'Half Moon' e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. My task became easier still when I found that Colman, the first European to die between the shores of the Hudson River, was a freeman of Rye - of that quarter of the world which I know and love best. For you could not have a better object lesson than Rye, in the seventeenth century, of what it was that made America. Rye then had many privileges that had descended to it from the Middle Ages; it had, like its sister towns of the Cinque Ports, its own laws, its own rights, its own nobility, quite apart from those of the rest of England. These laws and privileges pressed heavily on the poorer inhabitants and caused much unrest and discontent. Rye, too, had been almost depopulated by the Plague in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and, in consequence, a whole popula tion of foreign Protestants, Dutch, German and Huguenot, had been given leave to settle in Rye and around the walls.