XIV
Swedish Interlude On the Delaware
PETER Minuit, erstwhile governor and chief fur trader of New Netherland, was a man of energy and special talent for colonial administration. Although he had been discharged from his post in Dutch America after a disagreement with his employers, the directors of the West India Company, his administration there had been virile and efficient. It was therefore quite natural that he should be a bit vindictive toward the people who had treated him so unfairly. And, because of his driving energy, it would have been quite as unnatural for him to remain idle for long.
So it was that he sought out Samuel Blommaert who, embittered by the failure of his Swanendael patroonship, also felt he had reason for complaint against his former associates in the West India Company. According to Blommaert, it was their parsimonious policies on such matters as the fur trade and military protection for new plantations that had caused the fiasco at Whorekill. Anxious now to show up the stupidity of their management, he was attempting to form a Dutch-Swedish opposition company under Swedish protection for operations in the “West Indies.”
When Minuit came on the scene, with his firsthand knowledge of New Netherland, things began to happen fast. Blommaert’s project quickly crystallized into a fur trading company with the specific intent of colonizing the valley of the South River where the patroon himself had formerly adventured. It remained only for Minuit to offer his expert services as leader of such an expedition to the Swedish crown, and royal sanction and assistance were forthcoming for the venture.
“Pierre” Minuit, for that is what the Hollanders often called him when he was their governor in New Netherland, had been born a French Huguenot in the German city of Wessel. It is not strange that his nationalism was therefore elastic enough to meet almost any demands of his ambition and ability. About the only point at which Minuit might have hesitated in those bigoted times would have been an association with Catholics. Certainly, to serve under the banner of Sweden, a protestant nation allied in the crusade against Spain, required a minimum degree of adaptability, especially as Sweden’s official excuse for a colony in America was that it would provide a base for attacking the common enemy at his weakest spot.
Half the subscriptions for the venture in “New Sweden” were raised in Sweden and half in Holland, with Samuel Blommaert the largest single subscriber. Although the Swedish government furnished two well-armed ships, Kalmar Nyckel and Gripen, as well as all other weapons and ammunition, the cost of the expedition to the company ran to 33,000 florins by the time it sailed from Gothenburg in the closing days of 1637.
If Minuit was lucky however, a single Spanish prize would be enough to cancel out this unexpectedly high debt. Otherwise the New Sweden Company looked to the Indian fur trade to pay it off in a season or two.
Almost half of the invested capital was for cargo that consisted mainly of the merchandise needed for the Indian trade. Axes, hatchets, adzes, knives, tobacco pipes, looking-glasses, cheap trinkets, duffels and other cloth weaved in Holland were purchased by Blommaert and shipped to Sweden where they were loaded aboard the two ships. So were a few tools for farming, as well as some spirituous liquors and wines to be traded either in Virginia or the West Indies for tobacco. The tobacco was to be brought into Sweden where people had lately developed a taste for it. But the furs would be sold in Holland, a better market for foreign skins.
No act of fate guided Peter Minuit to the site he chose for the Swedish beachhead in America. It was on Minquas Kill, a little stream from the west emptying into the estuary of the Delaware River. The Indians from whom the stream acquired its name had often used its course in their raids against the Lenape. Minuit doubtless knew all about Minquas Kill from reports he had received from Dutch traders when he was Governor of New Netherland. He knew it was navigable by small boats almost to the borders of the Minqua country, where a trade might be joined for the rich pelts then finding their way to the English on Chesapeake Bay. Also, he well knew that the site he selected on this stream was a protected though strategic one from which, once fortified and garrisoned properly, further encroachment on the Dutch West India Company’s South River preserves might be safely launched.
For a kettle and other trifles Minuit bought enough land from a local sachem to erect a couple of houses, emplace some cannon and palisade “Fort Christina”—which was named in honor of the Queen of Sweden and which was the beginning of Wilmington, Delaware. Then, he managed to attract a few other Lenape chieftains from up and down the Delaware who were perfectly willing to cede all the land that he wanted for New Sweden in return for the colorful merchandise he offered.
There was some argument later about these “deeds,” that is, after they were “lost.” Not only was their geographical extent challenged, which the Swedes claimed to be the west side of the Delaware from Duck Creek up to the Schuylkill; but other purchasers, in particular the Dutch to whom the Lenape were equally accommodating, laid claim to identical grants from the Indians. The English did too, in at least one case.
