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.