Chapter VI: Part 6

Meanwhile, Captain Claiborne himself went to London where he obtained additional backing for his project through the merchant adventurer, William Cloberry. This wealthy man, together with Maurice Thompson and other merchants, subscribed for the major share of the joint-stock in the trading adventure. All agreed enthusiastically that through Claiborne’s plantation it would be possible to drain off much of the fur trade of the French in Canada. Cloberry well knew the potentialities of the “backside of Virginia,” as he had formerly adventured with the Kirkes in Canada.

Just to make sure that if Lord Baltimore later obtained his grant he did not molest Claiborne, the partners in the trading adventure obtained a commission under His Majesty’s signet of Scotland authorizing trade in all territory “neere or about these partes of America for which there is not allready a patent granted to others for the sole trade.” It was drawn up by Sir William Alexander, the Secretary for Scotland, who was entertained by Cloberry with bait in the form of a proposition for interchange of trade between Virginia and Nova Scotia. Sir William, making desperate efforts at the time to extract a profit from his grant in America, saw in the Claiborne venture a source of corn for his plantation at Port Royal.

In any event, the commission was confirmed by the King himself at Greenwich, and when the Secretary of Virginia sailed back across the ocean in May of 1631 to establish his plantation and launch his trading adventure he went with the royal blessing.

In his ship, the _Africa_, cargoed with colonists and supplies, Claiborne touched first at Kecoughtan and Accomac to attract additional volunteers, and then late in August he planted his colony on Kent Island, some hundred and twenty-five miles up the bay. Kent Island, which lies against the Eastern Shore opposite present-day Annapolis, was ideally situated for his purposes. He built a palisaded fort and stocked his plantation with cattle, swine and poultry. With the arrival of more farmers and traders from the lower settlements it was not long before the colony had a church, a windmill, warehouses, and a shipyard busily constructing shallops, wherries and pinnaces for the Indian trade.

Despite a devastating fire that once destroyed all the buildings, death from marauding savages, and sickness, as well as many other hardships, the plantation flourished. In the spring its fields were green with tobacco and corn, and its wharves were busy with trading boats and bundles of furs. During the summer the season’s pelts were stretched and leathered on rows of wooden hide racks inside the palisades before being packed in great hogsheads for shipment to England. Then in the autumn, after the harvesting, the sweet scent of tobacco wafted into the fort from the drying sheds where the leaves hung curing on poles.

In the spring of 1632 Captain Nicholas Martiau, an ancestor of George Washington, represented Kent Hundred in the House of Burgesses at Jamestown, and the first English settlement within the present bounds of the State of Maryland was recognized as a political unit of Virginia, established within the assigned territorial limits of that royal colony.

In the meantime, on the other side of the ocean, George Calvert died before ever getting a charter to establish a palatinate of his own in the Chesapeake. However, his efforts finally bore fruit. On June 30, 1632, two months after his death, a grant passed through the seals. “Maryland” was to be a slice of Virginia extending from the Potomac River northward to the 40th parallel which crosses the Delaware at present-day Philadelphia. It was a feudal seigniory to be passed on to the baron’s heirs, just as he had planned, and already it had made its first descent, to his oldest son, Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore.

Although Kent Island was obviously within the limits of the grant to Baltimore, neither William Claiborne nor the Council at Jamestown doubted the legality of Virginia’s claim upon the island. The Maryland charter expressly limited Baltimore’s rights to land “hactenus inculta,” that is, hitherto uncultivated. Kent of course was cultivated and had been for some time.

Two years later, however, when Cecilius’ younger brother, the twenty-eight-year-old Leonard, brought the first colonists over to plant on the Potomac River he promptly let it be known that Captain Claiborne must submit to his government. Kent Hundred, he said, came under the jurisdiction of the Lord Proprietor of Maryland. Furthermore, licenses from Lord Baltimore were to be required of anyone trading within the precincts of Maryland. Not only was Kent Island to be delivered up to his government at St. Mary’s on the Potomac, but the trading post in the Susquehanna River on mountainous little Palmer’s Island, which Claiborne had planted in 1633, was to be given over. The Marylanders, it appeared, planned to build their own ships for the Indian fur trade and to set up magazines in their colony that they might “make thereby a very great gayne.”

Cecil, Lord Baltimore, in fact laid much stress on the fur trade in his instructions to Leonard, consigning to his brother for his own account in trade with the natives a quantity of trucking stuff consisting of “coarse freeze, small groce glass beads, box, Ivorye, and horne Combes, brass kettles, axes, hoes, hawkes bells, and sheffeeld knives.” Before the palisaded fort at St. Mary’s was completed, the Maryland pinnace, _Dove_, was sent out to follow the “trade of beaver through all parts of the precincts of this province.”

