The New-Haveners were traders; they believed more in commerce than in husbandry, and so they “went down to the sea in ships.” But in the wilderness traffic did not yield the dividends which it gave on ’change in London, or on the Rialtos of the world; so that in half a decade their stock was spent, and they so nearly touched bottom that they gladly turned for help to despised agriculture,[920] the surest base for new states to build on. For some months New Haven lacked a charter, and so floated rudderless. But eventually the settlers formed themselves into a body politic by mutual consent, and signed a kind of constitution in a barn;[921] and this is the first political paper that was ever cradled in a manger. It was generally _secundum usum Massachusettensem_,[922] to follow Cotton Mather’s barbarous Latin; or, in plain English, after the model of the Bay State theocracy. “Thus it was,” exclaims a jubilant old chronicler, “that Jesus Christ was worshipped in churches of an evangelical character in the outermost wilderness; and from thence, if the inquirer were inclined to make a sally across the channel to Long Island, he might have seen the congregations of our God taking root in those wild wastes.”[923] The New Haven and Connecticut colonists were for many years on the verge of a quarrel with the Dutch at New Amsterdam, who felt that in this territorial race they had been outstripped and outwitted, and were consequently lifted out of their wonted phlegm by irritation. The “Yankee” and the Dutchman carried on a lusty war of words about their boundary lines, and for this good reason, there were none. Irving tells us that the Dutch disliked the smell of onions; and that the keen Yankee, knowing this, planted his rows each year a little farther west, and before this invasion of onions the sad Dutchman always retired with tearful eyes, leaving the polluted soil to the onion planters. But bright as seemed the portents, the colonists soon found themselves environed by danger—girdled by a wall of fire. The hostile Dutchman scowled in the west. The untrodden wilderness stretched away on the north. Scores of weary, pathless miles separated them from their brothers on the Atlantic coast. The vengeful Pequods were panting for war in the southeast. They had found, not peace, but a sword; their painful enterprise seemed but “a lure to draw victims within the reach of the tomahawk.” Premonitory symptoms gave warning that danger lurked in the covert beside every log-house beyond the mountains. Soon the woods were ambuscaded, “and the darkness of midnight began to glitter with the blaze of the frontier cabins.” Then shrieked the ghastly Pequod, smeared in his horrid paint. “Fathers found the blood of their sons fattening the wasted cornfields; mothers were frozen by the war-whoop which disturbed the peaceful slumber of the cradle.” CHAPTER XXIX. ON THE WAR-TRAIL.