The boundaries set up by the Treaty of Hartford were violated however. By 1655 the English had pushed across the line at Greenwich, well into present-day Westchester County. By 1659 Massachusetts itself was ready to repudiate the treaty. In that year, it appears, the Hollanders made the mistake of objecting too vigorously to being divested of the bulk of their beaver trade by Boston merchants. The Bay Colony, claiming unlimited western boundaries, had granted a tract in the Hudson valley to merchants interested in establishing a fur trading post close by Fort Orange itself. Then, as if this was not offensive enough to the New Netherlanders, the Boston men boldly requested free use of the Hudson River waterway to reach their new property. The overland route was too difficult, they explained. When Peter Stuyvesant angrily refused this request the Boston traders persisted, bringing their case before the Commissioners of the United Colonies. Whereupon those gentlemen announced airily that “The agreement at Hartford that the English should not come within ten miles of Hudson’s River, doth not prejudice the rights of the Massachusetts in the upland country, nor give any rights to the Dutch there!” Only the excitement generated by the Restoration in England quelled the ensuing controversy long enough to forestall a local conflict. This same year, only four years after the Dutch conquest of New Sweden, English pressure commenced from the south. There, Governor Fendall of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland colony was invading the Delaware valley with men and ultimatums. He demanded that “the pretended Governor of a people seated in Delaware Bay, within his Lordship’s Province ... depart forth!” Otherwise, he declaimed, that part of his lordship’s province “would be reduced to its due obedience under him.” Stuyvesant, of course, refuted the Maryland claim. He pointed out that Lord Baltimore’s patent gave him rights only to lands hitherto uncultivated by Christians. But the English pressure in that quarter, once commenced, was maintained with the same stubborn persistence as that on the New England front. The British were closing their ranks on the eastern seaboard of America. The squeeze was on New Netherland. The Dutch governor fought desperately for the life of his colony. He had been plagued with Indian uprisings in the valley of the Hudson, pirates in Long Island Sound and English plotters in New Amsterdam itself. Now the very life’s breath of his colony was being squeezed out, for, in addition to the loss of Indian trade to the trespassing Englishmen, Peter Stuyvesant also had to contend with the stifling effects of the new British Navigation Acts. These laws had not been relaxed in any degree since Cromwell’s death. On the contrary, they had been tightened upon the restoration of the crown.