Two years after this settlement at Fort Orange, the Dutch West India Company purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for sixty guilders in high-priced goods and, planting a colony and fort on the south end of the island, brought up the population of Nieu Nederlandt to two hundred souls. The Company, desiring to stimulate colonization, in 1629 projected the manorial or patroon system; a combination of feudal idea and Latin name, _patronus_. Killiaen Van Rensselaer, one of the directors and a rich merchant of Amsterdam, at once obtained an extensive grant of land south of Fort Orange and, by the purchase of the land from the Indians and the planting of a colony, became the patroon of Rensselaerswyck. He never visited his “colonie,” but before his death in 1646, he had sent from Holland over two hundred artisans and farmers, and included in his manor a territory forty-eight by twenty-four miles, and also another tract of sixty-two thousand acres. Thus Albany began with a Dutch imprint, which to this day has given to the city its distinctive mark. Forty years of Dutch sagacity and thrift rapidly developed the colony. It was on the whole a prosperous period, enlivened by chronic disputes between the garrison and the manor, and disquieting rumors regarding belligerent Indians and the French. It throws on a small canvas sturdy personages and stirring events. Brandt Van Slechtenhorst, the stiff upholder of the manor claims against the doughty Pieter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Director-General; Domine Megapolensis, the first Dutch minister; and the flitting figure of the Jesuit missionary, Father Jogues with his hands mangled by the Mohawks and kissed by the Queen of France, would make any canvas picturesque. To take Washington Irving’s delicious bit of humor too seriously shows a melancholy lack of humor. Certainly the Dutch burghers of Albany did not take very seriously the English occupation of Nieu Nederlandt in 1664. The seizure was colored by an old claim of uncertain dimensions based upon the Cabot discoveries, which for a long time had strained the relations between England and Holland concerning colonial matters. The capitulation was bloodless, and to Albany it brought little change, save that the English flag, in place of the Dutch, fluttered over the ramparts of Fort Orange, which took the name of Fort Albany in commemoration of the Scotch title of the Duke of York, the new lord of the province. The great manorial grant was confirmed, and in all its habits of thought and life the colony remained Dutch. The happiest change and perhaps the most startling shock came from the fact that the Duke of York, bigot as he was, broke the tradition of the period and introduced in his province religious toleration.