HISTORY OF BROOKLYN. 43

enforced; and the expenses of the province, which had previously been borne exclusively by the Amsterdam Chamber, were now assumed by all the chambers of the company in common.

With the spring of 1645 came, at last, a welcome termination to the Indian war, and on the 30th of August, a general treaty of peace was ratified with all the tribes at Fort Amsterdam. But “the sting of war” remained. At Manhattan and its vicinity, scarcely one hundred men, besides traders, could be found. The church, commenced in 1642, was still unfinished. The money contributed for the erection of a common school-house had “all found its way out;” and even the poor-fund of the deaconry had been sequestered and applied to the purposes of the war. Beyond Manhattan, almost every settlement on the west side of the North River, south of the Highlands, was destroyed. The western end of Long Island was almost depopulated, and Westchester was desolated. The posts on the South River and the Rensselaerwyck Colony alone had escaped the horrors of war.

In the work of regeneration and reconstruction which was now to be commenced, Kieft’s attention was first directed to securing the Indian title to lands in the vicinity of Manhattan, which had not yet become the property of the company. On the 10th of September, 1645, a tract of land on Long Island, on the bay of the North River, between Coney Island and Gowanus, and forming the present town of New Utrecht, was purchased from its native proprietors for the West India Company, thus completing their title to most of the land within the present counties of Kings and Queens. During the next month, a tract of sixteen thousand acres to the westward of Maspeth, was patented by the director to English emigrants who established there the town of Vlissingen, now known as Flushing. And Maspeth itself was soon repeopled by its former occupants, who had been driven from their homes by the desolation of war. Two months later (December, 1645), Lady Moody and her associates, who had so bravely maintained their position during these long and harassing years, received from Director Kieft a patent for their settlement on Long Island, adjoining Coney Island, now forming the town of “Gravesend.”

Meanwhile, disagreements which arose among the several