Chapter VII: Part 7

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!

XV

_New Netherland Threatened Without and Within_

Nowhere in America was there a better situation for a great fur emporium than Manhattan Island. There, converging into a protected harbor which was easily accessible to seagoing ships, were arteries of fur traffic that tapped both hinterland and coastal trade. Indeed, the beaver trade that originated at Manhattan in the round-bellied Dutch ships of the seventeenth century was the genesis of a commerce that was to make New York the greatest seaport in the world.

But, although the Hollanders at New Amsterdam had this material advantage and were exploiting it with all their energy, their occupation of New Netherland was insecure to say the least. In English eyes they were squatters on English territory, and the English had the physical means to do something about it whenever they wished.

Logically, of course, the Englishmen had a very poor case. In the light of their own Elizabethan theory that occupation of a territory was necessary to back up any claim of possession, the Dutch title to New Netherland was certainly valid. The Hollanders had searched out and settled the country. The Englishmen had not bothered to do either. Yet, stubbornly, they had never once conceded Dutch sovereignty.

Naturally, they had to come up with a new interpretation of Elizabeth’s historic pronouncement. It took the following line of reasoning. James I had long since defined Virginia as extending from the 34th to the 45th parallel, and, in fact, had granted it by charter to two great joint-stock companies of London and Plymouth before Captain Hudson ever went out to America for the Dutch. Such an act of sovereignty could be considered equivalent to taking possession of that territory! Therefore the Dutch were intruders!!

And, a quarter of a century after this “act of sovereignty,” parts of Dutch New Netherland--Connecticut, Long Island and the west bank of the Delaware River--were being reconveyed by the original English patentees or the king himself, all without benefit of having yet been settled by Englishmen.

That no official action was taken to eject the Hollanders can be attributed to the alliances of the Thirty Years’ War. However, the time was not too far away when England and Holland, relieved of their compacts, were to become deadly rivals. Already, in fact, patriotic Englishmen smarted with the knowledge that a foreign country which had to import its timber for shipbuilding, and one which had so recently been helped to independence by them, was growing rich on a carrying trade that should be in British bottoms. The ultimate conquest of New Netherland was a foregone conclusion as far as they were concerned.

Meanwhile, pressure on New Netherland from individual traders with the backing of London and New England merchants prepared the way for the anticipated military action.

* * * * *

The pressure on New Netherland began in 1633 when a trading vessel from England invaded the Hollanders’ North River for furs. Her name was the _William_. She was the first English ship ever to ascend the Hudson. At the time, the annual returns there were estimated at 16,000 beaverskins, and no one was better qualified to appreciate this rich business than the factor in charge of the _William_; for, he was none other than a former Dutch commissary on the Hudson, Jacob Eelkens, who himself had driven a great trade with the Indians at Fort Orange. In 1623 however, after incurring the displeasure of the West India Company, he had been summarily discharged. Now he was in the employ of English merchants, William Cloberry and Company of London, and he was of a mind to square accounts.

Defying both Governor Wouter van Twiller and the threatening guns on Manhattan, Eelkens proclaimed haughtily that the Hudson River belonged to England and then proceeded upstream. Van Twiller didn’t fire on him. In fact, the irresolute Dutch governor broached a cask of wine while he deliberated on the situation. Not until he had been roundly twitted for timidity by his drinking companions did he acquire enough spirit to dispatch three ships with some soldiers after the renegade Hollander. By the time this force caught up with Eelkens, he was anchored near Fort Orange, where he had established a well-stocked trucking station ashore and was enjoying a lucrative trade for beaver with the natives, all at the expense of the frustrated Dutch commissary there.

Van Twiller’s soldiers, upon their arrival, arrested the turncoat interloper, and the _William_ was convoyed back down the river to Manhattan where all the pelts aboard were confiscated. Then Eelkens, protesting loudly, was escorted with his empty ship out of the Narrows, never again to bother his countrymen on the Hudson.

