BEGINNING OF NEW YORK.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 13 September 1924, Page 15

BEGINNING OF NEW YORK.

HISTORIC LANDING OF THE WALLOONS. SEEKING FOR FREEDOM. .

Three hundred years ago the Walloons landed in N e\y. .Y.ofk Bay. One must ttirn'over numberless dusty pages of glowing history to read of all the ngii adventure of those lusty, colonists— Efiigehot; Dutch and Walloon—who. sailed in the good, ship New Ne.theflh.nd for a wild and unknown land.

A torn record, a yellow map, a faded print, are all that is left in many cases of those first stirring days. Authentic words, at least it; few. there are, however, traced in a Holland document of March 28, 1624, in old Amsterdam. . These offer proof of the date.,selected’ for the National Huge-not-Walloon; New Netherland tercentenary, which was celebrated last' week. In this document is set forth “conditions on which respective colonists are sent, to New Netherland in the service of the West India. Company to take their abode on the River of Prince Maurice (the Hudson) or at such other places as shall be assigned to theni by the Commander and his Council.”

And about May of that same year New York’s authorised settlers, thirty Walloon families, arrived in the “Hudson River country.” These refugees/ like other discontent - ed spirits of fifty years earlier, had found unbearable a mother country which would not allow them freedom of their particular brand of ireligous worshin. REFORM CHURCH FOUNDED.

As early as 1562 another intrepid band, driven out of Catholic France, had come. to. Parris Island, off', .the coast of South Carolina. But Jean Ribaut’s colony, as it was called, the earliest attempt, at colohisation ■ * iii America, did not long survive. A few white stakes marking the original site is all that is left to-day of the first settlement. .

For years the world had no .knowledge of the exact spot where. Ribairt and his little arihy disembarked.. Not until a vear ago, in fact, when ah old record was unearthed in Havana, .were details about that early colony known.

Investigation has" now' disclosed cedar logs well preserved staking the outlines of a fort or stockade; a few coins, some .broken pptteyy—nvute witnesses of that sixteenth-century attempt, when Ribaut, with s{Xl .followers, set out to plant the standard of France in the New World. Ninety leagues north of the mouth of St. John’s River, Jean Ribaut planted the standard he later died protecting. Like the Pilgrims of. Massachusetts, the Walloons founded their own Chui’ch in the New World, and the Reformed Church became, a centre/ fo- ogees from most of rhe yo in/rick of '.he Old World. Belgian, Hugeriot, Dutch, following in the wake of the good ship Netherland, all worshipped with the early Walloon, and, the ministers or dominies preached in French, as w r ell as in Dutch until 1690. Persecuted in their own country, these searchers after freedom had gathered round Leyden in Holland, making it the centre of their industry and their manufactures. Many _ families settled there,, but others, with their eyes fixed on a wider horizon, petitioned the West India, Company to help man and prevision a ship to take them to that “wild country” from which Henry Hudson had returned some years before with , tales of fabulous treasure. . . , And in May, 1624, the .first boatload of Walloons' dropped anchor in the Hudson River, stepped ashore, and read a prayer. ■ No record has been preserved of these first thirty families. But many of them are the same as the names .enrolled on the list of July 21, 1621, when Jesse de Forrest petitioned, that thev he allowed to settle in Virginia. Names of the original signers of the do Forest petition appear also/ in the earliest New York records —Cnrnille, Campion, Lambert, Le Roy.