William Whiting, a Hartford merchant, collected 1,069¹⁄₂ pounds of beaver worth 4,277 florins from the Swedes on one trading expedition to the Delaware in 1644. Captain Turner and Allerton, who made frequent trips there, purveyed cloth, barley seed and other grain, millstones, beer, leather and wampum for the Indian trade, all in exchange for the Swedes’ beaver. Several trading boats were also sold to the Swedes, a small one being exchanged for 98 skins, and larger barks bringing five to ten times as many.
Printz frequently sent his own people with beaver to New Amsterdam, and even to New England, to buy trade goods, livestock, rye, corn, lime, and other supplies. His chief commissary, Hendrick Huygen, usually headed up the expeditions to Manhattan. At the Dutch capital the going rate for corn, which was not always to be obtained direct from the Indians, was one beaver pelt for three bushels. Evidently the Swedes found this exchange less onerous than toiling with the plow.
On one trip to the Dutch capital Huygen bought seven oxen for 124 beaver skins valued at 868 florins, a cow for 22 skins worth 154 florins, and 75 bushels of rye for 32 skins valued at seven florins each. It cost him only ten skins to get this livestock to New Sweden, five being paid out to two Hollanders who led some of the oxen cross-country, and five to the Governor of New Netherland whose sloop delivered the remainder on the Delaware. On another trip, in addition to oxen, Huygen bought a horse for thirty skins. He even settled for his expenses at New Amsterdam with beaver, paying out nine skins for board and five for lodgings to the inn-keeper on one occasion, while having the storm-torn sails of his boat repaired for another six skins.
The Swedes never did root their colony in agriculture. For one thing, it was just too easy to rest the entire economy on the beaver trade, and somehow the habit persisted even after the fur frontier had passed into the hinterland. A visiting Indian convert from New France once accused them of being more concerned with fur trading than with converting his red kinsmen to Christianity. The charge was true enough. It might have been leveled in fact at almost any colonials of the time. But probably it wasn’t even of passing interest to the beaver-hungry Swedes.
A lesser reason for the agricultural failure was that there never seemed to be enough Swedes to man farms. The total population of the colony—soldiers, traders, farmers, servants, women, and children—amounted to no more than two hundred fifty at any time during Governor Printz’s tenure. And losses by death were not offset by reinforcements from home. In the spring of 1648 a census of all male inhabitants of age counted up to only seventy-nine. These seventy-nine were not all Swedes by a large number.
When Peter Stuyvesant arrived in America as governor of the Dutch, the inherent numerical weakness of the Swedes was at once apparent to him, for he was an experienced soldier. He also knew that because of changing conditions abroad there was less reason for being so friendly and neighborly. With the war against the Catholics drawing to a close, the alliance was breaking up, and Holland was no longer favoring Swedish shipping. The two countries were becoming bitter competitors.
The new Dutch governor had a personality that was every bit as colorful as that of his soldier counterpart in New Sweden. Having lost a leg in action, and being of an arrogant and tyrannical nature, Stuyvesant stamped about affectedly on a silver-banded pegleg, swishing a rattan cane to emphasize his commands. But he was also as zealously nationalistic and as company-minded in the administration of his colonial post as was Johan Printz.
It was predestined that hot-tempered “Big Belly” and autocratic “Peg-Leg” would clash. They did—almost immediately.
Printz, it appears, replaced his blockhouse on Province Island with a much stronger installation, Fort Korsholm, armed with cannon and manned with a garrison of soldiers. Andries Hudde, who had succeeded Jan Jansen as Dutch commissary on the South River, reported to Stuyvesant that he was now absolutely cut off from the Schuylkill and that the Swedes were “hindering” all other Dutch trade with the Indians in the river valley.
Furthermore, Hudde said, the Swedes had spoiled the trade anyway, for the Indians now insisted on two fathoms of white sewan and one fathom of purple sewan for a beaver. And, since a fathom was commonly estimated as the span of a man’s outstretched arms, the natives were sending “the largest and tallest among them to trade with us.” This made the barter “rather too much against” him, the Dutch commissary complained, as every fathom amounted “to three ells!”