But this same year, 1633, there was pressure of a more serious nature on the Dutch. It came overland, and it was not to be repulsed so easily.

The fur traders of New England hankered for the beaver that abounded in the valley of the Connecticut River where the Hollanders were taking annually some 10,000 skins. Of course Dutch Captain Adrien Block had discovered and explored the Connecticut, or “Fresh Water” as he called it, in 1614. And since fur traders from New Amsterdam bartered traditionally on the river, even establishing a temporary trading post and laying out the foundations of Fort Good Hope near the site of present-day Hartford in 1623, there was not much question in their minds about the jurisdiction of New Netherland. Admittedly, however, they had made no permanent settlements.

Neither had the English who now coveted the valley’s beaver meadows. However, they had lately done some exploring and liked what they found. Edward Winslow of New Plymouth went up the river in 1632 and was so impressed that he selected a site for a house. And John Winthrop of the Bay Colony let it out that because his colony extended “to the south sea on the west parte,” the Connecticut River, or the greater part of it anyway, belonged to Massachusetts under its charter.

So the Hollanders at New Amsterdam, a bit alarmed, bestirred themselves to complete the fort which had been commenced by them some ten years earlier. After buying “most of the lands on both sides” of the Connecticut River from the Indians, they built a strong house of yellow bricks at their old trading post and set up two cannon there to secure the river above them.

But, even while their commissary, Jacob van Curler, was building this fort in 1633, it was being enveloped by the New Englanders. Fur traders from Massachusetts Bay fought their way straight west through the wilderness that summer to reach the upper Connecticut valley north of Fort Good Hope. In the fall a party of Pilgrims from New Plymouth sailed up the river from the south for the same purpose.

It was John Oldham, an adventurous trader of ten years experience in New England, who pioneered the way for the English. With three companions he blazed what was to become known as the “Old Connecticut Path” from Watertown in Massachusetts to the Connecticut River. On his return he made an enthusiastic report on the valley and its beaver meadows, while delegations of Mohegans from the Connecticut valley offered alliances and otherwise made things most attractive to prospective settlers. They wanted the men of Massachusetts, or any other white men with guns, to settle among them. It was the only way they knew to even scores with their recent conquerors, the Pequots.

There were 4,000 Englishmen clustered about Massachusetts Bay at the time and quite a few were of a mind to get away. Puritanical intolerance, given free rein in this new American colony, was making too much of a strait jacket out of life for many of them. Connecticut sounded almost too good to be true. Some of the bold ones began making plans to migrate to the bounteous valley the following year.

In the meantime Winslow’s people at New Plymouth moved more quickly. With them fresh beaver territory was always a pressing necessity. Their very survival as a colony depended on their fur exports. They also sensed profit in taking sides with the Mohegans. Whereas the Massachusetts men cautiously avoided any complicating alliances with the Connecticut valley Indians, the Pilgrims in their desperate anxiety for pelts were quite willing, as usual, to involve themselves in inter-tribal disputes. In this case it led to most unhappy results for the traders, the farmers, and their families. Some have claimed that it was the genesis of the fierce war between the Pequots and the white men that exploded a few years later.

In any event, by early September of 1633 Captain William Holmes of New Plymouth, carrying a prefabricated house frame in “a great new bark,” was on his way up the Connecticut River. Undaunted by the Dutch fort and the Hollanders, who “threatened [him] hard, yet ... shot not,” Captain Holmes sailed past Fort Good Hope and erected his house above it at Windsor. There his people established a trading post that prospered at once on upriver furs at the expense of the Dutch traders below them. Strongly palisading this post, Holmes and his company then stood firm against a force of seventy Hollanders who were sent from New Amsterdam to eject them.

The Pilgrim coup was short-lived however. Competition from Boston had even more to do with this than Indian troubles, for in another three years a wholesale exodus from Massachusetts to the Connecticut was under way, over 800 people already having moved west to the fruitful valley. In the forefront of this migration were the fur traders, but farmers followed them to found Wethersfield and other towns. Invading Windsor, they swallowed up the small band of their Pilgrim brethren there.

