The Swedes on the Delaware

Immediate steps were taken for colonizing these manors. Under the direction of Captain de Vries, an eminent navigator and friend of Godyn, who had made him a partner in the purchase, two ships sailed with colonists, cattle, seeds and agricultural implements, for Delaware Bay. They left the Texel under the command of Peter Heyes on the 12th of December, 1630, and took the long southern route by way of the Canaries and the West Indies. One of the vessels was captured; the other, carrying eighteen cannon, did not reach the Delaware until April following. Near the site of the village of Lewiston, thirty emigrants, with their cattle and implements, seated themselves. There Heyes set up a wooden column, and on it placed a piece of tin emblazoned with the arms of Holland in token of taking possession of the country in the name of the States-General. The place was named Swaanendael. They built a house and stockaded it; and then Captain Heyes went over to the New Jersey shore and purchased from the Indians, in the name of Godyn, a tract of land along the coast from Cape May, twelve miles. In the autumn, Heyes returned to Holland, leaving the colony in charge of Gillis Hossett.

In the spring of 1632, De Vries went with two vessels to the Delaware. There a sad sight greeted him. The house which the settlers had built was in ruins; the palisades had been burned; and the bones of the settlers strewed the ground. They had all been murdered by the Indians. One of the savages told De Vries all about it. A chief thoughtlessly took down the piece of tin which bore the arms of Holland, to make a tobacco-pipe of it. Hossett made such ado about it, that the Indians, to allay the feeling, slew the offending chief, and sent his scalp to the Dutch commander. When the bearer presented it, Hossett told him the Indians had done wrong; that had the offender been brought to him he would only have cautioned him not to repeat the offence. The friends of the victim burned with vengeful desires, and determined to destroy the white people as a retribution. A party of warriors visited the settlement under the guise of friendship, and massacred the whole of them in their houses and in the fields. This crime was for-given, and the Indians and Hollanders remained friends.

A competition with the English and Dutch for American possessions now appeared in the North. The enlightened Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, had looked with longing eyes westward as he heard from time to time of the rich countries beyond the British isles. At length he was excited to action by William Usselincx, the projector of the Dutch West India Company, who, dissatisfied with his associates in that corporation, visited Sweden, and laid before its monarch well-arranged plans for colonization on the Delaware. The king was delighted. He entered warmly into the projects of Usselincx, and was preparing for the execution of a scheme for planting a colony in America that should be an open asylum for all Christians, when the danger which threatened Protestantism in Germany called him to the field to contend for the principles of the Reformation. While leading victorious armies against the Imperial hosts marshalled under the banner of the Pope on the fields of Germany, he did not forget the scheme for American colonization. At Nuremburg he drew up a paper for his great chancellor, the Count Oxenstierna, in which he recommended the enterprise as "the jewel of his kingdom." A few days afterwards he was face to face with his enemy at Lutzen, in battle array. On their knees he and the brave Swedes sang Luther's glorious hymn, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott--"A tower of strength is our God." Then they sang a hymn composed by the king himself, and springing to their feet, they made a furious charge upon the Imperialists, Gustavus leading the right wing. He fell covered with mortal wounds.

But the words of Gustavus did not die. Oxensteirna, at the head of a regency, administered the government for the heir to the throne, Christina, who was then only six years of age. "A colony in America would, indeed, be a precious jewel in the crown of Sweden," said the wise Chancellor. He had favored the project from the beginning; and in 1634, he issued a charter for a Swedish West India Company.

Governor Minuit, who had been recalled from New Netherland because he had favored the grasping patroons too much, it was thought, hastened to Stockholm and offered the fruits of his experience in America and his personal services to the new company. They were gladly accepted; and at near the close of 1637, he sailed from Gottenburg with fifty emigrants in two vessels, bearing a commission to plant a colony on the west side of Delaware Bay, within the manor of Godyn and Blommaert, where he knew no settlement then existed. He landed at the site of Newcastle in April 1638, and purchased from the Indians the whole territory from Cape Henlopen to the falls of the Delaware River at Trenton without the slightest regard to the claims of the Dutch. Then he sailed into the mouth of the river, and anchored in a creek at the site of Wilmington. They built a fort and then a church, and named the place Christina, in honor of their young queen. The territory they had purchased they called New Sweden.