The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

Introduction: From Hudson to Penn

1 INTRODUCTION FromHudsontoPenn We begin with two voyagers to the Delaware Bay, one at the start of the seventeenth century, the other at its finish. The first was Henry Hudson, “an Englishman late of London,” who cruised into the bay on a warm, clear day late in August 1609.1 Over the two previous summers he had sailed in “the company of our troublesome neighbours, Ice with fogge,” searching for a way through the Arctic to China. First the coasts of Greenland and Spitsbergen and then the frozen archipelago of Novaya Zemlya had thwarted him. The ice, once troublesome, turned murderous . At Novaya Zemlya, a day after observing such a “great plenty of Ice, [that] the hope of passage . . . was taken away,” he and his men had spent twelve hours “fending off with Beames and Sparres” a wall of ice “driving upon us, very fearfull to looke on.”2 During that voyage his employer had been the English Muscovy Company, a chartered trading company whose founders included one “Henry Herdson,” probably the navigator’s grandfather .3 Since then, Hudson had left behind England, the Muscovy Company, and his relations—or they had left him. When he entered the Delaware Bay, he was in the service of the Heren XVII der Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie , the Seventeen Lords of the Dutch East India Company. Before sailing the Halve Maen into the balmy waters of the mid-Atlantic, Hudson had attempted one final time to push through the ice floes north of Norway. “After much trouble with fogges, sometimes, and more dangerous 2 the conteSt for the delAwAre vAlley of Ice,” his restive crew, better suited to the South Seas than to the Barents Sea, had forced him to turn back. Hudson duly pointed the yacht toward “faire cleere Sun-shining weather” and North America.4 Inspiration for the detour came in part from Hudson’s correspondence with Captain John Smith, commander of the newborn settlement at Jamestown, whose Indian informants had plied him with tales of an open sea to the north of Virginia. Although the Powhatans’ passage evaded Hudson, he did find a “great Bay,”5 the Delaware Bay, as well as a “goodly river, into the which he sailed with his ship fifty leagues up.” Along this river, later known as “Hudson’s River,” he received a friendly welcome from native inhabitants who possessed a “great plenty of their country corn” and furs they were eager to trade.6 Short of supplies and willing sailors, the Halve Maen returned to Europe. Instead of proceeding directly to Amsterdam, however, the vessel stopped first at Dartmouth, a deepwater port along England’s southwestern coast. News of the voyage spread far beyond the walls of the ship—as, no doubt, Hudson had intended. By the time he had received orders to return with the ship and its crew to Holland, Crown officials had confiscated his papers and maps and demanded that he and the other Englishmen reenter English service. Although a copy of Hudson’s journal eventually reached the Netherlands, the Dutch East India Company lost the talents of the navigator himself.7 Hudson would undertake his next voyage in the name of his native country and its king. This expedition, Hudson’s last, ended in June 1611, when mutineers abandoned him, his seventeen-year-old son John, and seven other men in a shallop in “Hudson’s Bay” and then sailed for England.8 “What is otherwise become of them [he] knoweth not,” mariner Robert Byleth later testified. The bill for Byleth’s indictment suggested otherwise—it stated that Hudson and the others “came thereby to their death and miserably perished.”9 Soon afterward Dutch and English settlers, officials, and historians began asserting and disputing linkages between the departed captain’s national origin and the areas he had explored in 1609. For advocates of English claims to North America, Hudson was first and foremost a native Englishman, and the rights to his discoveries belonged to his natural sovereign, the King of England. For defenders of Dutch colonial claims, more important than Hudson’s place of birth was the fact that he had been in the service of a company chartered by the Lords of the States General in the Netherlands. The navigator’s Dutch sponsors owned the rights to whatever he found while under their protection. introduction: from hudSon to penn 3 Hudson, the focus of all these debates, may...