Читать книгу The Brandywine - W. Barksdale Maynard - Страница 10

Chapter 1

Fish Creek in New Sweden

Long ago, a little river flowed through desolate, wind-whipped tundra. Mammoths drank from the torrent, Brandywine water freezing to their matted brown fur. Such were the strange sights met with 150 centuries ago in the Ice Age, as the stream rushed through snowcovered wastes toward a shipless sea.¹

Jump ahead fifty centuries: the mammoth are extinct. Only now, the first humans begin to prowl the land, spears in hand. It is still cold; long reaches of time have yet to elapse before the climate moderates and forests of oak and hickory clothe these hillsides, bleakly draped in low mats of scraggly gorse. In places, freeze-thaw cycles are gradually strewing steep slopes with huge, round boulders of Brandywine blue rock, creating the jumbled landscapes we know today.

Eventually Lenape Indians hunted in these forests, in little bands that came and went with the seasons. They numbered a few hundred at most, making this fertile valley in aboriginal times as sparsely populated as rural Alaska is today. They strung fishing weirs along the Brandywine to catch alewife and shad that clogged the waterways every spring. A cave along the east bank afforded a refuge: Beaver Valley Rock Shelter, where archaeological excavation has yielded arrowheads, stone chips, and clay potsherds from transient hunting parties in the Woodland period, before 1000 a.d.²

To keep the forests open and easy to hunt through, the Lenape set fires in winter, filling the air with smoke and sweet fragrance, a smell that wafted for miles and could be detected even out at sea, by men who suddenly arrived in ships from unknown lands far away. For these strangers, the smell of burning forests, torched by the native people, was their first hint of land, of the mysterious shores of the New World.³

De Vries at the Rocks

On January 14, 1633, a little ship passed the mouth of the creek—still a nameless stream—and pulled up to an outcrop called the Rocks on Minquas Kill, today’s Christina River. (Dutch explorers named creeks throughout the territory of New Netherlands kill; “Minquas” referred to a warlike tribe who lived far west of the Christina.) On board ship was David de Vries, a tough Dutch artillerist who had fought many wars at sea, braving Turks and Barbary pirates.

De Vries had come to America to oversee a fledgling colony at the mouth of the Delaware River called Swanendael (near today’s Lewes), named for the fat swans that stood out among its abundant birdlife. The whole region newly belonged to the Dutch Republic, and Swanendael was to be the Dutch West India Company’s whaling outpost: whale oil was worth a fortune in Europe. Even upriver at Minquas Kill there were whales, de Vries was pleased to note—he saw one spout six or seven times there.

De Vries had come to the Rocks to gather ballast for his ship. Here the crystalline Piedmont touches the oozy Coastal Plain; here stones were available as they almost never are farther down the sandy-shored Delaware Bay. Five years later, de Vries’s rivals, the Swedes, would make the lonely Rocks the site of their nation’s first permanent settlement in the New World—European states jockeying for position amid the wilds of a little-explored, dauntingly immense continent. But all this lay in the future. As his men hauled stones aboard ship in 1633, de Vries little imagined the Swedes would ever come to threaten Dutch hegemony in the Delaware Valley. He was more worried about the British, starting to extend their influence north from Virginia, where they had settled at Jamestown twenty-six years before.

Past the buttonwood. Europeans have known the creek for nearly three centuries. Some sycamores that shaded the early explorers still grow today. Andrew Wyeth, First Traders on the Brandywine (1940).

And mostly his mind was on the troublesome Indians. Sent to oversee Swanendael just months after its establishment, de Vries had found it burned, its inhabitants massacred, their bones and skulls bleaching in the field where the hapless settlers had been slaughtered while hoeing tobacco and grain. Following this grim discovery, de Vries spent weeks sailing up and down the Delaware River seeking corn and beans from whichever Indians seemed cooperative, narrowly avoiding getting killed himself and finding the Lenapes convulsed with fear of the Minquas, who had sent war parties against them from the west. In these bellicose times they had no food to give him, not even for his best trinkets and knives. The Minquas had flattened their crops, burned their houses. Eventually de Vries would have to voyage all the way to Virginia to buy basic supplies from the upstart British, so he could make the long journey home to Holland and civilization.

