of Great Britain; upon which an order was immediately made by the board, of the 7th of June, ordering him to be confined, within the manor of Livingston, where he remained until he was sent into New-York, by a flag, under the superintendance of Colonel Burr, by order of General Washington.

Mr. Smith remained at New-York till the evacuation of that city by the king's troops, and went to England with Sir Guy Carleton, the then commander-in-chief. He there remained until he was appointed Chief Justice of Canada, in 1786, and continued to hold that station until he died, on 3d December, 1793. He thus held his office as chief justice for seven years, managing the court and all proceedings in it, with singular justice. It was observed by the whole country, how much he raised its reputation; and those who held places and offices in it, all declared, not only the impartiality of his justice, but his generosity, his vast diligence, and his great exactness in trials. It was customary before his time, that all prisoners should be brought into court, in the custody of a party of soldiers ; he disapproved of this, and established, for the first time, the appointment of constables, ordering them to be provided with their batons of office, which has been continued ever since. He was taken with a shivering fit in court, and it was succeeded by an ardent fever, which no medical skill could arrest or destroy. A day before his death, he desired one of his children to send round to the clergymen of each communion a déclaration to be read in the several churches, of his firm belief in the Divinity

of his Saviour. He was buried on the 4th December, 1793, in the Episcopal church.

As a christian, he was one of the greatest patterns of the time in which he lived; and, in his public employments, either when at the bar or on the bench, was equally distinguished as a model of christian perfection.

Having thus given his history and character, it is necessary to give the relation of what was private and domestic.

William Smith was married to Miss Janet Livingston, daughter of James Livingston, esq. of the city of New-York, merchant. This lady was distinguished for her disposition, eminent piety, and excellence of character, She died on the anniversary of her birth-day, in the 90th year of her age. By her he had eleven children, several of whom died young; his daughter Elizabeth, who had obtained the age of seventeen, died at Haverstraw, in 1776, in consequence of the deep interest she took in the public troubles, that then agitated the country.

His eldest son, William, who is still alive, went to England from New-York, was educated at a grammar school, at Kensington, near London, and came to Canada with his father, in 1786. He was soon appointed clerk of the provincial parliament, subsequently a master in chancery, and, in 1814, was appointed by the Earl Bathurst, then his majesty's secretary of state, a member of the executive council. He married Susan, daughter of Admiral Charles Webner, of the county of Hampshire, in England, by whom he had five children. His eldest daughter, Janet, married John Plinderhath, of Glen, in the

county of Peebles, in Scotland, who dying, left her with six children, four sons and two daughters. Three of the sons entered into the army, and were distinguished for their conduct; one at Maida,* and the others at Stoney Creek and Chrysler's farm, in Canada.

Their son John, who was a physician, and served under the Duke of Wellington, in the peninsular war, lost his life in the discharge of his professional duties, was buried at Coimbra, and has a monument erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

His second daughter, Mary, married Lieutenant General William Doyle, of Waterford, in Ireland, many years in the staff of that country as a general officer. Both are now dead. They have left two sons and one daughter, who are living.

His third daughter, Harriet, married Jonathan Dewitt, Chief Justice of the province of Lower Canada, by whom she has eleven children, several of whom are honourably settled at Quebec.

*The battle of Maida is one of the most brilliant achievements of the British arms. See Mr. Windham's speech in the House of Commons. Annual Register. 1806.

THE

HISTORY OF NEW-YORK.

PART I.

From the Discovery of the Colony to the Surrender, in 1664.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, a Genoese, employed by Ferdinand and Isabel, king and queen of Castile, was the first discoverer of America.* He sailed from St. Lucar in August, 1492, and made sight of one of the Bahama islands, on the eleventh of October following. Newfoundland, and the main continent, were discovered five years after, by Sebastian Gabato, a Venetian, in the service of Henry VII. of England, from the thirty-eighth to the sixtyeighth degree of north latitude.

