II.

IMMIGRANTS FROM ABROAD.

"When a score of nations, each with its own dialect, unite to make up our population, some effect must be produced on our language; some peculiar threads will be found after a while interwoven with the national web."

THE DUTCHMAN.

"The name of Hell Gate, which it continues to bear to the present day.” W. Irving.

ON September 9th, 1609, a bold English mariner in the service of the Dutch East India Company sailed his little shallop HalfMoon, of eighty tons, into the beautiful bay of New York, and three days later entered the great river that here flows into the ocean. The latter took its name from the discoverer, Henry Hudson, and the land, claimed by Holland, was called New Netherlands. A few years later the island of Manhattan was purchased of the Indians for the value of twenty-four dollars, and the little town of New Amsterdam began to flourish, and became the chief town of a prosperous colony. But the English claimed the whole as part of Virginia, which belonged to them by right of a prior discovery by Cabot, and in 1664, already, there was an end of Dutch supremacy in New Netherlands, which fell into the hands of their formidable neighbors. New Amsterdam became New York with a facility which justifies the Fenian prophecy that it will soon be New Ireland, and the good Dutch burghers in the town and along the banks of the river up to Albany had to learn the language of their new masters.

The traces which their own idiom has left on the face of the country are here, as with the Indians, by far more important and permanent than the elements which it has contributed to our every-day language. Hills and mountains, rivers and lakes still bear their old Dutch names, though often sadly disfigured."

There are Staten Island, Harlem River, the towns of Poughkeepsie, Flushing, Stuyvesant, and Blauvelt; in the city of New York streets called Cortlandt, Roosevelt, or Nassau; outside of the city, Coenties Slip and Fort Gansevoort; and farther eastward

Spuyten Duyvel, Cape May (Mey) and Block (Blok) ·Island—-almost all of them unaltered and forcibly recalling to us the days of the old Dutch dominion. But that crowded thoroughfare of New York, the Bowery, which for years reproduced all the fierce violence and reckless crime of ancient Alsatia, has little to remind us of the pleasant Bouvery, the garden-bower of old Dutch governors, who here enjoyed their fragrant floyers and luscious fruits in quiet rural retreats; nor would the ancient village of Breuckelen, seventeen miles from Amsterdam, which in May, 1676, gave its name to a small settlement within sight of the Bowery, recognize its godchild in the gigantic city of Brooklyn. The noble bay near by, in which the Navy Yard has long been situated, was once Waale Boght, a name hardly to be looked for under the thoroughly Anglicized Wallabout. The generic term Kill, a small stream or creek, has on the other hand remained faithful to many a small and large water of the North, from the lofty Kaatskill mountains, so-called from a picturesque brook arising in their bosom, to the broad Schuylkill (Hidden Creek) in the adjoining State. The Fishkill does still honor to its name, and the Kill Van Kull denotes the channel between Staten Island and Bergen, though it is, for brevity's sake, more commonly called the Kills simply. A small fish of the genus Fundulus, found only in these waters and used as a bait, is appropriately called Killy Fish.

This term Kill is one of a class of words which serve to mark the few traces of genuine provincialism existing in the United States; for the Kill of New York is a brcok in New England, a run in Virginia, and alas! a crick, or creek, almost everywhere else.

The term gat also, meaning a hole, a pot, or a passage at sea, has survived in the names of many maritime localities. Barnes' Gate, as the English would have called it, thus continues to be Barnegat, but Helle-Gat, concise and rather too suggestive, has been softened and made proper by being changed into Hurlgate. W. Irving denounces the alteration thus: "Certain mealy-mouthed men of squeamish consciences, who are loath to give the Devil his due, have softened the above characteristic into Hurlgate, forsooth! The name of this strait, as given by our author, is supported by the map in Vander Donck's history, published in 1656by Ogilvie's History of America, 1671-as also by a journal still