Warrior Kings of Sweden

by Gary Dean Peterson

  At another lull in the wars Gustav again pushed for a privately financed trading company. This time the scope was to be more limited. Voyages in European waters carrying freight for a fee would be the business. The assets and vessels of the Old South Company were transferred to this new venture. The United South Ship Company also bought an armed merchantman in 1632 named the Kalmar Nyckel (Kalmar Key) after the Kalmar Fortress. Again the company failed as did a third company called the New South Company.

  With Gustav’s death at Lützen, Oxenstierna picked up the quest to build Sweden’s overseas commerce. He contacted a Dutch merchant living in Amsterdam for help. Samuel Blommaert was a Dutch stockholder and former director of the Dutch West India Company. Like Usselinx he was dissatisfied with the company. He was not only willing to advise a Swedish competitor, he was quite willing to invest his own money. Blummaert was particularly interested in forming a company to export Swedish copper to the African Gold Coast where it was in demand and could be traded for gold. As discussions progressed Blommaert called on an old friend for advice, Peter Minuit. The Dutchman was born in Wesel on the Rhine of French Huguenot parents. He too had been associated with the Dutch West India Company. In fact he had been director general, establishing the successful New Netherlands settlement on Manhattan Island. In 1623 he had been recalled to Amsterdam to company headquarters where he either resigned or was fired. Still filled with resentment, Minuit argued for a commercial venture in America, an area he knew intimately. These three were joined by Admiral Klas Fleming, the Finnish president of the Swedish Board of Trade and Baron Peter Spiring, a Dutchman by birth, but ennobled in Sweden. The five partners set about forming a commercial enterprise to plant a Swedish colony in “Virginia, New Netherlands and adjacent regions.”1

  In secret the Swedish government issued a charter for the New Sweden Company to be capitalized at 14,400 riksdaler. Knowledge of the enterprise had to be kept from the Dutch and English as the intended landfall would be in an area claimed by both. Half the money was subscribed by Oxenstierna, Fleming, Spiring and two other Swedes. Blommaert and five other Dutchmen came up with the remainder. The Swedish government supplied thirty muskets, a ton and a half of gunpowder, and additional money. The Kalmar Nyckel was signed over to the company. Company headquarters were in Stockholm, but Gothenburg was chosen as the debarkation point.

  Without arousing suspicion a second smaller ship, the Fågel Grip, was purchased. Supplies, including spades, hoes and picks, were acquired, mostly in Amsterdam and sent to the Swedish port. Trade goods, including brightly colored cloth, wine and distilled liquors, were bought and moved to Gothenburg. A disassembled sloop was included, a boat intended to stay at the colony when the ships departed. Transportation of goods back and forth from the Netherlands to Sweden and the Baltic coast ports was so common that none of this activity raised any curiosity and so the two ships were fitted out and loaded for the voyage.

  In early November 1637 the Kalmar Nyckel and the Fågel Grip set sail from Gothenburg Harbor flying the Swedish flag. Total complement of passengers and crew is not known, but were probably less than seventy. Most of the sailors were Dutch and most of the soldiers Swedes or Finns with a sprinkling of other nationalities. Two barber-surgeons were part of the company, but no women. These men were to plant crops, establish relations with the Indians and build a settlement that women and children could be brought to later.

  The North America that the Swedish expedition would encounter was much different than the English Colonial America that would fight for independence a century and a half later. Russia had pushed through Siberia and reached the Pacific, but had not crossed to Alaska yet.

  In New Mexico, Spain had the lonely outpost of Santa Fe marking the northernmost point of their vast American empire. The Spanish were also well ensconced in Florida with a fort at San Augustine placed there originally to prevent French incursions into their territory. France had attempted to establish a presence along the southern Atlantic coast by planting Huguenot settlements in the Carolina and northern Florida area, but the colonists had been massacred and driven out by the Spanish.

  Further north the English colony of Virginia was thriving on the export of tobacco, a commodity becoming increasingly important as a trade item in Europe.

