The Dutch and the Swedes, A Colony Fought Over Twice

Most Americans know the British colonized the eastern seaboard. Fewer know that Delaware spent its early colonial decades as a Swedish colony, then a Dutch one, before England finally got around to taking it. The geography explains why it was worth fighting over: whoever controlled the Delaware Bay controlled the river approach to Philadelphia, the most important port city on the continent for most of the colonial period.

The Dutch had actually arrived first, in sixteen thirty-one, sending a small party of traders to a site they called Zwaanendael, near present-day Lewes. They built a small fort and began trading for furs. Within a year every colonist was dead, killed in a misunderstanding with local Native people over a stolen metal coat of arms. The Dutch pulled back. Seven years later the Swedes arrived at the Christina River and established New Sweden, the first permanent European colony in the Delaware Valley.

New Sweden was a curious enterprise: a Scandinavian outpost financed partly by Dutch capital, staffed largely by Swedes and Finns, governed for a time by Peter Minuit, a Dutchman who had previously founded New Amsterdam for the Dutch West India Company. The Swedes built a chain of small forts up and down the river and settled in comfortably. Then in sixteen fifty-five, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, the famously cantankerous Peter Stuyvesant, sailed into the Delaware Bay with seven ships and three hundred soldiers and demanded the colony's surrender. The Swedish governor, Johan Rising, had only a small force. He surrendered without a fight.

Dutch rule lasted only nine years. In sixteen sixty-four a fleet of four English warships arrived in New York harbor and Stuyvesant surrendered his own colony in almost identical fashion. England now controlled everything from Maine to the Carolinas, including this small peninsula on the western shore of the Delaware Bay. The cultural residue of those Swedish and Dutch decades never entirely vanished. Some family names, some architectural traditions, some place names, Zwaanendael itself is preserved in the name of a museum in Lewes, survived the British takeover and still inhabit the edges of Delaware's identity today.