Of course the Hollanders came down the river from Fort Nassau, shortly after the Swedes arrived, to find out what was going on. But Minuit, experienced in handling them, gave it out that he was only stopping in Minquas Kill for wood and water on his way to the West Indies. In this he was telling the truth, strictly speaking, for he and both of his ships were moving on to that part of the new world to exchange their liquor for tobacco and to try for Spanish prizes before returning to Europe. What he neglected to say was that he was building a fort to be left garrisoned with 24 men, collecting return cargoes of furs and leaving a sloop on the river to collect more.
Peter May, at the time in charge of Fort Nassau during Jan Jansen’s absence at Fort Amsterdam, learned the truth when Minuit’s little trading boat tried to slip past the Dutch outpost to barter for pelts. May wouldn’t let the sloop ascend the river, and he sped Indian runners overland to Manhattan with news of the Swedish invasion. Whereupon newly-arrived Governor Kieft dispatched Commissary Jansen back to his South River headquarters with many loud protests and threats against the Swedes, but not much in the way of force to back up his fulminations.
The New Netherland governor even issued a menacing proclamation. In view of the close political and economic ties between Sweden and his country, he couldn’t believe that the Swedish queen had authorized Minuit to build forts “or to trade in peltries on the South River,” but in any event, he proclaimed, the Dutch West India Company would defend its rights by bloodshed if the Swedes did not withdraw.
Peter Minuit was undeterred by all of this however. He went about finishing his fort and collecting his peltries, and there wasn’t really anything the Dutch could do about it. They claimed that he “drew all the skins to him by his liberal gifts,” and that as a result of his “underselling” their losses ran to 30,000 guilders.
While Minuit was still on the Delaware that spring of 1638 he sent the Grip down to Jamestown to try to barter liquor for tobacco. However the Governor of Virginia, Sir Francis Wyatt, who probably looked askance at the usurpation of English claims on the Delaware, diplomatically found excuses for not trading with the Swedes. He said he would refer the matter to his king, and that ended it. The Grip returned to Minquas Kill, transferred the liquor to the Kalmar Nyckel and set out in search of a fat Spanish galleon.
Soon thereafter, the Kalmar Nyckel also took aboard 710 beaver, otter and bear pelts, which had been collected from the Indians, and laid a course for the West Indies to trade the liquor for tobacco. Peter Minuit sailed in this ship. He left Mans Kling in command of Fort Christina, with Hendrick Huygen as commissary in charge of the provisions, merchandise and Indian trade. Huygen maintained excellent relations with the Indians and would appear to have opened up trade with the Minquas. He bartered for food as well as furs, and the first permanent white settlement in the present State of Delaware was able to sustain itself for two years before any further relief came from Sweden.
In the meantime, New Sweden’s founder had lost his life in the West Indies. While the Kalmar Nyckel was in harbor at St. Christopher’s Island, Minuit went aboard a ship out of Rotterdam as the guest of its skipper. A hurricane came up suddenly and drove this ship out to sea. It was never heard of again.
Peter Minuit’s untimely death was an irreparable loss to the Swedes. He would have made a capable governor for their colony in America, which might have turned out quite differently had he remained in charge.
After a fruitless year on the track of the silver fleet the Grip returned to New Sweden in the spring of 1639, took on a miscellaneous lot of over 1,500 fur skins and sailed for Sweden. All the skins were reshipped to Holland for merchandising, where the Kalmar Nyckel had already unloaded its cargo of pelts. Altogether, these first furs from New Sweden brought 15,426:13:8 florins into the coffers of the company according to Dr. Amandus Johnson, the American-Swedish historian.
The Dutch West India Company, at last awakening to the perils facing New Netherland from foreign encroachment, now took more positive steps to encourage immigration. The directors promised land and free trade in the colony to private persons and made their promise firm by an official proclamation. It was announced that anyone could henceforth trade in pelts, as well as other merchandise, upon payment of fifteen per cent tax and freight charges on all exports.
This lure to promote individual enterprise under the flag of Holland quickly brought Dutchmen from the Netherlands as well as “strangers” from Virginia and New England into the colony. After being on the verge of economic collapse because of the company’s mismanagement, New Netherland began to prosper again, especially those parts about the North River. The newly liberalized policy was too late, however, to have any effect in offsetting the invasion of the South River under the Swedish flag.
