Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The German Exodus to England in 1709: Massen-Auswanderung Der Pfälzer; Prepared at the Request of the Pennsylvania-German Society
The date given is 1526. The colony which settled itself on the shores of the Delaware in 1638, while ostensibly Swedish, was largely composed of Ger mans. Although Gustavus Adolphus and his no less illustrious minister, Axel Oxenstierna, were its pro moters, the great Protestant king begged the Protest ant German princes to permit their subjects to join his scheme of colonization,3 and from the names among those colonists that have come down to us, we are assured that many of them were Germans. The charter accorded the Germans even more favorable conditions than it did to the Swedes themselves. Campanius, the earliest Swedish historian of New Sweden, tells us Germans went in the ship der Vogel Greif which sailed with 50 colonists to establish the first colony on the Delaware. In 1638, Peter Min newit, the first Governor, was drowned in the West Indies. Johannes Printz, a native of Holstein, succeeded him. Although Printz was in the Swe dish service, he was a German nobleman whose full name was Edler von Buchan. With Printz came 54 German families, mostly from Pomerania.4 These facts establish the semi-german character of this so-called Swedish colony.
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