VERRAZANO AND HUDSON                     61
of Hell Gate, but his meaning is not perfectly clear. As for his mention of Frenchmen trading far up the Hudson River, it is corroborated by important Dutch testimony. In 1614 a syndicate of Dutch merchants applied to the States General of the Netherlands for a special license to trade up and down that river, and they affixed to their petition a manuscript map enriched with explanatory notes and memoranda.1 In these notes it is stated that the French were the discoverers of the river and had traded there with the Mohawks long before Hudson's time. Such testimony seems conclusive.
Before passing from the French to tell of the coming of the Dutch, some mention should be made of a question over which geographers and historians have long been puzzled. Immediately after Verrazano's voyage there began to appear upon maps the name " Norumbega," a name which evidently had for contemporaries much meaning, but which in less than a century fell out of use without making ample provision for gratifying the curiosity of later gener-ations.     Neither the maps nor the allusions of rumbega explorers have as yet enabled us fully to solve the ques on difficulties presented by this name.    We find it applied to three things: first, a spacious territory; secondly, a river somewhere in that territory;  thirdly, a town or village somewhere upon that river.
Now the territory called Norumbega does not present much difficulty; it may be roughly defined as the land included between the Hudson and the Penobscot rivers. It is thus not far from equivalent to New England. But when we come to the river there is a wide difference of opinion, and as to the origin of the name there has been much brave guessing. Perhaps the most common opinion is that the Penobscot was the River of Norumbega, with a village on its bank somewhere up country, where European skippers
1 The original map is in the Royal Archives at the Hague; there is a copy in the State Library of New York, at Albany. It is engraved as frontispiece to O'Callaghan's History of New Netherlands vol. i.