The Puritans completely surrounded the isolated Dutch trading post at Hartford. But, although the New Englanders on the Connecticut at this time outnumbered the population of all New Netherland, they made no attempt to oust the garrison of Hollanders in their midst. Some twenty men, sent out by the younger Winthrop from Boston, did however take possession of the Dutch claims about the mouth of the Connecticut. There they tore down the arms of the States General which had been affixed to a tree and contemptuously engraved “a ridiculous face in their place.” When a Dutch sloop came from New Amsterdam to dislodge them, it was compelled to withdraw in the face of two cannon threateningly mounted ashore. The Boston men then went about constructing fortifications and buildings which they called Fort Saybrook.

After that the English had control of the river and, as they thought, easy access also to the beaver trade “of that so pleasant and commodious country of Erocoise before us.”

One Puritan merchant, William Pynchon, who was to found a great fortune in the Indian trade, now spearheaded the economic attack on New Netherland’s northern flank. Because of his relentless search for fur he did more than any other man to defeat the Dutch traders and to expand the frontiers of Massachusetts.

William Pynchon was one of the original company of twenty-seven grantees of Massachusetts. For their concession these adventurers were committed to pay the crown one-fifth of all the gold and silver ore found within the limits of the grant. Pynchon, however, wasn’t interested in ore. He was of a more practical bent of mind. He traded with the Indians near Boston from the start, supplying them with guns and ammunition in exchange for their beaver.

Although this trade in guns was carried on with the court’s approval, Pynchon was severely criticized for doing it, fined in fact. Annoyed about this, dissatisfied anyway with the dwindling fur trade about the bay, and not being particularly in sympathy with the rigid Calvinism of the church he had helped to found there, Pynchon’s eyes turned westward.

This keen-minded, resolute man was probably one of John Oldham’s financial backers when that extraordinary adventurer pioneered the Connecticut Path. Pynchon himself made a trip up the Connecticut River by shallop in 1635 and chose a location for a trading post near the Indian village of Agawam. Somewhat above the other river towns which were being laid out, this strategic site was relied upon to intercept most of the Indian trade from the north and west.

Early in 1636 Pynchon with his son-in-law, Henry Smith, led a group of traders overland to Agawam. They shipped their goods by water. For 18 fathoms of wampum, and 18 each of coats, hatchets, hoes and knives, with “two extra coats thrown in for good measure,” land was purchased from the Indians, and a trading settlement was established. It wasn’t too long before every one was calling this trading post Springfield, in honor of its founder’s home town in England.

In the resolutions which were framed for the government of Springfield a provision was shrewdly included to limit the population. This was intended to prevent an influx of farmers who would spoil the fur trade. Actually, the founder brought out only twelve families. As a result of his plan the main business of Springfield for many years was the beaver trade.

There was a provision in the resolutions, too, for obtaining a minister, Pynchon himself acting in this capacity until the Reverend George Moxon was finally installed. It is recorded of this good parson that when he did arrive he preached a sermon that lasted for twenty-eight days. It is also a matter of record that an early purchase for the church was an hourglass. But whether its purpose was to impose a time limit or to insure good measure is not stated.

Travelling extensively by canoe and on horseback, William Pynchon bartered with many tribes for beaver, otter, marten, mink, muskrat, raccoon, lynx, and fox. And, tactfully using Algonquin tribes as middlemen, it wasn’t too long before he tapped the Iroquois trade. By 1640 he had established one of his agents, Thomas Cooper, at Woronoco, later the site of Westfield, “where the Indians brought not only their own furs, but also furs which they obtained from the Mohawks.” When this happened, the Dutch no longer had a monopoly of the furs of the Iroquois.

