nce the glacial age, untouched by the civilization of
the white man. There were then more islands in the river, the water was
clearer, and there were pretty pebble and sandy beaches now overlaid by
mud brought down from vast regions of the valley no longer protected by
forests from the wash of the rains. On a wooded island below Salem, long
since cut away by the tides, the pirate Blackhead and his crew are said
to have passed a winter. The waters of the river spread out wide at
every high tide over marshes and meadows, turning them twice a day for a
few hours into lakes, grown up in summer with red and yellow flowers and
the graceful wild oats, or reeds, tasseled like Indian corn.

At Christinaham, in the delta of the Christina and the Brandywine, the
tide flowed far inland to the rocks on which Minuit's Swedish expedition
landed, leaving one dry spot called Cherry Island, a name still borne
by a shoal in the river. Fort Christina, on the edge of the overflowed
meadow, with the rocky promontory of hills behind it, its church and
houses, and a wide prospect across the delta and river, was a fair spot
in the old days. The Indians came down the Christina in their canoes or
overland, bringing their packs of beaver, otter, and deer skins, their
tobacco, corn, and venison to exchange for the cloth, blankets, tools,
and gaudy trinkets that pleased them. It must often have been a scene of
strange life and coloring, and it is difficult today to imagine it all
occurring close to the spot where the Pennsylvania railroad station now
stands in Wilmington.

When doughty Peter Stuyvesant became Governor of New Netherland, he
determined to assert Dutch authority once more on the South River, as
the Delaware was called in distinction from the Hudson. As the Swedes
now controlled it by their three forts, not a Dutch ship could reach
Fort Nassau without being held up at Fort Elfsborg or at Fort Christina
or at the fort at Tinicum. It was a humiliating situation for the
haughty spirit of the Dutch governor. To open the river to Dutch
commerce again, Stuyvesant marched overland in 1651 through the
wilderness, with one hundred and twenty men and, abandoning Fort Nassau,
built a new fort on a fine promontory which then extended far out into
the river below Christina. Today the place is known as New Castle; the
Dutch commonly referred to it as Sandhoeck or Sand Point; the English
called it Grape Vine Point. Stuyvesant named it Fort Casimir.