It would appear at this distance of time that both Steen Bilde and the peasants were unfairly reproached for their conduct. The sudden landing of so many armed men was quite sufficient to create a panic, while the burning of "four farms in Stordalen, and of all the farms (twelve in all) which lay towards the river at Merager," was well calculated to strike terror into and to paralyze a peaceful population.[26] Under such circumstances, it would have been difficult to drive the men back to their ships, even with the fifteen hundred peasants hastily collected, under the command of three captains, and supported only by two hundred soldiers or militia. Mönnichhofen's troops appear to have had the same difficulty as the peasant levies in providing themselves with food; for the men sent by Steen Bilde into the mountains as scouts found some of the soldiers dead from hunger, and many pieces of armour as well as pikes and other weapons thrown away by them. On the other hand, Cronholm[27] asserts that the progress of the troops, which, laden with booty, were driving before them the cattle robbed from farms, was arrested in numerous mountain passes, where the soldiers were slaughtered by a host of peasants. But this statement is not in harmony with the Official Reports made to the Danish Chancellor, or with the punishment inflicted on Steen Bilde. The latter pointed out, on the contrary, that if some armed bands of peasants had understood how to utilize the advantages afforded by the physical conditions of the highlands, the rocks and precipices over which the bold Mönnichhofen and his men made their way "might easily have become their graves." However, it is on historical record that the expedition reached Jemtland, where it found itself on Swedish soil, the population having previously taken an oath of allegiance to the Swedish Crown, which at the end of the war acquired permanently that Danish province. Gustavus Adolphus occupied Herjedalen and Jemtland in pursuance of a threat made (March 1612) in a proclamation to the Norwegian peasantry, who yet spurned the idea of seceding from Denmark, and had attacked in force the lands on the Swedish borders, when, according to a contemporaneous writer, Dal and Vemland bore the brunt of the Norse onslaught.[28] In that proclamation Gustavus Adolphus attributed the war to the Danish king, "whose aim," he said, "was war and bloodshed, and who had caused, menaced, and forced both his late father and himself to have recourse to self-defence." He reminded the Norwegians how "Sweden and Norway had from the most ancient days been united by relationship of descent and language; how there was a time when they had one and the same king; how the bond that should unite Norwegians and Swedes was, after all, closer and more natural than anything that could unite Norwegians with Danes; and how even geographical conditions seemed to witness that it was the will of Fate that Norway and Sweden should be united."