Carrying out this policy, the city decided to establish a colony of its own in New Netherland, to be composed mainly of these Waldenses. The municipal authorities purchased of the West India Company, for seven hundred guilders, all the land on the west side of South river, from Christina kill to Bombay Hook. This gave a river front of about forty miles, running back indefinitely into the interior. This region was named New Amstel. The colonists were offered a free passage, ample farms on the river, and provisions and clothing for one year. The city also agreed to send out "a proper person for a schoolmaster, who shall also read the holy Scriptures in public and set the Psalms." A church was to be organized so soon as there were two hundred inhabitants in the colony. [Illustration] The Company wrote to Stuyvesant saying, "The confidence we feel about the success and increase of this new colony of which we hope to see some prominent features next spring, when to all appearance, large numbers of the exiled Waldenses will flock thither, as to an asylum, induces us to send you orders to endeavor to purchase of the Indians, before it can be accomplished by any other nation, all that tract of land situated between the South river and the Hook of the North river, to provide establishments for these emigrants." On Christmas day of 1656, three vessels containing one hundred and sixty emigrants, sailed from the Texel. A wintry storm soon separated them. The principal ship, the Prince Maurice, which had the largest number of passengers, after a long voyage, was wrecked on the South coast of Long island, near Fire island inlet, in the neighborhood of the present town of Islip. It was midnight when the ship struck. As soon as it was light the passengers and crew succeeded in reaching the shore in their boats through the breakers and through vast masses of floating ice. They found upon the shore a bleak, barren, treeless waste, "without weeds, grass or timber of any sort to make a fire." It was bitter cold. A fierce wind swept the ocean and the land, and the sea ran so high that it was expected every moment the ship would go to pieces. These poor emigrants thus suddenly huddled upon the icy land, without food and without shelter, were in imminent peril of perishing from cold and starvation. Their sufferings were so terrible that they were rejoiced to see some Indians approaching over the wide plains, though they knew not whether the savages would prove hostile or friendly. But the Indians came like brothers, aided them in every way, and dispatched two swift runners across the island to inform Governor Stuyvesant of the calamity. Some sails were brought on shore, with which a temporary shelter from the piercing blast was constructed, and enough food was secured to save from absolute starvation.