On the tenth of April, 1606, King James I. for planting two colonies, passed the great north and south Virginia patent. To Sir Thomas Gates and others, leave was given to begin a plantation, at any place on the continent, they should think convenient, between the thirty-fourth and forty-first degrees of latitude and all the lands extending fifty miles, on each side, along the coast, one hundred miles into the country, and all the islands within one hundred miles opposite to their plantations, were

* Some authors alledge, that Columbus first offered his services to the republic of Genoa; then to John II. of Portugal, and afterwards to our King, Henry VII.; but this disagrees with Lord Bacon's account, who informs us, that Christopher Columbus sailed before his brother Bartholomew had laid the project before the King, which was owing to his falling into the hands of pirates on his way to England.

granted in fee, to be called the First Colony. By the same patent, a like quantity was granted to Thomas Henham, Esquire, and others, for a plantation between thirty-eight and forty-five degrees of latitude, under the name of the Second Colony. The first began a settlement in the great bay (Chesapeak) in 1607. The latter was planted at Plymouth in NewEngland, 1620.

Henry Hudson, an Englishman, according to our authors, in the year 1608,* under a commission from

*Charlevoix, a French jesuit, author of the General History of New France, thinks this discovery was in 1609, vol. 1, 12mo. edition, p. 221. But Stith, Douglass, Oldinixon, and other English writers agree, that Hudson's first voyage was in the preceding year. It was thought to be a demonstration of a discovery of the country before this period, that the marks of a hatchet were found on the body of a tree in the spring of 1775, which had been made in 1590. The block was brought to town and shewn to the author. But the discoverer abused the value he had set upon this curiosity, to whom I observed, that the Indians, upon the authority of Stith's history, might have got the instrument from Canada, where Targues Carteu, according to de Laet, the discoverer, had watered in 1536, at St. Croix, a little above Quebec, and afterwards revisited the St. Lawrence in 1540 with five ships, and continued the crew at Chaslebourg above St. Croix to 1542, or from the English who came first to Wococon, or Ocacock, to the southward of Cape Hatteras on the second July, 1582, and a few days after entered Albemarle Sound. That they returned to it under Sir Richard Grenville on the 26th May, 1585; and, on his return that summer to England, left about one hundred persons at Roanoke, who expanded themselves southward and northward, and had dealings with the Indians above one hundred and thirty miles northwest into their country. That Sir Francis Drake visited the new colony in 1586, after burning St. Antony Urlena, in Florida, where he found the Spaniards had commenced settlements. That Sir Richard Grenville revisited that country the same year, and Capt. White with his company the next; and that in 1588 Sir Walter Raleigh had then expended forty thousand pounds upon the enterprise for planting a colony under the name of Virginia.— Sir Thomas Smith's company, after Raleigh's assignment, arrived August the 3d, 1598, the year designated on the block. Mr. Robert Yates, the surveyor, who brought it to town, gave me the following certificate of the discovery in a letter dated May the 3d, 1775:

"Sir: In the course of the survey of the patent granted in the year 1672, to Van Hendrichy Van Baale, in the county of Albany, as claimed by the proprietors thereof, the surveyors were particularly directed by the arbitrators appointed for the determination of its contested boundaries to bore the marked trees standing on and at some distance from the lines. In consequence of it a number of trees were bored. Several, whereof, appeared to be cut or marked, whose respective ages, upon ascertaining the streaks grown over such marks, counted from 110 to 140 years. But what more particularly strikes my attention, and to which I can find no satisfactory solution is, that at the distance of about one mile south-west from a hill called Kych-Uyt, in a pine wilderness, remote from any settlement, one of the axe-men, for the sake of keeping him in employ, was ordered, on the seventh March, 1775, to cut a pitch pine tree of about two feet diameter, whercon there was little of any appearance of a mark-about six inches in the tree a cut or mark was discovered and the block taken out. splitting it with the grain it opened to our view several cuts of an axe or other sharp iron tool, the dents whereof appeared as fresh and new as if the mark had been made within a year. In counting of the rings or streaks grown over

In