#17 - Maps Make the World Go Round

 Sometimes research takes a hard right when you start to notice patterns. I always know I am starting to get a handle on a new research topic when I begin to be able to make connections between different secondary sources - recognizing multiple authors using the same primary document, noticing recurring scholars, tracing older secondary sources quoted in newer ones, etc.

So, this week was supposed to be a brief overview of some not-so-helpful articles. These were a bunch of secondary sources from the 1950s through the present that I thought could have important info related to the RHH. Most of them turned out to be irrelevant to the RHH, but helpful for understanding the political and cultural history of Lewes pre-RHH. Others were older articles which means I’d need to do more research to decide if the information was still accurate or if further scholarship ruled them out-dated. Two though made me sit up. These are the two I want to talk about this week:

Becker, M.J. (2001). “The Dutch Fort on Pilottown Road in Lewes: Zwaanendael Map Re-evaluated.” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Delaware, 38, new series, 1-5. 

Huey, P.R. (2010). “Dutch Colonial Forts in New Netherland.” In Verre Forten, Vreemde Kusten: Nederlandse verdedigingswerken oversee. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 287-331

Now, neither of these have much to do with the RHH. They are about early settlements on the west side of the Delaware Bay, including Swanendael. I picked them to read because as you may have noticed so far, there isn’t much available for the RHH in specific. This means a lot of my readings will be of adjacent topics and time periods. So, when I started the Becker article, I originally wanted to hate-read it because Zwaanendael, but it was using an actual 17th century map, so I figured it should be interesting. I also had visited Lewes several times, but had never seen evidence of a fort. The Huey article was a follow up, picked because it also talked about forts and I figured if Lewes had one at some point this article would confirm it. I also had downloaded an article by Huey “The Archaeology of 17th-Century New Netherland Since 1985: An Update” from 2005 which I hoped would give me a run down of articles, excavations, and scholars to look up. 

The authors: Marshall Joseph Becker is a prolific writer of archaeology - Delaware Valley/Lenape, Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Etruscan Italy. He is a professor at West Chester University. It is very common as an older archaeologist to have multiple areas of expertise. He has been active since the 70s, and has been writing on the Delaware area almost his entire career. Paul R. Huey has also been active since the 70s, he has worked mostly in a professional capacity for New York State Historic Sites, with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He mostly works on New York history - Dutch Fort Orange and other Dutch colonial sites. He also has an extensive writing history. Both Becker and Huey have written works I have on my list to read in reference to the early history of Lewes. We’ll get to some of the others later on. But most interestingly, I have yet to find evidence of these two using each other’s publications for their own works!

Now, I read Becker’s Dutch Fort Map article first. I was at first suspicious of the article’s usability because of the ‘Zwaanendael’ thing, but I figured I should read the article anyway. The article lays out a brief history of the 1631 colony of Swanendael, with quotes from primary sources about the location of the site: a few miles into the bay, within Cape Carnelius to the Horekill, and a reference to a brick building. He then describes the known 1659 fort on Pilottown Rd. It was far to the south of the natives living at Bombay Hook (northward was purchased in June of 1659), it was constructed on ‘Bloemaerts kil.’ Next Becker described excavations at the site of the fort in the 1950s and 1960s as being a diamond shaped palisade made from wood as evidenced by the remains of postholes. 

This map is identified as NL-HaNA, Kaarten Leupe, V. Vel. inv.nr.518, It is a map that is believed to be from after 1659, which labels Bloemaerts kil, Cape Hinlopen, and Cape May (cropped out), oriented with North to the bottom-ish). It has a little drawing of a diamond shaped fort at the mouth of Bloemaerts kil that matches the palisades found on Pilottown road. There are also drawings of dwellings further inland (south toward Rehoboth and Indian River) one European style house with a gable roof (Plockoy settlement of 1663? Whorekil Town?) and four wigwam looking structures. The dating of the map is uncertain according to Becker, it is certainly from after the 1655 publication of DeVries’ accounts of the area between 1618 and 1644; there is also a later copy with some misspellings. The site of the fort on the map closely resembles descriptions of the Ciconicin village from 1629, perhaps meaning the site of Swanendael would have been further removed from the area. By 1659, the village was probably gone or diminished, since no archaeological evidence has been found so far to confirm contact between the native peoples and the Dutch. At the end of the article, past the sources, there is a modern map of the Delaware coast, marking the Pilottown Rd fort, Rehoboth Bay, and… the proposed site of the Swanendael colony at Slaughter Beach. Now, I’m a heavy metal fan and I had seen Slaughter Beach on google maps, deciding immediately I needed to visit for reasons. But, Becker gives absolutely no support to assume Slaughter Beach to be the site of the slaughtered Zwaanendael colonists. ...Although I suppose oral histories tend to resurface more often than you might think. 

