All of this jousting, carried on when Kieft was governor of New Netherland, was civil. Though there were “offensive remarks” on both sides, and though some Dutch agents claimed to be “bloody and bruised” by the Swedes or their Indian allies, there were no outright attacks, nor were there likely to be, given the fact that Sweden and the Netherlands were allies in Europe. But the arrival of Stuyvesant on Manhattan, as formidable a combat veteran and as tempestuous a personality as Printz, altered both the tone and the substance of the contest for control and settlement of the Delaware.18
Dissatisfied with Printz’s disdainful reaction to his claim that the Delaware was Dutch territory and fearful that the Swedes were preempting a major source of furs, Stuyvesant took action. He first sent an armed ship around the coast and up the Delaware to within a few miles of Fort Christina, and followed that with a flotilla of small vessels that sailed up and down the river “with drumming and cannonading,” while he led a battalion overland to the head of the river. There he began a series of negotiations with the Indians to establish Dutch priority in the ownership of the land. When he was satisfied with the documentation, which Printz contested point by point, he simply ignored Printz and began constructing a large, well-armed fort in the center of the Swedish colony, halfway between Forts Christina and Elfsborg. He called the new fort Casimir and, while continuing what he considered a policy of nonaggression with the Swedes, made plans to send “some hundred families” to settle around the fort. By April 1653 about twenty-six Dutch families were established there. Though Printz had neither the troops nor the arms to prevent any of this, and withdrew his soldiers from the river’s entrance, he was at least able to keep the Dutch from expanding farther, and turned to more urgent matters at the heart of the colony.19
3
By 1653 the colony’s small population of independent farmers was scattered in isolated woodland encampments that were only gradually becoming cultivated. But while the freemen were more or less content to continue clearing and planting, and proceeded to construct, besides a mill of traditional Swedish design, a makeshift brewery and a small shipyard, the officials, servants, and soldiers were restless and fearful. The officials and higher-status adventurers were prevented from fully exploiting the fur trade by Printz’s restrictive rule; the servants, debilitated and sickly, worked under desperate conditions with little to look forward to; and the soldiers, guarding swampy wilderness forts, were bored, beset by lurking dangers, poorly equipped, and weakly armed. All three groups were eager to escape from the colony, and some began to think enviously of what they had heard of conditions in New Netherland and Maryland. Desertions—of single servants, of isolated families, occasionally of soldiers—became a problem that had no easy solution. Printz occasionally hired Indians who, for a price, would track down the deserters, and he attempted to negotiate with Maryland for the fugitives’ forced return. But the Maryland authorities, who also claimed ownership of the Delaware lands, were not likely to cooperate—were more likely, in fact, to attract the deserters and hold them as hostages for the return of Delaware land. And the hired Indians either did nothing or showed a shocking excess of zeal. In 1653 the warriors sent to bring back a group of deserters killed two of them when they resisted, cut off their heads, and brought them back to Fort Christina as proof of a job well done. Many in New Sweden thought this procedure was “too severe,” not because deserters did not deserve decapitation, but because “the Indians might in that way become accustomed to slaughtering our Christians, which the Indians are only too willing to do when they have the opportunity.”20
As the years passed with no supplies, settlers, or even communication from Sweden—the one major supply ship of the late 1640s having been shipwrecked off Puerto Rico—conditions worsened. Lacking trading goods or company funds, Printz began to lay out his own money and credit to pay the soldiers and company employees (he later claimed to have advanced 15,000 dalers, equivalent to approximately £168 sterling), which had the effect of increasing his personal domination of the colony and leading him to seize every source of profit in the colony he could possibly find. Resentment rose in volume and bitterness; desertions increased. In 1650 Printz wrote that there were not thirty men in the entire place whom he could trust. It was in fact worse than he suspected. His loyal son-in-law, Johan Papegoja, reported that not only did the settlers respond to Printz’s authoritarian governance with “rebuke and ingratitude,” but “the soldiers cherished secret hatred towards him and if they would find a small fault in him they would likely murder him.”21
By 1653 the resentments exploded into open rebellion. Twenty-two settlers, Swedes and Finns, presented the governor, and indirectly the king, with a list of grievances in eleven articles. They charged Printz with brutality and avarice, with endangering “life and property,” prohibiting settlers from trading freely while trafficking himself without restraint, and prohibiting them from grinding flour in the mill and from enjoying full access to fishing, timber, grass, and land. In addition he had fined one Anders the Finn a parcel of rye and other essential goods, the lack of which would probably result in the man’s death from starvation and that of his wife and children.