Under Cyprian Thorowgood, Lord Baltimore’s traders paid a visit to the Virginians’ trading post on Palmer’s Island, which was manned by an interpreter named John Fullwood and a negro slave. However, the men from St. Mary’s “had a little falling out with the Indians” who never did take well to them. When Thorowgood threatened a small Kent Island shallop he found trading there, the Indians showed signs of siding with the Virginians and in the end the shallop was permitted to depart with its load of skins.

Although the Kent Islanders had taken in 3,000 skins during the first part of the 1634 season, the Marylanders, due to the lateness of their arrival that spring, took altogether “only 298, weighing 451 pounds, together with 53 muskrat and 17 other skins.”

Even so, Leonard Calvert was much encouraged, and he sent out shallops for more skins late in May. He also wrote home that he was certain that he could obtain a large part of the trade of the “Massawomecks” (Iroquois) who, he said, dwelt ten days journey to the north and had formerly traded with the Kirkes in Canada. He urged however that much more trucking stuff be sent over as “there is nothing does more endanger the loss of commerce with the Indians than want of truck to barter with them.”

The site of Calvert’s capital near the mouth of the Potomac River was an old trading ground of Virginia traders, including Claiborne, Fleet and Harmar. Once, Harmar had outwitted Fleet there to the tune of three hundredweight of beaver, when he persuaded the Yowaccomoco Indians to let him have the skins they were holding for his rival by telling them that Fleet was dead. The trick worked so well in fact that Harmar then went up the river spreading the report that Captain Fleet was dead, with the result that he made “an unexpected trade for the time, at a small charge, having gotten fifteen hundredweight of beaver, and cleared fourteen towns.”

Up the Potomac were the important towns of the Piscattaways. Beyond them lived the Anacostans who once held Henry Fleet captive and with whom he later traded. The Anacostans, like the Susquehannocks, were blood relatives of the Iroquois. But they too were now castoff and acted as buffers between the war-like Five Nations and the Algonquin tribes to the south. Through the Anacostans, Fleet hoped to make contacts with the Iroquois, tap the Canada trade, and drain it down the backside of Virginia through the Potomac River. He had run into trouble, however, due to the jealousies of the Piscattaways and others in the lower valley who didn’t want to be bypassed. They had no objection to acting as middlemen, but they objected to the white men taking their truck up the valley and dealing directly with their enemies.

Fleet’s problems were further complicated by the arrival of the Marylanders. It would appear that as a means of protecting his trade interests in the Potomac valley, he associated himself with them in the fur trade, agreeing to pay the ten percent tax demanded by the proprietary on all skins acquired from the Indians.

This, of course, William Claiborne and other Virginians would not agree to do.

* * * * *

When Captain Claiborne refused to submit to Lord Baltimore or to pay the tax on skins, he found himself accused of having incited the Indians against the Maryland settlement on the Potomac. Henry Fleet, it turned out, was the instrument of this accusation. Possibly he was hoping in this way to hasten the elimination of his major competitor for the backside trade.

However, the accusation against Claiborne was later proved false on the testimony of the Indian chiefs themselves. They said that it was actually Captain Fleet who had talked against the Marylanders--all of which might indicate that some original scheme concocted by Fleet to hang on to his Potomac trade had backfired. Father Andrew White, a restless Jesuit priest who was much involved in the fur trade with the natives as a means of supporting the Jesuits’ mission in Maryland, always insisted that Captain Fleet “had been a firebrand to inflame the Indians against us.”

The new Governor of Virginia, Sir John Harvey, also co-operated with the Marylanders. For reasons of his own he gave them cattle and supplies and assisted them against Claiborne whom he had relieved of his office as secretary. All of which was very much to the disgust of the Virginians who eventually “thrust” the governor out of office for treason to their interests and sent him packing back to England.

It was charged that Harvey had even encouraged Calvert’s men to fire on Kent Island shallops and confiscate their furs. In any case, this the Marylanders did almost from the time of their arrival in 1634, and during all the remainder of that year piracy and lawlessness ruled the Chesapeake.

Armed pinnaces out of St. Mary’s commandeered Claiborne’s smaller shallops and took his furs. His men were evicted from their traditional trading grounds with gun and sword. But the fort on Kent Island was not attacked, and the Virginians had time not only to make it more secure but to erect a second fort on another part of the island to prevent surprise. They also began building larger boats, including a pinnace called the _Long Tayle_, that could carry more fighting men and heavier weapons in addition to a cargo of pelts.