Of course Pynchon’s tremendous gains meant some real losses to the new towns below Springfield, which in 1639 had created a government of their own when they drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. In an effort to checkmate Pynchon, and bring the trade of the valley to Hartford instead, Connecticut now granted to Governor Edward Hopkins and William Whiting “liberty of free trade at Woronoco and at any place thereabouts ... all others to be restrained for the terme of seven years....” But Massachusetts came to Pynchon’s rescue, resisted the Connecticut grab, and eventually established through the Commissioners of the United Colonies that Woronoco was within its bounds.

Later, the Connecticut people tried another tack. They declared an impost on all pelts and other goods that Pynchon shipped down the river, a tax that could have ruined him. However, they voted to remove this excise when the Massachusetts authorities, in retaliation, levied a large duty on Connecticut goods coming into Boston harbor. And William Pynchon went on to expand the fur frontier of Massachusetts to the north and the west, and through his beaver trade to become one of the richest men in New England.

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Meanwhile, the Puritan migration was taking other avenues of expansion in the direction of New Netherland, along the shores of Long Island Sound. These routes, too, followed the paths of fur traders who as usual broke through the wilderness to make pacts with the natives or to fuse the wars that cleared the way for settlement.

The Narragansett country and Long Island Sound were of course traditional Dutch trading preserves. But as early as 1632, New Plymouth established a truckhouse at Sowamset, now Barrington, Rhode Island, and in the following year daring John Oldham, filled with “vast conceits of extraordinary gaine,” was driving a trade on his own account much farther to the west in Long Island Sound. Oldham did business with both the Pequots and the Narragansetts, the latter taking so kindly to him and his trucking goods that they offered him free land for the establishment of a permanent trading post among them.

Three years later however, on a trading voyage in the Sound, Oldham was murdered at Block Island by Indians under Pequot control. His boat was plundered and two English boys with him at the time were carried off into captivity. This episode fused the Pequot War, the chief results of which was a bloody purge by the New Englanders that cleared the shores of the Sound for settlement.

The campaign commenced against the Pequots in 1637 quickly became a hundredfold more terrible than the murderous episode the white men set out originally to avenge. Under the leadership of Captain John Endicott of Massachusetts, a devastating blow was first delivered at Block Island. A hundred men went there with him in three ships. They burned the native wigwams, spoiled the corn, and slew all the Indians they could catch. Then they repaired to the mainland, where they invaded the heart of the Pequot country and repeated their brutal chastisement of the red men.

This grim Puritan punishment came close to uniting all the Indians in those parts against the English. Only the diplomacy of Roger Williams, who traded for furs with the Narragansetts while preaching the gospel, prevented the great Narragansett tribe from joining the Pequots in the fierce revenge they now took against any isolated Englishmen they could find. Meanwhile the Pequots scourged the countryside--until, by a final campaign, the New Englanders set out to remove this powerful tribe from the face of the earth!

An army composed mostly of mercenary savages was assembled by the Englishmen for this gory task. It originated with a party of ninety white men from the Connecticut River towns under the command of John Mason. Together with an equal number of Mohegans, they went down to Fort Saybrook to meet Captain John Underhill who had been sent from Massachusetts with twenty soldiers. This nucleous force then proceeded to the Bay of the Narragansetts where it was joined by some 500 of those savages, all bent on scalps and loot. From the bay the army marched overland to the Mystic River to attack one of the chief Pequot towns, occupied at the time by some six or seven hundred men, women and children.

The English and their Indian allies took the inhabitants of the town by surprise. They put the torch to the wigwams before the sleeping natives could offer any resistance. All who were not burned to death were slaughtered as they tried to escape--all except seven who managed to escape and seven others who were taken captive. It was a terrible affair--for the Pequots. Only two Englishmen died in the encounter.

Another main body of the Pequots was routed soon afterward. But that did not end the bloody harassment. A month later, a large force from Massachusetts under Captain Stoughton, together with Captain Mason’s Connecticut men, surrounded all that remained of the once powerful tribe. This occurred in a swamp at Fairfield where the remnant of the tribe had taken refuge. The warriors put up a brave fight, but the odds were too great against them. Those few who escaped this final butchery were divided among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, never more to be called Pequots.

