Penn Sails For The Delaware
The framing of the constitution and other preparations consumed
the year following Penn's receipt of his charter in 1681. But at
last, on August 30, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, with
about a hundred colonists. After a voyage of about six weeks, and
the loss of thirty of their number by smallpox, they arrived in the
Delaware. June would have been a somewhat better month in which to
see the rich luxuriance of the green meadows and forests of this
beautiful river. But the autumn foliage and bracing air of October
must have been inspiring enough. The ship slowly beat her way for
three days up the bay and river in the silence and romantic
loneliness of its shores. Everything indicated richness and
fertility. At some points the lofty trees of the primeval forest
grew down to the water's edge. The river at every high tide
overflowed great meadows grown up in reeds and grasses and red and
yellow flowers, stretching back to the borders of the forest and
full of water birds and wild fowl of every variety. Penn, now in the
prime of life, must surely have been aroused by this scene and by
the reflection that the noble river was his and the vast stretches
of forests and mountains for three hundred miles to the westward.
He was soon ashore, exploring the edge of his mighty domain,
settling his government, and passing his laws. He was much pleased
with the Swedes whom he found on his land. He changed the name of
the little Swedish village of Upland, fifteen miles below
Philadelphia, to Chester. He superintended laying out the streets of
Philadelphia and they remain to this day substantially as he planned
them, though unfortunately too narrow and monotonously regular. He
met the Indians at Philadelphia, sat with them at their fires, ate
their roasted corn, and when to amuse him they showed him some of
their sports and games he renewed his college days by joining them
in a jumping match.
Then he started on journeys. He traveled through the woods to New
York, which then belonged to the Duke of York, who had given him
Delaware; he visited the Long Island Quakers; and on his return he
went to Maryland to meet with much pomp and ceremony Lord Baltimore
and there discuss with him the disputed boundary. He even crossed to
the eastern shore of the Chesapeake to visit a Quaker meeting on the
Choptank before winter set in, and he describes the immense
migration of wild pigeons at that season, and the ducks which flew
so low and were so tame that the colonists knocked them down with
sticks.
Most of the winter he spent at Chester and wrote to England in high
spirits of his journeys, the wonders of the country, the abundance
of game and provisions, and the twenty-three ships which had arrived
so swiftly that few had taken longer than six weeks, and only three
had been infected with the smallpox. "Oh how sweet," he says, "is
the quiet of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome
solicitations, hurries and perplexities of woful Europe."
As the weeks and months passed, ships kept arriving with more
Quakers, far exceeding the migration to the Jerseys. By summer, Penn
reported that 50 sail had arrived within the past year, 80 houses
had been built in Philadelphia, and about 300 farms had been laid
out round the town. It is supposed that about 8000 immigrants had
arrived. This was a more rapid development than was usual in the
colonies of America. Massachusetts and Virginia had been established
slowly and with much privation and suffering. But the settlement of
Philadelphia was like a summer outing. There were no dangers, the
hardships were trifling, and there was no sickness or famine. There
was such an abundance of game close at hand that hunger and famine
were in nowise to be feared. The climate was good and the Indians,
kindly treated, remained friendly for seventy years.
It is interesting to note that in that same year, 1682, in which
Penn and his friends with such ease and comfort founded their great
colony on the Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs from
Canada, after years of incredible hardships, had traversed the
northern region of the Great Lakes with their canoes and had passed
down the Mississippi to its mouth, giving to the whole of the Great
West the name of Louisiana, and claiming it for France. Already La
Salle had taken his fleet of canoes down the Mississippi River and
had placed the arms of France on a post at its mouth in April, 1682,
only a few months before Penn reached his newly acquired colony.
Thus in the same year in which the Quakers established in
Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of peace with the red men,
La Salle was laying the foundation of the western empire of despotic
France, which seventy years afterwards was to hurl the savages upon
the English colonies, to wreck the Quaker policy of peace, but to
fail in the end to maintain itself against the free colonies of
England.
While they were building houses in Philadelphia, the settlers lived
in bark huts or in caves dug in the river bank, as the early
settlers in New Jersey across the river had lived. Pastorius, a
learned German Quaker, who had come out with the, English, placed
over the door of his cave the motto, "Parva domus, sed amica bonis,
procul este profani," which much amused Penn when he saw it. A
certain Mrs. Morris was much exercised one day as to how she could
provide supper in the cave for her husband who was working on the
construction of their house. But on returning to her cave she found
that her cat had just brought in a fine rabbit. In their later
prosperous years they had a picture of the cat and the rabbit made
on a box which has descended as a family heirloom. Doubtless there
were preserved many other interesting reminiscences of the brief
camp life. These Quakers were all of the thrifty, industrious type
which had gone to West Jersey a few years before. Men of means,
indeed, among the Quakers were the first to seek refuge from the
fines and confiscations imposed upon them in England. They brought
with them excellent supplies of everything. Many of the ships
carried the frames of houses ready to put together. But substantial
people of this sort demanded for the most part houses of brick, with
stone cellars. Fortunately both brick clay and stone were readily
obtainable in the neighborhood, and whatever may have been the case
in other colonies, ships loaded with brick from England would have
found it little to their profit to touch at Philadelphia. An early
description says that the brick houses in Philadelphia were modeled
on those of London, and this type prevailed for nearly two hundred
years.
It was probably in June, 1683, that Penn made his famous treaty with
the Indians. No documentary proof of the existence of such a treaty
has reached us. He made, indeed, a number of so-called treaties,
which were really only purchases of land involving oral promises
between the principals to treat each other fairly. Hundreds of such
treaties have been made. The remarkable part about Penn's dealings
with the Indians was that such promises as he made he kept. The
other Quakers, too, were as careful as Penn in their honorable
treatment of the red men. Quaker families of farmers and settlers
lived unarmed among them for generations and, when absent from home,
left children in their care. The Indians, on their part, were known
to have helped white families with food in winter time. Penn, on his
first visit to the colony, made a long journey unarmed among the
Indians as far as the Susquehanna, saw the great herds of elk on
that river, lived in Indian wigwams, and learned much of the
language and customs of the natives. There need never be any trouble
with them, he said. They were the easiest people in the world to get
on with if the white men would simply be just. Penn's fair treatment
of the Indians kept Pennsylvania at peace with them for about
seventy years--in fact, from 1682 until the outbreak of the French
and Indian Wars, in 1755. In its critical period of growth,
Pennsylvania was therefore not at all harassed or checked by those
Indian hostilities which were such a serious impediment in other
colonies.
The two years of Penn's first visit were probably the happiest of
his life. Always fond of the country, he built himself a fine seat
on the Delaware near Bristol, and it would have been better for him,
and probably also for the colony, if he had remained there. But he
thought he had duties in England: his family needed him; he must
defend his people from the religious oppression still prevailing;
and Lord Baltimore had gone to England to resist him in the boundary
dispute. One of the more narrow-minded of his faith wrote to Penn
from England that he was enjoying himself too much in his colony and
seeking his own selfish interest. Influenced by all these
considerations, he returned in August, 1684, and it was long before
he saw Pennsylvania again--not, indeed, until October, 1699, and
then for only two years.
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