This perilous enterprise was to be conducted by Oloffe himself, who chose as lieutenants or coadjutors Mynheers Jacobus Van Zandt, Abraham Hardenbroeck, and Winant Ten Broeck--three indubitably great men, but of whose history, although I have made diligent inquiry, I can learn but little previous to their leaving Holland. Had I the benefit of mythology and classic fable, I should have furnished the first of the trio with a pedigree equal to that of the proudest hero of antiquity. His name, Van Zandt--that is to say, _from the sand_, or, in common parlance, from the dirt--gave reason to suppose that, like Triptolemus, the Cyclops, and the Titans, he had sprung from Dame Terra, or the earth! This supposition is strongly corroborated by his size, for it is well known that all the progeny of mother earth were of a gigantic stature; and Van Zandt, we are told, was a tall, raw-boned man, above six feet high, with an astonishingly hard head. Of the second of the trio but faint accounts have reached to this time, which mention that he was a sturdy, obstinate, worrying, bustling little man, and, from being usually equipped in an old pair of buckskins, was familiarly dubbed Hardenbroeck; that is to say, Tough Breeches. Ten Broeck completed this junto of adventurers. It is a singular but ludicrous fact--which, were I not scrupulous in recording the whole truth, I should almost be tempted to pass over in silence as incompatible with the gravity and dignity of history--that this worthy gentleman should likewise have been nicknamed from what in modern times is considered the most ignoble part of the dress; but in truth the small-clothes seem to have been a very dignified garment in the eyes of our venerated ancestors. The name of Ten Broeck, or, as it was sometimes spelled, Tin Broeck, has been indifferently translated into Ten Breeches and Tin Breeches. Certain elegant and ingenious writers on the subject declare in favor of _Tin_, or rather _Thin_, Breeches; whence they infer that the original bearer of it was a poor but merry rogue, whose galligaskins were none of the soundest, and who, peradventure, may have been the author of that truly philosophical stanza: "Then why should we quarrel for riches, Or any such glittering toys? A light heart and _thin pair of breeches_ Will go through the world, my brave boys!" The more accurate commentators, however, declare in favor of the other reading, and affirm that the worthy in question was a burly, bulbous man, who, in sheer ostentation of his venerable progenitors, was the first to introduce into the settlement the ancient Dutch fashion of ten pair of breeches. Such was the trio of coadjutors chosen by Oloffe the Dreamer, to accompany him in this voyage into unknown realms; as to the names of his crews, they have not been handed down by history.