Posted on 04/23/2007 5:54:30 PM PDT by blam
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Date: April 23, 2007
Historian Discovers Evidence Documenting First European Voyage Up The Delaware
Science Daily — A University of Pennsylvania scholar has pinpointed 1616 as the year of the first European voyage up the Delaware River.
Jaap Jacobs, a senior fellow at Penn's McNeil Center for Early American Studies, detailed his findings in a paper, "Truffle Hunting with an Iron Hog: The First Dutch Voyage up the Delaware River," recently presented as part of the McNeil Center Seminar Series.
Scholarly discoveries tend to be the outcome of a deliberate process, but serendipity played an important role in Jacobs' discovery of the significance of a centuries-old deposition pinpointing the year of the first Dutch voyage up the Delaware.
Sometime between 1993 and 1994 while doing research for his dissertation, Jacobs copied a summary of a document he found at the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, the Amsterdam notarial archives. He said that the summary didn't indicate that the document was important, so he didn't look at the original until July 2000. At that point it became clear to him that the document referred to the Delaware River rather than the Hudson River, as he had originally thought. Years later, in 2007, while preparing his paper on early Dutch exploration of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, he revisited the historiography and realized that the document pertained to the first voyage up the Delaware by Europeans.
The document he had found was a deposition of the sworn testimony of sailor Jan Jacobsz Bens. At the request of an Amsterdam merchant, Bens had testified about a trip he took on one of the earliest recorded ships built in North America, the Iron Hog. He stated that the trip occurred in 1616.
Historians acknowledge that while earlier European explorers may have sighted the mouth of the Delaware Bay, Henry Hudson became the first European to actually enter it in August 1609. European exploration of the Delaware River had long been presumed to have occurred sometime during 1614-1616. The document Jacobs found now pinpoints the year as 1616.
"The document I found provides the missing link in the early cartography of the Delaware River," Jacobs said. "This document is evidence that the Dutch voyaged to America in 1616 and explored a large section of the coastline, claiming it for the Dutch Republic in the process."
The first trades between the Dutch and the Susquehannock Indians took place during the time when the Iron Hog sailed across the Atlantic to Europe and the northeastern coast of America.
"Jaap Jacobs's discovery of a document that has rested in Dutch archives for nearly three centuries casts our understanding of the Philadelphia region's early colonial history in a new light," said Daniel K. Richter, director of Penn's McNeil Center and a professor of history at Penn. "Perhaps no other scholar has the depth of knowledge, the insight and the detective skills not only to uncover but to understand the significance of this remarkable discovery."
The Dutch eventually came to an agreement with the Swedes several years after they began exercising their "rights" to their claim ~ and began leaving the Swedes alone to raise pigs and cut down ships' timber (really big trees).
http://www.getnj.com/historicroadsides/salem.shtml
If you scroll down you will see about a Oak Tree that was here no doubt during the time this article speaks of.
That Oak is now close to or over 400 years old and is still standing.
One of my ancestors was the skipper of the Governor’s private yacht in New Sweden and is listed with the “Old Swedish Settlers”. He actually settled her twice — 1st arriving with the Governorand then returning to Sweden to collect his wages, marry and return with his bride to become a permanent settler. He lived in Kingsessing, now part of Philadelphia. Hardly anybody knows about New Sweden. They hardly teach that it ever existed in school.
The Dutch also used the Swedes to negotiate with the indians, as the Swedes got along with them better than the Dutch.
His diaries which documented these voyages all refer to his prescient prose when he named these rivers in Italian as:
Uppa UESS!
The first serious settlement effort had about 105 members. Only 6 of them spoke Swedish. The others are identified as speaking "Fin". At that period of time "Fin" always referred to inhabitants of the Finmark, that is Sapmai.
Not only did the Sa'ami get along with the Indians, they slept in leather tents (just like the Indians), until they could build sturdy log cabins (a custom adopted by other groups in America), and were so rough, tough and ready for action they did not need stockades for protection.
Not long ago I ran into a piece on the net that covered this phenomenon of "stockade-less living" ~ these were the ONLY guys to try it ~ even the Indians built stockades. Guess chopping trees all day long with a trusty steel blade gives your swinging arm massive muscles.
Later historians not understanding the relationship between the Swedes and the Sa'ami have attempted to identify these folks as Fins from the Duchy of Finland then being organized by Sweden. The result is the Fins get the credit for fair dealing with the Indians, but it was Sa'ami who settled all those places named after deer, elk and Christmas traditions, and then later on, all those places named Uniontown, or Union.
It's noteworthy that the early Swedes gave up and moved to Nieuwe Amsterdam which they naively misgoverned into bankruptcy thereby forcing the Dutch, and then the English to take the place back for better usage.
Isn't that a racist name?
bad...very bad... ;)
One of my ancestors, Joseph Kellogg was the first “Englishman” (born in Hadley, Mass., 1691) to navigate the the Great and Lakes Mississippi River in 1710 as a captive of the French and Mohawks.
Well, my ancestor was born in Bangsta, Turinge Parish, Gotenburg area and was thought to be Swedish and carried a Swedish name. He hired on as a ship hand. He served Gov. Printz, ferrying him back and forth to his island estate. There were a lot of Finns listed in the early records, but not my ancestors — they were identified as Swedes. But all your lore about the Sa’ami is very interesting. Where did you learn about all of it?
