USA > Pennsylvania > Pennsylvania, colonial and federal : a history, 1608-1903, Volume One > Part 8
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he added, "the country is now amply able to sustain." His letter to Oxenstiern, August I ( 1651), is pathetic. "I have frequently," he says, "according to my duty, in the most humble way, re- ported to your Excellency whatever here occurred, asking for more people and means of defense; but, during the whole space of six years and three months, I have received no orders and not the first matter of assistance from the old country. Every day yet I am with great anxiety expecting it ; for myself. too, I beg of your Grace to be released. God knows what I have suffered these three long years."
Efforts were made in Sweden to send another ship. The Swan was selected, but did not get off. Printz and his people still waited. It had now been-in the summer of 1652-over four years since the Swan went away. Not even a letter or mes- sage had come to them from Sweden. The colonists began to think they had been abandoned by the mother country, and some deserted. This year excessive rains spoiled the crops. Still Printz kept up a bold front; he had built the hull of a ship of about two hundred tons, and hoped for sails, rigging, and guns from home. In April, 1653, he again wrote. There were then "living and remaining" in New Sweden, he said, "altogether two hundred souls." Soldiers and others were discouraged; they had but "mean subsistence ;" and they sought a chance "every day" to get away. It was now, he said, "five years and a half since a letter was received from home." He could not trade with the Indians, since he had no goods; besides, the Indians on the Susquehanna (the "Minquas") were at war. In the summer he sent his son Gustaf, a lieutenant, to Sweden to report, and finally in the fall, no ship and no letter having come, he resolved to go himself. The announcement of his purpose caused dismay ; he assured the peo- ple, however, that he would either return within ten months, or would send a ship. He appointed Papegoia, his son-in-law, dep- uty governor, and with his wife, the commissary Huyghen, and some others, he left at the beginning of October, 1653, in a Dutch
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ship. England and Holland were then at war; it was the time of terrific naval battles in the narrow seas between the two countries ; so the ship put in at Rochelle, in France, and the Swedish passen- gers landed there. Getting to Holland after a long delay, it was not until 1654 that Printz reached Stockholm.
Meanwhile the affairs of the colony had been once more earnestly discussed in the Swedish Council. The Queen, Chris- tina, disliked affairs of state-she was a strange child of her great father-and the faithful pilot of Sweden, Oxenstiern, was near his end. But a fresh effort was resolved upon. Different ships were designated for the expedition, and there were delays and false starts, but at last on the 2d of February, 1654, the Eagle left Gottenburg for the Delaware. She had, it is said, no less than three hundred and fifty emigrants on board. It was the "Ninth Expedition."
In command of the company was Johan Claesson Risingh. He had been commissioned Commissary and Assistant Councillor to Governor Printz. No one in Stockholm yet knew that Printz was on his way home, and had landed two months before on the coast of France. Besides Risingh others of distinction were on the ship-Sven Schute, captain of the soldiers ; an engineer, Peter Lindstrom, well known in our Delaware river history by his maps and plans; and two Lutheran clergymen, the Rev. Petrus Hjort, and Matthias Nertunius; the last named had been one of the dis- tressed company on the unfortunate Cat.
The Eagle had an adventurous voyage. Danger seemed to be in the air. Half the emigrants were sick. The ship was dis- mantled by a hurricane. She narrowly escaped capture by Turk- ish corsairs. But the 18th of May (1654), she came inside the Delaware capes, and the hearts of the adventurers rose out of discouragement. They passed by ruined Elfsborg, and on the 2Ist cast anchor off Fort Casimir. This was held by a Dutch Commissary, Gerrit Bikker. He had twelve men. The Swedish ship had been seen coming up the river, and a boat sent down to
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reconnoitre returned with word that it "was full of people, with a new governor," and that they wanted possession of the fort, since it stood on Swedish land. The Dutch residents demanded that Bikker make defense; that commandant, in despair, asked, "What can I do? I have no powder!" An hour later, Schute and twenty or thirty of his soldiers landed, and Bikker went to meet them on the beach. The fort gate was open ; the Swedes marched in. Fort Casimir was captured !
