A Scandinavian Heritage. Joan Magee
took livestock of all kinds, for they intended to make a permanent settlement there if possible.1
The colony was short-lived, and was abandoned about 1014, after three winters, apparently because of the enmity of the native Skraelings.2 Along with the departing colonists went a small child, Snorri Thorfinnsson, the son of the expedition leader and his wife Gudrid. Snorri had been born in Vinland, and was thus the first child of European descent to be born in America.
The recently excavated L’Anse aux Meadows site in Northern Newfoundland has many Norse artifacts, and has been carbon-dated to about the year 1000 A.D. It is quite possible that the Vinland colony was situated there. However, this cannot be said with certainty, for there may well have been other such Norse settlements in America during medieval times.3 Written sources and recent finds in Northeastern Canada show that from about 986 to 1350 the Norse made many voyages from Greenland to the territory now known as Canada.4 In the latter half of the fourteenth century the Norse colony in Greenland became weaker, and within the next century it disappeared.5 With the gradual decline of the Greenland colony early Norse exploration of America came to a halt.
It recommenced centuries later with the expedition led by Jens Munk, the Norwegian-born son of a Danish nobleman, who set out with two ships in 1619. King Christian IV, ruler of both Denmark and Norway, had given Munk and his men the task of discovering the North West Passage leading to the riches of Asia. The expedition reached Hudson Bay before winter set in, and landed at a site now Churchill, Manitoba. Munk named the land Nova Dania or New Denmark, claiming it in the name of King Christian IV. During the winter of 1619-1620 Munk and his men suffered extreme hardship in their small settlement, many dying from scurvy. Of the 67 men, only Jens Munk and two of his crew survived the harsh winter. After heroic effort, they managed to sail one of the ships to Bergen, Norway, where they arrived 25 September 1620. Angered that they had abandoned a ship in Hudson Bay, King Christian ordered Munk to return to New Denmark with a second expedition to recover the ship and to found a permanent settlement. This voyage did not materialize and no further attempts were made to settle New Denmark.
During the years immediately following Munk’s voyage, 1621-1665, several hundred Scandinavians emigrated to America as settlers for New Netherland. This Dutch colony had been founded by the West Indian Company in 1621 for trading purposes and populated with settlers drawn from the Netherlands. It was a prosperous time for the Dutch and few were willing to leave for an unknown fate in America. Many of those attracted to the thought of emigration were refugees from the religious wars of the time, Protestants from various parts of Northern Europe. Among them were individual Scandinavians willing to settle among the Dutch in New Netherland. One of these was Laurens Andriessen Van Boskerck from Slesvig, the immigrant ancestor of all members of the Van Buskirk family in America. Such Scandinavian settlers were soon integrated into the cosmopolitan population of New Netherland, where they adopted the Dutch language and customs.
In 1638 the Swedes founded the first permanent Scandinavian settlement in America. This colony was located on the Delaware river and was named New Sweden. Dismissed by the Dutch as director-general of New Netherland, the Dutch leader Peter Minuit had gone to Sweden and persuaded the authorities there to found a colony. In the 1630s the Swedes were engaged in warring against the Hapsburgs and the power of Catholic Spain, and were interested in establishing a base for attacking Spanish possessions in the New World. In addition, the Swedes, too, wanted to take part in the profitable colonial trade of this period. In 1637 Sweden chartered the New Sweden Company, a trading company based on the model of the Dutch West India Company. Then Minuit was sent with a party of Swedes and Dutchmen to found a Swedish colony on the Delaware River. There he selected a site where the city of Wilmington now stands and named it Fort Christina in honour of the Swedish princess, later the famous Queen Christina. Minuit was careful to establish New Sweden beyond the limits of the territory claimed by the Dutch, and to make a treaty with the Delaware Indians, peaceably purchasing the right to settle in the Delaware Valley, obtaining all the land west of the River as far to the north as what is now Philadelphia and “westward to where the sun sets.”
It was difficult to arouse an interest in emigration among the Swedes, and it was hard to find settlers. New Sweden was settled with a few Dutch followers of Minuit in addition to a number of Swedes and Finns. Finland was under Swedish rule at this time, and Finns formed a minority group in Sweden, where their skill in forest crafts was prized.
For 10 years New Sweden grew slowly, with occasional ships arriving with Finnish and Swedish settlers abroad, some of them army deserters, others were people caught poaching in the royal forests. Some Norwegians and Danes also arrived on these ships, while a few Dutch settlers moved from New Netherland to New Sweden. The population had reached only about 600 when in 1655 Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Netherland sailed up the Delaware with a Dutch fleet of seven ships and seized Fort Christina. Greatly outnumbered, the Swedes gave up the Fort without a fight, ending Swedish claims to the New Sweden. In 1664 the British took the territory from the Dutch when they captured New Netherland.
Although few in number, the Swedes in the Delaware Valley had a strong influence on their fellow settlers in pioneer America. The Swedes and the Finns cleared the forests with great efficiency. They taught the settlers of other nationalities how to construct log cabins, which were much better suited to the rugged American climate than the woodframe houses built by the British colonists. Soon the log cabin became the accepted type of pioneer home on the American frontier, and after the American Revolution, in Canada, as well. The Swedes maintained friendly relations with the Indians, thus paving the way for the work of William Penn in founding Pennsylvania.
The Norwegians among the settlers of New Netherland are said to have taught the Dutch in the Catskills the use of waterwheels instead of windmills as a source of power. It is certain that the familiarity of the Scandinavians with forest crafts was of immense benefit to the early Dutch settlers, and influenced future generations of pioneers.
More Swedish and Finnish immigrants continued to arrive in the Delaware Valley as late as 1664. In the 1650s some Swedes moved to the present state of Maryland, while others went to Virginia. Later, more Swedish and Finnish settled on the eastern side of the lower Delaware, and others moved to the north and northwest as far as present-day Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Although the British took over political control of New Sweden in 1664, the Swedish language continued to be spoken in certain villages and districts. In 1683 Andreas Rudman, a clergyman in Pennsylvania, sent a report back to Sweden that:
We live scattered among the English and Quakers, yet our language is preserved as pure as anywhere in Sweden. There are about 1,200 persons who speak it.6
A replica of a Norse sod building atLAnse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, at a site identified as an early Norse settlement of about the year 1000 A.D.
An imaginative drawing made after Jens Munk had returned from Nova Dania to Denmark showing the two ships, the Unicorn and the Lamprey, in Munk Haven in the estuary of the Churchill River. The crew are shown felling trees, burying the dead, burning charcoal, and hunting polar bears.
But among the Loyalists who in 1783 and 1784, and for some years afterwards, left their homes in the Thirteen Colonies to come north to Canada, those few who were of Scandinavian origin spoke English, for the use of Swedish had died out gradually in the preceding 50 years, even in New Jersey where there were strong religious ties with Sweden during most of the eighteenth century.7
Among the Loyalists from New Jersey who came to Nova Scotia after the Revolution were four brothers, members of the Van Buskirk family of Bergen County, New Jersey.8 The founder of this part-Dutch, part-Danish family was Laurens Andriessen Van Boskerck, the Dane mentioned earlier. He had settled in New Netherland about 1635 and had founded a large family. By 1784 its members were well established in New Jersey as well as New York. Those who settled as Loyalists in Nova Scotia brought with them a long-standing family tradition that claimed Laurens Andriessen had been a university student from Denmark