INTRODUCTION.

The following description of the City and Colony of New York carries us back one hundred and sixty-six years to the day when William III ruled the destinies of the English nation. Its author, the Rev. John Miller, was for a time chaplain to the troops in the fort, and sole Episcopal clergyman in the colony. Beyond the account here given, and which he addressed to Henry Compton, Bishop of London, we have few data for his history. He was a graduate of one of the English universities, and was commissioned chaplain to two companies of Grenadiers in the Colony of New York, March 7, 1691-2. He arrived here in 1693, and as an act was passed that year for settling a ministry, he, in February, 1694, claimed a right to be inducted, but the Council decided against his pretensions. He left the colony apparently, June 1, 1695, and was taken in July by a French privateer, destroying his papers to avoid giving information to the enemy. His present account was therefore drawn up from recollection, and in fact is more taken up with a most extraordinary plan of civil and ecclesiastical government than with a detailed description of the colony in which he had sojourned. After his return to England he applied to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantation for additional salary, but did not succeed in obtaining anything. A short note of information

furnished by him to the Board at the time is given in the Appendix.

Mr. Miller's Description, with its curious map and plans, found its way from the archives of the Bishops of London to the hands of George Chalmers the historian, and on the dispersion of his library fell into the hands of Thomas Rodd, a London bookseller, who published it in 1843. Since then the original manuscript has been added to the treasures in the British Museum.

Of Mr. Miller's earlier or later history I know nothing, and admit that I was deterred from seeking a clue for research by the slight results attained by Dr. O'Callaghan in his endeavors to investigate the history of Mr. Miller's predecessor in the chaplaincy, the Rev. Mr. Wolley. As connected with his history, however, we add his commission and the accompanying papers from the archives of the

state.

New York at this period had just emerged from a civil war, that had been most disastrous to its prosperity. Submitting readily to the rule of William and Mary, it had seen the regular authorities overthrown by the ignorant and deluded or ambitious Leisler; whose sway, recognized in New York and on Long Island, was resisted at Albany, but who by stimulating the Iroquois to attack the French in Canada had contributed to the fearful slaughter of Lachine, and thus drawn on the exposed frontiers of New York the vengeance of the enemy, which soon laid Schenectady in ashes, and repeated on a diminished scale the horrors of Lachine. The terror inspired by this, the civil war existing and the oppressive measures of Leisler drove many from the colony, and it was fast declining, when Sloughter arrived, and his summary disposal of the usurper in turu made others deem flight a necessary precaution.

The Colony of New York had been the private property of James II as Duke of York, under the grant from his brother, and on his accession to the throne became an apanage of the crown, and subsequent monarchs so held it down to the close of the Revolution, when George III wished it to be so regarded.

During the period of James's actual possession of the territory, New York had been transformed into an English colony, a code of laws, compiled chiefly from those in force in New England, had been introduced, New York and Albany been incorporated, and finally a legislature assembled, which passed a bill of rights securing the liberties of the subject and granting free toleration to all Christians.

The acts of this legislature had been ignored by that convened under William III, and a resolution passed declaring them of no force. A new bill of rights, less generous indeed, was too full of dangerous ideas to meet the new champion of liberty, although it did not contain the "evil egg of toleration." The colony, when Miller came here, was divided into two parties, the Leislerian and AntiLeislerian. Fletcher had identified himself with the latter, but the former had just succeeded in obtaining an act of parliament of a most false preamble, reversing the sentence on Leisler, and were to consummate their triumph by the king's appointment of Richard, Earl of Bellamont, as Governor, in place of Fletcher, whose extravagant grants of land afforded a good pretext for his removal.

New York city at this time was, as Miller's map shows, confined almost altogether to the part of the island below Wall street, where a palisade ran across the island, with stone bastions at Broadway and William street. A fort and a battery on the site of our present Battery, recently laid out by Fletcher, defended the city on the south, and other bat

teries and block houses on the river sides. The population was about four thousand, one-eighth being slaves Yet the commerce was so considerable that in 1696, the year when Miller reached England, forty square-rigged vessels, sixty-two sloops, and as many boats, were entered at the New York custom house.

Bradford had just introduced printing in 1693, and in this very year, 1695, was printing the first New York Almanac for John Clapp, who is entitled to the honor of introducing hackney coaches into the city. A Dutch church had just been erected in Garden street, called Church street for that reason on Miller's map, although many a one yet remembers the time when it bore its earlier The Episcopalians were preparing to erect a church for themselves, and Miller advised the site of the bastion at the corner of Wall and William as the spot, but it was begun on the ground intended by Dongan for a Jesuit college, and next appropriated as a burial ground, the present site of Trinity.

name.

New York possessed conveniences. It had its regular ferry to Brooklyn; its post to Philadelphia. Wells, to the number of a dozen, stood in the middle of the street in various parts and before the Fort, and the Stadt House, New York's first city hall, school house and court house. Provision was made for the prevention of fires, by leathern buckets, a system introduced in 1658, and of which at this time every house with three fireplaces was required to have two, brewers six, and bakers three, under penalty of a fine of six shillings.

Other improvements were talked of and introduced within a few years. Before the close of the century, Broad street was drained by a sewer, the residents on Broadway set out trees by consent of the Common Council,