Belt of Wampum
Given to William Penn by the Leni Lenape Sachems at the Elm Tree Treaty at Shacka- maxon in 1682. Photographed especially for this work by J. F. Sachse from the original in possession of the Historical Society of Pennsyl- vania
Risingh's written orders at Stockholm had been to secure possession of Casimir, if possible, by peaceable means. But he is said to have had other unwritten instructions, not to miss a good chance to seize it. He acted here on the verbal, not the written, orders. If peace had not just then been made (April, 1654) between England and Holland, so that a threatened invasion of New Netherland by men from New England was averted; and if the Dutch governor at Manhattan had been Van Twiller or Kieft, instead of the choleric, energetic Stuyvesant, the course taken by Risingh would probably have been justified by the event, but as it was, he could hardly have acted more imprudently.
Sven Schute was placed in command of the fort; its name was changed from Casimir to Trinity, for it was on the Trinity Sun- day of the Lutheran calendar that the capture had been made. Of
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the dozen Dutch soldiers most were sent to Manhattan, and others, including Bikker, took the oath of allegiance to the Swedish queen. Risingh, in the Eagle, sailed on up the river, landed at Tinicum, and relieving the discouraged Papegoia, assumed the position of governor of New Sweden. Things were at a low ebb. After Printz's departure many of the Company's people had deserted. Only seventy colonists, according to Risingh, re- mained. With those who came on the Eagle, and the Dutch set- tlers who took the oath to Sweden, there were now 368. The fort at Korsholm, abandoned after Printz left, had been burned by the Indians.
Risingh now entered on a career of government which lasted sixteen months. He wrote to Stuyvesant at Manhattan, announc- ing and justifying his action. He convoked at Tinicum the Dutch and other settlers to take the oath of allegiance. He called the Indians together, also, in a council at Printz Hall, the chiefs, headed by Naaman, a sachem whose name is preserved in Naa- man's Creek, near the circular boundary of Delaware, once more renewed the league of friendship.
He announced new regulations concerning "the people, land, agriculture, woods, and cattle." He invited back those Swedes who had gone to Virginia. A little town outside the fort at Christina was laid out by Lindstrom. The Trinity fort was reconstructed by Captain Schute, and four fourteen-pound cannon were taken from the Eagle to be placed upon it. The ship herself sailed homeward in July, with a partial cargo of tobacco.
But no energy of Risingh could permanently avail. A new disaster now befell. Another ship had been dispatched from Stockholm a few weeks after the Eagle. It was the Golden Shark, which had come out before in 1646. She left Gottenburg in April (1654), and touching at Porto Rico to give opportunity to her commissary, Elswick, for urging a claim on the Spanish governor for damages in the case of the Cat, reached the Ameri- can coast in September, and then was steered, by design or stupid-
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ity, into New York harbor, instead of Delaware Bay. As she came up to Manhattan, Stuyvesant's eye must have shone with pleasure at sight of her flag. Here was his chance for reprisal ! He seized her, of course, as offset to the capture of Fort Casimir, and as Risingh refused to come to Manhattan to treat for the restoration of the fort, he confiscated the ship as well as her cargo. Most of those who had come in her remained at New Netherland ; the commissary, Elswick, at last reached the Delaware in No- vember.
The Dutch West India Company had now sent orders to Stuyvesant to proceed to retake Fort Casimir. Hearing of his seizure of the Golden Shark, they wrote approving that, and noti- fying him that they would soon dispatch "one of the largest and best ships" of Amsterdam, carrying thirty-six guns and two hun- dred men, on whose arrival he was to proceed to the South river, in an energetic campaign against the Swedes. The ship, De Waag (The Scales), reached Manhattan early in August, 1655, commanded by "the valiant Frederick de Koninck." Stuyvesant was ill, but his subordinates pushed forward preparations for the expedition. August 25 was set apart as a day of fasting and prayer, to implore the Divine blessing upon it. Volunteers were called for, "at reasonable wages," with assurance that if wounded they should have "due compensation." Pilots were engaged, supplies of ammunition and provisions laid in, and three small ships were chartered. A French privateer happened to come into port, and she also was prevailed upon to join. The Jews of the town, declared exempt from military service, were mulcted in a stiff tax in lieu of it.
On the first Sunday in September,1 "after the sermon" in the Dutch church at Manhattan, the expedition set sail. It was an im- posing armada-seven ships, great and small, with "six to seven
"This was the new, the Gregorian calen- dar, which the Dutch had adopted in 1582. The Swedes adhered to the old, the Julian,
calendar, until 1753. By this, the Dutch expedition left Manhattan August 28.
