第50章 Little Delaware (4)

The tables were now turned: the Dutch could retaliate upon Swedish shipping.But the Swedes were not so easily to be dispossessed.Three years later a new Swedish governor named Rising arrived in the river with a number of immigrants and soldiers.He sailed straight up to Fort Casimir, took it by surprise, and ejected the Dutch garrison of about a dozen men.As the successful coup occurred on Trinity Sunday, the Swedes renamed the place Fort Trinity.

The whole population--Dutch and Swede, but in 1654 mostly Swede--numbered only 368 persons.Before the arrival of Rising there had been only seventy.It seems a very small number about which to be writing history; but small as it was their "High Mightinesses," as the government of the United Netherlands was called, were determined to avenge on even so small a number the insult of the capture of Fort Casimir.

Drums, it is said, were beaten every day in Holland to call for recruits to go to America.Gunners, carpenters, and powder were collected.A ship of war was sent from Holland, accompanied by two other vessels whose names alone, Great Christopher and King Solomon, should have been sufficient to scare all the Swedes.At New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant labored night and day to fit out the expedition.A French privateer which happened to be in the harbor was hired.Several other vessels, in all seven ships, and six or seven hundred men, with a chaplain called Megapolensis, composed this mighty armament gathered together to drive out the handful of poor hardworking Swedes.A day of fasting and prayer was held and the Almighty was implored to bless this mighty expedition which, He was assured, was undertaken for "the glory of His name." It was the absurdity of such contrasts as this running all through the annals of the Dutch in America that inspired Washington Irving to write his infinitely humorous "History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty," by "Diedrich Knickerbocker." It is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in America seriously.What can you do with a people whose imagination allowed them to give such names to their ships as Weigh Scales, Spotted Cow, and The Pear Tree? So Irving described the taking of Fort Casimir in mock heroic manner.He describes the marshaling of the Dutch hosts of New York by families, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the Brinkerhoffs, the Van Kortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat, the fighting men of Wallabout, the Van Pelts, the Say Dams, the Van Dams, and all the warriors of Hellgate "clad in their thunder-and-lightning gaberdines," and lastly the standard bearers and bodyguards of Peter Stuyvesant, bearing the great beaver of the Manhattan.

"And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate struggle, the maddening ferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and self-abandonment of war.Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged, panted, and blowed.The heavens were darkened with a tempest of missives.Bang! went the guns; whack! went the broadswords;thump! went the cudgels; crash! went the musket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors of the scene! Thick, thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, heads-over-heels, rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes.Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter.Fire the mine! roared stout Rising--Tantarar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of Antony Van Corlear;--until all voice and sound became unintelligible,--grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of triumph mingling in one hideous clamor.The earth shook as if struck with a paralytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the sight; rocks burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even Christina creek turned from its course, and ran up a hill in breathless terror!"As a matter of fact, the fort surrendered without a fight on September 1, 1655.It was thereupon christened New Amstel, afterwards New Castle, and was for a long time the most important town on the Delaware.This achievement put the Dutch in complete authority over the Swedes on both sides of the river.The Swedes, however, were content, abandoned politics, secluded themselves on their farms, and left politics to the Dutch.Trade, too, they left to the Dutch, who, in their effort to monopolize it, almost killed it.This conquest by their High Mightinesses also ended the attempts of the New Englanders, particularly the people of New Haven, to get a foothold in the neighborhood of Salem, New Jersey, for which they had been struggling for years.They had dreams of a great lake far to northward full of beaver to which the Delaware would lead them.Their efforts to establish themselves survived in one or two names of places near Salem, as, for example, New England Creek, and New England Channel, which down almost into our own time was found on charts marking one of the minor channels of the bay along the Jersey shore.They continued coming to the river in ships to trade in spite of restrictions by the Dutch; and some of them in later years, as has been pointed out, secured a foothold on the Cohansey and in the Cape May region, where their descendants are still to be found.