New Amsterdam and its people : studies, social and topographical, of the town under Dutch and early English rule . undred and seventy-five feet in width, and extending fromthe road, or Hoogh Straet, to the river,—a distance ofsomething over one hundred feet. This parcel seems tohave formed a hill, or bluff of moderate height, which waslevelled —in part, at any rate — about the year 1G5C!, furthe purpose of filling out and grading the open space alongthe shore which formed what is now Pearl Street in thisvicinity, of which proceeding some notice has already beentaken.^ Who this Thomas Willet, t
New Amsterdam and its people : studies, social and topographical, of the town under Dutch and early English rule . undred and seventy-five feet in width, and extending fromthe road, or Hoogh Straet, to the river,—a distance ofsomething over one hundred feet. This parcel seems tohave formed a hill, or bluff of moderate height, which waslevelled —in part, at any rate — about the year 1G5C!, furthe purpose of filling out and grading the open space alongthe shore which formed what is now Pearl Street in thisvicinity, of which proceeding some notice has already beentaken.^ Who this Thomas Willet, the original grantee, was,has not been very clearly ascertained. He has been con-stantly confounded by various writers with Captain ThomasWillet of Plymouth Colony, who afterwards engaged in tradebetween New Amsterdam and the New England towns, andwho, after the surrender to the English in IGG-i, was ap-pointed the first mayor of the City of New York. That hewas of kin to Captain Thomas Willet is not at all improbable;but examination fails to disclose the nature of the connection, 1 See ante, page 185, I. THOMAS WILLET 193 ^ if any existed. About all that seems to bo known of theantecedents of Thomas Willet of Now Amsterdam is that inhis marriage reccd in the Dutcli Church ho is described asbeing from Bristol, in England. Thomas Willet, the grantee of the Hoogh Straet land,appears in 1(J13 — then being a young man of twenty-twoyears of age —as one of the iMiglish .soldiers in the employof the West India Company. As such, he was one of tliDsewho took part in the massacre of the Indians, by DirectorKiefts orders, on the night of February 25, 1(J43, at Pa-vonia; and upon the next day he was one of tlie witnesses ofthe killing of the Dutchman, Dirck Straetmaker, and his wife,who in spite of warnings to the contrary had insisted on visit-ing the scene of the liorrid butchery of the preceding night,where the bodies of the slain were still lying; he and luswife were there nui
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