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hundred men," according to Risingh's report, or according to a Dutch authority, "three hundred and seventeen soldiers, and a company of sailors," which appears somewhat more probable. The next day they entered the Delaware, and on the following day they cast anchor before old Fort Elfsborg. Here the force was landed and reviewed, and "divided regularly into five sections, each under its own colors." The next day, the 3Ist of August, (O. S.) they proceeded up the river, and "about eight or nine o'clock" in the morning sailed past Fort Casimir. Schute's guns were silent. The ships went a little farther up, near the mouth of the Christina, and the troops were landed. They thus easily took position between the two forts, Christina and Casimir, cut- ting off their communications, and menacing the latter in the rear.
Risingh received word of the intended invasion, through the Indians, and by spies. He had strengthened Fort Casimir (or Trinity, as renamed), making the garrison forty-seven in number, and had ordered Commissary Schute to challenge the Dutch ships when they appeared, and to prevent their passage if possible. But the imposing array apparently paralyzed the commissary. So far as appears, he did nothing. The Dutch commander sent an offi- cer, with a drummer, to demand his surrender. Schute asked time to communicate with Risingh at Christina, which was re- fused. Further parley followed, the Dutch closing in; a second and a third demand for surrender were made; finally, Schute begged for delay until the next morning, which was granted ; and then about noon (September I, O. S.), a "capitulation" was signed on the Dutch warship. The guns of the fort, nine alto- gether, were to be reserved for the Swedish "crown," and removed when convenient, and similarly "the guns and muskets belonging to the crown." The Swedes were to march out, twelve fully equipped, the remainder with their side-arms. Stuyvesant pro- claimed that Swedes who would take the oath of allegiance to him might remain unmolested, and twenty did so. In a letter dated at Fort Casimir on the 12th September (September 2, O. S.), the
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Dutch commander reported to his council at Manhattan his com- plete success so far.
The surrender, Risingh's report says, was unknown to him until next day. His situation at Christina had become practically untenable. He had placed some of his best men in the captured fort, and an additional party, sent the day of the surrender, had been made prisoners on the way. He prepared, however, for resistance. "We collected," he says, "all the people for the de- fense of fort Christina, and labored with all our might by night and by day in strengthening the ramparts and filling gabions." September 2 (12th, N. S.), the Dutch appeared on the opposite side of Christina creek, and the siege began-the famous and bloodless siege which Washington Irving found so attractive and made so diverting a theme in his "Knickerbocker" history. There was, however, nothing humorous in the situation, to either of the chief combatants. The Dutch commander was in dead earnest ; to Risingh the tragedy of the fall of New Sweden, now plainly impending, was all too real.
The siege need not be here described in detail. It lasted two weeks. On the 6th ( 16th, N. S.), of September, Stuyvesant sent a letter, "claiming the whole river." Risingh replied next day with a letter asserting the rights of the Swedes on the Delaware, and protesting against the Dutch invasion. Stuyvesant renewed his demand, and Risingh next urged that the boundaries between the Swedish and the Dutch colonies be settled by the governments at home, or by commissioners to be agreed upon. Nothing but delay resulted from their correspondence. Stuyvesant was sure of capturing the place, and was satisfied to wait; it would have been folly in Risingh, with his thirty men, some of them, he said, "ill affected," to have begun a fight. It resulted that in the two weeks no one on either side was killed, and no one was wounded. September 15 (25th, N. S.), Risingh surrendered. A formal "capitulation" was drawn up and signed by the two commanders on the "parade ground" outside the Fort.
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The agreement resembled that made at Fort Casimir. The soldiers were to march out with the honors of war. The "guns, ammunition, implements, victuals, and other effects belonging to the crown of Sweden, and the South Company," in the fort or its vicinity, were to remain their property. The Swedish settlers might stay or go, as they chose, and for a year and six weeks, if they stayed, need not take the Dutch oath of allegiance. Swedes who remained should enjoy the Lutheran faith ("liberty of the Augsburg confession") and have a minister to instruct them. Risingh and the commissary, Elswick, were to be taken to Man- hattan, and thence provided with a passage to Europe.
