It was hardly to be supposed that a people so little inclined to acknowledge the rights of England should treat with greater respect those of Holland; and indeed they had the countenance of the home government in encroachments upon the Dutch colonies. In 1642 Boswell, who represented England at the Hague, advised his fellow-countrymen in New England to "put forward their plantations and crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of those places where they have occupied." The New Englanders were not slow to adopt this aggressive policy. Settlements were pushed out westward from New Haven on the mainland, and southward on Long Island. Peter Stuyvesant, then governor of New Netherland, bitterly complained of these encroachments,--for the Dutch then claimed everything between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers,--and appealed to the federal commissioners to put a stop to them; but the answer came that the Dutch were selling arms and ammunition to the Indians, that their conduct was not conducive to peace, that they harbored criminals from the English colonies, and that the United Colonies proposed to "vindicate the English rights by all suitable and just means." Stuyvesant, who was a hot-headed man, would have liked to go to war with the New Englanders, but was informed by the Dutch West India Company that war "cannot in any event be to our advantage: the New England people are too powerful for us." The matter was finally (1651) left to arbitrators, who settled a provisional boundary line which "on the mainland was not to come within ten miles of the Hudson River," and which gave to Connecticut the greater part of Long Island. Sidenote: Weakness of the confederation in the Dutch War. War broke out between England and Holland in 1652, and the Connecticut people were anxious to attack New Netherland, which had not ceased its depredations on the outlying settlements. All of the federal commissioners except those from Massachusetts voted to go to war; there was a stormy session of the federal court, in which Massachusetts endeavored in vain to override the other colonies. Connecticut and New Haven applied to Cromwell for assistance. He sent over a fleet to Boston, with injunctions to Massachusetts to cease her opposition. The General Court stoutly refused to raise troops for the enterprise, although it gave to the agents of Cromwell the privilege of enlisting five hundred volunteers in the colony if they could. But while arrangements were in progress for an attack by eight hundred men on New Amsterdam, news came that England and Holland had proclaimed peace (April 5, 1654), and warlike preparations in America ceased. Sidenote: Massachusetts in collision with the commissioners.