English navigator in the service of the Dutch East India Company, Henry Hudson anchored the Halve Maen in Sandy Hook Bay in September 1609 during a voyage nominally in search of a northwest passage to Asia. Robert Juet's shipboard journal records the crew's first days along the New Jersey Highlands — the site's founding phrase, "a very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to see," and the September 6 skirmish that killed John Colman and, by tradition, gave the first European burial to the ground of Sandy Hook. Hudson himself was set adrift by a mutiny in James Bay in June 1611.
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