The _Long Tayle_ was the first real ship built within the present boundaries of Maryland. She had a crew of twenty men. Her guns were chambers and falconets for ball shot, and murderers--the little cannon into the muzzles of which could be jammed scraps of iron, rocks, or almost anything lethal that might be handy for standing off boarding parties.

The Kent Islanders launched the hostilities in the spring of 1635 when John Butler, Claiborne’s brother-in-law, captured a Maryland boat loaded with pelts taken from Palmer’s Island. Soon after, Captain Thomas Smith went out in the _Long Tayle_ to trade for beaver with an Indian village on the south side of the Patuxent River. Since this village was not more than half a dozen miles overland from the Maryland capital, it is not strange that Calvert learned of the _Long Tayle’s_ presence. He promptly sent a sufficient force of soldiers to surprise the Kent Islanders and take them and their pinnace.

Captain Claiborne retaliated just as promptly. He dispatched Lieutenant Radcliffe Warren down the bay in a fast wherry, called the _Cockatrice_, with a vengeful crew of thirteen men. They tried to recapture the _Long Tayle_. However they couldn’t get at her under the guns of Calvert’s fort at St. Mary’s where she lay protected. But then, Warren heard that a Maryland pinnace, the _St. Helen_, was trading alone in the Pocomoke River on the Eastern Shore. So he set out after her.

Entering the Pocomoke, he sighted the Maryland pinnace and splashed a ball from his falconet beside her. She hove to quietly. He was closing in to board when, suddenly from a nearby cove, another pinnace bore down on him. Her decks were razed and her crew were presenting arms. It was the _St. Margaret_, Calvert’s largest boat, commanded by his chief trader and councillor, Captain Thomas Cornwallis.

Lieutenant Warren had little time to consider the probability that he was the victim of a well-laid trap. Falconets cracked out their sharp reports. Chambers barked. The surrounding marshes of the Pocomoke reverberated with the din of oaths, shots and belching murderers as the three boats became environed with fire and smoke. Warren himself was killed. Three others died in the fight, and many were wounded on both sides. Only the greater maneuverability and speed of the badly battered _Cockatrice_ accounted for its escape back to Kent Island.

Claiborne and his men were bitter about the unexpected outcome of Warren’s expedition. They soon had an opportunity for revenge however. Just a few weeks later they learned that Cornwallis was again bartering in the Pocomoke, together with his aide, Cuthbert Fenwick, and some other well known Maryland traders. Two boats were sent this time to trap the Marylanders. Captain Thomas Smith, recently escaped from St. Mary’s and now master of the _Cockatrice_, went in escort with a newly enlisted Virginia pinnace under the command of Philip Taylor. They succeeded in capturing the big Maryland boat and its crew in a naval action that was later described as “felonie and piracie” by Lord Baltimore’s government.

The next day Taylor was in the Potomac River for a try at recapturing the _Long Tayle_. He carried what might be described as a letter of marque and reprisal given him by William Claiborne. The Marylanders, however, turned the tables on him. They captured Taylor along with his pinnace.

But in the meantime Governor Harvey had been placed under arrest by the Virginia Council and put on a ship for England. When Claiborne arrived from Kent Island late in May of 1635 with news of the bloody encounters on the bay, the acting governor, John West, at once sent a mission to St. Mary’s to apprize Calvert of Harvey’s arrest and to demand that the Marylanders “desist their violent proceedings.”

Leonard Calvert took pause at this unexpected development. His younger brother, George, as well as his councillor, Jerome Hawley, had been contending all along that Claiborne had some right on his side. Violence was certainly not accomplishing anything. Maybe, Calvert may have conjectured, his brother in England could do better through the courts.

So it came about that the mission was successful in imposing a truce on Maryland that lasted for two years. Prisoners and confiscated boats were exchanged. Claiborne, now married and settled with his family, was left unmolested in the possession of his island home and undisturbed in his trading activities. Another windmill was built, and another church, better to serve the two growing communities on Kent Island. Besides an enormous number of pelts traded locally for private accounts and for the maintenance of the plantation, furs to the value of 4,000 pounds sterling were shipped to England for the company partners there.

But then, Captain Claiborne found it necessary to go to England, for Lord Baltimore had powerful friends. It looked as if he might get a legal decision against the Virginians through the Lords Commissioners of Plantations. Claiborne turned over all his operations to a partner who had recently arrived from England representing the joint-stock company, and went to London to fight for his rights. No sooner had he left however than this partner, one George Evelin, managed to betray Kent Island into the hands of his enemies.

