Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley 1609‑1684

by Clinton Albert Weslager

 (p4)  Contents

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here is my copy of the first and I believe only edition, published in 1961 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The copyright was not renewed in 1988 or 1989 as was still required by the law at that time in order to be maintained, and the book has thus been in the public domain since Jan. 1, 1990: details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

The book includes only three illustrations, and no table of illustrations. Here is mine:

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.) My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the chapters are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The edition I followed was very well proofread, with very few typographical errors I could detect; since they are trivial, I made the corrections, merely marking them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. That said, much of the text contains native American names and terms, as well as older Dutch; or quotes passages, often long, which though in English are in the erratic spellings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which to be thoroughly checked would require comparison with the original documents, which I have not done.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles. Most of the time in this particular book, though, I haven't ventured to convert units of distance, since it's often not clear to me whether English or Dutch miles (and the latter come in short or long varieties), statute miles or nautical miles are meant.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchors at their exact places in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is not altogether adequate, since the only images in the book are schematic maps that don't lend themselves to any good graphic treatment, and the book jacket proved impossible to reduce to a legible graphic: so I've used instead a crop of the well-known painting "The Threatened Swan" by the 17c Dutch artist Jan Asselijn, contemporary with the colonization of the New Netherlands. The bird can remind us of the settlement of Swanendael (Swan Valley) that met its tragic end (Chapter 4) due to poor communications between the indigenous Lenape and the Dutch colonists, despite goodwill on both sides. As it turns out also, the colors, which I've merely brightened a bit, are those of the Dutch flag at the time the colony was established.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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