The Swedes had held their independent position on the Delaware but about seventeen years.
Leaving an agent, as temporary commandant, Stuyvesant returned triumphantly to fort Amsterdam.
And now for ten years there had been peace with the Indians, when a gross outrage again roused their savage natures to revenge.

The Indians, ever accustomed to roam the forest, and to gather fruits, nuts and game wherever they could find them, had not very discriminating views of the rights of private property.

Ensign Van Dyck, the former treasurer, and one of the most noted men in the colony, detected an Indian woman in his orchard gathering peaches.
Inhumanly he shot her dead.

This roused all the neighboring tribes, and they united to avenge her death.

There was certainly something chivalrous in this prompt combination of the warriors not to allow, what they deemed the murder of a sister, to pass unpunished.
Taking advantage of the absence of Governor Stuyvesant, with nearly all the military force he could raise, on his expedition to the South river, sixty-four war canoes, containing nineteen hundred armed Indians, were at midnight on the fifteenth of September, stealthily paddled into the waters surrounding fort Amsterdam.