Although the main fort was traitorously delivered up, the island was not yielded quietly or easily. Repeated military expeditions to subdue the inhabitants were made by Leonard Calvert before Captain Thomas Smith and others were finally captured in 1638 and hanged as pirates and rebels. Claiborne himself, _in absentia_, was attainted by the Maryland Assembly of the “grievous crimes of pyracie and murther,” and “all his lands and tenements, goods and chattels” were forfeited to the Lord Proprietary. Evelin took his share of the loot, even digging up some of Claiborne’s fruit trees and transplanting them to the manor that Lord Baltimore granted him near St. Mary’s in payment for his services.

In another few years, due to continued disturbances, Kent Island was to be laid waste without hope of recovery, the mill and the forts destroyed, its former population scattered abroad.

Soldiers armed with ordnance taken from Kent were also sent in 1638 to Palmer’s Island in the Susquehanna River where they “utterly ruined” the plantation and reduced the palisaded fort which had been built there the previous year. They seized all of Claiborne’s goods and chattels. Leonard Calvert himself, following the expedition, triumphantly supervised the conversion of this trade outpost to “Fort Conquest” of Maryland. The spoils were divided. Claiborne’s bonded servants, cattle and other goods at Palmer’s Island went to John Lewger, Secretary of Maryland. His books were sequestered by a petty officer, as was a wooden chest belonging to the unfortunate Captain Tom Smith.

Gone was the “Plantation in the Sasquesahonoughs Country” at the mouth of the river, for which Captain Claiborne had been willing to pay the king a rental of fifty pounds sterling a year including rights “to the head of the said River, and to the Grand Lake of Canada to be held in fee from the Crown of England.” In fact, forever gone was the “greate trade of beaver and other furrs which Claiborne might have had with the mountayn Indians which live upon the lakes of the river of Canada.”

The Marylanders carried on a profitable local fur trade, in spite of Indian disturbances, for some years. But they were no threat to the French or the Dutch as they were never successful in tapping the northern lake-country trade on the backside of Virginia through either the valley of the Susquehanna or the Potomac. Their relations with the Indians were not up to it, and they were more inclined to agricultural pursuits anyway.

The French were therefore able to continue their penetration of America without the interference they might have had from the Virginians who settled Kent and Palmer’s Islands. In fact, they were now almost unmolested in an encirclement of the English colonies that would not stop until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River. And the Dutch were undisturbed by the Marylanders even in the neighboring valley of the Delaware, where they were now settling and trading in pelts under the very noses of Lord Baltimore’s people who claimed jurisdiction over some of those parts.

By the end of the century the fur frontier in Maryland had almost disappeared and the trade was no longer important in the economic life of the colony. The average value of skins exported per year didn’t exceed 650 pounds sterling. By then the Governor of Maryland was declaring that “this Countrey is an open Country and deales generally in Tobacco and not in furrs.”

XIII

_New Netherland’s South River_

The charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines, build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels.

Although the company was chartered in 1621, it did not commence operations until 1623. But then, during the next six or seven years, its success was phenomenal in the matter of profits--from waging war against Spain. So much so, that by 1629 its directors in Amsterdam were prone to speak slightingly of New Netherland, their trading colony in North America. “The trade carried on there in peltries is right advantageous but, one year with another, we can at most bring home fifty thousand guilders,” they complained.

For a plantation which at the time numbered no more than 300 inhabitants this would seem to be most productive, especially when compared to what the English had done in either Virginia or in New England. It was paltry enough, however, when compared with the loot of Spanish colonial strongholds that fell to the conquering Dutch merchants, or when weighed against the spoils of Spain’s silver fleet that Admiral Peter Heyn had captured in the name of the West India Company. In one fell swoop he took seventeen galleons laden with bullion and merchandise to the value of fourteen millions of guilders! From that operation alone the investors received a dividend amounting to well over half of the company’s paid-up capital.

Experienced Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, who had been appointed the first managing director of the West India Company’s colony in America, acted primarily as a chief fur factor for the company. During 1624, the first and only year of his governorship, he sent home pelts which brought 27,000 guilders. The next year his successor did even better. In 1626, the year that Peter Minuit received the formal title of Director General of New Netherland and purchased Manhattan from the Indians, one ship for Amsterdam was cargoed with “7246 beaver skins, 178¹⁄₂ otter skins, 675 otter skins, 48 minck skins, 36 wild cat skins, 33 mincks, 34 rat skins.” It also carried some oak and hickory to timber-hungry Holland.

This, incidentally, is the earliest known true manifest of a ship clearing from the present port of New York. In terms of today’s money the skins brought well over one hundred thousand American dollars. A right advantageous trade indeed!

