33. Early Germans in America.--In the Colonial days, next to the English, the Germans were foremost in settling and developing our country. Long before the Puritans thought of emigrating to America, Germans had landed in various parts of the New World. As early as 1538, J. Cromberger established a printing-office in the City of Mexico, from which he issued numerous books. From 1528 to 1546 German explorers came to Venezuela also with a printing-press and with fifty miners to explore the mountains. A number of German craftsmen accompanied the first English settlers who came with Captain John Smith to Virginia. Soon after Henry Hudson had discovered the river which bears his name, Christiansen, a German, became the explorer of that stream. He also built the first homes on Manhattan Island, 1613, and laid the foundations of New Amsterdam and Fort Nassau, the present cities of New York and Albany. Peter Minuit (Minnewit), the first Director-General of New Netherland, was also a German, born in Wesel, on the lower Rhine. He arrived in New Amsterdam on May 4, 1626, and one of his first acts was the purchase of Manhattan Island, 22,000 acres, from the Indians for trinkets valued at $24. He remained at his post till 1631, when he, soon after, became the founder and first director of New Sweden, at the mouth of the Delaware River. He lost his life in the West Indies during a hurricane. His successor in New Sweden was another German, Printz von Buchau, during whose regime, from 1643 to 1654, the colony became very successful and thereby aroused the jealousy of the Dutch, who, while Buchau was on a trip to Europe, attacked the colony and annexed it to New Netherland. When New Netherland, in 1664, fell a prey to the English, the colony had among its citizens numerous Germans, most of them Lutherans. A native of Hamburg, Nicholaus de Meyer, became burgomaster of New York in 1676. Another German, Augustin Herrman, made the first reliable maps of Maryland and Virginia. J. Lederer, a young German scholar, who came to Jamestown in 1668, was the first to explore Virginia and part of South Carolina. Lederer's itinerary, written in Latin, was translated by Governor Talbot of Maryland into English and published 1672 in London; etc. However, it was at Germantown, at present a suburb of Philadelphia, that Germans broke ground for the first permanent German settlement in North America. A group of Mennonites, 33 persons, landed October 6, 1683. They were received by William Penn and Franz Daniel Pastorius, a young lawyer from Frankfort on the Main. In Germantown Gerhard Henkel preached before 1726, and St. Michael's Church was begun 1730 and dedicated by the Swede J. Dylander in 1737. Pastorius had landed in America with several families on August 20 of the same year in advance of the Mennonite emigrants, in order to prepare for their arrival. The official seal of Germantown bore the inscription: "Vinum, Linum et Textrinum," the culture of