In the course of these years the English settlements in North America had multiplied rapidly. Maryland had been granted to Lord Baltimore in 1632; Carolina was planted by a company in 1663; Delaware with New Jersey was assigned by patent to the Duke of York, afterwards James the Second, in 1664, and Pennsylvania to William Penn in 1680. In fact, by the close of Charles the Second's reign the British seaboard in North America extended from the river St. Croix[242] in the north to the river Savannah in the south. But of all England's acquisitions during this period the most momentous was that of the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, captured in 1664 by Colonel Nicolls, who gave to the town of New Amsterdam its now famous name of New York.[243] One chief advantage of New York was that it possessed a direct way to the west from Albany, on the Hudson, up the Mohawk River to Lake Oneida and so to Lake Ontario, whereby it had access to the great fur-trade with the Indians. But this consideration, important though it was commercially, paled before the strategical significance of the port of New York. No more simple method of explaining this can be found than to quote the belief held by many of the English emigrants before they sailed, that New England was an island. In a sense this is almost true, the country being surrounded by the sea, to north, east, and south, and by the rivers Hudson and St. Lawrence to the west. Champlain had already paddled up the Richelieu to Lake Champlain with the design of passing through Lake George, carrying his canoes to the head-waters of the Hudson and re-embarking for a voyage down the river to the sea. He had in fact chosen the highway of lakes and rivers on which the principal battles for the possession of the New World were to be fought. The northern key of that highway was Quebec, the southern New York. France possessed the one, and England the other. The power that should hold both would hold the whole continent. [Sidenote: 1670.] [Sidenote: 1673.] [Sidenote: 1678.] [Sidenote: 1680.]