To Printz all of this was treachery if not treason, and he knew how to handle such matters. He quickly decided that the ringleader was Anders Jönsson, a common soldier who had been personally recruited by Papegoja. He arrested him, tried him in a military court, and had him executed by firing squad. Having cleared that up, he turned to the charges against him, which would later be expanded to include exploitation of bound labor, personal beatings of irreverent Finns, and refusal to abide by jury decisions. But while he could quell the rebellion by martial law and could satisfy himself that he had refuted the accusations, he had clearly lost the trust of the colonists, and in any case he felt he had served his country well for ten years under difficult circumstances and deserved to be relieved and rewarded. Hearing no objection from home, he packed up his personal goods and a valuable cargo of furs and in October 1653, after elaborate departing ceremonies, took passage home on a Dutch ship, together with his wife, four daughters, and twenty-five soldiers and settlers. He left behind in charge of Printzhof his tough, “overbearing … irritable and self-willed” daughter Armegot and her husband, Papegoja. It was Papegoja’s fate to see the new regime start off with the defection of fifteen more colonists to Maryland.22
But Papegoja was to participate in a sudden surge in the colony’s fortunes, before witnessing its equally sudden demise as a Swedish enterprise. Circumstances had changed. A period of peace in the Baltic allowed investments in Sweden to return to more productive channels, and army recruitment had slackened, creating a pool of potential migrants. Word had gotten back to the most deprived and harassed people of Sweden, the Finns, that despite all its miseries New Sweden was a land of opportunity; and the colony had acquired a new civilian leader, a man with a broad vision, administrative skill, and wide experience.
Johan Risingh was a well-educated, well-traveled scholar and economist, a protégé of Oxenstierna, recently ennobled and appointed secretary of the nation’s Commercial College. A learned public servant, he would leave behind a vivid account of his short tenure as governor and incorporate many of his experiences of those years into both strongly imperialist reports to the government and in A Treatise on Commerce, the first essay on mercantilist economics and population theory written in Swedish.
Risingh approached the colony with high expectations, both material and ideological. The colony, he wrote in a memorandum detailing his reasons for accepting the appointment, was potentially rich and hence would produce wealth for both the state and individuals. Sweden’s “reputation and honor,” its stature in the greater world, would be enhanced by the development of the colony, the success of which he believed was assured by promises he had received of future supplies of goods and people. And like others who might venture there as officers, he was promised advantages both occupational and financial upon his retur
n to Sweden.23
The start of his voyage was promising, at least in terms of the number of emigrants. His sister ship, The Golden Shark, having been delayed, Risingh’s Eagle took on an enormous load: more than 350 voyagers—passengers, crew, and soldiers—leaving one hundred behind. In February 1654 the Eagle left Sweden for the Delaware by way of England, the Canaries, and the Caribbean. The passengers, jammed together with their possessions, animals, and the ship’s supplies in a vessel only 132 feet long and 30 feet wide, began to suffer even before they left the English Channel. There were deaths while the ship was still in the Canaries, and the transatlantic voyage, in blazing heat, with little sanitation, food, or water, was a catastrophe. Food spoiled, dysentery swept through the huddled population, lice were said to be so thick in the clothes and blankets that when beaten with clubs, blood dripped from the cloth. Disease and delirium so disoriented some people that they fell overboard and drowned. By the time the Eagle arrived in the Delaware, three and a half months after its departure, approximately one hundred people had died and been thrown into the sea, and of the survivors thirteen were so severely ill that not only were they unable to row the dinghies to the shore, they could not walk without assistance. And it was difficult to help the survivors on board since, Risingh reported, “the stench was so strong that one could not stand it for long.”24
But before their painful debarkation took place, Risingh had made a decisive move that would come to be seen as the beginning of the end of New Sweden. As the Eagle sailed up the Delaware it came abreast of the Dutch Fort Casimir, built three years earlier. Risingh, discovering that it was guarded by only nine men who lacked effective weapons, interpreted his orders broadly and decided to capture the fort and reclaim it and the surrounding settlement for Sweden. He had no trouble. Faced with a troop of Swedish musketeers and guaranteed good treatment, the garrison quickly surrendered, and the soldiers and the nearby settlers swore allegiance to the Swedish king. There was no violence and no dispute, and Risingh’s judgment seemed vindicated. But in taking the fort, which he renamed Trinity (Trefaldighet), he had laid down a direct challenge to the Dutch, which would eventually lead to a drastic response.25
For the moment the Dutch reaction was unknown, and Risingh turned to the manifold tasks ahead. He had to nurse his fellow passengers back to health, restore trust in the government, confirm the settlers’ personal rights, rebuild the colony’s decayed defenses, restore good trade relations with the Indians, work out a new land settlement policy that would be attractive to settlers, and somehow develop the colony’s economic potential. There were difficulties everywhere, and everything could not be done at once. But in the sixteen months of Risingh’s rule—May 1654 to October 1655—he made remarkable progress.
He first arranged for the distribution of the newcomers among the few available households and forts, and then, since the local Indians, fearing the immigrants’ diseases, stayed away, he sent to New England for needed food supplies. A major question was where to settle the new colonists, who outnumbered the earlier population. His plan was both practical and strategically shrewd. He turned away from the earlier emphasis on the northern area near the Schuylkill River and gave out plots to the newcomers around Fort Christina and south from there to Fort Trinity, thus forming a continuous line of habitations on the middle and lower section of the west shore. He also distributed land west of Christina, reaching back toward the upper Chesapeake, to preempt possible encroachment by the English moving east from Maryland. Then, abandoning Fort Elfsborg, which had become a mosquito-ridden, swampy ruin, he shored up the fortifications of Christina and Trinity along with Gothenburg on Tinicum Island. The center of the colony was now clearly Fort Christina, in which he built an inn, and he had plans drawn up for a city to be constructed there, to be called Christinehamn.
