The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  This time there was reason to hope for substantial results, especially for success in North American trade, and specifically in the Delaware region. For chief among the investors and directors of the New Sweden Company was Samuel Blommaert, a wealthy, well-connected, and rather ruthless Dutch merchant with long experience in overseas trade. As a leading director of the Dutch West India Company, he had invested in patroonships in New Netherland and the Caribbean, most substantially in Samuel Godijn’s ill-fated Swanendael on the Delaware. He also had an interest in a Swedish brass works, was a major marketer of Swedish grain and copper, and a manipulator of Sweden’s foreign exchange. In 1635 he formed a close connection with Sweden’s powerful chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna—the “universal, omniscient, all-competent minister”—and became the salaried Swedish commissary in Amsterdam. The Swedish West India Company would, Blommaert hoped, while creating new markets in “Guinea” for such Swedish products as copper, revive the earlier settlement at Swanendael. It was natural for him to bring into the project Peter Minuit, the German-born former director of New Netherland who knew the Delaware region well. Oxenstierna’s and the government’s interests were represented by Adm. Klas Fleming, who became the company’s director, and by the Dutch-born official and politician Peter Spiring.5

  THUS TIED TO and patronized by the highest leadership of the Swedish government, the Swedish West India Company began its short, strange, and well-recorded career. Its mandate was to develop trade and plant colonies on the North American coast, from Florida to Newfoundland, and specifically to conduct trade on the Delaware. A consortium of investors led by Blommaert and his friends, half of them Dutch, half Swedish, financed the first expedition, which was organized by Blommaert and Minuit in 1637.6

  Between 1637 and 1655, the company sponsored a total of eleven expeditions (fourteen ship voyages) to the Delaware, two of which never arrived at their destination. The first expedition, which reached the Delaware in 1638, was exploratory and carried not settlers but Dutch and Swedish sailors and soldiers, twenty of whom, together with an Angolan slave, remained behind to hold the small, crude Fort Christina, which they built a few miles off the Delaware on a major Indian trading route, the Minquas Kill (creek). Two years passed before another Swedish vessel appeared on the Delaware. Then between 1640 and 1644 five expeditions (eight vessels) arrived, bearing the migrants who formed the colony’s population base. But after those few years of activity, the settlement, spread thinly 120 miles up and down the shores of the Delaware, from Cape Henlopen on the south to the Schuylkill River on the north, was in effect abandoned. In the twelve years after March 1644, only four vessels arrived from Sweden with supplies and reinforcements, one of them after the Dutch had taken over the colony.7 Only at the very end of the Swedish period was there a revival of interest in the colony and the beginning of a successful effort to increase its population. For over a decade, therefore, the Swedish colony, which never numbered more than four hundred souls—caught between the Dutch in the north and the English in the south, impoverished and riven with internal conflicts—struggled to survive in almost complete isolation from its European sources. That the settlement did survive and contributed to the pluralism of the American population was the result of its successful adaptation of Scandinavian peasant folkways to conditions in the American woodlands, the indulgence of the neighboring Lenapes, and the presence of strong, at times brutal, leadership.

  The first leader was Minuit himself, who arrived with the first expedition. After renewing his acquaintance with the area, he bought, or negotiated, from the Indians, a fifty-mile stretch along the west bank of the river, drew up a detailed map of the region, and supervised the construction of the fort, its palisades, storehouses, dwellings, and barn. After four months he left for home, where he expected to organize the first group of permanent settlers, some of whom he planned to recruit in the neighborhood of his native Hanseatic town of Wesel. That disputed area on the German-Dutch border had been briefly occupied by the Dutch a few years before and had a troubled, potentially mobile population. How successful Minuit might have been in recruiting emigrants in this area can never be known since on the return voyage he was lost at sea in a storm off St. Kitts. His successor, Peter Ridder (1640–43), a Dutch- or German-born Swedish naval officer, had no such connections, and the recruitment for the second expedition, which he commanded, introduced a pattern that would persist and would determine the peculiar character of the colony’s population.8

