It took a final annihilating blow, no less terrible than the recent English offensive against the Pequots, to end the war. And it was Captain John Underhill who delivered it with the same dreadful efficiency he had demonstrated during the Pequot campaign. Underhill, now a Boston “heretic” living under the jurisdiction of the West India Company, led 150 Dutch soldiers into the mountainous region north of Stamford where the remnant of the Indian league against the New Netherlanders had a strongly palisaded town. When it was all over 700 Indian corpses darkened the snow. The Dutch lost 15 men. Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s patroonship far up the Hudson was spared the tomahawk during these Indian troubles. There, where the shrewd Amsterdam jeweler had purchased lands about Fort Orange embracing most of two present-day New York counties, the neighboring Mohawk allies of the Dutch provided complete protection from Algonquin depredations. While all was pandemonium on the lower river, both agriculture and trade flourished at Rensselaerwyck. Nowhere in New Netherland, in fact, was there a livelier trade in pelts then or at any other time than at Van Rensselaer’s manor. And nowhere was this trade more unlicensed. In 1644 it was estimated that between three and four thousand furs had been carried off the manor illegally during a twelve month period. That is, illegally carried off in the eyes of the patroon, although he himself was shipping out pelts illegally as far as the authorities at Manhattan were concerned. Van Rensselaer, however, recognized no jurisdiction from that quarter. He asserted that he held his patroonship directly from the States General and that he would buy and ship furs as he pleased without regard to any laws or taxes proclaimed by the West India Company’s representatives at New Amsterdam. And so he did. He even built a fort of his own on a Hudson River island where he emphasized the independence of his feudal domain by enforcing the medieval principle of “staple right.” Every passing vessel, except those of the Dutch West India Company, must pay duty or deposit its cargo of pelts ashore where the patroon might buy these “staples” on his own terms. The skippers must strike their colors too, in homage to the lord of Rensselaerwyck.