31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 7/16)

Delaware

The Swedish West India Company had established the small colony of New Sweden, centering on Fort Christina on the site of present Wilmington, in 1638. This consisted of only 200 to 300 Swedes and Finns, but they brought log construction and the log cabin to America. Peter Stuyvesant, of the New Netherland Colony, annexed this weak Swedish settlement in 1655 so that when the Duke of York took over the Dutch possessions, this area became part of that. William Penn later purchased the region from the Duke and for years it was called the "Three Lower Counties" of Pennsylvania. The Charter of Privileges, which Penn brought back in 1699, allowed these three counties to have their own assembly, but their governor was always the same as Pennsylvania's. These three counties, however, were the future state of Delaware. (Ref. 151 )

Chesapeake bay colonies

Virginia

The first true and lasting settlement in the United States was made at Jamestown, off Chesapeake Bay, in 1607 by Englishmen who, according to de Tocqueville (Ref. 217 ), "were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character.”

The Indians of the Tidewater at the time of the planting of the Jamestown colony were the powerful Powhatan Confederacy (Tsenacommacah). They were Algonquians, but Iroquois, Sioux and Muskogeans all lived close by. There were rumors of blond, blue-eyed Indians to the south, but these were probably survivors from Raleigh's lost colony or shipwrecks. Although a century earlier Tsenacommacah may have had over 100,000 inhabitants, the population was considerably less in this 17th century. The microparasites introduced by the visits of Verazzano, Menendez and Raleigh had already done much of their destructive work. Contemporary writers accused the Powhatans of sacrificing children, but this was a mistaken concept of the huskanaw , an initiation rite in which at the appropriate time children were collected and sent to a designated spot in the woods, where for weeks they subsisted on a limited diet. Perhaps some drugs and rigorous mental and physical ordeals were supervised by their priests, but they were not killed, although some of the weaker may have perished. The local chief at the time of the Jamestown founding was Powhatan, whose daughter was the famous Pocahontas, captured in 1613 by Samuel Argall, to be used to influence the chief to make peace. She married John Rolfe in 1614, visited England and died there in 1617, though her son Thomas survived. Thomas Rolfe was not the only mestizo born from the white-Indian contact at Jamestown. (Ref. 267 )