Little Delaware
Delaware was the first colony to be established on the river that
bears this name. It went through half a century of experiences under
the Dutch and Swedes from 1609 to 1664, and then eighteen years
under the English rule of the Duke of York, from whom it passed into
the hands of William Penn, the Quaker. The Dutch got into it by an
accident and were regarded by the English as interlopers. And the
Swedes who followed had no better title.
The whole North Atlantic seaboard was claimed by England by virtue
of the discoveries of the Cabots, father and son; but nearly a
hundred years elapsed before England took advantage of this claim by
starting the Virginia colony near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in
1607. And nearly a quarter of a century more elapsed before
Englishmen settled on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Those were
the two points most accessible to ships and most favorable for
settlement. The middle ground of the Delaware and Hudson regions was
not so easily entered and remained unoccupied. The mouth of the
Delaware was full of shoals and was always difficult to navigate.
The natural harbor at the mouth of the Hudson was excellent, but the
entrance to it was not at first apparent.
Into these two regions, however, the Dutch chanced just after the
English had effected the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia. The
Dutch had employed an Englishman named Henry Hudson and sent him in
1609 in a small ship called the Half Moon to find a passage to China
and India by way of the Arctic Ocean. Turned back by the ice in the
Arctic, he sailed down the coast of North America, and began
exploring the middle ground from the Virginia settlement, which he
seems to have known about; and, working cautiously northward along
the coast and feeling his way with the lead line, he soon entered
Delaware Bay. But finding it very difficult of navigation he
departed and, proceeding in the same careful way up along the coast
of New Jersey, he finally entered the harbor of New York and sailed
up the Hudson far enough to satisfy himself that it was not the
desired course to China.
This exploration gave the Dutch their claim to the Delaware and
Hudson regions. But though it was worthless as against the English
right by discovery of the Cabots, the Dutch went ahead with their
settlement, established their headquarters and seat of government on
Manhattan Island, where New York stands today, and exercised as much
jurisdiction and control as they could on the Delaware.
Their explorations of the Delaware, feeling their way up it with
small light draft vessels among its shoals and swift tides, their
travels on land--shooting wild turkeys on the site of the present
busy town of Chester--and their adventures with the Indians are full
of interest. The immense quantities of wild fowl and animal and bird
life along the shores astonished them; but what most aroused their
cupidity was the enormous supply of furs, especially beaver and
otter, that could be obtained from the Indians. Furs became their
great, in fact, their only interest in the Delaware. They
established forts, one near Cape Henlopen at the mouth of the river,
calling it Fort Oplandt, and another far up the river on the Jersey
side at the mouth of Timber Creek, nearly opposite the present site
of Philadelphia, and this they called Fort Nassau. Fort Oplandt was
destroyed by the Indians and its people were massacred. Fort Nassau
was probably occupied only at intervals. These two posts were built
mainly to assist the fur trade, and any attempts at real settlement
were slight and unsuccessful.
Meantime about the year 1624 the Swedes heard of the wonderful
opportunities on the Delaware. The Swedish monarch, Gustavus
Adolphus, a man of broad ambitions and energetic mind, heard about
the Delaware from Willem Usselinx, a merchant of Antwerp who had
been actively interested in the formation of the Dutch West India
Company to trade in the Dutch possessions in America. Having
quarreled with the directors, Usselinx had withdrawn from the
Netherlands and now offered his services to Sweden. The Swedish
court, nobles, and people, all became enthusiastic about the project
which he elaborated for a great commercial company to trade and
colonize in Asia, Africa, and America.* But the plan was dropped
because, soon after 1630, Gustavus Adolphus led his country to
intervene on the side of the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War in
Germany, where he was killed three years later at the battle of
Lutzen. But the desire aroused by Usselinx for a Swedish colonial
empire was revived in the reign of his infant daughter, Christina,
by the celebrated Swedish Chancellor, Oxenstierna.
* See "Willem Usselinx," by J. F. Jameson in the "Papers of the
American Historical Association," vol. II.
An expedition, which actually reached the Delaware in 1638, was sent
out under another Dutch renegade, Peter Minuit, who had been
Governor of New Netherland and after being dismissed from office was
now leading this Swedish enterprise to occupy part of the territory
he had formerly governed for the Dutch. His two ships sailed up the
Delaware and with good judgment landed at the present site of
Wilmington. At that point a creek carrying a depth of over fourteen
feet for ten miles from its mouth flowed into the Delaware. The
Dutch had called this creek Minquas, after the tribe of Indians; the
Swedes named it the Christina after their infant Queen; and in
modern times it has been corrupted into Christiana.
