The Old Village of Bergen
A History of the First Settlement in New Jersey
]hen the first representatives of the Amsterdam Licensed Trading West India Company built four houses on Manhattan Island in 1610–1612, one could hardly consider the territory crowded. Those ancestors of New York and New Jersey, however, had more spacious ideas than are held by their apartment-dwelling descendants. The charter of the Dutch East India Company, which had granted the trading monopoly to its West India Company, designated New Netherland as comprising "the unoccupied region between Virginia and Canada"—a little tract that must forever inspire pained admiration in modern real estate dealers. It was bounded approximately on the south by the South River, as the Dutch called the stream that the English afterward re-christened the Delaware. And because the Delaware was South River, the river explored by Henry Hudson in 1609, which first was called Mauritius River in honor of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, came to be referred to as North River, which explains why we today call it Hudson River or North River, just as the words happen.
Henry, we may suspect, always had remained a little disappointed, if not indignant, about that river. He had no
