New Sweden lasted seventeen years. Almost everybody who lived there stayed for good.
That is the whole strange shape of it. As a colonial project, New Sweden is a footnote — a small Scandinavian holding on the Delaware River, absorbed by the Dutch in 1655 without a shot fired, absorbed again by the English nine years after that. As a settlement, it never really ended. The people did not leave. Their farms, their river frontage, their churches and their peculiar cultural separateness carried straight through two changes of flag, and were still there a century later when the Three Lower Counties started arguing with Pennsylvania about who they were.
This installment is about how Europeans first took hold of the ground that became Delaware — and why the colony's political failure mattered less than its demographic persistence.
March 1638
Two ships, the Kalmar Nyckel and the Fogel Grip, came into Delaware Bay in late March 1638 after roughly four months at sea from Gothenburg.
They were commanded by Peter Minuit, and the choice of Minuit tells you what kind of venture this was. He had been director of New Netherland — the Dutch colony — and was now sailing for a Swedish company into territory the Dutch considered theirs. New Sweden was launched by a man who knew exactly whose toes he was standing on.
The expedition put in on the Christina River at a stone outcrop that served as a natural wharf, a place still called The Rocks. There they built Fort Christina, named for Sweden's young queen. It was garrisoned by about two dozen men under Lieutenant Måns Kling. That fort became Wilmington.
It was the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware Valley, and the first in what would become Delaware.
The purchase, and what it did not settle
Almost immediately, Minuit arranged a land transaction with Indigenous leaders — a purchase, in the Swedish records, of the land on the west side of the Delaware River running from Bombay Hook north to the Schuylkill.
That is a very large piece of ground, and it is the moment the story requires the most care.
The Swedish account of the transaction survives. What the Indigenous signatories understood themselves to be agreeing to does not, at least not in any form that a Swedish company ledger can settle. Sources differ even on who was present: some accounts name Lenape and Susquehannock leaders specifically, while the surviving chronologies refer only generically to Indigenous leaders. European colonial deeds routinely recorded permanent alienation of land where the other party may have understood something closer to shared use or access — and the record here is not detailed enough to say confidently which occurred.
What can be said plainly: a European company recorded a purchase, acted on it for seventeen years, and passed the claim to the Dutch and then the English, none of whom revisited the question. The pre-colonial world this transaction reached into is the subject of the first installment of this series, which is not yet written, and it is not going to be improvised here.
Seventeen years of not quite working
New Sweden expanded. By 1641 the colony's claimed reach ran along both sides of the Delaware — on the west from Bombay Hook down to Cape Henlopen, which is to say it claimed nearly the whole of the future state's river and bay frontage.
Claiming is not holding. The colony was chronically undersupplied and thinly populated, dependent on ships that arrived irregularly from a Sweden with other priorities. Johan Printz governed from 1643 to 1653 and governed hard; the colonists eventually petitioned against his autocratic rule, and he went home.
Then in 1655 Peter Stuyvesant came down from New Netherland with seven armed ships and more than three hundred soldiers. The Swedes were outnumbered several times over and surrendered without a fight. Governor Johan Rising and some three dozen others went back to Sweden.
That is the end of New Sweden as a political entity: seventeen years, one bloodless surrender.
The part that matters
Most of the Swedes and Finns did not go home.
They stayed, pledged allegiance to the Dutch, and were left largely to run their own affairs — keeping a measure of self-government under Dutch authority right up to 1664, when English warships took the Delaware from the Dutch in turn. The English gave the same assurance: property rights and existing freedoms would not be disturbed.
So the flag changed twice in nine years and the population barely moved.
There is a detail here that says more than the battle would have. In 1656 — a year after the colony had already surrendered — the ship Mercurius arrived in the Delaware carrying fourteen Swedes and ninety-two Finns. The political entity they had sailed for no longer existed. They came ashore and settled anyway.
The Finnish presence is easy to miss in a story called New Sweden. Finland was then part of the Swedish realm, and Finns made up a substantial share of the settlers — on that 1656 crossing, the overwhelming majority. They settled along the river at Marcus Hook and elsewhere, and they stayed too.
What survived the colony
By the time England took over, the lower Delaware had a European population that was neither English nor Dutch, had been there for a generation, held its land under claims that predated both conquests, and worshipped in its own Lutheran congregations.
Hold that thought against what happens later in this series.
When William Penn took the Lower Counties in 1682, he was not taking empty ground or a blank English frontier. He was taking a river corridor already settled by Swedes, Finns and Dutch, with its own churches, its own landholding history and its own sense of not being anybody's appendage. The friction between the Lower Counties and Quaker Pennsylvania that produced a separate assembly in 1704 — and eventually a separate state — began partly in that difference. The Lower Counties were settled earlier, by different Europeans, with a different religious character. That is not an accident of the eighteenth century. It is the residue of 1638.
New Sweden failed at everything a colony is supposed to do. It did not turn a profit, hold its territory, or survive contact with a stronger neighbour. What it did was put people on the ground who would not leave — and by not leaving, they made the lower Delaware a different place from the province upriver.
Seventeen years of Swedish rule; three and a half centuries of consequences.
Sources: Delaware Public Archives historical markers for the Landing of the Swedes and Fort Christina; Kalmar Nyckel Foundation materials on the 1638 expedition; the Swedish Colonial Society chronology of Colonial Swedes on the Delaware, 1638–1713, for the sequence of governorship, the Dutch conquest and post-1655 settlement; National Park Service First State National Historical Park materials on Fort Christina. Accounts differ on who was present at the 1638 land transaction: some name Lenape and Susquehannock leaders, while the standard chronology records only Indigenous leaders generically, and that discrepancy is noted rather than resolved here. The terms as recorded are Swedish-company terms; what the Indigenous signatories understood the agreement to convey is not established by the surviving record. The pre-colonial history of the peoples whose land this was belongs to installment 1 of this series, which is not yet published.