They sailed about two and a half miles through its delta marshes to
some rocks which formed a natural wharf and which still stand today
at the foot of Sixth Street in Wilmington. This was the Plymouth
Rock of Delaware. Level land, marshes, and meadows lay along the
Christina, the remains of the delta which the stream had formed in
the past. On the edge of the delta or moorland, rocky hills rose,
forming the edge of the Piedmont, and out of them from the north
flowed a fine large stream, the Brandywine, which fell into the
Christina just before it entered the Delaware. Here in the delta
their engineer laid out a town, called Christinaham, and a fort
behind the rocks on which they had landed. A cove in the Christina
made a snug anchorage for their ships, out of the way of the tide.
They then bought from the Indians all the land from Cape Henlopen to
the Falls of the Delaware at Trenton, calling it New Sweden and the
Delaware New Swedeland Stream. The people of Delaware have always
regarded New Sweden as the beginning of their State, and Peter
Minuit, the leader of this Swedish expedition, always stands first
on the published lists of their governors.
On their arrival in the river in the spring of 1638, the Swedes
found no evidences of permanent Dutch colonization. Neither Fort
Oplandt nor Fort Nassau was then occupied. They always maintained
that the Dutch had abandoned the river, and that it was therefore
open to the Swedes for occupation, especially after they had
purchased the Indian title. It was certainly true that the Dutch
efforts to plant colonies in that region had failed; and since the
last attempt by De Vries, six years had elapsed. On the other hand,
the Dutch contended that they had in that time put Fort Nassau in
repair, although they had not occupied it, and that they kept a few
persons living along the Jersey shore of the river, possibly the
remains of the Nassau colony, to watch all who visited it. These
people had immediately notified the Dutch governor Kieft at New
Amsterdam of the arrival of the Swedes, and he promptly issued a
protest against the intrusion. But his protest was neither very
strenuous nor was it followed up by hostile action, for Sweden and
Holland were on friendly terms. Sweden, the great champion of
Protestant Europe, had intervened in the Thirty Years' War to save
the Protestants of Germany. The Dutch had just finished a similar
desperate war of eighty years for freedom from the papal despotism
of Spain. Dutch and Swedes had, therefore, every reason to be in
sympathy with each other. The Swedes, a plain, strong, industrious
people, as William Penn aptly called them, were soon, however,
seriously interfering with the Dutch fur trade and in the first
year, it is said, collected thirty thousand skins. If this is true,
it is an indication of the immense supply of furbearing animals,
especially beaver, available at that time. For the next twenty-five
years Dutch and Swedes quarreled and sometimes fought over their
respective claims. But it is significant of the difficulty of
retaining a hold on the Delaware region that the Swedish colonists
on the Christina after a year or two regarded themselves as a
failure and were on the point of abandoning their enterprise, when a
vessel, fortunately for them, arrived with cattle, agricultural
tools, and immigrants. It is significant also that the immigrants,
though in a Swedish vessel and under the Swedish government, were
Dutchmen. They formed a sort of separate Dutch colony under Swedish
rule and settled near St. George's and Appoquinimink. Immigrants
apparently were difficult to obtain among the Swedes, who were not
colonizers like the English.
At this very time, in fact, Englishmen, Puritans from Connecticut,
were slipping into the Delaware region under the leadership of
Nathaniel Turner and George Lamberton, and were buying the land from
the Indians. About sixty settled near Salem, New Jersey, and some on
the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania, close to Fort Nassau--an outrageous
piece of audacity, said the Dutch, and an insult to their "High
Mightinesses and the noble Directors of the West India Company. " So
the Schuylkill English were accordingly driven out, and their houses
were burned. The Swedes afterwards expelled the English from Salem
and from the Cohansey, lower down the Bay. Later the English were
allowed to return, but they seem to have done little except trade
for furs and beat off hostile Indians.
The seat of the Swedish government was moved in 1643 from the
Christina to Tinicum, one of the islands of the Schuylkill delta,
with an excellent harbor in front of it which is now the home of the
yacht clubs of Philadelphia. Here they built a fort of logs, called
Fort Gothenborg, a chapel with a graveyard, and a mansion house for
the governor, and this remained the seat of Swedish authority as
long as they had any on the river. From here Governor Printz, a
portly irascible old soldier, said to have weighed "upwards of 400
pounds and taken three drinks at every meal," ruled the river. He
built forts on the Schuylkill and worried the Dutch out of the fur
trade. He also built a fort called Nya Elfsborg, afterward
Elsinboro, on the Jersey side below Salem. By means of this fort he
was able to command the entrance to the river and compelled every
Dutch ship to strike her colors and acknowledge the sovereignty of
Sweden. Some he prevented from going up the river at all; others he
allowed to pass on payment of toll or tribute. He gave orders to
destroy every trading house or fort which the Dutch had built on the
Schuylkill, and to tear down the coat of arms and insignia which the
Dutch had placed on a post on the site of Philadelphia. The Swedes
now also bought from the Indians and claimed the land on the Jersey
side from Cape May up to Raccoon Creek, opposite the modern Chester.
