nd people, all became enthusiastic
about the project which he elaborated for a great commercial company
to trade and colonize in Asia, Africa, and America. * But the plan was
dropped because, soon after 1630, Gustavus Adolphus led his country to
intervene on the side of the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War in
Germany, where he was killed three years later at the battle of Lutzen.
But the desire aroused by Usselinx for a Swedish colonial empire
was revived in the reign of his infant daughter, Christina, by the
celebrated Swedish Chancellor, Oxenstierna.

* See "Willem Usselinx," by J. F. Jameson in the "Papers of the
American Historical Association," vol. II.

An expedition, which actually reached the Delaware in 1638, was sent out
under another Dutch renegade, Peter Minuit, who had been Governor of New
Netherland and after being dismissed from office was now leading this
Swedish enterprise to occupy part of the territory he had formerly
governed for the Dutch. His two ships sailed up the Delaware and with
good judgment landed at the present site of Wilmington. At that point
a creek carrying a depth of over fourteen feet for ten miles from its
mouth flowed into the Delaware. The Dutch had called this creek Minquas,
after the tribe of Indians; the Swedes named it the Christina after
their infant Queen; and in modern times it has been corrupted into
Christiana.

They sailed about two and a half miles through its delta marshes to some
rocks which formed a natural wharf and which still stand today at
the foot of Sixth Street in Wilmington. This was the Plymouth Rock of
Delaware. Level land, marshes, and meadows lay along the Christina, the
remains of the delta which the stream had formed in the past. On the
edge of the delta or moorland, rocky hills rose, forming the edge of the
Piedmont, and out of them from the north flowed a fine large stream,
the Brandywine, which fell into the Christina just before it entered
the Delaware. Here in the delta their engineer laid out a town, called
Christinaham, and a fort behind the rocks on which they had landed. A
cove in the Christina made a snug anchorage for their ships, out of the
way of the tide. They then bought from the Indians all the land from
Cape Henlopen to the Falls of the Delaware at Trenton, calling it New
Sweden and the Delaware New Swedeland Stream. The people of Delaware
have always regarded New Sweden as the beginning of their State, and
Peter Minuit, t