alive and prosperous throughout all subsequent changes in their native land, rendered them well fitted to fight their own battle in a new scene; and when the Dutch authorities heard of their expulsion from their homes on account of their religious opinions, they most wisely invited them to settle in New Netherland.
The first city founded by the Dutch under the new charter—or, to be more strictly accurate, by the Walloons, under the West India Company—was the modern Albany, the capital of the present State of New York, which was at first called Fort Orange, and was the second town of importance built within the limits of the United States, Jamestown having been the first. The foundations were laid in 1623, and in less than a year it had become a flourishing settlement, while trading stations established at the same time on Manhattan Island, the Delaware, Connecticut, and other rivers, grew with equal rapidity. In course of time, difficulties with the Indians led to the temporary abandonment of Fort Orange, and the building on Manhattan Island, on a site purchased for twenty-four dollars, of Fort Amsterdam, round which clustered the town long known as New Amsterdam, and now under its English name of New York—it having been taken by the British in 1664—the chief city and most important seaport of America.
The climax of Dutch prosperity in America was reached about 1635, when the settlers in New Amsterdam became involved in difficulties with the English of Connecticut, who drove them, step by step, and little by little, from every outpost they had gained. In 1636 began the terrible Indian war in which the English and Dutch were alike involved, and all the Dutch inhabitants of Staten Island were murdered by the fierce Algonquins; and in 1637 a company of Swedes and Finns, most of them religious refugees, arrived in Delaware Bay, where, having purchased extensive territories from the Indians, they quietly established themselves, calling their American home New Sweden, and their first fort, built at the mouth of the Delaware, Fort Christiana, after the young Swedish Queen.
In vain did the Dutch protest against what they looked upon as an invasion of their rights. Settlement after settlement of Swedes was established on both banks of the Delaware, and not until 1665 were the Dutch able to gain possession of New Sweden, which, however, ten years later, fell, with the whole of the Dutch territories of America, into the hands of the English.
