate of its value
came too late. The Dutch and the Swedes occupied the Delaware at that
time and drove them out. Puritans, however, entered northern Jersey
and, while they were not numerous enough to make it a thoroughly Puritan
community, they largely tinged its thought and its laws, and their
influence still survives.

The difficulty with Jersey was that its seacoast was a monotonous line
of breakers with dangerous shoal inlets, few harbors, and vast mosquito
infested salt marshes and sandy thickets. In the interior it was for
the most part a level, heavily forested, sandy, swampy country in its
southern portions, and rough and mountainous in the northern portions.
Even the entrance by Delaware Bay was so difficult by reason of its
shoals that it was the last part of the coast to be explored. The
Delaware region and Jersey were in fact a sort of middle ground far less
easy of access by the sea than the regions to the north in New England
and to the south in Virginia.

There were only two places easy of settlement in the Jerseys. One was
the open region of meadows and marshes by Newark Bay near the mouth
of the Hudson and along the Hackensack River, whence the people slowly
extended themselves to the seashore at Sandy Hook and thence southward
along the ocean beach. This was East Jersey. The other easily occupied
region, which became West Jersey, stretched along the shore of the lower
Delaware from the modern Trenton to Salem, whence the settlers gradually
worked their way into the interior. Between these two divisions lay
a rough wilderness which in its southern portion was full of swamps,
thickets, and pine barrens. So rugged was the country that the native
Indians lived for the most part only in the two open regions already
described.

The natural geographical, geological, and even social division of New
Jersey is made by drawing a line from Trenton to the mouth of the Hudson
River. North of that line the successive terraces of th