Although the Dutch traders didn’t put up any fight in the face of Thomas Young’s well-gunned ship that summer, it was a different matter the next year when an English deserter brought word overland to Fort Amsterdam that a party of Virginia traders was occupying Fort Nassau. An armed bark was immediately dispatched to the South River. It recaptured the fort and made prisoners of the Englishmen, about fifteen altogether including their leader, George Holmes. These captives, after being transported first to Fort Amsterdam where no one could decide what to do with them, were finally returned to Kecoughtan in Virginia. The New Netherlanders then installed and maintained a permanent garrison of traders at Fort Nassau under the management of Jan Jansen with Peter May as his assistant. All of which so discouraged other Virginians, who at the time were planning to follow in Holmes’ track, that they abandoned the project. However, across the ocean, venturers of still another nationality were preparing to invade New Netherland’s South River. The Swedish people, aroused to territorial expansion by their late King Gustavus Adolphus, wanted a bridgehead in America. Profit-minded merchants, with the fur trade uppermost in their minds, were moving eagerly to accommodate them. XIV _Swedish Interlude On the Delaware_ Peter Minuit, erstwhile governor and chief fur trader of New Netherland, was a man of energy and special talent for colonial administration. Although he had been discharged from his post in Dutch America after a disagreement with his employers, the directors of the West India Company, his administration there had been virile and efficient. It was therefore quite natural that he should be a bit vindictive toward the people who had treated him so unfairly. And, because of his driving energy, it would have been quite as unnatural for him to remain idle for long. So it was that he sought out Samuel Blommaert who, embittered by the failure of his Swanendael patroonship, also felt he had reason for complaint against his former associates in the West India Company. According to Blommaert, it was their parsimonious policies on such matters as the fur trade and military protection for new plantations that had caused the fiasco at Whorekill. Anxious now to show up the stupidity of their management, he was attempting to form a Dutch-Swedish opposition company under Swedish protection for operations in the “West Indies.” When Minuit came on the scene, with his firsthand knowledge of New Netherland, things began to happen fast. Blommaert’s project quickly crystallized into a fur trading company with the specific intent of colonizing the valley of the South River where the patroon himself had formerly adventured. It remained only for Minuit to offer his expert services as leader of such an expedition to the Swedish crown, and royal sanction and assistance were forthcoming for the venture.