The wants of the race had fairly outgrown the capacities of the East. An accession of new ideas was demanded; human liberty could not be realized amid the crushing despotisms of the Old World, and benevolence, the divinest grace of the soul, languished for want of a broader theatre on which to work out and exhibit its sublime developments. Divine Providence opened the gates to this western world. Varrazzani, a Florentine in the employ of the French Government in the sixteenth century (1525), is believed to have been the first white man who sailed through the Narrows, and looked upon the placid waters of the New York bay and its green islands. In 1609 Henry Hudson, an intrepid English navigator in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, sailed from Europe in search of a northwest passage to the East Indies. The vessel in which he sailed was a yacht, called the "Half Moon," of about eighty tons burthen, and would be considered a very diminutive thing for an explorer in our day, when canal boats carry three hundred and fifty tons. His crew consisted of fifteen or twenty sailors, partly of Dutch and partly of English birth. He traversed the American coast from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake bay, and then turned again northward to explore more carefully the country thus passed. On the 2d of September he rounded Sandy Hook, and on the 4th he anchored near the Jersey shore in the south bay. As the waters swarmed with fish, a boat was lowered to catch some, and the crew is believed to have landed on the foam-fringed beach of Coney Island, and to have been the first white men who ever set foot on the soil of the Empire State.

It is not wonderful that Hudson forgot his mission, and became enchanted with the gorgeous scenery everywhere spread out before him. Majestic forests, that had slumbered on through the solitudes of the ages, waved on the shores; the little hills were crowned with grass and a variety of fragrant flowers; the waters swarmed with finny tribes, while birds of strange plumage and song flitted through the air. A hither-to unknown race, with strange manners and showy trappings, came to his ship in their canoes with corn and other vegetables, for which they received from the generous commodore axes and shoes, which they hung about their necks for ornaments.