Stuyvesant, as this was concluded, had alarming news from Manhattan. After ten years of comparative peace, the Indians of the lower Hudson had risen again. Injuries done them had caused an outbreak, and the time had been seized when the Dutch fighting men were mostly away. Probably for this reason-if the story is true-Stuyvesant is said to have offered, after the capitulation, to restore Christina to the Swedes, "on honorable and reasonable terms," but this Risingh declined, preferring to abide by the "capitulation" made, and to trust to the adjustment which might come when the subject was taken up by the govern- ment at Stockholm against that at The Hague. Risingh then held a court-martial on Commissary Schute for his surrender of the fort-with what result is unknown-and presently, with others of the Swedish officials, proceeded to Manhattan on the warship, The Scales. From there they sailed-Risingh, Lind- strom the engineer, Elswick the commissary, and the two clergy- men, Hjort and Nertunius-on Dutch merchant vessels early in November, and were landed in Plymouth. England, where a re- port of the Dutch conquest was made to Leydenberg. the Swedish ambassador to England. It may here be added that Sweden presently made claims upon Holland for her act in the overthrow of the colony, and might have pressed them with effect had not the king. Charles X .. who had succeeded in 1654, on the abdica-
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tion of Queen Christina, been absorbed during the next four years in wars with the Poles and the Danes. When he suddenly died in 1660, his son Charles XI. was a minor, and affairs were con- fused. Nothing but diplomatic claims and counter-claims had resulted up to 1664, when the whole of New Netherland was seized by the English. Then the claims of Sweden and Holland on the Delaware were substantially alike; both nations had lost their colonies; neither was likely to obtain much satisfaction from the other. The controversy thus faded away.
We must pause a moment to relate that one more Swedish "expedition," the "tenth" and last, had been sent out, which ar- rived after the surrender. This was the ship Mercury. She was in charge of the old commissary, Hendrick Huyghen, whom we first saw at Christina in 1638; and had on board also Johan Papegoia, who had been home to Sweden; a minister, Herr Matthias, and emigrants, making a party of eighty-four in all. Her cargo was chiefly linen and woolen goods and salt. She left Gottenburg in October, 1655, a few weeks after the fall of New Sweden, the event being unknown there, of course, and reached the Delaware in March, 1656. The situation being learned, she was taken to Manhattan by order of Huyghen, and her cargo sold; she reached Gottenburg again in September, 1656.
Though the war between Stuyvesant and Risingh was blood- less, it was not, according to the Swedish accounts, without some elements of rapine and destruction. Much injury was done the settlers, they declare, by the men from Manhattan. The fort on Tinicum Island was said to have been destroyed by them, but remains of it were visible long after. The wife of Papegoia. Armgard, the daughter of Printz, had her home on the island, at Printzhof, and in his report Risingh says the Dutch robbed her, during the siege of Christina, "of all she had, with many others who had their property there."
The Swedish colony, as a possession of Sweden, thus failed. In its hopeful inception, its unanticipated difficulties, its trials and
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struggles, its drain upon the mother country, and its ultimate catastrophe, it was an example of many such colonial undertak- ings. Most of them, the world over, have been a loss to those who directed them. The policy of the home government, though it seemed at times slack, was in the main consistent and persevering. The long intervals during which the colonists waited for a ship, or even a letter, were times in which the Swedish statesmen were engrossed in affairs more immediately pressing. To do her best, Sweden could have done little more. In the seventeen years she had accomplished this : she had actually planted a colony. The Swedes were settled upon the soil, and here they remained. The Dutch episode, of which we must next speak, did not displace them. William Penn found them here, doing well, and welcom- ing him heartily, when he came, twenty-seven years after Ris- ingh's surrender.
One of the most notable features of the Swedish chapter is that there were no wars with the Indians. The settlers lived amicably not only with their near neighbors, the Lenape, but with the more dangerous Susquehannocks. Whatever tedious sifting may be given to the long story of the so-called purchases of Indian title to the land, on both banks of the river, by the Dutch, the Swedes, and the English, down to 1655, the result of it all will be inconclusive as to the right acquired under any of them to an exclusive possession of the soil, but in the case of the Swedes one fact will plainly appear-the preservation of friendly relations with the natives. This was the consistent and patiently-pursued policy of the Swedes, and it was made completely successful. Contrasted with the bloody chapter of the lower Hudson, in Kieft's time, and even in Stuyvesant's, it makes a white page.
