“The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere and of such stupendous dimensions that Dame Nature with all her sex’s ingenuity would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone just between the shoulders. His body was oblong and particularly capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordained by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits and very averse to the idle labor of walking. His legs were short but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain; so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a Spitzenberg apple.” After the seizure of the colony by the British in 1664, the island became a perquisite of the governor’s office, a sort of retreat from care for the occupant of that harassed position, and was developed into a smiling garden. At this time it became known as Governor’s Island, the name that has become its official designation on the charts of the present day. The first immigrants to New York under the English were assigned by the council to Nutten Island for detention until the presence or non-presence of contagious disease in their ranks could be proved. These immigrants were about fifty Palatines who had been driven from their home land by the war between Louis XIV and Holland and Austria. Subsequently 10,000 followed these first fifty unfortunate exiles. The island thus became the first quarantine station of the city of New York. During the wars of the Spanish Succession until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the people of the colonies of British North America were in constant dread of attack by the French navy and during this time it was urged continually that Governor’s Island should be changed from a garden to a fortified spot. Notwithstanding this fact the successive executives Slaughter, Fletcher and Cornbury did nothing toward carrying out the desires of their subjects.