The celebration, then, was arranged on a scale more elaborate than anything theretofore undertaken by an American municipality, and in this the Commission was seconded by the wonderful natural setting of the city, fronting the expanse of the harbor and with broad rivers on either side of the long tongue of land—Manhattan—that gently uplifts its serried lines of stately homes and massive buildings, from South to North. One of these rivers, the Hudson, a stream noble in itself and the scene of the great suggestive feats of Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton, invited special attention. It was, therefore, early decided that New York’s tribute to these two great men and grand memories should share its functions between land and water. Accordingly while a section of the Commission planned land decorations, parades, assemblies, illuminations and banquets to fill an entire week, the officers busied themselves first with the Federal government at Washington to invite the naval powers of the world to send warships wreathed in flowers, as it were, and asking for a mighty squadron of our own ocean thunderers to greet the armored Tritons from oversea. Then Holland, in whose service Henry Hudson sailed the blue waters, offered a gift of unique kind, namely a duplicate of the little ship, Half Moon, in which Hudson traversed the Atlantic and ascended the river that has rightly come to bear his name. It was not strange, then, that the Commission should resolve to build a replica of that other historic craft, the Clermont, in which Fulton first went up the same river under steam.