CHAPTER XIII. NEW YORK; NEW SWEDEN. The treaty with the Mohawks caused the utmost joy throughout the settlements of New Netherlands. In May 1646, the brave and good Peter Stuyvesant arrived as governor, and the same year Kieft sailed for Europe, he being expelled the colony as the author of so much misery, the West India company also resenting his barbarous measures. But the vengeance of Heaven seemed to follow him on the sea, as the execrations of the Dutch had followed him from land. The large and richly laden ship in which he embarked was wrecked on the coast of Wales, and he and eighty others perished in the remorseless waves. Stuyvesant, a man of good education, as well as a truehearted, brave old soldier, who had lost a leg in the wars, introduced a much milder line of policy into the government of New Netherlands as regarded the natives. In comparison with the New England settlements, New Netherlands could not be said to have flourished, nor even had they, in a pecuniary point of view, with all their trading engagements, proved a lucrative speculation to the Dutch West India company; the truth was, they lacked that element of freedom, both politically and commercially, on which true prosperity is based. Manhattan did not flourish until its merchants “obtained freedom to follow out their own impulses.” The merchants of Amsterdam, at that time the first commercial city of the world, knew this when, addressing their brethren at Manhattan, they said, “when your commerce has become established, and your ships ride on every part of the ocean, throngs that look towards you with eager eyes will be allured to embark for your island.” But these words, though prophetic, as the historian remarks, of the future destiny of that port, were fated not to be fulfilled by the enterprise of Dutch merchants. At the time of Stuyvesant’s assumption of office, the settlers in New Netherlands amounted but to about 6,000. A few huts were gathered round Fort Orange or Beaverswyk, as the present town of Albany was then called; Long Island was still almost wholly uncleared forest, and “the land there was of so little account, that Stuyvesant thought it no wrong to his employers to purchase of them, at a small price, an extensive bowery just beyond the coppices, among which browsed the goats and kine of the village.” Nor was New Amsterdam, the seat of government, anything more than a rude village of huts, protected by palisades, while the fort itself could scarcely be considered a place of defence.