HISTORY OF BROOKLYN. 221

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DOMESTIC HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE, FROM THE SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTRY TO THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

THE unsettled and wandering life led by the earliest Dutch traders in the New Netherlands, had a natural tendency to assimilate their habits and customs to those of the untutored savages with whom they associated. Freed from the restraints of civilization, they cohabited with the native girls, and every change of temporary location which occurred in the course of their traffic, afforded them the opportunity of selecting now companions, while former ties were carelessly sundered. The children, in these cases, remaining with their mothers, were left to be brought up amid the influences of savage life. Under such circumstances, fostered alike by the recklessness of the white, and the loose morality of the Indian, it can scarcely be a matter of surprise that the life of the former presented little or no trace of the domestic civilization which should have been a distinguishing mark between him and his red neighbor.

The domestic history of the country, however, commenced with the arrival of the thirty families brought over in the good ship “New Netherland,” in the year 1623. Rapidly, under the repeated blows of the stalwart woodsman’s axe, the forests bowed their lofty heads, and the sun, for the first time in many centuries, peeped in here and there upon the little “clearings” where the settler had commenced to raise his first scanty crop of maize or vegetables. Fences, too, divided men's possessions from their neighbors', or restrained the cattle (imported from Europe) from extensive wanderings into the neighboring woods after food, as had been their wont during the first busy days which had succeeded the disembarkation. Houses, or at least temporary shelter, were also furnished—and the foot of civilization was, at length, firmly planted on these hitherto silent shores.