The Tall Ship Kalmar Nyckel

The New Sweden colony was centered at Fort Christina, situated approximately two miles upstream from the mouth of the Christina River on the Delaware River.

Kalmar Nyckel Foundation
1124 East 7th Street
Wilmington, DE 19801

By the middle of the 17th century, the Realm of Sweden had reached its greatest territorial extent, encompassing Finland and Estonia along with parts of modern Russia, Poland, Germany and Latvia. The Swedes sought to create a tobacco and fur-trading colony in America, which would enable them to bypass French and British merchants. The first Swedish expedition to North America was led by Peter Minuit; as a former director-general of the Dutch West India Company’s New Netherland colony he was well qualified for the role of establishing a new colony in the same region.

Aboard the ships Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip, the expedition sailed into Delaware Bay (between the present-day states of New Jersey and Delaware) and anchored at the site of today’s Wilmington, Delaware on March 29, 1638. There they built a fort which they named Fort Christina, after Queen Christina of Sweden.

As Swedes and Finns continued to immigrate and settle the area, the colony of New Sweden was established, with Peter Minuit as the first governor. The colony’s primary forts were later captured by the Dutch, and New Sweden was incorporated into the New Netherland colony. This status lasted until the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, which was temporarily reversed by a Dutch recapture in 1673, which was followed by the signing of the Treaty of Westminster of 1674, which returned sovereignty to the British. The rest, as they say, is history.

Kalmar Nyckel made three more transatlantic voyages, each one bringing additional settlers to New Sweden. Her four successive round trips from Sweden set a record unmatched by any other colonial vessel. Constructed in about 1625, she was a Dutch-built armed merchant ship of the pinnace type. Following the transatlantic voyages she served the Royal Swedish Navy and then as a merchant ship, and was finally lost at sea in the late 17th century.

In 1986 the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation was established to build and launch a re-creation of the Kalmar Nyckel. The word “replica” is not used since we don’t have exact specifications for the original vessel. She was built at a Wilmington shipyard on the Christina River situated adjacent to Fort Christina, the 1638 Swedish settler’s landing site. Public sails are given during the warm months. The lengthier voyage lasts three hours and the briefer one takes an hour and a half. I was on the 1.5 hour sail, which brings you down the Christina River, past the Fort Christina site. The ship turns around and returns before reaching the Delaware River; that is sufficient to give you a basic understanding of how the ship operates and what it might have felt like to journey on it across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Kalmar Nyckel was a large Pinnace, typified by three square-rigged masts and a hull form resembling that of a small galleon.

We “sailed” under the power of the ship’s diesel engines, as the Christina River is not easily navigable by large vessels.

The top photo shows Fort Christina State Park, which occupies the ship’s original landing site. The next photo is a closeup showing the reconstructed fort, and the third one shows the Kalmar Nyckel Shipyard, which is where the ship resides when she’s not busy doing something else. At the time of this writing Fort Christina State Park is not open to the public, as some maintenance construction needs to be completed.

This is where passengers and crew slept, as the dry space below-deck was needed for storage of goods unable to withstand exposure to the elements.