In a similar manner, and with the example of my worthy ancestor full before my eyes, have I proceeded in writing this most authentic history. The honest Rotterdammers no doubt thought my great-grandfather was doing nothing at all to the purpose, while he was making such a world of prefatory bustle about the building of his church—and many of the ingenious inhabitants of this fair city will unquestionably suppose that all the preliminary chapters, with the discovery, population, and final settlement of America, were totally irrelevant and superfluous,—and that the main business, the history of New York, is not a jot more advanced than if I had never taken up my pen. Never were wise people more mistaken in their conjectures: in consequence of going to work slowly and deliberately, the church came out of my grandfather’s hands one of the most sumptuous, goodly, and glorious edifices in the known world,—excepting that, like our magnificent Capitol at Washington, it was begun on so grand a scale that the good folks could not afford to finish more than the wing of it. So, likewise, I trust, if ever I am able to finish this work on the plan I have commenced (of which, in simple truth, I sometimes have my doubts) it will be found that I have pursued the latest rules of my art, as exemplified in the writings of all the great American historians, and wrought a very large history out of a small subject,—which, nowadays, is considered one of the great triumphs of historic skill. To proceed, then, with the thread of my story. In the ever-memorable year of our Lord 1609, on a Saturday morning, the five-and-twentieth day of March, old style, did that “worthy and irrecoverable discoverer (as he has justly been called), Master Henry Hudson,” set sail from Holland in a stout vessel called the _Half-Moon_, being employed by the Dutch East India Company, to seek a north-west passage to China. Henry (or, as the Dutch historians call him, Hendrick) Hudson was a seafaring man of renown, who had learned to smoke tobacco under Sir Walter Raleigh, and is said to have been the first to introduce it into Holland, which gained him much popularity in that country, and caused him to find great favor in the eyes of their High Mightinesses, the Lords States-General, and also of the honorable West India Company. He was a short, square, brawny old gentleman, with a double chin, a mastiff mouth, and a broad copper nose, which was supposed in those days to have acquired its fiery hue from the constant neighborhood of his tobacco-pipe. He wore a true Andrea Ferrara, tucked in a leathern belt, and a commodore’s cocked hat on one side of his head. He was remarkable for always jerking up his breeches when he gave out his orders, and his voice sounded not unlike the prattling of a tin trumpet,—owing to the number of hard northwesters which he had swallowed in the course of his seafaring.