Swedish reinforcements, men and women, began arriving in 1640. Even some Hollanders came over and took up land near Fort Christina, their leader being paid a salary by the Swedish government as the commandant of his people. Among contingents of new settlers from Sweden itself were some who came unwillingly. Such were the Finns, those hearty, pioneering outlaws who had been roving Sweden, poaching game and destroying forests, and rudely mocking all efforts to curb their depredations. Many of them were rounded up and “persuaded” to emigrate, along with some native “criminals” whose most serious offenses appear to have been unpaid debts, adultery, and draft-dodging.
But these unwilling emigrants quickly adapted themselves after they arrived in the new country. They rendered good service clearing the land, hewing trees and building houses. Back of Fort Christina typical Scandinavian houses went up, the first “log cabins” ever seen in America, with the timbers notched so that the carefully tailored logs lay flat and close at the joints. These primitive but highly efficient cabins soon became the symbol of the American pioneer—the fur trader as well as the farmer.
The trading limits of New Sweden were extended to the Falls of the Delaware on the north and to Cape Henlopen on the south by new purchases from the Indians. Traffic in pelts, always the chief business of the colony, was prosecuted with real vigor. With the arrival in 1643 of a vigorous new governor, Johan Printz, the Swedes began establishing trading posts and forts up and down the river in their expanded territory. And there just weren’t enough Hollanders under the flag of the Dutch West India Company at Fort Nassau to stop them, no more in fact than twenty at any time.
The Swedes went out even to the Minqua country in the valley of the Susquehanna, competing with the Dutch for the luxuriant pelts from the northern lake country. Traders with Hendrick Huygen penetrated the northwestern hinterland over 200 miles. Most often however the Minquas, or Susquehannocks, who no longer went to the Marylanders in Chesapeake Bay, came with great bundles of their fine pelts to trade at Fort Christina, for they found that the Swedes were more liberal than either the Dutch or the English, not only with trade goods but with sewan, or wampum.
Always the Swedes gave the Minquas generous measures of shell strings in exchange for beaver. Whether it was common white roanoke made from the cockle shells found in quantity along some local beaches, valuable peake strung with purple conch shell, or a variety of the even more highly prized Long Island wampum, measurements were uniformly generous. And since fathoms, ells and yards were roughly estimated by using the length of one’s arm, the giant Susquehannocks did very well for themselves.
Resourceful as usual, the Dutch began manufacturing false wampum to meet the competition. But the savages were quick to detect the counterfeit and wouldn’t accept it.
Meanwhile, some English traders from the New Haven Colony, which was being hemmed in and cut off from the Indian trade of New England, had come down to test out the prospects on the Delaware River and were very much impressed. George Lamberton, Nathaniel Turner and others decided to form a company to purchase land about the Schuylkill River as well as the unoccupied country stretching northward from Cape May. As usual the natives obliged them, regardless of prior deeds, and the New Englanders soon had a colony at Varkens Kill, now Salem Creek in New Jersey.
Everything might have been all right if the Englishmen had remained on the land they bought on the east side of the river. But this was not destined to be. Although there were some twenty families who cleared land and planted crops in 1641 at Varkens Kill, these people were primarily fur traders. They discovered that the east side of the river was too far from the trading grounds of the Indians. The next year they established a fort, building dwellings and a truck house, on the west side of the river at the mouth of the Schuylkill.
This trading post, located on Province Island in present Philadelphia, was on land claimed by both the Swedes and the Dutch. Actually it must have incorporated whatever was left of the abandoned Dutch installation built there originally by Arendt Corssen in 1633. In any case the men from New Haven, after starting a lively Indian trade, made it clear that they would countenance no competition within their newly acquired precincts.