  In Canada the French were well established with settlements in Acadia (Nova Scotia) and a substantial trading post at Quebec. From this outpost they could dominate the St. Lawrence Valley and trade with their friends the Algonquins and Herons, assisting them in their wars against the Iroquois.

  South of New France was another English settlement, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with offshoots already spreading to Rhode Island and Connecticut. The English were beginning to gobble up the coastline with a Virginian establishing a trading post on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. This outpost was reinforced in 1634 by two shiploads of English settlers landing at St. Clements Island in the Potomac River, founding the colony of Maryland. In between these English colonies was the Dutch territory of New Netherlands, the property of the Dutch West India Company. Actually, the North American enterprise was only a sideline for the Dutch commercial venture. The company’s main interest was the looting of the unbelievable riches of the Spanish Main. Ships, ports, forts and settlements were fair game. Gold, silver, emeralds and pearls could be taken from the Netherlands’s arch enemy in an immensely lucrative business though it was fraught with peril. The long running Dutch war of independence provided the excuse and Spanish plate fleets, ports of assembly and mining towns provided the opportunity. Precious metals and jewels were much more exciting than fish, tobacco and furs. Still, there was profit to be made even in these mundane items and New Netherlands proved to be an excellent source.

  Dutch claims to the area were based on the voyage of Henry Hudson. While Canada, Florida and the Carolina coasts had been investigated early, little was known about the central coastline of Atlantic North America. Hudson, an English explorer commanding a Dutch ship, the Half Moon, sailed into Delaware Bay in 1609 searching for the Northwest Passage through the Americas to the Pacific and Asia beyond. On August 28 he rounded Cape Henlopen and found an expansive bay with many rivers feeding into it. It was tidal, but looked unpromising in terms of a continental passageway for the bay was full of shoals. To go further, “we must have a small pinnasse [a type of small boat], that must draw but foure or five foote water, to sound before him,”2 wrote Robert Juet, Hudson’s first mate. The Half Moon left the bay after only a one night stay at anchorage.

  Hudson moved on up the coast entering New York Bay and the river that bears his name. A year after Hudson’s visit, Samuel Argall, sailing for the Virginia Company, was blown off course on a trip to Bermuda. On August 17, 1610, he found shelter behind Cape Henlopen from the storm. He named the bay after his master the governor of Virginia, Thomas West, Baron de la Warr. The name stuck for the bay and the Indian tribes living along it. More information on the area was passed to the Netherlands in 1616 by Cornelis Hendricksen who explored the bay and reached the Delaware River, and by Cornelis Jacobsen May who named the cape (Cape May) on the north side of the entrance in 1620. The territory of the North River (Hudson) and the South River (Delaware) became a stopping place for Dutch fishermen and later for fur traders. Beaver hats made from the soft felt of the fur had become the fashion in Europe. The two river area was rich in beaver and the Indians were only to happy too trade for Dutch trinkets.

  In 1614 the New Netherlands Company was granted a charter by the Dutch Estates General to develop the territory and give it a name. This corporation was succeeded in 1621 by the Dutch West India Company, given rights to Dutch territory in Africa and America. By 1624 they had two settlements established, a colony of Walloons (French-speaking Huguenot refugees from Spanish-controlled Netherlands) on Burlington Island upriver of present day Philadelphia, and a trading post called Fort Nassau at Gloucester across the river from today’s Philadelphia. Other settlements and trading posts were established along the Nor
th River. Two of these flourished—Fort Orange at present day Albany, and New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan Island. The early records of these colonies have been lost, but the celebrated story of Peter Minuit buying Manhattan Island from the Indian sachems (chiefs) for trinkets worth twenty-four dollars has survived.

  Minuit became director-general of New Netherlands, developing the fur trade and clearing land on Manhattan Island to plant tobacco, which he saw as a cash crop to raise money for the colony. In this he was following the successful example of the English in Virginia.

