Some, he said, believed these mischievous powers of the air to be evil
spirits conjured up by the Indian wizards, in the early times of the
province, to revenge themselves on the strangers who had dispossessed
them of their country. They even attributed to their incantations the
misadventure which befell the renowned Hendrick Hudson, when he sailed
so gallantly up this river in quest of a north-west passage, and, as
he thought, run his ship aground; which they affirm was nothing more
nor less than a spell of these same wizards, to prevent his getting to
China in this direction.
The greater part, however, Heer Antony observed, accounted for all the
extraordinary circumstances attending this river, and the perplexities
of the skippers which navigated it, by the old legend of the
Storm-ship, which haunted Point-no-point. On finding Dolph to be
utterly ignorant of this tradition, the Heer stared at him for a
moment with surprise, and wondered where he had passed his life, to be
uninformed on so important a point of history. To pass away the
remainder of the evening, therefore, he undertook the tale, as far as
his memory would serve, in the very words in which it had been written
out by Mynheer Selyne, an early poet of the New-Nederlandts.
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