Swedish reinforcements, men and women, began arriving in 1640. Even some Hollanders came over and took up land near Fort Christina, their leader being paid a salary by the Swedish government as the commandant of his people. Among contingents of new settlers from Sweden itself were some who came unwillingly. Such were the Finns, those hearty, pioneering outlaws who had been roving Sweden, poaching game and destroying forests, and rudely mocking all efforts to curb their depredations. Many of them were rounded up and “persuaded” to emigrate, along with some native “criminals” whose most serious offenses appear to have been unpaid debts, adultery, and draft-dodging.
But these unwilling emigrants quickly adapted themselves after they arrived in the new country. They rendered good service clearing the land, hewing trees and building houses. Back of Fort Christina typical Scandinavian houses went up, the first “log cabins” ever seen in America, with the timbers notched so that the carefully tailored logs lay flat and close at the joints. These primitive but highly efficient cabins soon became the symbol of the American pioneer—the fur trader as well as the farmer.
The trading limits of New Sweden were extended to the Falls of the Delaware on the north and to Cape Henlopen on the south by new purchases from the Indians. Traffic in pelts, always the chief business of the colony, was prosecuted with real vigor. With the arrival in 1643 of a vigorous new governor, Johan Printz, the Swedes began establishing trading posts and forts up and down the river in their expanded territory. And there just weren’t enough Hollanders under the flag of the Dutch West India Company at Fort Nassau to stop them, no more in fact than twenty at any time.
The Swedes went out even to the Minqua country in the valley of the Susquehanna, competing with the Dutch for the luxuriant pelts from the northern lake country. Traders with Hendrick Huygen penetrated the northwestern hinterland over 200 miles. Most often however the Minquas, or Susquehannocks, who no longer went to the Marylanders in Chesapeake Bay, came with great bundles of their fine pelts to trade at Fort Christina, for they found that the Swedes were more liberal than either the Dutch or the English, not only with trade goods but with sewan, or wampum.
Always the Swedes gave the Minquas generous measures of shell strings in exchange for beaver. Whether it was common white roanoke made from the cockle shells found in quantity along some local beaches, valuable peake strung with purple conch shell, or a variety of the even more highly prized Long Island wampum, measurements were uniformly generous. And since fathoms, ells and yards were roughly estimated by using the length of one’s arm, the giant Susquehannocks did very well for themselves.
Resourceful as usual, the Dutch began manufacturing false wampum to meet the competition. But the savages were quick to detect the counterfeit and wouldn’t accept it.
Meanwhile, some English traders from the New Haven Colony, which was being hemmed in and cut off from the Indian trade of New England, had come down to test out the prospects on the Delaware River and were very much impressed. George Lamberton, Nathaniel Turner and others decided to form a company to purchase land about the Schuylkill River as well as the unoccupied country stretching northward from Cape May. As usual the natives obliged them, regardless of prior deeds, and the New Englanders soon had a colony at Varkens Kill, now Salem Creek in New Jersey.
Everything might have been all right if the Englishmen had remained on the land they bought on the east side of the river. But this was not destined to be. Although there were some twenty families who cleared land and planted crops in 1641 at Varkens Kill, these people were primarily fur traders. They discovered that the east side of the river was too far from the trading grounds of the Indians. The next year they established a fort, building dwellings and a truck house, on the west side of the river at the mouth of the Schuylkill.
This trading post, located on Province Island in present Philadelphia, was on land claimed by both the Swedes and the Dutch. Actually it must have incorporated whatever was left of the abandoned Dutch installation built there originally by Arendt Corssen in 1633. In any case the men from New Haven, after starting a lively Indian trade, made it clear that they would countenance no competition within their newly acquired precincts.
The Swedes and the Dutch, who had been operating under a kind of armed truce in this area, united promptly in the face of this threat to their common interest. Two armed sloops were sent out by the Council of New Netherland, and Jan Jansen with the cooperation of the Swedes attacked and burned out the interlopers. George Lamberton managed to escape in his pinnace with a few of his people. But most of the New Englanders were captured and shipped off to Manhattan as prisoners.
Lamberton, however, like most English traders, was a man of tenacity and courage. Certainly he was persistent when he thought he saw a good thing. The very next year he was back in the river again. This time, unfortunately for him, the atmosphere was even more hostile. That hot-tempered, national-minded Governor of New Sweden, Johan Printz, had arrived in the meantime—all four hundred imperious pounds of him!
