At this time the settlement on Manhattan Island occupied only a very small region below the present Battery Place. Its main feature was the fort, whose protecting presence was one of the inducements which the Company extended to colonists. A decree issued in 1629 declared that any member of the West India Company who, under certain easy conditions, should form a settlement of not less than fifty persons, none of whom should be under fifteen years of age, should be granted a tract of land fronting sixteen miles upon the sea or upon any navigable river (or eight miles when both shores of the river were occupied), and extending thence inland indefinitely; and that the _patroons_ to whom such grants of land should be made should exercise manorial rights over their estates. The provisions were sufficiently liberal to assure the making of many minor settlements, and it was natural that many eyes should be turned toward the softly undulating country on the southeast of the East River. The official land-grabbing under Van Twiller retarded rather than advanced colonization. Indeed, the company scarcely fulfilled the obligations of the charter in sending colonists to the new region. The grant to Van Corlaer appears as a purchase from the Indians of a "flat" of land called "Casteteeuw, on Sewan-hackey, or Long Island." The same date is given to grants to Andries Hudde and Wolfert Gerritsen of flats to the west of Van Corlaer's, Van Twiller himself getting the desirable land to the east. These purchases, amounting to 15,000 acres, were in a level region, reported already to have been cultivated to some extent by the Indians, and appealing to men brought up in a flat country, and unaccustomed to wood-clearing, as superior to the regions having a heavy tree growth. Plows were soon at work, and from the settlement thus begun grew the village of "New Amersfoort," now the town of Flatlands. In the same year (1636) the Indians sold to William Adriaense Bennett and Jacques Bentyn a tract of 930 acres at Gowanus, a region so named by the Indians. The tract extended from the vicinity of Twenty-eighth Street, along Gowanus Cove and the bay, to the New Utrecht line. The transaction is described in the following record:--