Pennsylvania, as first conceived by the Proprietor, was not a colony for one sect only. He offered no particular inducements to Quakers rather than to others. The early emigrants were a veritable olla podrida, and consisted of English Quakers, Scottish and Irish Presbyterians, German Mennonites, and French Huguenots. It was not long, however, before the Quaker element distinctly preponderated, with two obvious results. In the first place one of the strongest tenets of Quakerism was a horror of war and bloodshed, which belief was steadily upheld by the Pennsylvanians and proved in later years most baneful to the colony when the French began their aggressions. The second result was just as good as the first had been bad. The Quakers taught and believed the equality of all men before God; to them there was no distinction between settler and savage, and unlike some of the colonists in the Puritan group, offered the best of treatment to the Red Indians. In the autumn of 1681, William Penn dispatched four commissioners to found the colony that was in later years to become so famous. William Crispen, Nathaniel Allen, John Bezar and William Heage were chosen by the Proprietor to select a site on the Delaware; Crispen, Penn's kinsman, died on the voyage, but the other three faithfully carried out their orders and selected a spot where the river "is most navigable, high dry and healthy; that is where most ships can ride, of deepest draught of water, if possible to load or unload at the bank or key (_sic_) side without boating or lightering of it."[189] Thomas Howe had been appointed surveyor-general and at once proceeded to lay out the city of Philadelphia upon a modification of the plans of Penn and covering a surface area of about 1200 to 1300 acres. William Penn stands alone as the founder of a great city of which he was justly proud, and in 1683 he was able to write, "Philadelphia: the expectation of those who are concerned in this province is at last laid out, to the great content of those here who are anyways interested therein. The situation is a neck of land and lieth between two navigable rivers, Delaware and Sculkill, whereby it hath two fronts upon the water, each a mile, and two from river to river."[190]