As early as the year 1624, the great Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the hero of his age, and the champion of the Protestant faith in Europe, entertained a design of extended colonisation in the New World. A commercial company, under the patronage of the king, was incorporated in Sweden, the monarch himself pledging 400,000 dollars of the royal treasure for the purposes of its advancement. “Men of every rank were invited to engage in the enterprise, and colonists from all countries of Europe.” Perfectly comprehending the soundest principles of colonisation, the scheme of this emigration rejected slaves, “which,” said they, “cost a great deal, labour with reluctance, and soon perish from hard usage. The Swedish nation, on the contrary, is laborious and intelligent, and we shall gain more by a free people with wives and children.” The thirty years war was then raging, and the great protestant hero looked forward to his proposed colony becoming an “asylum for the wives and daughters of those whom wars and bigotry had made fugitives; a blessing to the common man throughout the whole protestant world.” This noble plan occupied almost the last thoughts of Gustavus; shortly before his death, at the battle of Lutzen, he recommended it to the people of Germany. When protestantism and humanity lost at Lutzen one of their greatest ornaments, the scheme from which he had hoped so much was not allowed to perish. The great and good Oxenstiern extending, as his master had desired, its benefits to Germany, the charter was confirmed by deputies from the four upper circles at Frankfort. In 1637, Peter Minuits, the former governor of New Amsterdam having offered his services and his experience to Sweden, conveyed over from that country a company of Swedes and Finns in two vessels, the Key of Calmar and the Griffin, furnished by government with a religious teacher, provisions and merchandise for traffic with the natives. Early the following spring they arrived in Delaware Bay; and so beautiful did the country appear to these natives of a rigid clime, that they called the southern cape Paradise Point. From this cape to the falls of the Delaware near Trenton, the whole territory was purchased from the natives, and called New Sweden; and Christiana Fort, so designated from the youthful queen of their native land, was built.