In the spring of 1624 some thirty families, mostly French-speaking Walloons from the lower provinces fleeing persecution by Spanish inquisitors, had come over with Captain May in the _New Netherland_. They came as the plantation’s first real colonists, to raise livestock, to put their spades into the earth. May, as well as his successor, was charged with “spreading out” and more formally occupying New Netherland. It would prevent any further trouble with England about the possession of that country, it was hoped, since the English themselves had expounded the doctrine that “occupancy confers a good title by the laws of nations and nature.” In the case of their North American colony the Hollanders could afford a point of agreement on such a doctrine.

A part of this 1624 expedition is said to have been landed on Manhattan Island. Although the evidence has been attacked, it is not at all unlikely that May did promptly put some of the _New Netherland’s_ passengers ashore at Manhattan to begin the replacement of any temporary works there. There must have been a truck house or two, huts and possibly even palisades in need of rehabilitation for permanent, year-round occupancy. The immediate occupation of such a strategic location at the mouth of the river could hardly have been neglected anyway, especially as it was necessary at the time to escort from the harbor a poaching French ship whose captain seemed bent on going ashore to set up the arms of his king and take possession of the country.

In any case, some eighteen families were conveyed up the Hudson to a previously selected site a few miles above the redoubt at Norman’s Kill. In this more convenient location a new fort was built, while the Walloons settled around it. Fort Orange, as they called this plantation, was within the limits of present-day Albany, New York. Here the Mohegans, as well as the Iroquois, came immediately with presents of beaver and other peltry to confirm their alliance with the Dutch, and the old trade continued to flourish under the new management of the West India Company.

It would appear that about this time a group of May’s people also went up the Connecticut River to establish a trading post near the present site of Hartford and to begin the construction of Fort Good Hope there. But the building of this outpost lagged. It was some years before the fort was completed and manned. When that came about, in 1633, Fort Good Hope had become a focal point of rivalry between the Dutch and the New Englanders for the beaver meadows of the Connecticut valley and a question mark in the matter of resolving jurisdiction over the country.

* * * * *

At the time of the planting of Fort Orange another part of May’s expedition, including some of the Walloon families, was dispatched to the Delaware, or South River, as the Hollanders now called it to distinguish it from the Hudson, their great North River.

Up the South River, on its east bank, at a strategic trading site also previously selected by Captain May, a new Fort Nassau was built. It was opposite the confluence of the Schuylkill River and the Delaware, the tongue of land on which Philadelphia was later founded by William Penn but which at the time of the Dutch arrival was the seat of probably the largest Lenni Lenape community in the valley. There, at Passyunk, lived the great chief of all the lower river Indians. Fort Nassau, the new Dutch trading post across the Delaware River, stood at the mouth of Timber Creek within the present limits of Gloucester, New Jersey.

Some soldiers and traders, together with a few of the Walloon farmers and their families who were originally to have settled a farming plantation on the lower west side of Delaware Bay, were eventually installed at Fort Nassau. There, they established trade relations with the natives. Others, it is said, with the addition of new recruits from Holland the following spring, were sent still higher up the river to build a house and operate a trading station on Verhulsten Island, near the present site of Trenton. This island, at the head of navigation just below the falls, was named for Captain May’s successor in 1625, William Verhulst, who made his headquarters on the South River. The site of the falls was an important Indian crossing from the valley of the Hudson, where the Lenni Lenape traditionally traded with other tribes.

The Lenni Lenape Indians, later called the Delaware by the English, were an Algonquin nation that inhabited all the immense valley of the Delaware. Tribal relatives occupied important villages even in the lower valley of the Hudson River. Relatively peaceful, the Lenni Lenape made their homes beside placid streams, in grass-matted huts thatched with the bark of cedar, the men fishing and hunting while their women tilled gardens of corn, beans, tobacco and squash. The men hunted fur-bearing animals whose pelts would be useful for winter body coverings. The women scraped the pelts with stone tools and dried them on wooden stretching racks, rubbing the animals’ brains and livers into the skins to help in the suppling process.

All was not quiet and peace for the Lenape however. They were subject to terrifying raids by the Susquehannocks (Minquas, the Dutch called them) as well as by the Iroquoian relatives of the Susquehannocks who lived farther up the valley of the Susquehanna River. These fearsome marauders stole their women, burnt their houses and devastated their gardens. Trapping beaver and muskrat for blankets or hunting the raccoon too far away from native grounds was a precarious venture for Lenape braves. In fact, some tribes had fled their more isolated villages for the safety of Passyunk on the Schuylkill before the white men came. Others, on the west bank of the lower river, had crossed over the Delaware to settle on the safer east bank.

