1646.] DIFFICULTIES BETWEEN DUTCH AND SWEDES. 473 Swedes and Dutch. In the summer of 1646, a New Amsterdam trading vessel, approaching the right bank of the mouth of the Schuylkill, was sharply Disputes beordered off by the Swedish officer of the post near by, and tween was forced to obey. The captain of the vessel appealed to Hudde; but when that officer came in person to investigate the complaint, he was commanded to "leave the territory of the queen" with as little ceremony as had been used in the first case. He retired to Fort Nassau in great indignation, and an angry interchange of messages and letters followed, during which Printz requested Hudde to define precisely the rights which the Dutch believed they had in the neighboring region. Hudde replied rather vaguely to the Swedish messengers; and Printz, who had none of the patience of a diplomat, wrote decisively to the captain of the Manhattan vessel that he must leave the river or lose ship and cargo, conveying his threat, however, in courteous language, and laying all the blame on the Fort Nassau commissary. The captain wisely obeyed, and sailed away. This dispute, however, was only the prelude to further difficulties. Later in the summer Hudde found himself prevented from Further dif going to the falls at Sankikan (Trenton), whither he had ficulties. been ordered by Kieft on an exploring expedition. Printz had persuaded the Indians to stop him, making them believe that the Dutch designed to attack the tribes of that region, and build a fort upon their land. The Dutch commissary was furious but discreet, and gave up his expedition. Nor did the interference of Printz cease here. When Hudde, at Kieft's command, attempted to begin a new settlement on some land he had bought near the present site of Philadelphia, a Dutch mile or more to the north of Fort Nassau, on the west shore of the river, Printz sent a deputy to prevent it; the officer tore down the Dutch arms, and used "in an insolent and hostile manner these threatening words that although it had been the colors of the Prince of Orange that were hoisted there, he would have thrown these too under his feet;' besides many bloody menaces." 2 This was followed up by a formal letter from Printz, demanding that Hudde should at once" discontinue the injuries of which he had been guilty against the Royal Majesty in Sweden "— injuries which he had committed "without showing the least respect to Her Royal Majesty's magnificence, reputation, and highness;" and the document so belabored the commissary with protests against his "gross violence" and "gross conduct," that it is plain to see the choleric Swede believed himself to be a most patient, innocent, and abused governor. Hudde was naturally enough astonished at the tone of this despatch. 6 1 Hudde's report, in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., New Series, vol. ii., p. 431. He returned an answer in the most exaggerated form of Dutch courtesy, to "the Noble Governor De Heer John Printz," addressing him as" Sir Governor." Yet the letter was not without firmness, and contained a great deal of excellent counsel. After protesting that he had done everything in his power to promote "a good correspondence and mutual harmony," he appealed to the Swede to do likewise. “I confide that it is your Honour's intention to act in the same manner at least from the consideration that we who are Christians will not place ourselves as a stumbling-block or laughing-stock to those savage heathens." The good sense and moderation of this answer were of no avail. When the sergeant by whom Hudde sent it approached the Swedish governor, who stood before the door of "Printz Hall," with several servants and others about him, the burly officer paid no heed to the messenger's courteous "good morning," but took Hudde's despatch from his hand without ceremony, and threw it unopened toward one of his attendants, telling him to "take care of it." Turning away he went to meet some Englishmen just arrived from New England, paying no further attention to the sergeant or his letter. The Dutch soldier waited patiently for a considerable time, and then humbly asked for an answer; whereupon the governor became furiously angry, and seizing the unfortunate sergeant with all the strength of his huge frame, threw him violently out of doors, afterward "taking a gun in his hand from the wall, to shoot him, as he imagined." After this positive breach of friendly relations, nothing but hostility could exist between the Dutch and Swedes on the South River. During the short time that was left of Kieft's administration at Manhattan, petty acts of enmity and retaliation marked all the intercourse between the settlements of the two nations. "John Printz leaves nothing untried to render us suspected," wrote Hudde a little later, "as well among the savages as among the Christiansyea, often is conniving when the subjects of the Company, as well freemen as servants, when arriving at the place where he resides, are in most unreasonable manner abused, so that they are often, on returning home, bloody and bruised." The Dutch trade with the Indians had passed almost entirely out of their control; the English were kept away with an energy they would never have experienced at the hands of the Fort Nassau garrison. At the moment when Kieft of New Swe- gave up his misused power into the hands of his successor at Manhattan, the Swedes were in all respects the lords of the South River valley; and as the power of their rivals declined, they prospered and grew strong. Large reinforcements of settlers and sol Prosperity den. 1635.] PROSPERITY OF NEW SWEDEN. 