At the lonely Rocks that day in 1633, de Vries looked around him in wonderment. The scenery was “beautifully level, full of groves of oak, hickory, ash, and chestnut trees, and also [grape] vines which grow upon the trees.” It was a land of unimaginable abundance, he thought, but wasted on bands of quarrelsome Indians. And it was fearfully cold—how could this part of America be so frigid and yet lie at the latitude of Spain, he wondered bitterly.⁴

The Rocks had a fine advantage: here ships could pull in and escape the ice floes that drifted down the mighty Delaware all winter, threatening to crush their wooden hulls. Minquas Kill had the makings of a port—though now it dozed in winter sunlight, uninhabited, huge forest trees rubbing their branches together in creakings no one heard unless an Indian happened to drift by in his dugout canoe. And here, in stately silence, the waters of the Brandywine—perfectly pure—joined the Minquas amid reeds of the tidal marsh where ducks and muskrat teemed.

De Vries was one of the very first white men to visit the Brandywine. It was the Dutch Golden Age—back home, Rubens and Rembrandt were painting—and he had been sent as part of ambitious Dutch efforts to exploit the lucrative fur trade. The Dutch West India Company’s hired navigator, Henry Hudson, had first laid European eyes on the Delaware River twenty-four years earlier, and a handful of brave explorers followed. A year after de Vries’s visit, a British adventurer named Thomas Yong, recently arrived at Jamestown, sailed up and down the Delaware in a shallop, seeking the Northwest Passage and boldly nailing the coat of arms of King Charles I to a tree in haughty defiance of Dutch claims.

Yong likely saw the Brandywine during this summer 1634 expedition, during which he traded beads, pipes, scissors, and cloth with Indians who pulled alongside in their canoes and offered eels, or beaver and otter skins. The forests were astonishingly dense and dark, except where the natives had hacked out a clearing and planted corn.

Yong gazed upon what seemed to be the mythical land of plenty: the waters of the Delaware River teemed with sturgeon, and there were birds in quantities “so great as can hardly be believed,” an “infinite number” of pigeons, blackbirds, turkeys, swans, geese, duck, teal, widgeon, brant, herons, and cranes. A hawk chased a flock of partridges across the wide river, and Yong and his companion shot forty-eight of them as they flew over the boat—that was a haul not greatly out of the ordinary.⁵

The Dominion of Fort Christina

Soon the Swedes would come. The first Swedish settlement of the Delaware Valley in March 1638 marked another huge milestone in the European conquest of the continent, and it all unfolded on the narrow neck where an Indian path linked Minquas Kill and the Brandywine. Here, disdainful of Dutch claims, the Swedes built Fort Christina at the Rocks. Ships Kalmar Nyckel and Vogel Grip carried brave pioneers as well as their opportunistic leader Peter Minuit, formerly in Dutch service at New Amsterdam and famous for having bought the whole island of Manhattan for sixty guilders. They turned into Minquas Kill, sailed up and down it past Brandywine mouth, firing cannon; but there was no “vestige of Christian people” to be seen in this forlorn place. And so they claimed the land for Queen Christina of Sweden.

Minuit named his fort after her and, in another spectacular transaction, bought from the Indians the whole western shore of the Delaware River from the Atlantic at Cape Henlopen to the falls at today’s Trenton, New Jersey—and far inland too—setting up wooden stakes that stood, famous landmarks, for generations. The Indians traded these immense tracts for “awls, needles, scissors, knives, axes, guns, powder and balls, together with blankets,” probably thinking the deal was a canny one, since they planned to continue to live and hunt there, unmindful of these puny, legalistic explorers. The Swedes proudly set out to map their vast new territory (which of course embraced the Philadelphia metropolitan region of today), including the Brandywine and all the other “tributaries” and “creeks.” A copy was sent to the Crown.