  As English and French ships began to frequent the two rivers, the Dutch West India Company became worried about the vulnerability of the colony. In 1629 the Estates General of the Netherlands passed the Freedoms and Exemptions charter designed to encourage immigration. Individual settlers were granted all the land they could cultivate just for coming to the colony. This enticement was only moderately successful in inducing immigrants because of the expense of the trip. More successful was the section aimed at the company stockholders.

  Any investor who settled fifty adults in America had the right to buy a sixteen mile tract along a river or eight miles on both shores. He received the hereditary title of patroon (roughly equivalent to the English lord of the manor). His colonists were exempt from government taxes for ten years and were tied to the land, not able to move without written permission from the patroon. A patroon had the right to fish and trade anywhere in the colony. However, all imports and exports had to pass through New Amsterdam and the fur trade remained a company monopoly.

  Stockholders and groups of stockholders organized colonial ventures not only in America, but in the Caribbean and South America (a large colony developed on the coast of Brazil). One group of stockholders headed by a Walloon, Samuel Godyn, and included Samuel Blommaert, organized a colony to be established in the bay of South River. An agent purchased a tract of land on Lewes Creek just past Cape Henlopen. Twenty-eight men landed at the mouth of the creek, constructed a brick house and encircled it with a palisade. They then cleared ground and planted crops to be harvested before winter. The colonists of Swanendael survived the first winter, but in 1632 they clashed with the Indians.

  A second expedition arriving at Swanendael on December 3, 1632, found thirty-two corpses and the remains of horses, cows and dogs. All had been killed and the buildings burned. The two ships of the second expedition did some whaling during the winter months and explored the bay. On a trip up the Delaware they found Indians wearing English clothes taken from members of a party of Virginians that had come upriver on a sloop only to be waylaid and killed.

  The expedition obtained some whale oil by hunting in the bay and traded with the Indians for furs, but not enough to pay for the venture. The investors called it quits and sold all rights to the Dutch West Indies Company. Thus, the Dutch presence on the lower Delaware below Nassau had evaporated by the time of the Swedes’ arrival.

  Swanendael did accomplish one thing. It prevented the incorporation of the area into the colony of Maryland. In 1632 King Charles I of England granted Cecilus Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore and a Catholic, a tract of land to settle running north from the Potomac River. This may have included land along the Delaware, but a clause in the charter said only “hitherto uncultivated land”3 (meaning by Europeans) could be claimed. Thus, the crops planted at Swanendael removed this area from Baltimore’s claim.

  In early March 1638 the Fågel Grip and Kalmar Nyckel nosed into Delaware Bay. After a 600 year absence, a Scandinavian presence had returned to North America in a second attempt to establish a colony. After two months at sea the sight must have been wonderful to those on board. The west shore was sandy with stands of tall pine trees. Farther into the bay the sandy beaches turned to marshes and numerous islands covered with reeds among cypress and cedar produced a pungent fragrance that could be smelled far out to sea. The interior was heavily forested with oak, beech, chestnut, walnut, hickory, maple and ash. Among the trees were raccoons, opossums, rabbits, squirrels, deer and elk hunted by the predators: fox, bear, wolves, panthers and bobcats. Rattlesnakes, something new to the Europeans, were prevalent, but so were beaver, otter, mink, weasels and muskrat. The marshes and streams held a treasure in furs.

  In the forests were occasional open areas where the Indians cultivated corn, beans and squash. The Delaware Indians of this area lived in wigwams (bark huts) arranged in small semi-permanent villages. The leader of each community was a sachem who held varying degrees of power depending on his political abilities. These Native Americans survived by fishing, farming and hunting, and were generally peaceful, though unpredictable. They spoke a dialect of the Algonquian language as did most of the Indians up and down the coast. To the north and northwest, however, lay the land of the Iroquois. A tribe of this linguistic group, the Minqua, lived in the Susquehanna Valley, but had for some time raided the Delaware for food, women and slaves. By the time the Swedes arrived the Minqua had established a loose control over the lower Delaware. Similarly, the upper Delaware had become subject to the powerful Iroquois tribes of the Five Nations. Rattlesnakes and Indians were things the newcomers would have to learn about, but for the moment the scene was of trees and an occasional sighting of wildlife.

