In 1646 the men of New Haven set up a trading-house near the mouth of the Housatonic, and thereupon Kieft wrote to the commissioners, who met at New Haven in April, 1646, a blustering letter of which the following is a good sample: "We protest against all you commissioners met at the Red Mount (New Haven) as against breakers of the common league, and also infringers of the rights of the lords, the states, our superiors, in that you have dared, without our express and especial consent, to hold your general meeting within the limits of New Netherland."[22] At the close of Kieft's administration in 1647 the whole province of New Netherland could furnish not more than three hundred fighting-men and contained a population of not more than two thousand. Compared with the population of New England these figures seem insignificant enough, and render highly improbable the story popular with some New England historians that the Dutch were enlisted in a great scheme of uprooting the English colonies. In 1647 Peter Stuyvesant was sent over as governor. He had the sense to see that the real safety of the Dutch consisted not in bluster, but in settling a line between the possessions of the two nations as soon as possible. The charter of the West India Company called for the territory between forty and forty-five degrees north latitude, but to assert the full extent of the patent would have been to claim the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Accordingly, Stuyvesant, soon after his arrival, addressed a letter to Governor Winthrop, asserting the Dutch claim to all the land between the Connecticut and Delaware and proposing a conference. But it is evident that in claiming the Connecticut he was actuated more by a hope of deterring the further aggressions of English settlers than otherwise. The federal commissioners returned a polite reply, but showed no anxiety to come to an accommodation. Soon after a fresh quarrel broke out with New Haven, and in March, 1648, Stuyvesant wrote to the governor of Massachusetts offering to submit to him and the governor of Plymouth the matter in dispute. He then wrote home for instructions, and as diplomatic relations between England and Holland were suspended, the West India Company bade him make such terms as he could with his English neighbors.[23]