“Big Belly” Printz, as the Indians called him, came with the fire of patriotism in his eye. He was not one to stand for any nonsense from foreigners. As a good diplomat he maintained a neighborly friendship with the Dutch, as he had been instructed to do, that is, so long as they were no military threat to New Sweden and so long as they could be outwitted in the Indian trade. But the English—those aggressive and stubbornly nationalistic colonizers—were another matter.
So, in 1643, when George Lamberton once more sailed up the Delaware in his pinnace, he was to find himself in real trouble.
Intercepting some Minquas en route to Fort Christina with their furs, Lamberton induced them to trade with him. Whereupon the Swedish governor invited him to dinner in order to arrest him, the charge being that of having bribed the Minquas with cloth and wampum to massacre the Swedes and Dutch. For a while it looked as if the Englishman might have a short life.
But, although “Big Belly” set himself up as inquisitor, prosecutor and judge, he couldn’t make his accusation stick before a mixed court of English, Dutch and Swedish commissioners in the face of 400 beaver skins Lamberton produced as evidence of his peaceful barter. In the end Printz could only fine the New Englander double duty on the beaver skins he had taken in trade and let him go. As a parting threat however, he told Lamberton that his pinnace would be confiscated if ever he traded again in New Sweden without authorization.
Then the corpulent but vigorous governor turned his full attention to tightening Swedish control of the river, with a view toward gaining a monopoly of the fur trade for his company.
On the east side of the Delaware, where he pretended to the same land claimed by the New Englanders, he constructed a stronghold which he named Fort Elfsborg. It was an imposing earthwork, emplaced with 8 twelve-pound guns and a mortar. Located on waterside just below Varkens Kill and garrisoned by thirteen men, Fort Elfsborg not only asserted Printz’s authority over a sickly remnant of the New Haven Englishmen still there, but gave him military control of the river. Even Dutch vessels on their way up to Fort Nassau were compelled to lower their flags before the guns of the Swedish fort, their skippers no doubt muttering curses against “Big Belly” who now “held the river locked for himself.”
On the west side of the river the governor strengthened Fort Christina, the fur emporium of New Sweden where the general storehouses were maintained. He moved his own headquarters however to a much grander manor setting farther upstream at Tinicum Island.
There, on this water-bound river bank, over which sleek airliners now wing low, in and out of close by Philadelphia Airport, he built a riverside fort of hemlock logs “laid one upon another” and a princely “hall” for himself. Fort New Gothenborg, he named this new capital, which was little more than half a dozen miles from Dutch Fort Nassau across the river. To Fort New Gothenborg the Swedish governor hoped to attract most of the Indian traffic that he now shared grudgingly with the New Netherland traders.
For a while the strategy proved highly successful, especially after Printz established a trading post on the near-by Schuylkill to control that important artery of traffic from the hinterland. There, on Province Island, from which the English had so recently been ousted, he built a blockhouse of his own and mounted “stone cannon” on it. These were the vicious little “murderers” of the time, whose broad iron mouths could be jammed with stones or anything else lethal that might be handy to spray attackers at close range. Other buildings too were later erected at Province Island, but in the spring of 1644 the blockhouse served for stores, and also as quarters for Lieutenant Mans Kling and the traders stationed there.
The Dutch traders under Jan Jansen at Fort Nassau, frustrated by lack of numbers as well as by restraining orders from Fort Amsterdam, now could only stand by watching and biting their nails, while taking whatever crumbs of the Indian trade their Swedish neighbors deigned to share with them.
This same year of 1644 some merchants of Boston, with the backing of Winthrop and the Court of Massachusetts, formed a company to discover the great Lake of the Iroquois by ascending the Delaware River. Some dozen years earlier, Captain Walter Neale of the Laconia Company had failed in his efforts to reach the lake via the rivers of Maine. At least the Delaware ran in the right direction, toward that “inexhaustible” supply of beaver, something it was now conceded no Maine or Massachusetts rivers did.
A well-equipped pinnace was actually sent out to the Delaware. However, just what happened on the river is vague. Certainly neither the Swedes nor the Dutch wanted English traders on their “backside.” A few tentative shots were fired, but apparently some wisely dispensed liquor accomplished more than force. In any event the New Englanders were “entertained,” one way or another, first at Fort Elfsborg by the Swedes and then at Fort Nassau by the Dutch, and in the end they were persuaded to turn back. They returned to Boston in their pinnace, at great loss to the chagrined investors in the enterprise.