  Fleming and Spiring made elaborate preparations for the second expedition, despite the news that the Dutch backers were pulling out for lack of immediate profits. Supplies were assembled, ships hired and outfitted, and the first effort at recruitment began. It took the form of instructions from Fleming to an officer of the new Commercial College (board of trade) and to Johan Hindricksson, the governor of the west port town and naval base of Gothenburg, to locate any likely migrants in southwestern Sweden, and especially to gather up a group of artisans in the building trades, and to include with them their wives, who would cook, make beer, and wash for the entire settlement. The same orders went out to the governor of the south-central provinces of Värmland and Dalarna, which would remain prime targets of recruitment. Similarly Måns Kling, the military commander of the first expedition who had returned to Sweden, was told to proceed to the Norwegian border region and elsewhere in the west, “to collect and hire a multitude of roving people … who nowhere have a steady residence and dwelling,” and particularly to round up “all the forest-destroyers.” If they did not come willingly he was to “capture” them and hold them for the ship departures. Hindricksson soon reported failure in locating the desired artisans, but he proposed that, instead of such respectable people who were unlikely to be dislodged from their homes, the company should seek out soldiers who had deserted or committed offenses, and send them over with their families. Fleming agreed, and the governor was told to proceed as quickly as possible—but quietly, discreetly, so as not to touch off riots. In this he succeeded, and in the four expeditions that followed, his mandate was extended to the southern Swedish and Finnish territories and to include a variety of other marginal, stigmatized groups—timber thieves and game poachers, embezzlers and adulterers, debtors and tax defaulters—as well as people who for whatever reason could be induced to settle in the colony.9

  In New Sweden two alien groups appeared quickly. The second expedition, which arrived two years after the first, contained a contingent of Dutch families from the same impoverished province of Utrecht that had supplied immigrants to New Netherland. They settled as a separate group in the woods eighteen miles north of Fort Christina. At approximately the same time, some twenty English families—people mainly from southeastern England, but some from Yorkshire and Cornwall—subsidized by an English Delaware Company founded in New Haven, Connecticut, settled at an equal distance to the south of Christina, at Varkens Kill (later Salem, New Jersey), on the eastern shore. Then the five expeditions of 1640–44 deposited three hundred of the most diverse north European people imaginable.10

  At least two hundred—twenty-one of them women—can be identified by name and place of origin. Some were respectable people seeking land or opportunity—a tailor and a mill maker and their families “to begin agriculture”; “a young nobleman … to try his luck (or gain experience)”; a mayor’s son, “an adventurer … to try his luck.” But many were far from respectable; not a few were convicts or refugees from the law. From one village in Uppland, north of Stockholm, came a convict recently reprieved from a death sentence for robbery; from another came a deportee condemned for spreading “hard and rebellious words” against a sheriff. From Västergötland in the south came a young cavalry officer given the choice of death by hanging or six years in New Sweden for cutting off branches of fruit trees at the Royal Garden in Varnhem to use as mane combs. From the island of Åland, between Sweden and Finland, came two men condemned for adultery, one of whom had compounded his guilt by shooting an elk w
ithout permission.

  All sorts of offenses and all sorts of places of origins were recorded. The voyagers came not only from Västergötland, Uppland, Åland, Värmland, and Dalarna but from Södermanland and Östergötland south of Stockholm and from Medelpad in the north. And they came from the Netherlands and from north German towns and villages; from Saxony and Norway; from Denmark and the Frisian coast; from Danzig and Schleswig-Holstein. One of the sailors came from Dublin. And in all the shipments there were Finns: Finns from Savo-Karelia near Lake Ladoga in the east and from Kainuu near Lappland in the north; Finns from the southern Finnish farmlands and from the islands and shorelands of the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia; above all, there were Finns from the hill country of south-central Sweden to which, under official sponsorship, they had recently migrated but from which, in the 1630s and 1640s, they were being ruthlessly expelled. Of all the voyagers to New Sweden up to 1644 whose origins are known, at least 22 percent were Finns; by 1655 they constituted 40 percent of the colony’s population.11