The best place to trade with the Indians for furs was the Schuylkill
River, which flowed into the Delaware at a point where Philadelphia
was afterwards built. There were at that time Indian villages where
West Philadelphia now stands. The headwaters of streams flowing into
the Schuylkill were only a short distance from the headwaters of
streams flowing into the Susquehanna, so that the valley of the
Schuylkill formed the natural highway into the interior of
Pennsylvania. The route to the Ohio River followed the Schuylkill
for some thirty or forty miles, turned up one of its tributaries to
its source, then crossed the watershed to the head of a stream
flowing into the Susquehanna, thence to the Juniata, at the head of
which the trail led over a short divide to the head of the
Conemaugh, which flowed into the Allegheny, and the Allegheny into
the Ohio. Some of the Swedes and Dutch appear to have followed this
route with the Indians as early as 1646.
The Ohio and Allegheny region was inhabited by the Black Minquas, so
called from their custom of wearing a black badge on their breast.
The Ohio, indeed, was first called the Black Minquas River. As the
country nearer the Delaware was gradually denuded of beaver, these
Black Minquas became the great source of supply and carried the
furs, over the route described, to the Schuylkill. The White Minquas
lived further east, round Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and, though
spoken of as belonging by language to the great Iroquois or Six
Nation stock, were themselves conquered and pretty much exterminated
by the Six Nations. The Black Minquas, believed to be the same as
the Eries of the Jesuit Relations, were also practically
exterminated by the Six Nations.*
* Myers, "Narratives of Early Pennsylvania", pp. 103-104.
The furs brought down the Schuylkill were deposited at certain rocks
two or three miles above its mouth at Bartram's Gardens, now one of
the city parks of Philadelphia. On these rocks, then an island in
the Schuylkill, the Swedes built a fort which completely commanded
the river and cut the Dutch off from the fur trade. They built
another fort on the other side of Bartram's Gardens along the meadow
near what is now Gibson's Point; and Governor Printz had a great
mill a couple of miles away on Cobb's Creek, where the old Blue Bell
tavern has long stood. These two forts protected the mill and the
Indian villages in West Philadelphia.
One would like to revisit the Delaware of those days and see all its
wild life and game, its islands and shoals, its virgin forests as
they had grown up since the glacial age, untouched by the
civilization of the white man. There were then more islands in the
river, the water was clearer, and there were pretty pebble and sandy
beaches now overlaid by mud brought down from vast regions of the
valley no longer protected by forests from the wash of the rains. On
a wooded island below Salem, long since cut away by the tides, the
pirate Blackhead and his crew are said to have passed a winter. The
waters of the river spread out wide at every high tide over marshes
and meadows, turning them twice a day for a few hours into lakes,
grown up in summer with red and yellow flowers and the graceful wild
oats, or reeds, tasseled like Indian corn.
At Christinaham, in the delta of the Christina and the Brandywine,
the tide flowed far inland to the rocks on which Minuit's Swedish
expedition landed, leaving one dry spot called Cherry Island, a name
still borne by a shoal in the river. Fort Christina, on the edge of
the overflowed meadow, with the rocky promontory of hills behind it,
its church and houses, and a wide prospect across the delta and
river, was a fair spot in the old days. The Indians came down the
Christina in their canoes or overland, bringing their packs of
beaver, otter, and deer skins, their tobacco, corn, and venison to
exchange for the cloth, blankets, tools, and gaudy trinkets that
pleased them. It must often have been a scene of strange life and
coloring, and it is difficult today to imagine it all occurring
close to the spot where the Pennsylvania railroad station now stands
in Wilmington.
When doughty Peter Stuyvesant became Governor of New Netherland, he
determined to assert Dutch authority once more on the South River,
as the Delaware was called in distinction from the Hudson. As the
Swedes now controlled it by their three forts, not a Dutch ship
could reach Fort Nassau without being held up at Fort Elfsborg or at
Fort Christina or at the fort at Tinicum. It was a humiliating
situation for the haughty spirit of the Dutch governor. To open the
river to Dutch commerce again, Stuyvesant marched overland in 1651
through the wilderness, with one hundred and twenty men and,
abandoning Fort Nassau, built a new fort on a fine promontory which
then extended far out into the river below Christina. Today the
place is known as New Castle; the Dutch commonly referred to it as
Sandhoeck or Sand Point; the English called it Grape Vine Point.
