The course of the river is nearly north and
south, and drains a comparatively narrow valley.
It is emphatically the "River of the Mountains," as it rises in the
Adirondacks, flows seaward east of the Helderbergs, the Catskills, the
Shawangunks, through twenty miles of the Highlands and along the base
of the Palisades. More than any other river it preserves the character
of its origin, and the following apostrophe from the writer's poem,
"The Hudson," condenses its continuous "mountain-and-lake-like"
quality:
O Hudson, mountain-born and free,
Thy youth a deep impression takes,
For, mountain-guarded to the sea,
Thy course is but a chain of lakes.
=The First Settlement of the Hudson.=--In 1610 a Dutch ship visited
Manhattan to trade with the Indians and was soon followed by others
on like enterprise. In 1613 Adrian Block came with a few comrades and
remained the winter. In 1614 the merchants of North Holland organized
a company and obtained from the States General a charter to trade in
the New Netherlands, and soon after a colony built a few houses and
a fort near the Battery.
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