  2

  Ridder had presided over the first arrivals and did what he could to begin a program of construction. The fort, which had already collapsed in three places, was repaired; several log cottages and a windmill were built; a number of clearings were made in the forest; and a few tobacco and vegetable patches appeared. Ridder was successful in obtaining land from the Indians that filled out the colony’s territorial claims, as far north as the lower Dutch settlements and as far south as Maryland. He established peaceful contact with the neighboring Indians, the Lenapes, and concluded at least one cycle of profitable trade with the interior tribes. But the colony was desperately short of skilled workmen—or indeed of capable colonists of any kind. “It would be impossible,” Ridder wrote, “to find more stupid people in all Sweden” than those he was forced to work with.12 He was beset by Dutch and English traders who descended on the settlements and sold the colonists needed goods at outrageous prices, and he was incapable of keeping peace between the Dutch and Swedish soldiers in his command. Cast off in what seemed a desolate wilderness surrounded by danger on all sides, the soldiers, used to the savagery of the European wars, broke through whatever discipline had bound them, fought among themselves, threatened desertion, and contributed little to the settlement’s security. Though the immigrant arrivals of 1641 were more promising than their predecessors, the colony would collapse if it did not have stronger leadership, and in 1643 Ridder was replaced by Johan Björnsson Printz.

  Sources of Swedish and Finnish settlers on the Delaware River

  Click here to see a larger image.

  LIKE JOHN SMITH in Virginia and Stuyvesant in New Netherland, Printz brought to bear on a fragile marchland community scrabbling for survival the experience of military command, tolerance for brutality and physical hardship, and a taste for adventure in exotic places. During his forceful authoritarian governorship (1643–53) the initial confusion and bewilderment was overcome and the settlement on the Delaware developed a distinctive way of life. It was also, for Printz, a time of personal frustration since he never received the reinforcements from home that he needed. Despite his increasingly urgent appeals for help, only two vessels reached him from Sweden after 1644; during the last six years of his governorship, there were none.

  But Printz had no intention of conceding defeat and thus of destroying his reputation altogether. He had taken the governorship in part to recover from a sudden decline in his fortunes, and he looked forward to the reward of an appropriate appointment at home when his service abroad was concluded. A huge man—De Vries said he weighed over four hundred pounds: the Indians called him “big belly”—he had a fierce temper, drank heavily, and brooked no opposition. “Very furious and passionate,” John Winthrop wrote, always “cursing and swearing,” Printz, he said, had “neither [a] Christian nor moral conscience”; he treated the Puritans who sought entry to the Delaware trade like criminals, denouncing them as “runagates” and personally shackling them in irons.13

  JOHAN PRINTZ

  A disgraced officer of the Swedish army, assigned to the governorship of New Sweden, Printz did what he could for the scattered, undersupplied settlers under pressure from the Indians, the Dutch, and the English, but gave up after a mutiny and the failure of support from home. (illustration credit 10.1)

  No one should have been surprised. Though initially intended for the church by his highly placed clerical family and once a student of theology, Printz had become a career army officer, fighting with outstanding bravery in a long series of battles in Germany, some of them desperate, bloody encounters, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was always a military man. In America as in Europe, he thought like a soldier and lived like a soldier. “For the last twenty-seven years,” he wrote from New Sweden, he had had more often “the musket and the pistol in my hands than Tacitus and Cicero,” and so he made no pretense of being able to reply in kind to the messages in Latin he received from Governor Winthrop in Boston. But his military career had come to a halt in 1640 when, having been forced to surrender the city of Chemnitz, he had left Germany without either reporting the loss to his superiors or obtaining their permission to leave. For this he was arrested, imprisoned, convicted by court martial, and sent off to retirement in the sprawling Finnish province of Pohjanmaa that stretched north to Finnish Lappland, where he owned property and where in earlier days he had sought army recruits.14

  It was his sudden availability with reduced prospects, his reputation for success as a tough commander, his familiarity with recruitment in Finland, and above all the patronage of Per Brahe, Finland’s aristocratic governor general (1637–40, 1648–54), that led to his appointment to the governorship of the obscure, forlorn colony 3,500 miles to the west.