Thus a flamboyant challenge was hurled at the Dutch, who loudly protested this Scandinavian incursion. Minuit, they said, had no authority “to build forts upon our rivers and coasts, nor to settle people on the land, nor to traffic in peltries.”

Subsequent governor Johan Printz bolstered the Swedish settlement at the Rocks and defied the imperious Dutch leader, Peter Stuyvesant, who erected the rival Fort Casimir a short way down the Delaware River at today’s New Castle, Delaware. Weighing over four hundred pounds, Governor Printz—“Big Guts” or “Big Tub” to the Lenape—inspired awe. When de Vries returned for another American visit, Printz drank his health with a glass of Rhenish wine, toasting the intrepid pioneer navigator. Where de Vries had seen only the Rocks, lonely amid forests and marshes, now there was a sturdy, permanent fort with iron cannon guarding the Christina River and “some houses inside” its walls.⁶

Upon arrival, Printz had immediately shipped 1,300 beaver skins home as evidence of the great abundance of God’s bounty in New Sweden. Soon the Swedes were trading far inland with the Minquas for “beavers, raccoons, sables, gray foxes, wildcats, lynxes, bears, and deer.” The Lenape vexed Printz with their constant attacks, keeping the Swedes confined to their fortifications. He longed to bring over plenty of troops and guns until he “broke the necks of all of them.” Then “we could take possession of the places (which are the most fruitful) that the savages now possess.”⁷

In the 1640s, Fort Christina bustled with activity: residents included a commissary, pastor, barber, trumpeter, constable, blacksmith, carpenters, and three soldiers. Outside, stretching to the lazy, tidal-plain Brandywine a short distance away, were fields of tobacco, maize, rye, and barley amid tree stumps, and a roaming herd of cattle and swine. Forests were falling to the steel axes of Finnish settlers, a strapping breed of immigrants brought for just this purpose. Within the walls of Fort Christina debuted the first “log cabin” in America, a typically Finnish housing type, soon to spread everywhere—another Brandywine contribution to the culture of the entire nation.⁸

Printz dreamed of a great “tobacco plantation”—controversial, since some Swedes rued importation of the filthy weed. Just east at the fledgling Swedish settlement of Manathaan (today’s Cherry Island landfill), a cooper set up a cask-making business and constructed small boats, the very beginnings of European industry in the Delaware Valley.⁹

Two rivers meet. This 1940s view shows the Brandywine, center, as it flows down toward the wider Christina, left. Downtown Wilmington at upper left. Swedish colonial settlement happened at the narrow isthmus, site of Fort Christina at the Rocks.

The Swedes recognized the potential for water power on the area’s swift streams. Printz built the first “watermill” in the Mid-Atlantic on Cobb’s Creek near today’s Philadelphia, for grinding grain, replacing an earlier windmill that “would never work, and was good for nothing.” He ordered a survey of potential sites (“waterfalls”) for a sawmill that could cut oak to be “bartered in the Flemish Islands for wine,” and although this came to nothing, Printz was prescient in seeing the opportunities for industry on local creeks, where water rushed powerfully over the boulders.¹⁰

The last Swedish governor, as it turned out, was Johan Rising, who survived a hellish 1654 voyage across the Atlantic in which a hundred prospective settlers died. Like every new arrival along the Delaware River, he marveled at the many intersecting waterways teeming with geese and ducks. What was later “Brandywine” was being called “Fish Creek” now, appropriately, for “in the creeks there are eel, salmon, thickhead and striped bass.” Like Printz, Rising dreamed of mills, and he was surely referring to the Brandywine when he described “the great fall [where] many waterworks could be placed.” He planned “to construct there a good dam … and then a flour-mill, a saw-mill, and a chamois-dressing mill…. If we could here establish powder-mills it would bring us great profit.”

Confidently, Rising had engineer Peter Lindeström divide the field between Fort Christina and the Brandywine into building lots, where six or eight houses were soon erected—not so many as the twenty-two the obnoxious Dutch had built at New Castle, but the promising start of a port city. Rising and Lindeström improved the crumbling fort, rebuilding it “with good ramparts of turf” and palisades against “the attacks of savages.” Lindeström drew a map that survives; it shows the fort, the town grid, and the lower Brandywine twisting through its mosquitoey marshes.

