Samuel Blommaert - New Sweden

New Sweden

In 1635, he started a brass factory in Nacka, outside Stockholm. Swedish chancellor Count Axel Oxenstierna subsequently visited Holland. Soon after he left, Blommaert started to send letters to the Swedish chancellor. In 1636, Blommaert became the consul for Sweden in Amsterdam. Blommaert secretly assisted with the fitting out of the first Swedish expedition with Fogel Grip and Kalmar Nyckel to New Sweden in 1637 and engaged Peter Minuit to command it. When two expeditions turned out to be unprofitable for Blommaert, he withdrew. In those years, Blommaert was so heavily interested in seizing Spanish ships, which sailed from the Caribbean loaded with silver, to make the New Sweden colonization more successful.

Blommaert's thirty-eight letters to the Swedish chancellor Count Axel Oxenstierna, from 1635-1641 are of great importance to the history of New Sweden. These letters were published in Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum 1870-1879 of the Utrecht Historical Society and in Bijdragen en Mededeelingen (1908).

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