Under Johan Printz’s able direction Swedish trade flourished throughout the Delaware valley. Fine cargoes of beaver and other pelts were shipped across the sea. Some went to Sweden, but the market was never good there for foreign pelts and most were auctioned in Holland. Great quantities, however, were sold locally in America for needed supplies. And, we are told, “otter coats” and “elkskin trousers” were common articles of dress among the Swedes themselves.
Like the Pilgrims, the Swedes could not have maintained themselves but for the beaver trade. Their attempts to cultivate tobacco were unsuccessful. Neither did they grow sufficient food for themselves. And little enough help came from home. For nearly six years after the winter of 1647-48 there was no relief ship nor even any official word from Sweden to its earnest governor in America. A relief expedition sent out in 1649 was wrecked en route in the Spanish West Indies, its people tortured and enslaved. Printz had to depend on his Dutch and English neighbors for supplies. And there was only one thing of value to give them in exchange for this subsistence—beaver.
The problem of the Swedes was to monopolize the Indian beaver trade while depending upon competitors not only for subsistence supplies but for the very trucking merchandise required for the Indian trade. Dutch traders, as well as English, were therefore welcome on the Delaware so long as the Swedes could act as middlemen between them and the natives who had the beaver pelts.
English traders of this type were particularly active in New Sweden—Virginians and New Englanders, and some roving independents like Isaac Allerton, the former Pilgrim father who made so much trouble for his associates at Plymouth. Allerton, as a matter of fact, made his headquarters at this time with the Dutch at Fort Amsterdam.
John Wilcox and William Cox were among other colonial merchants who purveyed fowling pieces, sailcloth, duffels, cheese and brandy to the Swedes in exchange for beaver skins. They also provided Printz with trucking goods, such as knives, kettles, axes, hoes, cloth, red coral and sewan, or wampum. Among many such entries in the company books, reported by Dr. Amandus Johnson, is one for 220 yards of sewan purchased from an Englishman for 140 beaver skins valued at 800 florins.
William Whiting, a Hartford merchant, collected 1,069¹⁄₂ pounds of beaver worth 4,277 florins from the Swedes on one trading expedition to the Delaware in 1644. Captain Turner and Allerton, who made frequent trips there, purveyed cloth, barley seed and other grain, millstones, beer, leather and wampum for the Indian trade, all in exchange for the Swedes’ beaver. Several trading boats were also sold to the Swedes, a small one being exchanged for 98 skins, and larger barks bringing five to ten times as many.
Printz frequently sent his own people with beaver to New Amsterdam, and even to New England, to buy trade goods, livestock, rye, corn, lime, and other supplies. His chief commissary, Hendrick Huygen, usually headed up the expeditions to Manhattan. At the Dutch capital the going rate for corn, which was not always to be obtained direct from the Indians, was one beaver pelt for three bushels. Evidently the Swedes found this exchange less onerous than toiling with the plow.
On one trip to the Dutch capital Huygen bought seven oxen for 124 beaver skins valued at 868 florins, a cow for 22 skins worth 154 florins, and 75 bushels of rye for 32 skins valued at seven florins each. It cost him only ten skins to get this livestock to New Sweden, five being paid out to two Hollanders who led some of the oxen cross-country, and five to the Governor of New Netherland whose sloop delivered the remainder on the Delaware. On another trip, in addition to oxen, Huygen bought a horse for thirty skins. He even settled for his expenses at New Amsterdam with beaver, paying out nine skins for board and five for lodgings to the inn-keeper on one occasion, while having the storm-torn sails of his boat repaired for another six skins.
The Swedes never did root their colony in agriculture. For one thing, it was just too easy to rest the entire economy on the beaver trade, and somehow the habit persisted even after the fur frontier had passed into the hinterland. A visiting Indian convert from New France once accused them of being more concerned with fur trading than with converting his red kinsmen to Christianity. The charge was true enough. It might have been leveled in fact at almost any colonials of the time. But probably it wasn’t even of passing interest to the beaver-hungry Swedes.
A lesser reason for the agricultural failure was that there never seemed to be enough Swedes to man farms. The total population of the colony—soldiers, traders, farmers, servants, women, and children—amounted to no more than two hundred fifty at any time during Governor Printz’s tenure. And losses by death were not offset by reinforcements from home. In the spring of 1648 a census of all male inhabitants of age counted up to only seventy-nine. These seventy-nine were not all Swedes by a large number.