After reading this article, I was pretty convinced of its argument. The original 1631 Swanendael settlement probably would not have had the time, supplies, or manpower to build a diamond shaped palisade, plus they were supposed to have a brick structure which was not found at the excavations. So that means the Pilottown Road Fort was from 1659, but does that necessarily mean Swanendael had to be elsewhere? Proving the location and date of the Fort does help me understand the early history of Lewes and confirm that stuff was going on in the direct vicinity of the RHH to lend credence to the early construction date of 1665. Would less than 30 years be enough time for new settlers to either forget about the massacre of Swanendael and rebuild on its site or would the memory have kept them away, meaning Swanendael was elsewhere and settlers moved to the current Lewes area to establish a new site? I really need to find the original archaeological reports from 1956 and 1964, they were published in the Archeolog, but that doesn’t seem to be easily accessible. I also would like to track down a digitized copy of the map in questions so I can look at a hi-res version myself. ‘Bloemaerts kil’ is a new term for me, I think. And good old DeVroes’ journals, I need to find a translated copy of that as well. And I need to track down this idea of Swanendael being further up the bay; even if it wasn’t at Slaughter Beach, it could very well be away from Lewes. 

Fast forward a few months, and I get around to reading our second article, Huey’s chapter on New Netherland Dutch forts in the book Verre Forten, Vreemde Kusten: Nederlandse verdedigingswerken oversee. Which, being Dutch looks like weird German to my eye (yes, I can read German), it means something like Distant Forts on Foreign Coasts: Dutch Defenses Overseas. In his chapter, Huey writes about several Dutch Forts in New Netherland including ones in New York, and New Jersey. But it was his use of two maps that had me quite excited. Our map from the Becker article shows up second (we’ll talk about the first in a bit, thats the cool one). Huey claims the map is from the 1630s and does indeed show the fortifications at Swanendael, bringing up the good point to always remember that these early maps are rarely literal. He confirms that the excavations in the 50s and 60s discovered a diamond shaped palisade, but that Craig Lukezic at the Delaware State Historical Preservation Office believes the recovered cultural artifacts are most likely 18th century. Huey then goes on to confirm, from primary documents, that prove the construction of a Fort at the Horekil or Cape Henlopen in 1659. He mentions that it could be built near the site of Swanendael, quoting some soldiers were ‘not without fear and danger of being sooner or later massacred by the cruel savages.’ This could prove some memory of Swanendael existing into the 1660s, but does not prove conclusively that the fort and Swanedael shared a site, or were close to each other. Huey also names the fort as Fort Oplandt… I have yet to read this term and it will require some digging to confirm, he says this was the name of the Swanendael ‘brickhouse.’ 

So, when comparing this to the Becker article’s conclusions, I am again confused. I believe the fort on the map must be the palisades found on Pilottown Rd. But of anything else I am less certain. I find it hard to believe that Swanendael’s colonists would have been able to build the palisade, but if they did construct the palisade, then the archaeologists should have found evidence of bricks, which they did not. So, if we then can say that the map’s fort, the palisade, and the 1659 fortifications are all the same, then what about Swanendael? I could maybe conjecture that people would be uncomfortable to build on the site of a known massacre, and it seems based on the soldiers’ quote that the memory did survive to the 1660s. This would mean that Swanendael was located elsewhere, and as a whaling station it must also have been in the Bay, near the water. Slaughter Beach does make some sense, it would have a clear shot to the ocean with enough distance to perhaps lend some safety from the weather as well as any aggression from the English and Swedish. But Swanendael could have been anywhere up the west side of the bay.

Now, the juicy part, the first map in Huey’s article:

Whaaat? Do you see that, on the left side of the map?! Swanendael and then Hoere Kill! Again oriented weird, North is vaguely to the right. This image is taken from the 1667 ‘Nieuw Nederlandt’ map by Pieter Goos. Now, after some quick googling, this map seems to be a copy made with 10-15 year old data, but still, what in the world does this mean? The best part is Huey completely ignores the labeling of separate Swanendael and Hoere Kill sites. So, this could mean that Hoere Kill is the site of the 1659 Dutch palisade fort, which grew into Whorekill, to be renamed Lewes; and it could confirm the site of Swanendael to be further up the bay in the vicinity of Slaughter Beach or Prime Hook. I will need to track down the original maps, but this could change so much. ...And make a lot of people in Lewes unhappy. But hey, history constantly changes as new evidence is uncovered. Fit the theory to the facts, not the facts to the theory, people. 

And this is what caused me to go off the rails, I knew there was something fishy about S vs. Z for the original settlement, but names change all the time; plus the story about Horn, Netherlands naming the town of Hoere Kill which became Whorekill and launched the story about ‘free loving native women’ leading to the demise of the original Swanendael settlers sounded silly but made a lot of sense from a historiographical perspective. This totally blindsided me. Slaughter Beach is about 15 miles along the coast from Lewes; that would definitely be enough distance for people to feel safer from past events. Also, the creek at Lewes and the creek at Slaughter Beach would both give protection to ships, making them good candidates for settlement. A later settlement at Lewes/Pilottown Rd would make more sense as a defensive position because there would have been more activity in the area - Cape May, the Delaware River, but more importantly the Chesapeake and the encroachment of the English from the south in Maryland. Whoever controlled the mouth of the Delaware Bay controlled the path to Wilmington and the trading posts up the Delaware Valley. Of course, these two maps in no way confirm or deny the actual site of Swanendael, but if I can find more primary sources or archaeological evidence, I could very well be on the path to discovering something new. And that is very exciting! 

*both images are taken from Huey, P.R. (2010). “Dutch Colonial Forts in New Netherland.” In Verre Forten, Vreemde Kusten: Nederlandse verdedigingswerken oversee. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 287-331