The natives met them in canoes with oysters the size of trays. (Later he was murdered by hostile Indians, but that's another story.) In 1624 the Dutch established an outpost at the southeastern tip of the island. Adriaen van der Donck, an early settler, described a place of streams and waterfalls and running brooks; copious wild turkeys that slept in the trees; a multitude of trout, striped bass, shellfish, and weakfish; natives "all properly formed and wellproportioned," who, despite their "particular aversion" to "heavy slavish labor," managed to grow maize, squash, and watermelon; an air "so dry, sweet and healthy that we need not wish that it were otherwise"; and, most important of all, beavers. New York was founded on animal skins and oysters. The Dutch West India Company, granted a monopoly by the Netherlands government, ran New Amsterdam as a trading post, pure and simple. Almost immediately it attracted a polyglot, continental population, with forty languages spoken, and blacks, Jews, Portuguese, and Samoans intermingling. The Dutch found it a somewhat disappointing investment-less profitable, from their perspective, than Cura£ao. When the British threatened in 1664, pointing cannons at Wall Street, the Dutch surrendered without a fight. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, had wanted to defend it, but cooler, more mercantile heads prevailed. The next day they were doing business with the enemy. Once upon a time, New York and New Jersey were part of the same British colony; then the Duke of York severed them-to pay off a gambling debt, according to legend. (Since then, politicians in Trenton and Albany have each tried to pretend that the Hudson River's problems affected only their own state lines.) Both the Dutch and the British did not hesitate to tinker with Manhattan's shoreline, extending the waterfront streets outward through landfill, and giving love handles to its arrowhead profile at the island's southern tip. Swamps were filled in, piers built along the East River. Very quickly the geographical advantages of New York's port were grasped: that it had a deep channel, sheltered from the ocean's rages; that it had a choice of two river routes leading to the sea (along either shore of Long Island); that it had a fairly mild climate and was rarely icechoked in winter, compared with the more northern Boston or Halifax; that it had potentially good access to the western territories. In spite of this superiority to other American ports, it started slowly: in 1770 it ranked fourth, behind Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, in total tonnage. Yet its strategic importance seemed so manifest even then that, during the American Revolution, the British sent the largest naval force ever amassed to secure it. They secured it. Washington's troops were forced to flee under cover of night, silently rowing across the East River, then the Hudson. New York spent most of the war as a Tory port.