  To the Dutch this might have seemed a strange land, but to the Swedes, never far from their country’s ubiquitous forests, it would have looked familiar. The smaller Fågel Grip led, picking its way past submerged shoals that could rip a hole in a ship’s bottom. Soundings were constantly taken as the vessels crossed the bay and proceeded up the river to the mouth of a creek known to the Dutch as the Minquas Kill for it was a favorite path of raiding parties headed for the Delaware villages. Here Minuit anchored his ships. This location, of present day Wilmington, had a rock ledge on the west bank next to deep water forming a natural wharf where cargo and passengers could debark directly from ship to shore.

  The sloop was unloaded and assembled. A scouting party was sent up the Minquas Kill which was renamed the Elbe River, memorializing the river by the same name in Germany. Several trips were made up the Elbe to be sure there were no “Christian people” in the area. The closest Europeans would be the traders and soldiers of the Dutch West India Company at Fort Nassau a few miles upstream.

  Minuit had a cannon of the Kalmar Nyckel fired, which brought a score of curious Indians to the site. Eventually, five sachems were located and brought aboard the Kalmar Nyckel. In exchange for iron pots, metal axes, glass beads, cloth and distilled spirits, the Indians deeded to the Swedes the land from the Schuylkill River to the north downriver to Bombay Hook, some fifty miles of waterfront. The Delaware Indians, who called themselves Lenape or “the Common People,” understood this to mean they were granting the privilege of sharing the land with the colonists, not turning it over to them. Such misunderstandings were to lead to problems later, but for the present relations with the Lenape were good and Minuit began to construct a fort on the spot.

  Four bastions were built of logs with a wall between each made of poles stuck vertically in the ground and pointed at the top. Three sides were protected by marsh and creek. The main gate opened toward the rock wharf. Inside the fort two log houses were built with fireplaces and ovens made from bricks brought from Europe. One cabin was the barracks for the men and the other a storehouse for food, supplies and Indian trade goods.

  These two log buildings were the first seen in America of the Lincoln Log style construction, that is, with the logs parallel to the ground, the ends notched to fit and hold the walls in place. Until the Swedes arrived in Delaware this construction was unknown in the New World.

  Immigrants from France, the Netherlands, England and Spain built houses of clapboard, boards and plaster. Later, brick and stone were used when there was true affluence.

  The Swedes and Finns were woodsmen in addition to any other vocation they followed. The log structure was a staple of their construction and would become so in North America. The Swedish log cabin spread from
the Delaware valley across the Appalachians to Tennessee and Kentucky, then the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. On the Great Plains it was replaced by the sod home, but reappeared as Americans approached the Rocky Mountains where trees were again abundant. The log cabin, along with the covered wagon, has become, perhaps, the most recognized symbol of the American pioneer.

  Minuit named this first outpost Fort Christina in honor of the twelve-year-old queen and daughter of the great Gustav Adolf. Eventually the creek picked up the name also, but to the Swedes and Dutch it remained Minquas Kill.

  It didn’t take long for the commander of the Nassau garrison to discover the presence of the Swedes. Since he had fewer men than Minuit, he could only pass word of the encroachment on to the director-general at New Amsterdam, William Kief.

  Kief sent a protest to Minuit, then passed the information of the new arrivals up the chain to Dutch West Indies headquarters in the Netherlands. None of this fazed Minuit who was concerned only with acquiring enough cargo to show a return on the company’s investment.

  He sent the Fågel Grip to Jamestown to buy tobacco, but the Virginians refused to sell. Upon its return, the ship was refitted and sent, on May 20, to the Caribbean to capture a Spanish ship carrying gold or silver. Minuit sent the sloop up the Delaware repeatedly to trade with the Lenape, outbidding the Dutch for pelts.