During the 1600 the situation politically and religiously had become so oppressive as to offer no toleration for religions other than Catholic, to the extent that Huguenots families were brutally murdered, plundered, imprisioned, tortured, burned at the stake, and beheaded so that masses of French Calvinist, called Huguenots, fled France for their lives.

In the year following Louis XIV revocation or the Edict of Nantes which proptected Huguenots life and property more than 100,000 French fled to neighboring European countries. Within three years more than 400,000 had escaped. The Netherlands was a Protestant country and offered easy access and religious protection. The Dutch Reformed church of was the official state religion so that many French families found it easy to begin rebuilding their lives in this amiable country.

About this time expansion in the New World was reaching a cresendo. Pamphlets advertising the wonders of this new land in the west was appealing and fortuitously timely for the French. Many of them took the opportunity to immigrate with the Dutch to the Dutch Colonies in New York, New Jersey, and New England areas. Who could resist such an inticing invitation to freedom and prosperity.

"You poor, who know not how your living to obtain;
You affluent, who seek in mind to be content;
Choose you New Netherland, which no one shall disdain;
Before you time and stregth here fruitlessly are spent.

The birds obscure the sky, so numerous in their flight;
The animals roam wild, and flatten down the ground;
The fish swarm in the waters and exclude the light;
The oysters there, than which none better can be found;
Are piled up, heap on heap, till islands they attain;
And vegetation clothes the forest, mean and plain.

...a living view does always meet your eye,
Of Eden, and the promised land of Jacob's seed;
Who would not, then, in such a formed community,
Desire to be a Freeman; and the rights decreed,
To each and every one, by Amstel's burgher lords,
T'enjoy? and treat with honor what their rule awards?"

---- From Jacob Steendam's verse composed for
Plockhoy's Pamphlet advertising his colony. 1662

Descriptions that circulated at the time were no less aluring to the man without a country:

"...the country is very like that of France...the country falls behind none in Europe both as to excellence and cleaness of furits and seeds....the country is for the most part covered with trees, except a few valleys and some large flats, seven or eight leagues and less in extent; the trees consist as in Europe, of oak, hickory, chestnut, vines. The animals also are of the same species as ours, except lions and some other strange beasts; many bears, abundance of wolves, which harm nothing but small cattle. Elks and deer in vast numbers, foxes, beavers, otters, minx, and such like. the fowles which are natural to the country, are turkeys, like ours, swans, geese of three sorts, ducks, teals, cranes, herons, bittern; tow sorts fo partriges, four sorts of heath fowl or pheasants. the river fish is like that of Europe, namel: carp, sturgeon, salmon, pike, perch, roach, eel, etc. In the salt waters are found cod, shellfish, herring, and so forth; also abundance of oysters and muscles..."

Who in his right mind could resist such a paradise?

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