Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/386

 immortalized by Washington Irving's genius of burlesque. Rising, aware of his weakness, professed to believe that the Dutch had no further hostile intent, but when they invested Fort Christina on three sides, planted cannon, and called for the surrender of the place in forty-eight hours, he first temporized, then put on a bold face, and finally, without striking a blow, surrendered. So ended Swedish rule in Delaware, and so began the short-lived Dutch supremacy.

The Dutch guaranteed to the vanquished religious liberty and all other reasonable privileges, so that few Swedes took the chance afforded of selling their property and removing out of the jurisdiction. The Swedes, indeed, were soon reconciled to Dutch rule, and in fact the colony remained, in all save politics, as truly Swedish as it had been before. The Dutch children learned the Swedish tongue, and as the Swedes far outnumbered the Dutch, the latter were soon lost in the mass of the former. When a nephew of Prinz visited the country, late in the seventeenth century, he found that the people "used the old Swedish way in all things." Pastor Rudman wrote home to Sweden that the mother tongue was