So it was that at the coming of the Dutch these river Indians welcomed the Europeans’ guns. And the deliberative Hollanders bought land and made trade treaties with them while, at the same time, probing for avenues of trade with the Lenapes’ enemies, too. Although there were muskrat, mink, ordinary otter and some brown beaver on the South River, the Dutch well knew from previous dealings with the Iroquois that there were vast stores of the finer black pelts, both beaver and otter, and valuable “lion skins” cached in the “forts” of the Susquehannocks and their northern relatives. However, on the lower Delaware, it was principally muskrat that the Lenape had to offer, the market value of which was but a fraction of other pelts.

The muskrat, a bushy-furred member of the rodent family, resembles nothing so much as a big wharf rat. This was something with which the seagoing Dutchmen were only too familiar. As a matter of practice they referred to the kindred fur bearers in America simply as “rats.” Like the Englishmen they also marketed both the pelts and the musky cods, the fluids of which were useful for perfumes and as demothing agents.

Muskrats frequent tidewater marshlands and swamps. Their hind feet are oar-like, being slightly webbed and set obliquely to the legs, permitting a swivel action that propels them through the water. They steer themselves with their tails which are flattened sidewise. The Indians hunted and trapped these animals along their waterside runs very much as they did the beaver. And they often dumped the skinned carcasses of the “rats” into the communal stew pot, much to the disgust of the traders who had to partake of the feast which always preceded barter.

In the early days of the Dutch occupation on the South River, as it turned out, the Hollanders were not too successful in opening up trade with the Susquehannocks and their Iroquois relatives of the hinterland. The Susquehannocks were too busy subjugating the Lenni Lenape. By the time things settled down, after most of the lower river Indians had taken flight or been made tributary, the Susquehannocks were bartering in a more convenient market. They were selling pelts at the mouth of their own river among the English in the Chesapeake Bay.

On the other hand, the furs of the lower Delaware River Indians were not hard to come by, even when they were good. Brown beaver by the bundle, when the Lenape had it, might be taken for a white clay pipe worth a mere pittance. To an Indian who had not yet learned the true value of such a tobacco pipe, with its smoothly beautiful bowl and straight stem, it was a treasure to accompany him to his grave. And, as for the Dutchman’s iron and his colored cloth, his liquor, his firearms, and especially the clothes he wore, these all represented unbelievable wealth to the savage. Quick to learn that he could acquire such amazing riches for a few animal skins, he would risk traffic with his aboriginal enemies if necessary to get the kinds of pelts the white men wanted.

But it was entirely different when it came to the food for which the Dutch in their early occupation of the Delaware valley had to depend on their native neighbors. Although the Lenape were perfectly willing to part with their own furs, and sometimes took extraordinary risks to get more of them, it was another matter when it came to corn and beans. With the Minquas constantly raiding, no treasure could tempt a Lenape chief to give up what little corn he might have to keep his people from starving.

It was this difficulty, coupled with the squeeze put on New Netherland by greedy directors of the West India Company, that soon brought about the recall of the South River settlers to Manhattan. One small yacht, the directors contended, would adequately take care of the South River trade at much less cost than maintaining garrisons there under the conditions with which they had to contend.

Anyway, it was asserted, the need for formal occupation of this distant outpost was less necessary now that England had joined the Netherlands in the war against Spain. All ports of each country were open to merchantmen and warships of the other, and both were committed to maintain fleets that were finally to rid the world of Spanish might. Under the circumstances the English would hardly risk offending their ally by disturbing any part of the Netherlands’ province in America.

So, after the government of New Netherland was formally taken over in 1626 by Peter Minuit, who forthwith installed a “Battery” on the southern tip of Manhattan Island for protection against the Spaniards and named the place “Fort Amsterdam,” the South River was all but abandoned as a plantation. Now and then Dutch factors put ashore at Fort Nassau to occupy it temporarily as a trading post, but by 1628 all the Walloon farmers had returned to the North River.

There, at Fort Amsterdam, the company now concentrated its own colonists and centralized the control of its fur trade, while promoting another scheme for the permanent planting of the outlying districts with farmers at no expense to itself.

* * * * *

The no-expense colonizing scheme was not a new one among the colonial powers of Europe, except for its dressing.

Members of the West India Company who at their own expense planted the unoccupied provinces of New Netherland were to become “patroons,” that is, proprietors of little colonial principalities with feudalistic “privileges and exemptions.” By transporting and settling a specified number of colonists, black slaves qualifying as such, a rich if otherwise undistinguished merchant of Amsterdam could elevate himself to the worshipful status of a feudal lord. Of course he had first to purchase his land from the Indians in conformance with Dutch policy. A little _aqua vitae_ and a few jackets sufficed usually to keep that a relatively minor expense however.