When Peter Stuyvesant arrived in America as governor of the Dutch, the inherent numerical weakness of the Swedes was at once apparent to him, for he was an experienced soldier. He also knew that because of changing conditions abroad there was less reason for being so friendly and neighborly. With the war against the Catholics drawing to a close, the alliance was breaking up, and Holland was no longer favoring Swedish shipping. The two countries were becoming bitter competitors.
The new Dutch governor had a personality that was every bit as colorful as that of his soldier counterpart in New Sweden. Having lost a leg in action, and being of an arrogant and tyrannical nature, Stuyvesant stamped about affectedly on a silver-banded pegleg, swishing a rattan cane to emphasize his commands. But he was also as zealously nationalistic and as company-minded in the administration of his colonial post as was Johan Printz.
It was predestined that hot-tempered “Big Belly” and autocratic “Peg-Leg” would clash. They did—almost immediately.
Printz, it appears, replaced his blockhouse on Province Island with a much stronger installation, Fort Korsholm, armed with cannon and manned with a garrison of soldiers. Andries Hudde, who had succeeded Jan Jansen as Dutch commissary on the South River, reported to Stuyvesant that he was now absolutely cut off from the Schuylkill and that the Swedes were “hindering” all other Dutch trade with the Indians in the river valley.
Furthermore, Hudde said, the Swedes had spoiled the trade anyway, for the Indians now insisted on two fathoms of white sewan and one fathom of purple sewan for a beaver. And, since a fathom was commonly estimated as the span of a man’s outstretched arms, the natives were sending “the largest and tallest among them to trade with us.” This made the barter “rather too much against” him, the Dutch commissary complained, as every fathom amounted “to three ells!”
Stuyvesant, to Hudde’s surprise, instructed him to take the initiative against the Swedes, telling him it was now well known that the Swedes could expect no succor from home, and that he should go into the Schuylkill and erect a stronghold there for his own traders.
Backed by this authority the South River commissary, who was of an aggressive nature anyway, went into the Schuylkill with enthusiasm. In May of 1648 he began building a log house surrounded by palisades at Passyunk, on the lands purchased by Corssen in 1633. He called it Fort Beversrede (Beaver Road Fort). Located within the limits of present-day Philadelphia, on the east bank of the Schuylkill, Fort Beversrede not only challenged the Swedish monopoly of the Schuylkill trade but it restrained some of Printz’s people who were now probing east and north of that stream.
Governor Printz reacted violently as might have been expected. He sent out several chastising expeditions of armed men who tore down palisades, destroyed surrounding forests and burned houses being built about the new Dutch trading post. But there doesn’t appear to have been too much blood shed, and the whole affair ended up amusingly enough when the Swedes constructed a blockhouse of their own on the riverside within a dozen feet of the gates to the Dutch fort. Evidently the six nervous Hollanders who manned Fort Beversrede looked the other way during this operation. In any case, after the Swedish blockhouse went up, thirty-five feet in length, the Hollanders in their fort didn’t have “the sight of the water on the kill” that they were supposed to dominate.
It is easy to imagine that this was almost too much for Stuyvesant. However, he was cautioned by his employers in Holland to arm himself with some patience before using force against the Swedes. But then, becoming increasingly irritated by further trespasses, the governor determined to send both ships and troops to the South River as a convincing show of strength. In 1651 he dispatched eleven ships with arms and supplies around the coast, while he marched overland with 120 soldiers to Fort Nassau where the fleet met him.
There ensued much on-the-spot argument among the Dutch, the Swedes, and the Indians, about their overlapping land titles. But it all ended up with the Dutch becoming the masters of the South River, their troops being much the most persuasive consideration in the case.
Stuyvesant sailed down the river to a likely site on the west bank just below Fort Christina, landed two hundred men and erected a commanding fortification which he named Fort Casimir. Located on a peninsula, near present New Castle, Fort Casimir was 210 feet long and was mounted with twelve guns, some of which came from Fort Nassau, now dismantled. Two warships were also stationed in the river and several English trading-boats were taken as prizes since England and Holland were at war. All traders on the South River were now compelled to pay duty to New Netherland.
Printz’s situation deteriorated rapidly as Dutch trading factors overran New Sweden, monopolizing the beaver commerce. With pitifully few remaining subjects, desertions having cut the total population to less than a hundred souls, the governor had to leave Forts Elfsborg and Korsholm unmanned and rotting. Now that he was without trade goods even the Indians turned against him, boldly committing depredations within the limits of the colony.
