Canada -- Description and travel; Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); Indians of North America -- Canada
[Footnote 355: Nine years before (1655), Stuyvesant had attacked the
happy and contented little colony of Swedes who were settled on the
banks of the Delaware, and after a sanguinary contest, the Swedish
governor, John Rising, was obliged to submit to the Dutch authority.
Such was the end of New Sweden, which had only maintained an independent
existence for seventeen years. Thus the Swedish settlements passed into
the hands of the English at the same time as those of the Dutch. The
first Swedish colonization had been projected and encouraged by the
great Gustavus Adolphus in 1638. They gave their settlement on the banks
of the Delaware, the name of the Land of Canaan, and to the spot where
they first landed that of Canaan, so inviting and delightful did this
part of the New World first appear to them. The only thing now known of
this terrestrial paradise is, that its situation was near Cape Henlopen,
a short distance from the sea. The colonists purchased tracts of lands
of the Indians, and threw up a few fortifications; of the city they
founded, Christina, there is now no trace. It was situated near
Wilmington, twenty-seven miles south of Philadelphia. The Dutch, whose
principal city was then New Amsterdam, pretended that the country round
the Delaware belonged to them, having paid it a visit before the arrival
of the Swedes. This insinuation, moreover, did not prevent the latter
from settling, and, according to Charlevoix, the two nations lived in
amity with each other until Stuyvesant's aggression, the Dutch being
wholly devoted to commerce and the Swedes to agriculture. The Swedish
settlement was at first called New Sweden, afterward New Jersey.]
[Footnote 356: "The entire cost of this transportation amounted to
L78,533, which, amid the ferments of party, was declared by a subsequent
vote of Parliament to be not only an extravagant and unreasonable charge
to the kingdom, but of dangerous consequence to the Church."--_Brit.
Emp. Amer._, vol. i., p. 249, 250.
"Swabia, with the old Palatinate, has contributed very largely to the
present population of America. From the end of Queen Anne's reign to
1753, it is said that from 4 to 8000 went annually to Pennsylvania
alone."--Sadler, b. iv., cap. v.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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