REVIEWS Alf Åberg. FOLKET I NYA SVERIGE. VÅR KOLONI VID DELAWAREFLODEN 1638-1655. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1987. 198 pp., illustrated. Voluminous and detailed as the scholarly literature about the seventeenth-century Swedish settlements on the Delaware River has been down through the centuries, Alf Åberg makes no claim of contributing anything essentially new to the subject of this modest volume. Rather his purpose has been to retell the story of this footnote to Swedish history for the modern layman who reads Swedish on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the founding of New Sweden, Nova Sveda [Nya Sverige], 1638). As usual, Alf Åberg has succeeded remarkably well in fulfilling his purpose—so well, in fact, that a translation into American English of Folket i Nya Sverige can be recommended with enthusiasm. By soberly and sensibly confining himself to the facts as we presently are able to discern them, Alf Åberg draws repeated attention to two leitmotifs, so to speak, that resound throughout his chronological retelling of the story itself: the international coopera• tive—and competitive—effort that the enterprise essentially was and the penchant toward failure, rather than success, that typified it. To expand briefly on these themes, Swedish and Dutch capital was required to finance the initial voyage of the ships Kalmar Nyckel and Gripen in their pursuit of such viable commodities as tobacco and furs; and since the Dutch then had far greater expertise at seafaring than did the Swedes, the leadership and most of the sailors for these vessels were recruited in Amsterdam rather than the fledgling seaport of Göteborg. From the very beginning, those who settled in New Sweden were not only of Swedish and Finnish but also Dutch and from an early point English extraction. Peter Minuit, the same Dutchman who in 1626 bought Manhattan for $24.00 from the Carnarsee Indians, now rendered service to the Swedish Crown by purchasing for it land on the banks of the Delaware River from the Lenapes in March of 1638. The court of Queen Christina, however, benefited only briefly from Minuit's 80 experience and abilities, for on the return voyage he perished at sea in a tropical storm during the summer of 1639. "America fever" in no way characterized those intrepid souls who undertook the perilous voyage from the kingdom of Sweden to terra incognita in the 1630s and 1640s. While some did embark on it willingly, most of the early colonists were soldiers who either singly or with their families were deported because of desertion or other crimes, or Finns from the remote areas of Dalarna and Värmland who having been caught scorching the Crown's forests had to choose between becoming soldiers or emigrating. Departing by ship from Göteborg, moreover, guaranteed nothing: all who sailed on the ship Kattan in the summer of 1649 underwent horrifying tribulations at the hands of nature and man after shipwreck in the West Indies—only a handful of them ever made it back to Sweden with life and limb—and probably 100 of the 350 people who sailed on the ship Örnen in 1653 died at sea. Throughout his readable and fascinating account, Alf Åberg has a keen eye for the telling detail, such as Axel Oxenstierna's conviction that sufficient manpower would result in the Swedish Crown's mastering "the entire country" (p. 45) or Queen Chris• tina's proposal to send all of the gypsies in her realm to New Sweden (p. 80). Also brilliant is his treatment of the absolute authority shared by the strange bedfellows that the Crown- appointed governor of the colony and a series of Lutheran clergymen were. But then the "Swedish" settlers, unlike their English or Dutch contemporaries who immediately established themselves in villages such as Jamestown, New Amsterdam, or New Haven, preferred to set up house on their own isolated farmsteads much as they had been accustomed to in the forest wildernesses of Dalarna, Värmland, and Dalsland, from whence most of them came. Thus the Church, with its obligatory three- to four-hour services not only on Sundays and multiplied on such major holidays as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, but also on such minor ones as New Year's Day, Epiphany, Annunciation Day, St. Michael's Day, and All Souls' Day, had necessarily to provide whatever community these people enjoyed. And the legends of the tyrannical Governor Printz that Per Kalm reported as still circulat• ing in the 1750s among the descendants of the original colonists, reflect, as Åberg shrewdly points out, a reality probably no better or worse than that which prevailed on the estate of a nobleman in Småland, Östergötland, or Södermanland during the seventeenth century. 81 Despite the high quality of the work under consideration, the reviewer must register a few minor demurrals. Why has virtually every historian since Ingvar Andersson forgotten to mention that the official name of this Swedish enterprise was Nova Svecia—not Nya Sverige? Why, for example, did Governor Printz once urgently ask the powers-that-be to send him someone proficient in Latin (p. 59)? Is, indeed, the Church of the Holy Trinity in Wilmington, Delaware (consecrated 4 July 1699), "the oldest church in the United States, which remains in its original condition and is still used regularly for services" (p. 179)? What about the Church of St. Augustine, established in 1613 on what now is the Isleta Indian Reservation in New Mexico and still in use as a parish church? These reservations notwithstanding, Alf Åberg's Folket i Nya Sverige is strongly recommended to those who read Swedish and, one hopes, to those who will read it in an American-English translation. A fitting parting shot to the seventeenth-century Swedish attempt to colonize the New World was fired in the last words of Per Lindeström's account—the first detailed description of a Swede's trip to America (1653-1656)—"The one who cannot pray to God, put him out to sea on such a long and dangerous journey, then he will certainly learn to pray" (p. 106). RAYMOND JARVI North Park College Ulf Beijbom. UTVANDRARE OCH SVENSK-AMERIKA. Stock• holm: LTs förlag, 1986. 254 pp., illustrated. Ulf Beijbom is well qualified to comment on immigration and Swedish America. Associated with the Emigrant Institute in Växjö, Sweden, he has devoted some twenty-five years to studying and writing on immigration to the United States and has made innumerable study trips to America. Many of the essays in this anthology were first published in the Swedish provincial press. In his preface, Beijbom states that he has rewritten a number of these articles and added several new ones in order to achieve continuity and cohesiveness in this volume. Unfortunately, the book still lacks real unity. But it is a valuable contribution to the bibliography on Swedish America and well worth the while of a reader with a knowledge of Swedish. 82 .