The Rocks: Where America's First Permanent Colony Began

You are standing at the edge of the Christina River, near a small granite outcropping the city calls The Rocks. It does not look like much today, a few weathered stones at the water's edge. But on the twenty-ninth of March, sixteen thirty-eight, two small ships nosed toward this bank and changed the history of an entire continent.

The vessels were called Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip, and they sailed under the Swedish crown, though many of their crew were Dutch and Finnish. In command was Peter Minuit, a savvy Dutch merchant who had already founded New Amsterdam, the settlement that would one day become New York City. Now he was working for Sweden, and he had brought roughly fifty colonists across the Atlantic to plant a flag in the New World.

What made the landing at The Rocks extraordinary was what happened next. Rather than simply claiming the land by force, as many European powers did, Minuit's party sat down with five Lenape chiefs, including Mattahorn and Mitatsemint, and purchased sixty-seven miles of Delaware River frontage extending, in the language of the deed, as far west as the setting sun. A Lenape translator named Andres Lucassen helped broker the exchange. Whether the two sides understood the transaction the same way is a matter historians still debate. Sachem Mattahoon later argued the sale covered only a small plot bounded by six trees, not a sweeping coastal territory.

Regardless of that dispute, the colony of New Sweden took root here. The settlers built Fort Christina on the high ground nearby, named for Christina, the eleven-year-old queen of Sweden who sat on the throne at the time. The colony changed hands to the Dutch in sixteen fifty-five and to the English a decade later, but its founders left something permanent: the log cabin construction technique they brought from Finland spread steadily westward and became the iconic shelter of the American frontier.

Today a replica of the Kalmar Nyckel sails out of this very port. When she rounds the bend with her tall masts and Dutch-style hull, you are seeing something close to what those Lenape chiefs watched appear on the horizon nearly four hundred years ago.