There was only one hitch. A patroon could not engage in the fur trade. He had freedom of trade in any merchandise “except beavers, otters, minks, and all sorts of peltry.” The commerce in pelts was to remain the company’s monopoly.

Because of this restriction the early patroonships were destined to failure. Trade in furs was needed to help root a new plantation in the soil, as had already been proved so often on the wild American coasts. Only one of the early patroonships survived, Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s colony in the Albany area. And it was the illegal pursuit of private fur trade that suckled Rensselaerwyck through its infancy.

The earliest patroonship for which land was chosen in New Netherland was patented on the “South River” in 1630. Samuel Godyn and Samuel Blommaert, leading members of the company, were original partners in this venture which later included Captain David Pieters de Vries among others. Their original manor tract, called Swanendael, lay west of Cape Henlopen in Delaware Bay, but the proprietorship was later extended to the opposite shore including Cape May. The bay, reportedly, was a favorite haunt of whales, many having been sighted there in the past. It was decided that whaling would be a profitable enterprise in lieu of fur trading to support the plantation in its infancy.

The first colonizing expedition to Swanendael arrived in the spring of 1631 and planted at Whorekill, on present-day Lewes Creek, just above Cape Henlopen. Although the whaling proved a failure that year, the ship that brought over the colonists returning to Amsterdam with no more than a sample of oil taken from a dead whale found on the beach, it was said that the settlers did seed their land and had a fine crop by July. But then, as the story goes, a piece of tin was the instrument of their undoing.

They had emblazoned a small sheet of this metal with the arms of Holland and attached it to a pillar which was erected to proclaim their possession of the land. An Indian chief, happening along, appropriated the tin, probably with the idea of converting it into a shiny tobacco pipe. That savage whim, it was claimed, set off a chain of misunderstanding that ended in his own death and the massacre of the Dutch. Only one of the thirty-three settlers survived the carnage.

The Hollanders had built a brick house which should have served them well as a fort. They were also supposed to have surrounded the house with palisades, a requirement of the time, and to have had an Indian-fighting mastiff handy for just such an emergency. However, according to those who later argued with the company over responsibility for the failure of the Swanendael patroonship, the settlers at Whorekill were caught and butchered individually one day while laboring in the fields, unable to reach the safety of the palisades reportedly erected--while their fierce dog was unfortunately chained at the house.

If Whorekill, which may be translated as Harlots’ Creek, acquired its name as indicated, one cannot resist wondering whether playful Indian squaws, too much _aqua vitae_ and vengeful braves might have had something to do with the demise of the Dutchmen. Certain it is that these first Europeans “left other reminders of their brief sojourn on the bay besides their skeletons,” for later Dutchmen who visited in this vicinity “with their goods where they traded with the Indians ... got the country dutyes, otherwise called the Pox.”

When Captain David de Vries came over as patroon in the winter of 1632-33 he built a lodging hut ashore, constructed “sloops” for whaling and set up a kettle for rendering oil. But although his harpooners killed a few whales, they were small and almost worthless for oil. The whale fishery was an economic failure.

Meanwhile, for some reason, Captain De Vries made peace with the savages who had slaughtered the original settlers on the Whorekill. There was no retaliation, surprisingly enough, for whatever happened on the creek the previous year. De Vries explained that the natives promised to provide him with food. But apparently they didn’t do so.

The Dutch patroon ascended the South River to barter for corn and beans. Twice during the winter he visited abandoned Fort Nassau where many Indians congregated on the news that he was in the river. However there was the usual difficulty about food. The Lenape were anxious to trade skins for his merchandise, even pausing in flight from the terrible Minqua to do so, but few of them were willing to part with corn.

De Vries did buy some of their pelts, though without much enthusiasm. Under an ambiguous agreement the company had recently made with the patroons, they were permitted to barter for pelts where no company factories were maintained. However, all skins taken under this arrangement had to be delivered at Fort Amsterdam for processing and shipment by the company to Holland. Such transactions were therefore not too satisfactory from an overall profit standpoint.

With the coming of spring, the Patroon of Swanendael went down the coast to call on the neighboring English at Jamestown for enough supplies to evacuate his people. The small profit on the pelts he had taken represented the only gain from the patroonship. It wasn’t too long afterward that the continuing wrangle over fur trading privileges, and other contentions, ended in the proprietors of Swanendael selling out their interests to the company, without having made any further attempt at colonization.

