Note 355 — Chapter XI

Nine years before (1655), Stuyvesant had attacked the happy and contented little colony of Swedes who were settled on the banks of the Delaware, and after a sanguinary contest, the Swedish governor, John Rising, was obliged to submit to the Dutch authority. Such was the end of New Sweden, which had only maintained an independent existence for seventeen years. Thus the Swedish settlements passed into the hands of the English at the same time as those of the Dutch. The first Swedish colonization had been projected and encouraged by the great Gustavus Adolphus in 1638. They gave their settlement on the banks of the Delaware, the name of the Land of Canaan, and to the spot where they first landed that of Canaan, so inviting and delightful did this part of the New World first appear to them. The only thing now known of this terrestrial paradise is, that its situation was near Cape Henlopen, a short distance from the sea. The colonists purchased tracts of lands of the Indians, and threw up a few fortifications; of the city they founded, Christina, there is now no trace. It was situated near Wilmington, twenty-seven miles south of Philadelphia. The Dutch, whose principal city was then New Amsterdam, pretended that the country round the Delaware belonged to them, having paid it a visit before the arrival of the Swedes. This insinuation, moreover, did not prevent the latter from settling, and, according to Charlevoix, the two nations lived in amity with each other until Stuyvesant's aggression, the Dutch being wholly devoted to commerce and the Swedes to agriculture. The Swedish settlement was at first called New Sweden, afterward New Jersey.