Immediately on receiving the patent Penn despatched his cousin, Colonel Markham, with three ships to take possession of the new province in his name, to arrange with Lord Baltimore as to the doubtful boundary lines on the south, and above all to make friends with the Indians by concluding a formal treaty with them for the purchase of such lands as they laid claim to. The kindliness of his nature made it impossible for him to treat the unfortunate natives as other Europeans had done, driving them ruthlessly from their own hunting grounds wherever the land was worth taking possession of and forcing them as far as possible into slavery. The Spanish explorers especially, in their insatiable thirst for gold, had even robbed them of all the precious metals and pearls they had and endeavored by the most shameful cruelty to extort from them knowledge of the location where they found the gold of which their ornaments were made. If they offered the slightest resistance or took up arms to defend themselves or regain their liberty, they were hunted like wild beasts by bloodhounds trained for that purpose, or fell in heaps before the murderous bullets against which their arrows were of no avail. Even the Puritan settlers of New England, who should have practised the Christian virtues of justice and humanity, were guilty of many acts of cruelty and treachery toward the red men, with whom they were perpetually at warfare in consequence. Penn hoped, by the use of gentler methods, to win the confidence of the Indians, who must have already discovered from the New Jersey settlers that all white men were by no means like those with whom they had first come in contact. It was necessary, in fact, if his colony were to enjoy permanent peace and security, and in spite of the ridicule which such humane ideas was likely to evoke, Markham was charged with the strictest instructions in this regard. He was a bold and determined man, devoted to his kinsman Penn, the wisdom and purity of whose ideas he fully appreciated in spite of his soldierly training. On his arrival in Pennsylvania he lost no time in concluding a treaty with the chiefs or sachems of the principal tribes, conveying to Penn for a fixed sum all lands claimed by them with the solemn assurance in his name that no settler should ever molest or injure them. The next two ships which came over from England brought three agents authorized to make further treaties of peace and friendship, thus strengthening the work begun by Markham, and also an address written by Penn himself to be read to the Indians, expressing it as his earnest wish “by their favor and consent, so to govern the land that they might always live together as friends and allies.”