For several years after Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch, discovered the harbor of New York and the great river which took his name, in the year 1609, there is uncertainty and doubt as to the nature of the settlement. For a time it seems to have been merely a trading post, occupied only by those in the employment of the company that owned it, and without many of the elements requisite to make up a permanent colony. At Fort Orange (Albany) and at Esopus (Kingston), the conditions were the same as at New Amsterdam, as New York was then named. The first party of immigrants that seemed to have the elements of permanent colonization about it arrived in 1625, and consisted of six families and several single men, making in all forty-five persons, with furniture, utensils, etc., and one hundred and three head of cattle. Doubtless some of these “cattle” were horses, and the general instead of the specific term was used in enumerating them. Very little is known of the early horse history of the New Netherlands, as the whole region was then named; there can be no doubt, however, that they increased and multiplied. Sometime, probably about 1643, a cargo or two of horses were brought up from Curaçoa and Azuba, in the Dutch West Indies, but the climatic change was too great for them, and they did not do well, being specially subject to diseases from which the Dutch horses seemed to have complete immunity. In 1647, Isaac Allerton, as agent, was authorized to sell twenty or twenty-five of these horses to Virginia, and whether the authorities were able thus to get clear of a bad investment does not appear from the existing records. In a report to the home company, made in 1650, I find the following prices were given at that time: A young mare with second foal, one hundred and fifty florins; stallion, four or five years old, one hundred and thirty florins; milch cow, one hundred florins. The same report makes a comparison by giving the prices of New England horses, as follows: A good mare one hundred to one hundred and twenty florins; stallion, one hundred florins; milch cow, sixty to seventy florins. Neither horses nor cows were then allowed to be shipped out of the province without permission of the council. Adrien Van der Donck wrote a description of New Netherlands which was published 1656, in which he speaks of the horse stock as follows: “The horses are of the proper breed for husbandry, having been brought from Utrecht for that purpose; and this stock has not diminished in size or quality. There are also horses of the English breed which are lighter, not so good for agricultural use, but fit for the saddle. These do not cost as much as the Netherlands breed and are easily obtained.”