Captain Young traded extensively for beaver, otter and lesser furs, and he was much impressed by the abundance of elk and deer skins available in the Delaware valley. However, his ambition was to discover a northwest passage to the South Sea and he had secret instructions authorizing him to explore the Delaware, challenge any Dutch encroachment there, and plant forts to occupy the land if he wished to do so. He was stopped of course by the falls. Although he established an English post at Eriwoneck, where his lieutenant recorded that “we sate down,” the adventure was given over after a year or two.
Young himself was later captured by the French of Canada when, in his continuing quest for the elusive passage to the Orient, he ascended the Kennebec River, portaged to headwaters of streams that took him to the St. Lawrence and found himself unexpectedly before Quebec!
The English post that Captain Young established on the Delaware at Eriwoneck was opposite present-day Philadelphia. It is frequently mentioned as having been on Pennsauken Creek. However, since the Eriwoneck tribe appears to have been living close by if not at the site of Fort Nassau, it is more likely that the English captain simply “sate down” in the deserted Dutch fort. In view of his mission any other course would appear to have been inexpedient.
Captain Young discreetly makes no mention of Dutch works on the river, probably to avoid any perplexity over the Elizabethan theory about occupation proving right of possession. But his report admits of two contacts with Dutch traders. First he ran into a trading vessel from Manhattan which he accosted and chased from the river. Then a fresh expedition from Fort Amsterdam, which he reported had been sent to “plant and trade heere” by the Hollanders, was similarly forced to retire by the English captain.
Although the Dutch traders didn’t put up any fight in the face of Thomas Young’s well-gunned ship that summer, it was a different matter the next year when an English deserter brought word overland to Fort Amsterdam that a party of Virginia traders was occupying Fort Nassau.
An armed bark was immediately dispatched to the South River. It recaptured the fort and made prisoners of the Englishmen, about fifteen altogether including their leader, George Holmes. These captives, after being transported first to Fort Amsterdam where no one could decide what to do with them, were finally returned to Kecoughtan in Virginia. The New Netherlanders then installed and maintained a permanent garrison of traders at Fort Nassau under the management of Jan Jansen with Peter May as his assistant. All of which so discouraged other Virginians, who at the time were planning to follow in Holmes’ track, that they abandoned the project.
However, across the ocean, venturers of still another nationality were preparing to invade New Netherland’s South River. The Swedish people, aroused to territorial expansion by their late King Gustavus Adolphus, wanted a bridgehead in America. Profit-minded merchants, with the fur trade uppermost in their minds, were moving eagerly to accommodate them.
XIV
Swedish Interlude On the Delaware
Peter Minuit, erstwhile governor and chief fur trader of New Netherland, was a man of energy and special talent for colonial administration. Although he had been discharged from his post in Dutch America after a disagreement with his employers, the directors of the West India Company, his administration there had been virile and efficient. It was therefore quite natural that he should be a bit vindictive toward the people who had treated him so unfairly. And, because of his driving energy, it would have been quite as unnatural for him to remain idle for long.