  Arriving in January 1643, he quickly took charge. He found a shockingly small population—105 adult males—severely debilitated as a result of their sea voyages and malnutrition: 26, he noted, died in the course of his first year—5 murdered by the Indians, 1 drowned, the rest victims of disease. The goods he had carried with him had rotted, almost everyone in the colony wanted to leave, and there were dangers on all sides. The local Lenapes were ostensibly friendly, exchanging not furs, which they lacked, but food, desperately needed, in exchange for European goods. But relations with the less peaceful Susquehannocks—Minquas, they were called in the colony—who lived along the Atlantic outlets of the interior rivers and hence were middlemen in the vital fur trade with the Iroquois, were much more complicated. Neither the Lenapes nor the Susquehannocks, Printz believed, could be relied on. “They do not trust us and we trust them still less.” When they detect a weakness in the European defenses, he wrote, or are disappointed in the trading goods available, they strike out randomly. So without apparent provocation they slaughtered, in one place, a man and his wife “on their bed”; in another, two soldiers; in still another, a workman. Though they spoke of peace and friendly relations, they were no different from the Indians who, he was told, had recently wiped out a thousand Dutchmen in New Netherland and six hundred Christians in Virginia. The Lenapes, he said, were proud in manner, but they were in fact nothing but miserable beggars. The best thing to do, he wrote, echoing more successful appeals that had been made in Virginia, would be “to send over here a couple of hundred soldiers, and [keep them here] until we broke the necks of all of them in this river … Then each one could be secure here at his work, and feed and nourish himself unmolested … and we could take possession of the places (which are the most fruitful) that the savages now possess.” That will certainly happen sooner or later, he wrote, and the sooner the better, “before they do us more harm.” If he had the troops and officers he requested, he could guarantee that “not a single savage would be allowed to live in this river,” and the colony would have unimpeded access to trade north and south.15

  As for converting them to Christianity, the prospects were bleak. They simply slipped away when one tried to instruct them in the fear of the only true God;
they “intimate that they are a free people and subject to no one and do what they please … They know nothing of God, but serve Satan.” One must simply force them to accept Christianity; those who refuse should be exterminated.16

  Swedish and Dutch forts and trading stations on the Delaware River, 1638–55

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Soldiers were sent, but not in the numbers Printz wanted, and the settlers he needed were slow in coming. These were years of renewed warfare in Sweden: besides campaigns in Germany there was a bitter naval war with Denmark (1643–45) in which the colony’s patron Fleming was killed. Thereafter there was an agricultural depression, a contraction of commercial investments, and political struggles that weakened the authority of the colony’s chief sponsor, Oxenstierna. Neither resources nor attention could be spared for the colony. Four years after Printz’s arrival a census revealed the presence of even fewer people than had been recorded in 1644: only 83 adult males, 183 people in all. Many had left for home, some had deserted to other colonies, and death had claimed others. But Printz made progress on several fronts, and there were indications that when the turmoil in the Baltics and northern Europe died down reinforcements and supplies would arrive.17

  Turning to defense, Printz forced the English at Varkens Kill to switch their allegiance to Sweden and then built an earthwork fort, New Elfsborg, just below them on the eastern shore to command the entrance to the river. Then north of Fort Christina, on Tinicum Island, he built another fort, Gothenburg, as well as a residence for himself, Printzhof, which, though constructed simply of “pine beams laid one upon the other,” in a world of small, dark log huts and flimsy lean-tos, was considered a princely mansion. With the Dutch he maintained a guarded amity, collaborating with them for mutual benefit and to oppose the English, but competing with them for control of the river outlets of the fur trade. While Fort Christina was well placed to receive the furs carried down Christina Kill, which reached back to the head of Chesapeake Bay, the major conduit for eastbound furs was the Schuylkill River, and to control it Printz built at its mouth a string of forts and blockhouses—New Vasa, New Korsholm, Mölndal. When the Dutch retaliated by building a blockhouse of their own in the same area, Printz constructed yet another to screen that emplacement from view.