But it was not savages who brought doom to Fort Christina: it was those Dutch, whom Rising had fatally antagonized by claiming Fort Casimir for Sweden. In August 1655, Peter Stuyvesant’s soldiers, in retaliation, suddenly surrounded Fort Christina, sending boats up the Brandywine to Third Hook, a bluff on the north bank of the creek. From there, they crossed to Timber Island, which Rising owned personally and had partly cleared of its fine trees; it lay in a bend in the Brandywine across from the fort, where the invaders now seized a house and hoisted a flag. Then they dashed up to the Great Falls (today’s Brandywine Park) and nearby heights overlooking the Swedish settlement. Stuyvesant had swiftly “invested Fort Christina on all sides.”

So began the first European military operation on the Brandywine. Stuyvesant sent a letter demanding that the Swedes surrender, then had his troops fire warning shots from batteries at Timber Island and along the Christina River. His Dutch troops slaughtered cattle, goats, swine, and poultry, and “broke open houses.” The Swedish fort was poorly equipped, and a dejected Rising soon met Stuyvesant outside its “sconce” and gave the place up, bringing New Sweden to a humiliating close.

But Dutch rule itself would not last long. The English were pressing in from all sides now, and in 1664 they took control of the entire Delaware Valley.¹¹

By the time Dutch traveler Jasper Danckaerts passed through in the fall of 1679, Fort Christina had vanished, swallowed by the mists of history. He came from the north, crossing Schiltpads Kill, Swedish for “turtle” (literally “creek of the toad with a shield on its back”). This was today’s Shellpot Creek in Delaware, which has now been diverted and no longer enters the Brandywine.¹²

Along the Shellpot, “a fall of water over the rocks” had allowed construction of a productive grist mill. The Swedish miller showed the curious traveler a dead muskrat hanging up to dry, a creature “numerous in the creeks.” Danckaerts then crossed the Brandywine in a canoe, visiting the former site of Fort Christina as well as the place across Christina River where “Stuyvesant threw up his battery to attack the fort.” Already these places were of historical interest, and Danckaerts seems to have been our first “heritage tourist,” that lucrative industry in modern times. Near the site of the battery, he noted, abundant medlar fruit was harvested by a Dutchman to make “good brandy”: a possible clue, as we saw, to the origins of the newly minted name of the river.¹³

By the 1670s these once all-but-trackless woods were being divvied up by Dutch and English immigrants (and remaining Swedes and Finns) into landholdings. Swedish surgeon Tymen Stidham had served as ship’s doctor on many voyages, first with the Kalmar Nyckel; on one disastrous trip his wife and three small children perished as prisoners of the Spanish. Eventually he settled near Fort Christina and bought huge tracts along the Brandywine, including most of the south bank of the creek from Big Bend (north of the Delaware state line) down to “ye Rattle-snake Kill” in today’s Brandywine Park. (Rattlesnakes were once fear-somely common—but are now extinct locally.) A 1671 deed signed by authorities in Manhattan gave Stidham “600 acres of land lying on the north side of ye fish creeke at Brandewyns Creeke just below the falls.”

Those falls were extremely valuable: Stidham’s sons are said to have opened the first mill on the Brandywine there, near an old Indian ford at the foot of today’s Adams Street. In 1678, Cornelius Empson applied for the privilege of establishing a ferry across Stidham’s shallow “mill pond.” North to south overland travel was gradually increasing, to which the Brandywine proved a vexatious obstacle. When pioneering Quaker evangelist George Fox journeyed south toward Maryland in 1672, he recorded his trepidation when they came to Wilmington and “passed over a desperate river, which had in it many rocks and broad stones, very hazardous to us and our horses.”¹⁴

Along the creek, polyglot citizens of four nations—plus Lenape—were now living alongside each other in these years just prior to the great cultural turning point—the arrival of William Penn.