The tables were now turned: the Dutch could retaliate upon Swedish
shipping. But the Swedes were not so easily to be dispossessed. Three
years later a new Swedish governor named Rising arrived in the river
with a number of immigrants and soldiers. He sailed straight up to Fort
Casimir, took it by surprise, and ejected the Dutch garrison of about a
dozen men. As the successful coup occurred on Trinity Sunday, the Swedes
renamed the place Fort Trinity.

The whole population--Dutch and Swede, but in 1654 mostly
Swede--numbered only 368 persons. Before the arrival of Rising there
had been only seventy. It seems a very small number about which to be
writing history; but small as it was their "High Mightinesses," as the
government of the United Netherlands was called, were determined to
avenge on even so small a number the insult of the capture of Fort
Casimir.

Drums, it is said, were beaten every day in Holland to call for recruits
to go to America. Gunners, carpenters, and powder were collected. A ship
of war was sent from Holland, accompanied by two other vessels whose
names alone, Great Christopher and King Solomon, should have been
sufficient to scare all the Swedes. At New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant labored
night and day to fit out the expedition. A French privateer which
happened to be in the harbor was hired. Several other vessels, in
all seven ships, and six or seven hundred men, with a chaplain called
Megapolensis, composed this mighty armament gathered together to drive
out the handful of poor hardworking Swedes. A day of fasting and prayer
was held and the Almighty was implored to bless this mighty expedition
which, He was assured, was undertaken for "the glory of His name." It
was the absurdity of such contrasts as this running all through the
annals of the Dutch in America that inspired Washington Irving to write
his infinitely humorous "History of New York from the Beginning of the
World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty," by "Diedrich Knickerbocker." It
is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in America seriously.
What can you do with a people whose imagination allowed them to give
such names to their ships as Weigh Scales, Spotted Cow, and The Pear
Tree? So Irving described the taking of Fort Casimir in mock heroic
manner. He describes the marshaling of the Dutch hosts of New York by
families, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the Brinkerhoffs, the Van
Kortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat