248 
BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
Not a single salmon was captured at any time while the ship was in the river. 
The Halfmoon entered the mouth of the river September 3 and anchored inside Sandy 
Hook, and the next day, the 4th, the fishing was done. The ship ascended to the 
present site of the city of Hudson, and a boat’s crew was sent up the stream to about 
where Waterford now stands, or a little north of the present city of Albany. The ship 
and its master returned and set sail for Europe on the 23d of September, so that all 
told Hudson was in the river twenty days in the month of September. Had there 
been salmon in the river he must have seen them between Sandy Hook and Water- 
ford, and they would not have been in that portion of the river at that time, as their 
spawning habits would have taken them 50 miles farther up the river than Waterford, 
to Bakers Falls, to which point shad ran until stopped by the building of the Troy dam 
in 1825. 
In some of the Canadian rivers there is a late run of salmon, the fish running as 
late as October, but this was not true of the Connecticut or of other New England 
salmon streams, nor has it proven true of the Hudson since it was stocked by artificial 
means. Hudson being an Englishman, and possibly more or less familiar with salmon 
in the rivers of his own country, and Juet being born at Limehouse, on the river 
Thames, where salmon were then common, it is perhaps fair to assume that seeing 
schools of large fish of some sort, one or the other associated them with the fish of 
his home waters and called them salmon in the log. 
In a description of New Netherland, printed in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1671, 
occurs this sentence: “The streams and lakes, rich with fishes, furnish sturgeon, 
salmon, carp, bass, pike, roach, bleak, all sorts of eel, sunfish which resemble the 
bullhead in taste, and codfish which are caught near waterfalls.” It will be observed 
that European common names are applied to the fishes, and doubtless the writer was 
familiar with the fishes of the old country and applied their names to the fishes in the 
new country that to him resembled those of the old. To this day codfish are not 
caught near waterfalls, and it is more than doubtful if salmon existed in the lakes and 
streams any more than bleak and roach. 
New Netherland is bounded “ on the south by Virginia, northeast by New England, 
north washed by the river Canada, and on the coast by the ocean.” Besides codfish 
at the waterfalls and salmon in the streams and lakes, the writer found that “New 
Netherland hath, moreover, a wonderful little bird scarcely an inch long, quite bril- 
liant in plumage, and sucking flowers like the bee; it is so delicate that a dash of 
water instantly kills it. When dried it is preserved as a curiosity.” The humming- 
bird is a little larger now and more hardy, but the description is perhaps as accurate 
as the statement that codfish are taken at waterfalls and salmon in lakes within the 
boundaries as given of New Netherland. 
In 1680 Jasper Danker and Peter Sluyter, members of the society of Labadists 
in Holland, visited this country, and they record of the Mohawk, a tributary of the 
Hudson: “ There are no fish in it, except trout, sunfish and other kinds peculiar to 
rivers, because the Cahoos stop the ascent of others.” They dined in state “with 
Madam Rensselaer, at Albany, and had to eat exceedingly good pike, perch and other 
fish,” but no salmon. 
New York had salmon streams on the north, flowing into the St. Lawrence, Lake 
Champlain, and Lake Ontario, for I have found laws for their protection enacted in 
L801 and later, and mentioning the Oswego, Grass, Racket, St. Regis rivers, and Fish 