The shores of the Sound west of Fort Saybrook were open now to settlers. A wave of migration from Boston resulted in the founding of New Haven, Stratford, Norwalk, Stamford, and other towns. The New Haven people, forming their own government, even spread across the Sound to Long Island which, of course, had long been occupied only by the Hollanders, whose traders exploited the natives there for the wampum so essential in the beaver trade.

To halt this encroachment on the very nerve center of their trading territory, the Dutch hurriedly purchased from the Indians all the country that remained open between Manhattan and the oncoming English, acquiring legal title to additional lands on Long Island as far west as Oyster Bay as well as to all that triangle of territory between the Hudson and the Sound south of Norwalk. The latter comprised much of present Westchester County. However the English encroachment along the north shore of the Sound, as a practical matter, was halted no farther east than Greenwich.

Only in the Narragansett country, after 1640, did the Dutch hang on to any substantial beaver trade east of Greenwich. Rhode Island, by then well populated with Englishmen, tried to keep them out. However, the Dutch simply supplied the Indians there more generously with rum and guns--in return for beaver. So did some interloping but enterprising Frenchmen. And so did some of the New Englanders themselves, for that matter. Nowhere was the competition for beaver more keen or more dangerous than in Rhode Island.

English laws at the time sincerely prohibited the sale of liquor or firearms to the savages. But such laws were difficult to enforce on a wild frontier where uncontrolled profits could be scooped up so easily. Roger Williams was later to write that he had “refused the gain of thousands by such a murderous trade.” Some of his neighbors in the wilderness and even some of his own trading associates had no such scruples however.

Richard Smith who became wealthy on the Indian trade was a man of this stripe. He and Roger Williams, along with John Wilcox, “a sturring, driving, somewhat unscrupulous fellow,” began trading in the Narragansett country as early as 1637. Each of them built trucking houses on the much-traveled Pequot and Narragansett Trail at the site of present-day Wickford. As trading practices sharpened over the years, neither Smith nor Wilcox hesitated to meet the increasing demands of the natives for liquor and powder. Williams was revolted. In 1651, when he was about to go to England, he sold his house and trading interests to Smith for 50 pounds sterling. That left Smith without any competition for this lucrative fur trade, as he had bought out Wilcox some years earlier.

Men like Smith and Wilcox furnished tinder for many flaming atrocities in Rhode Island. But their murderous trade was “the most profitable employment in these parts of America ... by which many persons of mean degree advanced to considerable estates.” Rhode Island was truly one of the most fertile of all beaver grounds--while it lasted. That was until 1660. By then the beaver was all but exhausted, while, with the help of the white man’s goods, the Indian trapper was well on the way to destroying himself too.

It had been the same of course on every fur frontier in America. In Rhode Island the fateful process of the aborigine’s extinction was just exaggerated in dreadful degree. As native drinking increased, atrocities mounted and bloody retaliation followed. Yet, in spite of this terrible situation, the English themselves came to recognize wine and spirits as the chief staple of the Indian trade, while futilely putting new laws on their books intended to limit the natives’ consumption!

For their part the Hollanders never had any compunction about distributing hot waters or firearms among the savage neighbors of the New Englanders, who after all seemed bent on taking over all of New Netherland. Protected by ships, of which the Rhode Islanders had none, the Hollanders drove a continuing trade at their long-established posts in Narragansett Bay, especially at Dutchmen’s Island which they had fortified. As late as 1647 the natives were transporting their pelts in canoes to Dutchmen’s Island, where it was said they could lay in a supply of strong waters sufficient to keep an Indian village in an uproar for a week and acquire all the guns and powder they wanted. And the Dutch continued to trade in the bay for some years after that, until the beaver of Rhode Island was almost exhausted.