Nevertheless, the company proceeded to send over, in 1622, a number of French Walloons, who constituted the first Dutch colony in America.  One party, under the command of Captain Cornelius Jacobson May, the first Dutch governor, sailed to the South, or Delaware River, where, four miles below the present Philadelphia, they erected a fort called Nassau; and another party under Adrian Joris went up the Hudson, and on the site of Albany built Fort Orange.  Peter Minuit succeeded May in 1626, and bought from the Indians the whole of Manhattan Island, and organized a government with an advisory council.

The population of New Netherland was only two hundred, and though trade was brisk there was little agriculture.  The company met this difficulty by obtaining a new charter and seeking to promote emigration by dividing up the country among some great patroons:  Samuel Godyn, Killiaen van Renssalaer, Michael Pauw, David Pieterson de Vries, and other rich men.  In 1631 De Vries settled Swaanendael, on the South River, as the Dutch called the Delaware; but in a few months the Indians attacked the place and massacred the settlers.[18] Soon the patroons became rivals of the West India Company in the fur trade, and in 1632 Minuit, who favored them, was recalled and Wouter van Twiller was made governor.  His accession marks the first real clash between the rival claims of the Dutch and English.[19]

In 1632 Lord Baltimore obtained a patent for Maryland which included all the south side of Delaware Bay and river; and a month later Sir Edmund Plowden obtained a grant from the English king for “Long Isle and also forty leagues square of the adjoining continent,” including the very site of Manhattan.[20] In April, 1633, Jacob Eelkens, in command of an English vessel, forced his way past Fort Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, and traded with the Indians, until the incompetent Van Twiller at length stripped him of his goods and drove him from the river.[21] The same year Van Twiller, as we have seen, planted a fort near the site of the present city of Hartford, which served as the seed of future troubles.

In 1634 Captain Thomas Young visited the Delaware and lorded it over the Dutch vessels which he found in the river.[22] Then in 1635, while settlers from Massachusetts poured into Connecticut, and the Council for New England, preliminary to its dissolution, assigned Long Island, despite the Dutch claim, to Sir William Alexander, men came from Virginia to Delaware Bay and seized Fort Nassau, then abandoned by the Dutch; but Van Twiller soon drove them away.[23] Thus step by step English progress encroached upon the territories of the Dutch.

In 1638 Van Twiller was recalled and William Kieft was sent over.  He had to deal with Swedes as well as English, for in 1626 King Gustavus Adolphus was persuaded by Usselinx, an Amsterdam merchant, to form the Swedish West India Company, and after his death Oxenstierna, his prime-minister, renewed the scheme.  In 1638 he sent out a Swedish expedition under Peter Minuit, the late governor of New Netherland, who established a fort on the Delaware near the present Wilmington, and called it “Christina,” and the Swedes paid no attention to the protest of Governor Kieft.[24]