At the time of De Vries’ visit to the old Dutch works at Fort Nassau, he learned much to his surprise that an English shallop with seven or eight traders from Virginia had preceded him there. All the Virginians had been killed by the Lenape. Some of the chief men among the savages were jauntily wearing their victims’ jackets when they came to call on the Dutch patroon aboard his yacht that winter.

On the subsequent visit to Jamestown, which may have been prompted as much by curiosity concerning this invasion of the South River as by the need of supplies, Captain De Vries was told by Governor Harvey that these Virginians had indeed gone on an exploring voyage in those parts. And, although Harvey said there was no reason for Virginia traders to disturb the Hollanders, he nevertheless maintained the English claim to the Delaware valley and intimated that other countrymen of his would be going there too.

Shortly after this, when De Vries stopped off at Fort Amsterdam with his furs and the alarming news about the English, the Dutch provincial council dispatched an expedition once more to occupy Fort Nassau. A new house was built there and other improvements were made during the summer. Arendt Corssen, who went along at this time as the company’s commissioner in charge, also purchased from the Lenape a tract of land across the Delaware from Fort Nassau. There, probably on the west bank of the Schuylkill River and within the limits of present-day Philadelphia, he built a house and established a trading post.

This post of course promoted a more convenient trade with the western Minquas. It was also designed, no doubt, to serve as added evidence of the company’s maintenance of factories in the South River valley.

However, no English having appeared on the river during the summer and the Swanendael patroonship being inactive, these lonely outposts of the company were again deserted during the winter of 1633-34. A fur trader’s life in the winter wilderness, cooped up in a house surrounded by snow and unpredictable savages, must have been anything but enviable. The Hollanders on the South River could hardly be blamed for preferring their warmer and gayer quarters on Manhattan.

But then, in the summer of 1634 when no Dutch were about, an Englishman named Thomas Young sailed up the Delaware and planted the arms of his king ashore. He had come directly from England to trade in “Virginia,” under a license from the king, with special designs on the valley of the Delaware. Governor Harvey of Virginia lent all possible assistance to him when he stopped off in the Chesapeake to build trading shallops and gather information for his venture.

Captain Young traded extensively for beaver, otter and lesser furs, and he was much impressed by the abundance of elk and deer skins available in the Delaware valley. However, his ambition was to discover a northwest passage to the South Sea and he had secret instructions authorizing him to explore the Delaware, challenge any Dutch encroachment there, and plant forts to occupy the land if he wished to do so. He was stopped of course by the falls. Although he established an English post at Eriwoneck, where his lieutenant recorded that “we sate down,” the adventure was given over after a year or two.

Young himself was later captured by the French of Canada when, in his continuing quest for the elusive passage to the Orient, he ascended the Kennebec River, portaged to headwaters of streams that took him to the St. Lawrence and found himself unexpectedly before Quebec!

The English post that Captain Young established on the Delaware at Eriwoneck was opposite present-day Philadelphia. It is frequently mentioned as having been on Pennsauken Creek. However, since the Eriwoneck tribe appears to have been living close by if not at the site of Fort Nassau, it is more likely that the English captain simply “sate down” in the deserted Dutch fort. In view of his mission any other course would appear to have been inexpedient.

Captain Young discreetly makes no mention of Dutch works on the river, probably to avoid any perplexity over the Elizabethan theory about occupation proving right of possession. But his report admits of two contacts with Dutch traders. First he ran into a trading vessel from Manhattan which he accosted and chased from the river. Then a fresh expedition from Fort Amsterdam, which he reported had been sent to “plant and trade heere” by the Hollanders, was similarly forced to retire by the English captain.

Although the Dutch traders didn’t put up any fight in the face of Thomas Young’s well-gunned ship that summer, it was a different matter the next year when an English deserter brought word overland to Fort Amsterdam that a party of Virginia traders was occupying Fort Nassau.

An armed bark was immediately dispatched to the South River. It recaptured the fort and made prisoners of the Englishmen, about fifteen altogether including their leader, George Holmes. These captives, after being transported first to Fort Amsterdam where no one could decide what to do with them, were finally returned to Kecoughtan in Virginia. The New Netherlanders then installed and maintained a permanent garrison of traders at Fort Nassau under the management of Jan Jansen with Peter May as his assistant. All of which so discouraged other Virginians, who at the time were planning to follow in Holmes’ track, that they abandoned the project.

However, across the ocean, venturers of still another nationality were preparing to invade New Netherland’s South River. The Swedish people, aroused to territorial expansion by their late King Gustavus Adolphus, wanted a bridgehead in America. Profit-minded merchants, with the fur trade uppermost in their minds, were moving eagerly to accommodate them.

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.