Here he lingered a week, in friendly intercourse with the natives of New
Jersey, while a boat's company explored the waters up to Newark Bay. And
now the great question. Shall he turn back, like Verazzano, or ascend
the stream? Hudson was of a race not prone to turn back, by sea or by
land. On the eleventh of September he raised the anchor of the _Half
Moon_, passed through the Narrows, beholding on both sides "as beautiful
a land as one can tread on;" and floated cautiously and slowly up the
noble stream--the first ship that ever rested on its bosom. He passed
the Palisades, nature's dark basaltic Malakoff, forced the iron gateway
of the Highlands, anchored, on the fourteenth, near West Point; swept
onward and upward, the following day, by grassy meadows and tangled
slopes, hereafter to be covered with smiling villages;--by elevated
banks and woody heights, the destined site of towns and cities--of
Newburg, Poughkeepsie, Catskill;--on the evening of the fifteenth
arrived opposite "the mountains which lie from the river side," where
he found "a very loving people and very old men;" and the day following
sailed by the spot hereafter to be honored by his own illustrious name.
One more day wafts him up between Schodac and Castleton; and here he
landed and passed a day with the natives,--greeted with all sorts of
barbarous hospitality,--the land "the finest for cultivation he ever set
foot on," the natives so kind and gentle, that when they found he would
not remain with them over night, and feared that he left them--poor
children of nature!--because he was afraid of their weapons,--he, whose
quarter-deck was heavy with ordnance,--they "broke their arrows in
pieces, and threw them in the fire." On the following morning, with
the early flood-tide, on the 19th of September, 1609, the _Half Moon_
"ran higher up, two leagues above the Shoals," and came to anchor in
deep water, near the site of the present city of Albany. Happy if he
could have closed his gallant career on the banks of the stream which
so justly bears his name, and thus have escaped the sorrowful and
mysterious catastrophe which awaited him the next year!