And his name was? My direct ancestor, Peter Anderson, (b. before 1620 in the Gotenburg area) arrived in New Sweden on the Kalmar Nykel (sp.?) and became the skipper of the Governor's boat that he used to access his house on an island near what is now Philadelphia. He sailed back to Amsterdam to collect his wages, returned to Sweden to collect a bride, and brought her back to New Sweden where they settled to establish a farm and raise their family in Kingsessing. He and his family were among the founders of Gloria Dei (Swedish) Church and are listed on the roll.
His father, Ponce De La Gardie, was certainly as famous (although born of much lower rank in France). Yet, Ponce's mother, a Bourbon princess, is pretty much overlooked ~ even though one of her titles indicates she was the eldest daughter of a King of France.
Which one is a darned good question ~ you can find competing sources. Gives you an idea of the state of civil record keeping in the 1500s ~ really bad!
Christopher Columbus was a near contemporary to Ponce's father ~ just a generation earlier ~ and he, too, was supposedly of non-noble ranks YET he married a Braganza Princess!
In consideration of the normal living conditions in Europe in the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s I suspect these guys started off with a silverspoon in their mouths but didn't talk about it much. It was a normal practice for wealthy merchants and noble families to farm their kids out to relatives, friends or followers in safer and healthier villages and estates away from the disease rampant in cities and towns. This increased the chance of having a surviving heir.
At the time (1638) that didn't mean "Finnish", it meant "Sa'ami". Numerous researchers had earlier determined that the greater part of the passengers had simply been rounded up by the authorities in the Winter for getting too close to Stockholm or other important cities. That included the men, women and children since the Sa'ami always traveled in family groups.
Once here their job was to cut down trees for the purpose providing ships' timber to the Swedish and English navies.
Shortly after the Dutch interference in the original colony the people moved across the isthmus to found what is now called Elkton MD on Chesapeake Bay. That became a very prosperous area because it was protected from the hurricanes and Nor'easters of the Delaware/New Jersey shore.
By the year 1700 this colony relocated out of the Delaware Valley to a new colony called York Pennsylvania. The purpose appears to have been to evade contact with the Quakers then being resettled into Lancaster and other areas by Penn.
By that time there were 5 Sa'ami settlements in Pennsylvania and 3 in Maryland.
Getting back to the Kalmar Nyckel, it must have been a miserable trip with all those family groups ~ yet this ship made three more voyages of similar nature.
Through the centuries the colonists have maintained some cohesiveness and communal coherence by setting up additional "colonies" which were almost all named after reindeer, Christmas or the Kalmar Union. Elkton, Deer Park, Christmas Tree, Uniontown (5 in Pennsylvania alone), and so forth. They march West pretty much in a straight line all the way to Kansas.