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The Treaty Elm
Shackamaxon, Philadelphia, site of Penn's Treaty with the Indians, 1683. From the Birch views
CHAPTER IV
THE DUTCH SETTLEMENT .- 1655-1664
T HE overthrow of the Swedish authority on the Delaware was complete and final. For a period of nine years the white settlements on the river, on both sides, remained wholly under control of the Dutch. Ships from Sweden, with letters of instruction prepared at Stockholm, were no longer watched for at Tinicum; the immediate seat of authority was at Manhattan, and the more distant one at Amsterdam and The Hague. The great man to whom all looked was the wooden- legged Director-General of New Netherland, whose energy and capacity had been so signally shown in his prompt conquest of New Sweden.
As for the Swedes they submitted-if not cheerfully, then perforce. Politically, their connection with their mother country was ended, but as we shall see, the old ties of religion and lan- guage were long cherished, and testimony to them appeared a few years later in the chain of churches on the Delaware which perpetuated the Lutheran faith and practice as ordained in Sweden.
Under the Dutch rule the settlements on the west bank of the river became more definitely segregated. The Swedes lived to- gether, mostly north of Christina. The Dutch gathered about Fort Casimir, where a little hamlet sprang up, which became known as New Amstel-the New Castle of the English, and of our day. At New Amstel authority centered. Christina, re-
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named Altona (or Altena), was eclipsed, and Tinicum ceased to have importance except as the residence of Madam Papegoia and the location of a church. The log forts at both places rotted down, and were not rebuilt.
From Christina, after receiving Risingh's surrender. Stuy- vesant hastened back to Manhattan, to array the colonists there against the Indians. He left Ensign Dirck Smith in temporary command at Fort Casimir, but sent over in a few weeks John Paul Jacquet to be Vice-Director and administrator of the Dutch au- thority on the Delaware. Full instructions were given him- among other things to confine the trading on the river to Fort Casimir, where it could be guarded and controlled ; to prevent the sale of rum to the Indians ; to keep a watchful eye on the Swedes, and send away any who might be disaffected; and to maintain and protect the Reformed religion, according to "the word of God, and the Synod of Dordrecht."
Jacquet had been in the service of the Dutch East India Com- pany in Brazil. Coming now to Fort Casimir, he found but a feeble settlement there, a dozen families or so, and the fort itself fallen into decay. It needed renewing, he reported, "from the bottom," to be of any use against an enemy. Fortunately none
was in sight. Some of the Indian sachems came to ask better prices for furs, and to suggest that this was a proper time to make them presents, but they made no threats and gave no trouble. As for presents, Jacquet thought it worth while to raise a subscrip- tion to secure them, and one hundred and eighty-nine guilders were contributed, all the settlers "cheerfully" joining but two.
Jacquet, however, had scarcely been settled at New Amstel when an important change occurred. The West India Com- pany had been obliged to borrow money, and one of its chief creditors was the City of Amsterdam, which had especially ad- vanced funds to fit out Stuyvesant's armada of conquest the pre- ceding year. The Company therefore arranged (July, 1656). to sell to the City of Amsterdam all its claims to territory on the
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west side of the Delaware, from the south side of Christina kill to the place now known as Bombay Hook. The sale being completed, the City appointed its own Governor, Jacob Alrich, and dispatched him with three ships and a company of colonists. The largest of the three, the Printz Maurits, in which Alrich sailed with many of the colonists, was wrecked ( March, 1657) on the coast of Long Island, and though those on board escaped with their lives, it was not without suffering and loss. At the outset the Amsterdam enterprise was thus dampened.
With one hundred and eighty "souls," sixty being soldiers, Alrich reached New Amstel at the end of April, 1657, and en- tered upon his duties, displacing Jacquet. His authority cov- ered nominally only the territory from Christina to Bombay Hook, the remainder being still the West India Company's col- ony, but practically, for a time, he was the chief official on the Delaware, subject only to Stuyvesant at Manhattan.
He was not long in finding out the difficulties of his position. The fort, Casimir, had continued to decay, until at last no visitor, especially one who might sometime be an enemy, was allowed to go about it to detect its weakness. The Dutch colonists had made little progress in agriculture, and their crops were small. It happened now that in two seasons there were alternations of severe drought and excessive rain. In the summer and autumn of 1658 a general sickness, an "ardent fever," prevailed. The "barber-surgeon" died, and also Christian Barents, who had come to erect a much-needed mill to grind meal. "In great distress for bread and corn" the colony was, Alrich wrote to Stuyvesant. In the midst of these troubles, a ship arrived from Holland, bringing no supplies but a hundred people, many of them sick; ten or eleven had died during the long voyage, and three more succumbed after arrival.
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