Albanians are especially interested and participating in the preparations for this celebration, for the site of Albany was deemed the most important in the New Netherlands, that of the city of New York alone excepted, and in many respects, early, even more important than that. For at Albany, near the confluence of the two great rivers of the territory of New York, the Hudson from the north and the Mohawk from the west, the Indians from the north and west came in their canoes with their peltry and furs, as a market place, designed by nature, for the exchange of articles between the red men and the white men for what they did not want, to get what, respectively, they did want. Then, too, it was where the Indians assembled to make their important treaties; where the governors of the American provinces met to consider and decide important measures; and where the first provincial congress, in 1754, met and prepared a plan for the union of the colonies. It was, moreover, the great strategic point contended for by the French and English on American soil, and later by the English against the United States in the War of the American Revolution. Albany’s charter, as a city, under the date of 1686, is the oldest unrevoked charter of a city in the United States and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no place in the western world surpassed it in historic interest; and for the last hundred years and more, as the capital of the Empire State, it has been considered, next to Washington, the most influential and important legislative center in the United States. The Scandinavians were the earliest and boldest Arctic navigators and Iceland was their rendezvous. A great part of the Arctic shores that have been visited in modern times was known to the Scandinavians. Columbus visited Iceland fifteen years before he sailed in 1492. S. Cabot went to North America in 1498 by way of Iceland. Scandinavians were seeking fisheries, as were the exploring nations of that period, and many of their acts were those of freebooters. The Portuguese, the Spanish, and the French, the three nations which had followed in the track of Cabot and his English companions and had then arrived at the northern shores of America in search of a passage to Asia, did not abandon the newly explored region.