The parcels of land he distributed had an important new distinction. They were outright and perpetual gifts. Recipients were to hold the land in absolute ownership for themselves and their heirs. The settlers were also allowed to acquire land directly from the Indians, and soldiers after three years of service would be given a plot in full ownership, as would servants after six years. Risingh arranged to help the settlers clear the land, and allotted them cows in exchange for future deliveries of milk products. He began construction of a sawmill, and had the decrepit gristmill repaired.
These were important material gestures. But in addition, within weeks of his arrival, Risingh also turned to bolstering confidence in the future of the colony and to convincing incipient defectors to remain. To a gathering of freemen who swore loyalty oaths to the Swedish Crown and the company, he explained their rights and benefits, passed on to them the government’s promises of future recruitment and supplies, and described the consultative role that ordinary settlers would have with the new ruling Council. He brought all of this home with special emphasis to the former Dutch people near Fort Trinity, whose loyalty he particularly hoped for despite their obvious desire to rejoin their countrymen in Manhattan as soon as possible.
And through all of this Risingh sought to stabilize official relations with the English, the Indians, and the Dutch. To a delegation from Maryland claiming title to the Delaware land he delivered a technical disquisition on international law as it related to Sweden’s right to the land, and he gave a similar response to the claims of New Haven to the Delaware land. At the same time he made it a point to maintain good relations with the English merchants trading on the river, whose grain and other supplies were essential for the colony’s survival.26
As to the Indians, though relatively good relations were maintained, and though the Rev. Johan Campanius, who believed they were the lost tribes of Israel, attempted to teach them Christianity through a catechism he wrote in what he believed was the Lenape language, derived from Hebrew (it was in fact a kind of trader’s pidgin)—despite all of this, random clashes were unavoidable. Vandalism, thefts, and murders were committed almost casually by wandering Indians. Risingh himself had none of Printz’s fierce animosity to the natives and conducted elaborate, careful negotiations with them to confirm the legality of Sweden’s land purchases and to guarantee future deliveries of corn. His success was such that the Indians invited the Swedes to settle in their territory and to build trading stations there. But perhaps his greatest achievement was the purchase from the Susquehannock Indians of a huge block of land—over 250 square miles—that extended the colony’s western boundaries to the head of Chesapeake Bay. He hoped by this to tap into the Susquehanna River trade at its approach to the upper Chesapeake and draw the furs from there through the Christina Kill into the fort near that river’s mouth. Fort Christina would thereby, he hoped, become a major Atlantic entrepôt, an appropriate center for the craftsmen, builders, and artisans he hoped to attract to the colony. That fort and its surroundings were already beginning to take on the form of a small, orderly town, with new houses, one of them Risingh’s own two-story structure, and planned land plots. And indeed by early 1655, the whole colony was becoming visually more coherent and physically more comprehensible by virtue of extended surveys and detailed maps made by the military engineer Peter Lindeström.
Lindeström, eager to see “the remotest nations and countries of the world,” had volunteered to accompany Risingh on his voyage. Once in the colony, he quickly became New Sweden’s cartographer, and he became too, in his Geographia Americae, which he wrote years later from his surveys and notes of 1654–56, the Delaware Indians’ most vivid ethnographer. Seventeen of the twenty-nine chapters in that work describe the appearance, behavior, beliefs, customs, and economy of “the American savage people.”27
4
In these strenuous efforts to revive the colony, Risingh was successful, but everything he accomplished was ringed around with the sense that there were forces at work—conspiracies—that would destroy the colony, indirectly by encouraging defections to the Dutch and the English, directly by military conquest. Though rational and constrained in most th
ings, Risingh was ruthless and unforgiving in dealing with defections and those who encouraged deserters. When he learned that Andries Hudde, “a cunning Dutchman,” formerly a Dutch official, had absconded, Risingh assumed “he had treachery in mind,” sent out a posse to bring him back, arrested and interrogated him, searched his papers for incriminating evidence, and found just what he suspected: indications of “evil conspirations” by Virginians to entice the Swedes south. Hudde, though “a malicious man,” was treated gently: he was forced to sign an oath “that he did not wish to conspire.” Lars Olofsson, “the Finn,” had no such luck. When he refused to confess that he had solicited people to leave the colony or to reveal his accomplices, “he was hanged up in handcuffs” until he confessed that most of the Finnish soldiers had talked of escaping to Virginia, where “it was good to live” and where one would not starve in the winter, as one would in New Sweden, nor be attacked by Indians. Risingh, morbidly sensitive to “dangerous plots,” was determined to stop all this—to track down every deserter and to prosecute anyone, of whatever status, who conspired to depopulate the colony. To reinforce his authority to deal with this problem, he requested from home personal legal jurisdiction in all cases “higher and lower” and both a “law-reader” to assist in prosecuting such cases and “a hang-man” to handle punishments for secret plots in the future.28
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 36