Stuyvesant named it Fort Casimir.
The tables were now turned: the Dutch could retaliate upon Swedish
shipping. But the Swedes were not so easily to be dispossessed.
Three years later a new Swedish governor named Rising arrived in the
river with a number of immigrants and soldiers. He sailed straight
up to Fort Casimir, took it by surprise, and ejected the Dutch
garrison of about a dozen men. As the successful coup occurred on
Trinity Sunday, the Swedes renamed the place Fort Trinity.
The whole population--Dutch and Swede, but in 1654 mostly
Swede--numbered only 368 persons. Before the arrival of Rising there
had been only seventy. It seems a very small number about which to
be writing history; but small as it was their "High Mightinesses,"
as the government of the United Netherlands was called, were
determined to avenge on even so small a number the insult of the
capture of Fort Casimir.
Drums, it is said, were beaten every day in Holland to call for
recruits to go to America. Gunners, carpenters, and powder were
collected. A ship of war was sent from Holland, accompanied by two
other vessels whose names alone, Great Christopher and King Solomon,
should have been sufficient to scare all the Swedes. At New
Amsterdam, Stuyvesant labored night and day to fit out the
expedition. A French privateer which happened to be in the harbor
was hired. Several other vessels, in all seven ships, and six or
seven hundred men, with a chaplain called Megapolensis, composed
this mighty armament gathered together to drive out the handful of
poor hardworking Swedes. A day of fasting and prayer was held and
the Almighty was implored to bless this mighty expedition which, He
was assured, was undertaken for "the glory of His name." It was the
absurdity of such contrasts as this running all through the annals
of the Dutch in America that inspired Washington Irving to write his
infinitely humorous "History of New York from the Beginning of the
World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty," by "Diedrich Knickerbocker."
It is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in America
seriously. What can you do with a people whose imagination allowed
them to give such names to their ships as Weigh Scales, Spotted Cow,
and The Pear Tree? So Irving described the taking of Fort Casimir in
mock heroic manner. He describes the marshaling of the Dutch hosts
of New York by families, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the
Brinkerhoffs, the Van Kortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and
Kakiat, the fighting men of Wallabout, the Van Pelts, the Say Dams,
the Van Dams, and all the warriors of Hellgate "clad in their
thunder-and-lightning gaberdines," and lastly the standard bearers
and bodyguards of Peter Stuyvesant, bearing the great beaver of the
Manhattan.
"And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate struggle, the
maddening ferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and
self-abandonment of war. Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged,
panted, and blowed. The heavens were darkened with a tempest of
missives. Bang! went the guns; whack! went the broadswords; thump!
went the cudgels; crash! went the musket-stocks; blows, kicks,
cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors
of the scene! Thick, thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter,
higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, heads-over-heels, rough-and-tumble!
Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried
the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the
mine! roared stout Rising--Tantarar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of
Antony Van Corlear;--until all voice and sound became
unintelligible,--grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of
triumph mingling in one hideous clamor. The earth shook as if struck
with a paralytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the
sight; rocks burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even Christina
creek turned from its course, and ran up a hill in breathless
terror!"
As a matter of fact, the fort surrendered without a fight on
September 1, 1655. It was thereupon christened New Amstel,
afterwards New Castle, and was for a long time the most important
town on the Delaware. This achievement put the Dutch in complete
authority over the Swedes on both sides of the river. The Swedes,
however, were content, abandoned politics, secluded themselves on
their farms, and left politics to the Dutch. Trade, too, they left
to the Dutch, who, in their effort to monopolize it, almost killed
it. This conquest by their High Mightinesses also ended the attempts
of the New Englanders, particularly the people of New Haven, to get
a foothold in the neighborhood of Salem, New Jersey, for which they
had been struggling for years. They had dreams of a great lake far
to northward full of beaver to which the Delaware would lead them.
Their efforts to establish themselves survived in one or two names
of places near Salem, as, for example, New England Creek, and New
England Channel, which down almost into our own time was found on
charts marking one of the minor channels of the bay along the Jersey
shore. They continued coming to the river in ships to trade in spite
of restrictions by the Dutch; and some of them in later years, as
has been pointed out, secured a foothold on the Cohansey and in the
Cape May region, where their descendants are still to be found.
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