The people, growing mutinous, openly accused “Big Belly” of avarice and brutality. They claimed that by their enforced labor he had filled his storehouses at Tinicum Island with skins for his personal profit. But he tore up a petition of their grievances and had their leader convicted of treason. Then he heatedly dared the others to complain again.
As to the charge of brutality, things were probably no worse nor any better than the time a party of Indians was hired in New Sweden to track down some settlers who deserted. These luckless subjects, who had first tried unsuccessfully to desert to the Dutch, fled toward the English settlements on the Chesapeake. The savages did their job well—and efficiently—bringing back only the heads of those who resisted capture.
The Swedish governor could only protest the Dutch usurpation of his life-giving trade in the face of the military odds against him and his own internal problems. His government was left intact however, and he bided the time that reinforcements would arrive. But none came, nor even any word. In the end he asked to be relieved. When there was no reply to his request Johan Printz, at last disillusioned and completely frustrated, finally took it on his own authority in 1653 to relinquish his post and sail for home.
Once, some years earlier when Printz was a young officer in the Army of Sweden, he had been dismissed from the service for surrendering his post without authority. When he left America under similar conditions, it is said that he took the precaution of getting a letter of recommendation from Peter Stuyvesant to the Dutch West India Company, just as insurance.
The year after Printz sailed away reinforcements did at long last arrive in New Sweden, and with them came a new and impetuous governor named Johan Rising. Finding Fort Casimir in the embarrassing position of being without gunpowder and greatly underestimating the general situation of the Dutch in New Netherland, Rising made the mistake of reducing the fort to Swedish rule and pledging the loyalty of some of the Dutchmen there.
Infuriated, the Directors of the Dutch West India Company sent a fleet of ships and two hundred veteran soldiers across the sea to their governor at New Amsterdam. They ordered him to gather all possible additional forces before the Swedes could be reinforced and “exert every nerve to avenge that injury, not only by restoring affairs to their former situation, but by driving the Swedes from every side of the river.” Stuyvesant responded with alacrity. In September of 1655 he was under sail for the South River with a fleet of seven armed ships, land artillery for besieging batteries, and several hundred soldiers.
Captain Sven Skute who was the commandant at Fort Casimir, now called Fort Trinity by the Swedes, had greatly strengthened the fortifications there in anticipation of the attack. Shot and powder were stored in good supply, as were all other necessities for defense. Skute had written orders from the Council at Fort Christina not to let the enemy pass.
But, when the Dutch flotilla sailed up the river and anchored above the fort, Sven Skute didn’t fire a shot. Stuyvesant was permitted to mount his batteries ashore without interference. After the Swedish stronghold had been completely surrounded and cut off, Skute sent out word that his men were going to defend the position. Governor Stuyvesant replied that if a single Hollander became a casualty there would be no quarter for any Swede in the fort. Whereupon Captain Skute capitulated under terms that permitted him to walk out with his “personal property.” His men had mutinied, it appears.
Leaving Captain Dirck Smith in command of the fort, now renamed Fort Amstel, the Dutch moved on to the Christina. There Stuyvesant repeated his maneuver, investing the fort and the entire Swedish settlement. While he and Rising parleyed, Dutch soldiers pillaged the countryside as far north as Tinicum Island, where Johan Printz’s ambitious daughter, married to a pliable husband, now held forth at Printz Hall in the style of her father. The Hollanders killed livestock, plundered houses and left the women “stripped naked” in their beds, or so it was said.
Governor Rising’s situation was hopeless. He had only a small supply of ammunition, most of it having been sent to Fort Trinity. He was faced not only with the Dutch guns pointing at his fort but with increasing desertions to the enemy. Stuyvesant was demanding complete evacuation of the position or the oath of loyalty to Holland from all Swedish subjects.
In the end the Swedish governor could only agree to surrender, with transportation guaranteed for those who did not wish to remain as Dutch subjects. The governor himself did not fare too badly. It appears that his private property, like that of Captain Skute, was respected under the terms of the capitulation and that it was promised he would be landed in “England or France.”
New Sweden was no more. No longer did the Dutch at New Amsterdam have to worry about Swedish competition on their South River, much less the envelopment of Fort Orange in the north by Swedish penetration of the hinterland.
What the Dutch had to worry about now, other than the Indians in the vicinity of Manhattan who were getting a bit out of hand, were Englishmen—especially the New England traders pressing them in the north. And that was becoming quite a worry!