第4章 Penn Sails For The Delaware (1)

The framing of the constitution and other preparations consumed the year following Penn's receipt of his charter in 1681.But at last, on August 30, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, with about a hundred colonists.After a voyage of about six weeks, and the loss of thirty of their number by smallpox, they arrived in the Delaware.June would have been a somewhat better month in which to see the rich luxuriance of the green meadows and forests of this beautiful river.But the autumn foliage and bracing air of October must have been inspiring enough.The ship slowly beat her way for three days up the bay and river in the silence and romantic loneliness of its shores.Everything indicated richness and fertility.At some points the lofty trees of the primeval forest grew down to the water's edge.The river at every high tide overflowed great meadows grown up in reeds and grasses and red and yellow flowers, stretching back to the borders of the forest and full of water birds and wild fowl of every variety.

Penn, now in the prime of life, must surely have been aroused by this scene and by the reflection that the noble river was his and the vast stretches of forests and mountains for three hundred miles to the westward.

He was soon ashore, exploring the edge of his mighty domain, settling his government, and passing his laws.He was much pleased with the Swedes whom he found on his land.He changed the name of the little Swedish village of Upland, fifteen miles below Philadelphia, to Chester.He superintended laying out the streets of Philadelphia and they remain to this day substantially as he planned them, though unfortunately too narrow and monotonously regular.He met the Indians at Philadelphia, sat with them at their fires, ate their roasted corn, and when to amuse him they showed him some of their sports and games he renewed his college days by joining them in a jumping match.

Then he started on journeys.He traveled through the woods to New York, which then belonged to the Duke of York, who had given him Delaware; he visited the Long Island Quakers; and on his return he went to Maryland to meet with much pomp and ceremony Lord Baltimore and there discuss with him the disputed boundary.

He even crossed to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake to visit a Quaker meeting on the Choptank before winter set in, and he describes the immense migration of wild pigeons at that season, and the ducks which flew so low and were so tame that the colonists knocked them down with sticks.

Most of the winter he spent at Chester and wrote to England in high spirits of his journeys, the wonders of the country, the abundance of game and provisions, and the twenty-three ships which had arrived so swiftly that few had taken longer than six weeks, and only three had been infected with the smallpox."Oh how sweet," he says, "is the quiet of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations, hurries and perplexities of woful Europe."As the weeks and months passed, ships kept arriving with more Quakers, far exceeding the migration to the Jerseys.By summer, Penn reported that 50 sail had arrived within the past year, 80houses had been built in Philadelphia, and about 300 farms had been laid out round the town.It is supposed that about 8000immigrants had arrived.This was a more rapid development than was usual in the colonies of America.Massachusetts and Virginia had been established slowly and with much privation and suffering.But the settlement of Philadelphia was like a summer outing.There were no dangers, the hardships were trifling, and there was no sickness or famine.There was such an abundance of game close at hand that hunger and famine were in nowise to be feared.The climate was good and the Indians, kindly treated, remained friendly for seventy years.

It is interesting to note that in that same year, 1682, in which Penn and his friends with such ease and comfort founded their great colony on the Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs from Canada, after years of incredible hardships, had traversed the northern region of the Great Lakes with their canoes and had passed down the Mississippi to its mouth, giving to the whole of the Great West the name of Louisiana, and claiming it for France.