Excerpt from Documents Relating to the History of the Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware River, Vol. 12: Translated and Compiled From Original Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, at Albany, and in the Royal Archives, at Stockholm The downfall of the Dutch authority in New York was perhaps inevitable. The colonizing impulse of the British Empire in the Seventeenth Century was so much greater than that of any other foreign power that in all human probability the unsurpassed harbor of New York and its tributaries were its natural and inevitable prey. The result, however, if it was inevitable, was precipitated by an incident of which history has taken little or no account, and which illustrates in a singular manner the difficulty attending any contemporaneous estimate of the relative influence and importance of historical causes. Long before the English had made any direct claims upon the Hudson river or upon Manhattan. Island, they had set up and were very tenacious of a paper title to the territory along the Delaware, then called the South river. The Dutch claimed the same territory by the right of prior possession, insisting that they built the first fort on the South river [delaware] in 1598. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.