De Vries did buy some of their pelts, though without much enthusiasm. Under an ambiguous agreement the company had recently made with the patroons, they were permitted to barter for pelts where no company factories were maintained. However, all skins taken under this arrangement had to be delivered at Fort Amsterdam for processing and shipment by the company to Holland. Such transactions were therefore not too satisfactory from an overall profit standpoint. With the coming of spring, the Patroon of Swanendael went down the coast to call on the neighboring English at Jamestown for enough supplies to evacuate his people. The small profit on the pelts he had taken represented the only gain from the patroonship. It wasn’t too long afterward that the continuing wrangle over fur trading privileges, and other contentions, ended in the proprietors of Swanendael selling out their interests to the company, without having made any further attempt at colonization. At the time of De Vries’ visit to the old Dutch works at Fort Nassau, he learned much to his surprise that an English shallop with seven or eight traders from Virginia had preceded him there. All the Virginians had been killed by the Lenape. Some of the chief men among the savages were jauntily wearing their victims’ jackets when they came to call on the Dutch patroon aboard his yacht that winter. On the subsequent visit to Jamestown, which may have been prompted as much by curiosity concerning this invasion of the South River as by the need of supplies, Captain De Vries was told by Governor Harvey that these Virginians had indeed gone on an exploring voyage in those parts. And, although Harvey said there was no reason for Virginia traders to disturb the Hollanders, he nevertheless maintained the English claim to the Delaware valley and intimated that other countrymen of his would be going there too. Shortly after this, when De Vries stopped off at Fort Amsterdam with his furs and the alarming news about the English, the Dutch provincial council dispatched an expedition once more to occupy Fort Nassau. A new house was built there and other improvements were made during the summer. Arendt Corssen, who went along at this time as the company’s commissioner in charge, also purchased from the Lenape a tract of land across the Delaware from Fort Nassau. There, probably on the west bank of the Schuylkill River and within the limits of present-day Philadelphia, he built a house and established a trading post. This post of course promoted a more convenient trade with the western Minquas. It was also designed, no doubt, to serve as added evidence of the company’s maintenance of factories in the South River valley.