"Will call me a phantom, brave boys? Here you shall find enough sound flesh to make two men as good as any," he said, slapping his mighty thighs. "That ship is surely none other than the _Half Moon_ herself. Know you not that Hudson and his crew haunt the Kaatskills? O' nights the good ship, which lies sunken at the end of the world, rises, and the ghosts of my master and my mates pass from the phantom deck to their revels within the mountains, and back ere morning to their graves. Peace be to them, brave fellows all! "Twenty-nine years past," Von Donck went on, in his strident voice, which brought Van Vuren near to listen, "we cast away from our new city on the island, and sailed westward to discover the overland passage to China. In a day we had left the land of the Manhattoes far astern, and with a favouring breeze had run under the palisadoes, a wall of rock, young friend, which makes yonder height seem to my eye no greater than an ant-mound. The solitude unmanned all, save Hudson, who walked the deck, swearing that he would reach the sea if he had to explore till Judgment Day. Awful was that silence when our ship entered the shadow of the Highlands, where the falling of a rope upon deck broke into echoes among the hills, and over the river came a noise as of demons laughing. The terror of the New World was upon us, and when we sang our chanties, heaving the lead or drawing in sail, we would fain have stopped our ears, so terrible were the voices which answered us from the shore." "Was there no talk of turning back?" "There was no turning back with Hendrick Hudson. He strode the deck day and night, and at his every order the black rocks pealed and the precipices shrieked, though the weather would be calm and the wind not more than a whisper. We held on our course until a storm seized and flung us upon the shore; and there we made landing, in a place where snakes darted their heads at us, and having built us a fire under the basswoods, cooked food and dried our clothes. "'This mountain country is the place for me,' cried Hudson. 'Here might we spend a free life, my sailors, hunting by day, and at sport by night. Bring out our pipes and liquor from the ship, and in this hollow let us rest until the storm clouds pass.'