40 The Story of The Bronx 



along the coast, their data are too indefinite to give a valid 

 claim. The first Englishman whose reports are reliable is 

 Captain Thomas Dermer, who sailed under instructions from 

 Sir Ferdinando Gorges, afterwards one of the proprietors of 

 New Hampshire, in 1619. One object of his voyage was to 

 return to the island of Monhegan, near the mouth of the 

 Kennebec, an Indian named Squanto, who had been kid- 

 napped with twenty-six companions by Hunt in 1614, and sold 

 as slaves in Malaga, Spain, whence they were released by some 

 benevolent Spanish monks, whose efforts eventually returned 

 most of them to their native land. 



The account of Dermer's voyage in his pinnace along the 

 coast to Virginia is very interesting. He visited Patuxent, 

 on the shore of Massachusetts Bay, where, a year and a half 

 later, December, 1621, the Pilgrims were to land and establish 

 their colony of Plymouth, voyaged along the shores of Cape 

 Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Long Island Sound, where, he 

 says: "I fear I had been embayed." At what was later 

 Throgg's Neck, "a great multitude of Indians let fly at us 

 from the bank ; but it pleased God to make us victors. Near 

 unto this we found a most dangerous cataract amongst 

 small, rocky islands, occasioned by two unequal tides, the one 

 ebbing and flowing two hours before the other"; a very good 

 description of that terror of ancient navigators, Hell Gate. 

 He then visited Manhattan Island and "met with certain 

 Hollanders who had a trade in Hudson's River some years 

 before that time (1619), with whom I had a conference about 

 the state of that coast, and their proceedings with those 

 people, whose answer gave me good content." Dermer was, 

 therefore, the first Englishman to visit the shores of the 

 Borough. 



As early as 1632, the Dutch bought from the Indians the 



