Peter Minuit, the first Director of New Netherlands to hold his place for more than a year, and the first to organize a permanent provincial government, sent home hopeful reports, and backed them with shipments of fur and timber; but the expenses of administering the colony ultimately exceeded its earnings, and the West India Company was disappointed of the revenue it had counted upon receiving from the new settlement. The little village grew but slowly. When it had spread so far northward as the line of what is now Wall Street—which is so far down-town to-day that many a New York woman, native-born, has yet to see it for the first time—a stockade was set up across the island, narrower then than now, to fence off the village from the farms (bouweries) of the more adventurous pioneers, and the forest that bordered them. This defense, completed in 1653, consisted of palisades and posts, twelve feet high, with a sloping breastwork of earth and a ditch on its southern side. In less than two years its height was doubled to keep the Indians from leaping over it. [Illustration: THE FORT IN KIEFT’S DAY.] But neither the Fort with its stone guns, nor this high wooden wall, was ever called upon to withstand a vigorous attack or resist a siege; for whenever the place was seriously threatened, its flag came fluttering down, and its keys were turned over to the enemy. This happened first in August, 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls appeared in the bay, as deputy of the Duke of York, to whom Charles II. had granted all the territory between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay, and demanded the Fort’s surrender. The claim of the English was nebulous to the last degree. As Freneau neatly put it, “The soil they demanded, or threatened their worst, Insisting that _Cabot had looked at it first_.” But the flimsiest pretension, if vigorously backed, outvalues the strongest if less sturdily maintained; and Director Stuyvesant found his people unwilling to support him in defying the intruder. So down dropped the Dutch colors and up ran the British. Precisely nine years later, however, what had formerly been called New Amsterdam, but was now New York, yielded itself to a little Dutch fleet without striking a defensive blow. Captain Colve’s victory was so lightly won, indeed, that the English commander, Captain Manning, was courtmartialled for his apparent inefficiency, cowardice or treason, and the estates of the Governor, Colonel Lovelace, who, when the blow fell, was absent on affairs of state, were confiscated by the Duke. The triumph of the Hollanders was short-lived; for the year 1674 had not run its course when Major Edmund Andros assumed the governorship, and by the terms of a treaty of peace between England and the States-General, New Orange, as the place had been christened by the Dutch, again and finally became New York. [Illustration: PETER STUYVESANT.]