Delaware was the first colony to be established on the river that bears this name.It went through half a century of experiences under the Dutch and Swedes from 1609 to 1664, and then eighteen years under the English rule of the Duke of York, from whom it passed into the hands of William Penn, the Quaker.The Dutch got into it by an accident and were regarded by the English as interlopers.And the Swedes who followed had no better title.
The whole North Atlantic seaboard was claimed by England by virtue of the discoveries of the Cabots, father and son; but nearly a hundred years elapsed before England took advantage of this claim by starting the Virginia colony near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607.And nearly a quarter of a century more elapsed before Englishmen settled on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.Those were the two points most accessible to ships and most favorable for settlement.The middle ground of the Delaware and Hudson regions was not so easily entered and remained unoccupied.
The mouth of the Delaware was full of shoals and was always difficult to navigate.The natural harbor at the mouth of the Hudson was excellent, but the entrance to it was not at first apparent.
Into these two regions, however, the Dutch chanced just after the English had effected the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia.The Dutch had employed an Englishman named Henry Hudson and sent him in 1609 in a small ship called the Half Moon to find a passage to China and India by way of the Arctic Ocean.Turned back by the ice in the Arctic, he sailed down the coast of North America, and began exploring the middle ground from the Virginia settlement, which he seems to have known about; and, working cautiously northward along the coast and feeling his way with the lead line, he soon entered Delaware Bay.But finding it very difficult of navigation he departed and, proceeding in the same careful way up along the coast of New Jersey, he finally entered the harbor of New York and sailed up the Hudson far enough to satisfy himself that it was not the desired course to China.
This exploration gave the Dutch their claim to the Delaware and Hudson regions.But though it was worthless as against the English right by discovery of the Cabots, the Dutch went ahead with their settlement, established their headquarters and seat of government on Manhattan Island, where New York stands today, and exercised as much jurisdiction and control as they could on the Delaware.
Their explorations of the Delaware, feeling their way up it with small light draft vessels among its shoals and swift tides, their travels on land--shooting wild turkeys on the site of the present busy town of Chester--and their adventures with the Indians are full of interest.The immense quantities of wild fowl and animal and bird life along the shores astonished them; but what most aroused their cupidity was the enormous supply of furs, especially beaver and otter, that could be obtained from the Indians.Furs became their great, in fact, their only interest in the Delaware.They established forts, one near Cape Henlopen at the mouth of the river, calling it Fort Oplandt, and another far up the river on the Jersey side at the mouth of Timber Creek, nearly opposite the present site of Philadelphia, and this they called Fort Nassau.Fort Oplandt was destroyed by the Indians and its people were massacred.Fort Nassau was probably occupied only at intervals.These two posts were built mainly to assist the fur trade, and any attempts at real settlement were slight and unsuccessful.
Meantime about the year 1624 the Swedes heard of the wonderful opportunities on the Delaware.The Swedish monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, a man of broad ambitions and energetic mind, heard about the Delaware from Willem Usselinx, a merchant of Antwerp who had been actively interested in the formation of the Dutch West India Company to trade in the Dutch possessions in America.
Having quarreled with the directors, Usselinx had withdrawn from the Netherlands and now offered his services to Sweden.The Swedish court, nobles, and people, all became enthusiastic about the project which he elaborated for a great commercial company to trade and colonize in Asia, Africa, and America.* But the plan was dropped because, soon after 1630, Gustavus Adolphus led his country to intervene on the side of the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War in Germany, where he was killed three years later at the battle of Lutzen.But the desire aroused by Usselinx for a Swedish colonial empire was revived in the reign of his infant daughter, Christina, by the celebrated Swedish Chancellor, Oxenstierna.
* See "Willem Usselinx," by J.F.Jameson in the "Papers of the American Historical Association," vol.II.
An expedition, which actually reached the Delaware in 1638, was sent out under another Dutch renegade, Peter Minuit, who had been Governor of New Netherland and after being dismissed from office was now leading this Swedish enterprise to occupy part of the territory he had formerly governed for the Dutch.His two ships sailed up the Delaware and with good judgment landed at the present site of Wilmington.At that point a creek carrying a depth of over fourteen feet for ten miles from its mouth flowed into the Delaware.The Dutch had called this creek Minquas, after the tribe of Indians; the Swedes named it the Christina after their infant Queen; and in modern times it has been corrupted into Christiana.
