For a while the strategy proved highly successful, especially after Printz established a trading post on the near-by Schuylkill to control that important artery of traffic from the hinterland. There, on Province Island, from which the English had so recently been ousted, he built a blockhouse of his own and mounted “stone cannon” on it. These were the vicious little “murderers” of the time, whose broad iron mouths could be jammed with stones or anything else lethal that might be handy to spray attackers at close range. Other buildings too were later erected at Province Island, but in the spring of 1644 the blockhouse served for stores, and also as quarters for Lieutenant Mans Kling and the traders stationed there.
The Dutch traders under Jan Jansen at Fort Nassau, frustrated by lack of numbers as well as by restraining orders from Fort Amsterdam, now could only stand by watching and biting their nails, while taking whatever crumbs of the Indian trade their Swedish neighbors deigned to share with them.
This same year of 1644 some merchants of Boston, with the backing of Winthrop and the Court of Massachusetts, formed a company to discover the great Lake of the Iroquois by ascending the Delaware River. Some dozen years earlier, Captain Walter Neale of the Laconia Company had failed in his efforts to reach the lake via the rivers of Maine. At least the Delaware ran in the right direction, toward that “inexhaustible” supply of beaver, something it was now conceded no Maine or Massachusetts rivers did.
A well-equipped pinnace was actually sent out to the Delaware. However, just what happened on the river is vague. Certainly neither the Swedes nor the Dutch wanted English traders on their “backside.” A few tentative shots were fired, but apparently some wisely dispensed liquor accomplished more than force. In any event the New Englanders were “entertained,” one way or another, first at Fort Elfsborg by the Swedes and then at Fort Nassau by the Dutch, and in the end they were persuaded to turn back. They returned to Boston in their pinnace, at great loss to the chagrined investors in the enterprise.
Under Johan Printz’s able direction Swedish trade flourished throughout the Delaware valley. Fine cargoes of beaver and other pelts were shipped across the sea. Some went to Sweden, but the market was never good there for foreign pelts and most were auctioned in Holland. Great quantities, however, were sold locally in America for needed supplies. And, we are told, “otter coats” and “elkskin trousers” were common articles of dress among the Swedes themselves.
Like the Pilgrims, the Swedes could not have maintained themselves but for the beaver trade. Their attempts to cultivate tobacco were unsuccessful. Neither did they grow sufficient food for themselves. And little enough help came from home. For nearly six years after the winter of 1647-48 there was no relief ship nor even any official word from Sweden to its earnest governor in America. A relief expedition sent out in 1649 was wrecked en route in the Spanish West Indies, its people tortured and enslaved. Printz had to depend on his Dutch and English neighbors for supplies. And there was only one thing of value to give them in exchange for this subsistence—beaver.
The problem of the Swedes was to monopolize the Indian beaver trade while depending upon competitors not only for subsistence supplies but for the very trucking merchandise required for the Indian trade. Dutch traders, as well as English, were therefore welcome on the Delaware so long as the Swedes could act as middlemen between them and the natives who had the beaver pelts.
English traders of this type were particularly active in New Sweden—Virginians and New Englanders, and some roving independents like Isaac Allerton, the former Pilgrim father who made so much trouble for his associates at Plymouth. Allerton, as a matter of fact, made his headquarters at this time with the Dutch at Fort Amsterdam.
John Wilcox and William Cox were among other colonial merchants who purveyed fowling pieces, sailcloth, duffels, cheese and brandy to the Swedes in exchange for beaver skins. They also provided Printz with trucking goods, such as knives, kettles, axes, hoes, cloth, red coral and sewan, or wampum. Among many such entries in the company books, reported by Dr. Amandus Johnson, is one for 220 yards of sewan purchased from an Englishman for 140 beaver skins valued at 800 florins.