But who are any of us? Members of my family who have done the DNA genealogical test (for the males only) have come back with the most surprising results. The basic goal was to separate 2 families with similar names, but who are from totally different European countries. The two families have been confused by genalogists for 200 years. That’s the easy part. But the DNA test identifies all kinds of other genes in the males who have taken the test, including Polynesian, etc.
We all hail back to Eve, I guess, with meandering along the way.
Very interesting. He may have fought against another of my ancestors who earned a land grant in VA for his service in the French & Indian War and additional land in KY in the Revolutionary War. Or not!
Do you know how he got away, or did he assimilate with the Indians? He could have discovered Milwaukee.
Thanks.
Joseph Kellogg was rescued from the Mohawks in 1716. His two sisters married Mohawks and stayed with the tribe. Kellogg became an Indian scout and imterpreter and died at age 65 during a campaign against the French & Indians in New York 1756. His story is told in the book; "The Unredeemed Captive" by John Demos.
Cool Oak Tree! My family was living in Carney’s Point when I was born (across the river in Wilmington, DE). You ever been to Cowtown?
One of my own Swedish ancestors who lived in Nieuwe Amsterdam was named Marika von Stockholm ~ which is a pretty hoity-toity name these days ~ but I'm not sure what she did for a living.
Not going to ask either.
Now, the Sa'ami ~ until recently we didn't have a list of the folks on board the first "official" government sponsored New Sweden ship. This is the one with a handful of Swedish military officers (7?) on board, and 98 or so individuals who spoke "Fin".
Everybody has a Swedish surname ~ even if they don't speak "Swed".
There is supplemental information to the effect that the "Fin" speakers were rounded up (along with their families who are not listed) in the vicinity of Stockholm during a particularly cold winter. They were taken from their tents and herds (reindeer) and used to supplement the colonial ship.
At that time, mid 1600s, being a "Fin" speaker meant only one thing ~ that you spoke a language found in the Finmark, that is, the Sa'ami parts of Sweden, Norway, modern Finland and Russia.
Finland and the Finish language were poorly identified at the time since Finland and Keralia had only recently been acquired from Russia, and not so long before existing under Mongol rule, along with Estonia, for a couple of centuries, most of which is a total blank in the history books.
It is known that the Sa'mi had 5 settlements in Pennsylvania ~ in York county, and 2 settlements in Maryland.
In my own search for ancestors here and there I managed to latch on two facts that led me back through every place named "Christmas", "Santa", "Union", "Elk", "Deer" to the original New Sweden colony at Elkton, Maryland.
There were other New Sweden settlements along rivers in Eastern Pennsylvania, and of course in Delaware, and there was even an early Finnish settlement in Maine, but Elkton qualifies as a colony. It even had several Swedish Lutheran churches, and as I have found out, more than several primitive pre-Christian shamanistic congregations typical of the Sa'ami.
The trade in Sa'mi tree cutters continued for over a century. Best anyone can tell it pretty much depopulated Northernmost Keralia of the Skolt Sa'ami and brought almost of them to America. The Skolt lived right there at Nikel Oblast in fact, so if anyone thinks Nickel Mines, PA was named after the ship Nyckel, the Skolt lived there first and likely named it Nikel.
BTW, the only reason I got interested in tracking down any Sa'ami were the existence of some Sa'ami "marker genes" in the family. Unless you live on a diet of seals, fish and an occasional reindeer, with only occasional carbohydrates in the diet you will end up thinking these genes intended for live in the Arctic are actually a disease designed to make you misrable.
The Swedish and Finnish national medical research groups have been studying the Sa'ami and "diet", along with their genetic variations for several years and there are some truly fantastic articles about what they've found on the net. Easy to find under "Sweden Sa'ami genetic"
All the time.
All I know is that the family is listed amongst the Olde Swedes in the census. The Finns are listed separately. My family lived at Kingsessing on a peninsula, or island, in the Schuykill River in what is now Philadelphia — not a very nice part, I’m told. I don’t remember tha names of the ships, since he came here twice, but he did come on the Kalmar Nyckel at least once. I have it written down somewhere.
He was named Peter Anderson; and his father, in Gotenburg, was named Anders Olsen. Get it? Anders-Anderson? Of course the names switched back and forth through the generations until the English forced the the Swedes and the Dutch to settle down about their last names.
My ancestor adopted the name “Longacre” at that point instead of keeping the name Peterson, which I’m sure was pretty common amongst his Swedish neighbors. We are not sure whether he used the name Longacre after his land (which was shaped long and skinny, being on an island) or as a nod to his neighbor and b-i-l, an Englishman named Longshore.
At any case, he is listed amongst the Olde Swedes and as a founder and contributor to Gloria Dei Church in New Sweden.
He was a farmer.
I think that it is pretty amazing for anyone to make the trip to these shores twice in a lifetime, although others did. I don’t think that I would have the courage and the stamina to do it under the conditions they faced. Life at home must have been pretty bleak for them to take on the task of moving to these shores in the 1640s. Anderson made the first voyage as a seaman and stayed on as Gov. Printz’s skipper of his tiny yacht. He returned to Sweden with the Gov. to collect his wages. When he returned the second time, he brought his wife, Gunnilla.
Amazing folks, as were the ancestors on my other side — founders of Jamestown, VA in 1607. All those adventure genes must have been diluted out of me over the generations.
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