In 1631, a group of settlers under David Pietersz de Vries landed near this spot to establish Swanendael, the first permanent European presence on the Delaware Bay, as a whale hunting station and agricultural settlement after crossing the Atlantic in the Walvis. Before the Dutch arrived, the land was inhabited by an Algonquian group called the Cinconicins, also recorded as Sickoneyns, Siknoessink, Siconesius, Siconese, or Great Siconese, who likely lived by hunting and intensive seasonal gathering from forests, streams, and the coast. Dutch interest in the region followed Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage into Delaware Bay and the creation of New Netherland, whose southern boundary was the Delaware River, then known as the South River. In 1629, agents of the Dutch West India Company acquired from Native Americans a tract eight Dutch miles long and half a Dutch mile wide in exchange for cloth, axes, adzes, beads, and other goods, and a patent was confirmed in 1630. Samuel Godyn obtained rights to settle the territory, de Vries was given general administration from Holland, Captain Peter Heyes commanded the Walvis, and Gillis Hossitt oversaw the settlement on site. The settlers built a palisade, dormitory, and cook house, but after Heyes departed for Amsterdam, a cultural misunderstanding led to the colony’s destruction: after Native people removed a tin emblem bearing the arms of Holland from a column to make tobacco pipes, the settlers’ reaction helped set off a cycle of retaliation in which the settlers were killed and the buildings destroyed. When de Vries reached the burned settlement in 1632, he learned of the attack and recorded that the colonists had been struck down while working outside the walls. Although Swanendael lasted barely a year, the Dutch claim encouraged later resettlement of the lower Delaware Valley, intensified again in 1655, and the South River, including the Lewes area, became a flourishing Dutch colonial area until the English seized New Netherland in 1664, though many Dutch settlers remained and contributed to the new English colony.