475 diers came out to them; convicts and malefactors, some of whom had at first been sent out as servants to the colonists, gave way to the better class, under whose control they did good work on farms and buildings; the little town at Tinicum, with its manor-house and its church where the Reverend John Campanius preached on Sundays, had an appearance very different from that of the now desolated and unfortunate New Amsterdam. When New Netherland was at its lowest point of misfortune and mismanagement, New Sweden had reached a height of prosperity which was, however, to disappear in its turn in the advance of a stronger race. 1 Thomas Campanius Holm's Short Description, already cited, p. 73. The statement made in the same place about the sending back of subsequent bands of convicts is, like many of this author's statements, very improbable. His translator admits a considerable mingling of fable in Holm's work, and his account is only trustworthy where confirmed by others. CHAPTER XVIII. VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND. JEALOUSY OF JAMES I. OF THE VIRGINIA COMPANY. - EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON ELECTED TREASURER. - PROGRESS OF THE COLONY. - MASSACRE OF 1622. - DISSENSIONS IN THE LONDON COUNCIL. - CHARTER OF THE COMPANY TAKEN AWAY. - RAPID SUCCESSION OF GOVERNORS OF THE COLONY.-LORD BALTIMORE, AND HIS VISIT TO VIRGINIA. - CHARTER OF MARYLAND. - CECIL CALVERT'S COL- ITS LANDING IN MARYLAND. — THE FIRST TOWN. - ST. MARY'S BLUFF. — PURCHASE FROM THE INDIANS. THE FIRST CATHOLIC CHAPEL.-FRIENDLY RELATIONS WITH THE INDIANS. ONY. -- WHEN the regular meeting for the election of officers of the Virginia Company was held in 1620, a message was received from the king naming four persons, one of whom he wished to be chosen its treasurer for the ensuing year. It was a despotic act, not easy to enforce, on the one hand; hard to obey, and difficult to evade on the other. Its own charter, not the royal wish, was the law for the Company. But James sincerely believed that the Council of the Virginia the Virginia adventurers was a nursery of sedition, and, in a measure, he was unquestionably right. Among the many persons who were busy with schemes for peopling the new country, the larger number were moved, some by selfish motives, others by broad commercial and patriotic purposes. But besides these, the thinking James I. and Company. men of the time, those who valued religious and civil freedom; who contended and meant to contend against tyranny at home, so long as the struggle was of any avail; who looked to the future of England with apprehension, and were sustained by the hope that a new England might arise across the sea-all these by a common impulse engaged in some scheme of American colonization. The conviction of the king was neither a prejudice nor a mistake, but an instinct. However much it might please him to be busy about the government of a colony, he watched with jealous eyes any body of men accustomed to congregate together, lest treason against the royal prerogative should be hatched among them. The Council of the Virginia Company attended to its own affairs; but there were men at that board whose influence, in Parliament and out of it, James dreaded, not without reason. The nominations he now made were only the beginning of more serious aggressions. 1621.] CONDITION OF THE COLONY. 477 Southamp The Company was happy to effect a compromise. The king consented not to insist upon the election of one of his own candidates ; the Company so far gratified his wish as to quietly drop the man whom he held to be the most obnoxious. "Choose the devil if you will," said James," but not Sir Edwin Sandys." 1 The treasurer The Earl of elected was the Earl of Southampton a choice hardly to elected more acceptable to James than that of Sandys himself, but treasurer. quite as advantageous to the interests of the Company. For the policy which for the two previous years had been so successfully pursued, Southampton continued; nor was the active management of the affairs of the colony by Sandys lost to it; he still remained a member of the Council, and frequently acted as treasurer- always virtually the governor by Southampton's appointment. So vigorous was that management that the number of colonists sent to Virginia during the years 1619, 1620, and 1621, was three thousand five hundred and seventy, more than half of the whole number sent by the Council to the colony since Newport landed the first company at Jamestown in 1607. During the same period fifty patents were granted to individuals for private plantations, and these transported at their own charges and for their own use many servants and cattle in addition to those sent on the company's account. It was not the fault of the London Council that the establishment of a more prosperous community did not follow their large expenditure of labor, of care, and of money. Had there been nothing in the character of the emigrants, a large proportion of whom were persons whose expulsion from an old country was much more desirable than their acquisition in a new, to stand in the way of the progress and prosperity of the colony, there was reason enough in the want of any diversity of industry and the enforced labor of bound servants in one direction, to check any healthy and vigorous growth. All the energies of the people continued to be devoted to the cultivation of the one great staple, tobacco, and neither the constant and earnest remonstrance of the Council in London, nor the evidence of their own short-sightedness in the constant threat of scarcity of food, and often of famine, could induce the colonists to adopt a wiser system. The colony was fourteen years old when the governor wrote to the Council in London "as to barley, oats and the best peas there is either none, or a very small quantity of any of them in the country." So long as the colony was in the hands of the Council their efforts to check this evil were never pretermitted, but were never com- Cultivation pletely successful. The law to regulate the planting of to- of tobacco. bacco was made more stringent, but seems to have continued, for the 1 Neill's History of the Virginia Company, note p. 185. |