He, too, looked over the Indian village above the river, and he, too, found it good.  He made it the Company’s Farm Number 3, but he did not work it for the company.  Not he!  He worked it for Wouter Van Twiller, as he worked everything else.  He eliminated the Indians by degrees, whether by strategy or force history does not say.  R.R.  Wilson says it was “rum and warfare.”  Anyway, they departed to parts unknown and Van Twiller built a farm and started an immense tobacco plantation.  As the tobacco grew and flourished the place became known by the Dutch as the Bossen Bouwerie—­the farm in the woods.  It was one of the very earliest white settlements on the whole island.  R.R.  Wilson says, “Rum and warfare had before this made an end of the Indian village of the first days.  Its Dutch successor, however, grew from year to year.”

[Illustration:  JEFFERSON MARKET.  The old clock that has told the hours of justice for Greenwich Village during many years.]

The names of these first Dutch residents of the Bossen Bouwerie—­or Sappocanican as it was still occasionally called—­are not known, but it is certain that there were a number of them.  In the epoch of Peter Stuyvesant someone mentioned the houses at “Sappokanigan,” and in 1679, after the British had arrived, a descriptive little entry was made in one of those delightfully detailed journals of an older and more precise generation than ours.  The diary was the one kept by the Labadist missionaries—­Dankers and Sluyter—­and was only recently unearthed by Henry Murphy at The Hague.  It runs as follows: 

“We crossed over the island, which takes about three-quarters of an hour to do, and came to the North River, which we followed a little within the woods to Sapokanikee.  Gerrit having a sister and friends, we rested ourselves and drank some good beer, which refreshed us.  We continued along the shore to the city, where we arrived at an early hour in the evening, very much fatigued, having walked this day about forty miles.  I must add, in passing through this island we sometimes encountered such a sweet smell in the air that we stood still; because we did not know what it was we were meeting.”

It is odd that the Dutch names in Greenwich have died out as much as they have.  There is something in Holland blood which has a way of persisting.  They—­the old Manhattan Dutch anyway—­had a certain stubborn individuality of their own, which refused to give way or compromise.  I have always felt that the way the Dutch ladies used to drink their tea was a most illuminating sidelight upon their racial characteristics.  They served the dish of tea and the sugar separately—­the latter in a large and awkward hunk from which they crunched out bites as they needed them.  Now I take it that there was no particular reason for this inconvenient and labourious method, except that it was their way.  They were used to doing things in an original and an unyielding fashion.  I believe a real old-world Mevrouw would have looked as coldly askance upon the innovation of putting the sugar in the tea, as she looked at the pernicious ingress of the devil-endowed Church of England.