The Swedes and the Dutch, who had been operating under a kind of armed truce in this area, united promptly in the face of this threat to their common interest. Two armed sloops were sent out by the Council of New Netherland, and Jan Jansen with the cooperation of the Swedes attacked and burned out the interlopers. George Lamberton managed to escape in his pinnace with a few of his people. But most of the New Englanders were captured and shipped off to Manhattan as prisoners.
Lamberton, however, like most English traders, was a man of tenacity and courage. Certainly he was persistent when he thought he saw a good thing. The very next year he was back in the river again. This time, unfortunately for him, the atmosphere was even more hostile. That hot-tempered, national-minded Governor of New Sweden, Johan Printz, had arrived in the meantime—all four hundred imperious pounds of him!
“Big Belly” Printz, as the Indians called him, came with the fire of patriotism in his eye. He was not one to stand for any nonsense from foreigners. As a good diplomat he maintained a neighborly friendship with the Dutch, as he had been instructed to do, that is, so long as they were no military threat to New Sweden and so long as they could be outwitted in the Indian trade. But the English—those aggressive and stubbornly nationalistic colonizers—were another matter.
So, in 1643, when George Lamberton once more sailed up the Delaware in his pinnace, he was to find himself in real trouble.
Intercepting some Minquas en route to Fort Christina with their furs, Lamberton induced them to trade with him. Whereupon the Swedish governor invited him to dinner in order to arrest him, the charge being that of having bribed the Minquas with cloth and wampum to massacre the Swedes and Dutch. For a while it looked as if the Englishman might have a short life.
But, although “Big Belly” set himself up as inquisitor, prosecutor and judge, he couldn’t make his accusation stick before a mixed court of English, Dutch and Swedish commissioners in the face of 400 beaver skins Lamberton produced as evidence of his peaceful barter. In the end Printz could only fine the New Englander double duty on the beaver skins he had taken in trade and let him go. As a parting threat however, he told Lamberton that his pinnace would be confiscated if ever he traded again in New Sweden without authorization.
Then the corpulent but vigorous governor turned his full attention to tightening Swedish control of the river, with a view toward gaining a monopoly of the fur trade for his company.
On the east side of the Delaware, where he pretended to the same land claimed by the New Englanders, he constructed a stronghold which he named Fort Elfsborg. It was an imposing earthwork, emplaced with 8 twelve-pound guns and a mortar. Located on waterside just below Varkens Kill and garrisoned by thirteen men, Fort Elfsborg not only asserted Printz’s authority over a sickly remnant of the New Haven Englishmen still there, but gave him military control of the river. Even Dutch vessels on their way up to Fort Nassau were compelled to lower their flags before the guns of the Swedish fort, their skippers no doubt muttering curses against “Big Belly” who now “held the river locked for himself.”
On the west side of the river the governor strengthened Fort Christina, the fur emporium of New Sweden where the general storehouses were maintained. He moved his own headquarters however to a much grander manor setting farther upstream at Tinicum Island.
There, on this water-bound river bank, over which sleek airliners now wing low, in and out of close by Philadelphia Airport, he built a riverside fort of hemlock logs “laid one upon another” and a princely “hall” for himself. Fort New Gothenborg, he named this new capital, which was little more than half a dozen miles from Dutch Fort Nassau across the river. To Fort New Gothenborg the Swedish governor hoped to attract most of the Indian traffic that he now shared grudgingly with the New Netherland traders.