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Chapter XXIII
Wild Animals, Fish, Etc., Of Delaware County.
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would wither in consequence of this, but no symptoms of it was observed next year. Hogs and poultry fed on them. Even the Indians did eat them, especially when they first came, boiling them a little. This made it probable that they were of the same kind with those eaten by John the Baptist. They did not continue long, but died in the month of June."
In the early days flies were more abundant than in our times, and during the occupation of Philadelphia the flies were very annoying to the residents of that city. "You cannot conceive," wrote Capt. John Heinricks, in 1778, "of the superabundant swarms of flies."1 If flies attracted attention, certain it is that the early settlers, as well as all subsequent European visitors, were much surprised and interested in our phosphorescent beetles, or, as more commonly called, fire-flies. Thomas Moore has used these insects with effect in one of his most admired ballads. The origin of our common bees has long been a mooted question, because the Indians always declared that they were unknown in this country until the advent of Europeans, and termed them "the white man's fly." " Bees," writes Gabriel Thomas, in 1698, "thrive and multiply exceedingly in these parts. The Swedes often get great stores of them in the woods, where they are free for anybody. Honey (and choice, too) is sold in the Capital City for five pence per pound. Wax is also plentiful, cheap, and considerable commerce." That nocturnal pest, the mosquito, was general in the early time, and, within the recollection of the writer, in the vicinity of Chester they were more numerous thirty years ago than at the present day. They were certainly abundant in the early days of Swedish sway on the Delaware, for we learn that shortly after Governor Printz built Fort Elsinborg, near the mouth of Salem Creek, Campanius records "At last within a few years it was demolished by the Swedes themselves, who could not live there on account of the great numbers of moschetoes. After they left it they used to call it Myggenborg, that is to say, Moscheto Fort." | 1 Penna. Mag. of Hist., vol. i. p. 41. | ||
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| Chapter XXIV
Delaware County Climate, Together With Notices Of Remarkable Weather. | |||
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In 1633 it is recorded that De Vries was frozen up in Wyngaert's Kill from January 17th to February 3d, and that he did not return to Swansdale until the 20th of February. The Dutch colonists "did not imagine that we had been frozen up in the river, as no pilot or astrologer could conceive that in the latitude from the thirty-eighth and a half to the thirty-ninth such rapid running rivers could freeze." Governor Printz states in the early days of the colony, that the "winter is sometimes as sharp that I have never felt it more severe in the Northern parts of Sweden."2 | 2 Report for 1647, Penna. Mag. of Hist., vol. vii. p. 272. | ||
| The winter of 1657 is the first record of intensely cold weather we find in the annals of this colony, for the Delaware River was frozen in one night so that a deer could run over it, which, the Indians stated, had not occurred within the memory of their oldest living person, nor was there any tradition of it ever happening before that time. On Jan. 14, 1660, William Beekman wrote, "We are bravely blockaded by frost, but we are not affraid of it, as we are, on the contrary, well provisioned." And on the 25th of the same month he records, "Two days ago the ice broke up, so that we shall shortly have free water."3 The winter of 1681 was also remarkable for its severity, for on the 11th of December the river was closed in one night so that all navigation was interrupted, while the succeeding winter, that of 1682, was very mild, scarcely any ice forming, to be followed the next year with intense cold. In that year William Penn, in a letter to Lord North, says, "The weather often changeth without notice, and is constant almost in its inconstancy!" while a writer in 1684 says,4 "The air is generally clear and agreeable. The summer is longer and warmer, and the winter shorter and sometimes colder than in England." The latter statement was certainly true of the winter of 1697-98, when the river was frozen so solidly that wagon-loads of hay were repeatedly dragged across the Delaware at Christiana. |
3 Penna. Archives, 2d series, vol. vii. pp. 619, 628.
4 Penna. Mag. of Hist., vol. vi. p. 312. | ||
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The summer of 1699 was extremely warm, and the winter of 1704 was so cold that snow fell over a yard in depth, the deepest on record, and birds, deer, and other animals perished, unable to find sustenance. The winter of 1700 was very mild, while in February, 1714, flowers were seen in the woods near Philadelphia. The summer of 1724 was known as "the hot summer," which certainly must have been true of 1730, when eight persons dropped dead in the streets of Philadelphia in one day; while the winter of that year was bitterly cold, and the summer of 1734 was so warm that many men in the harvest-fields died, and great numbers of birds were found dead, owing to the heat. In the winter of 1739-40, when the cold was so intense in Europe, snow fell to a depth of three feet; the tops of the fences were covered, and sleds passed over them in every direction on the hard crust. The Delaware was frozen over until the 15th of March.
The suffering among the exposed settlers in Lancaster County, then on the borders of civilization, was extreme, the Pennsylvania Gazette recording that they were compelled to subsist on the deer which had died, and it was no unusual event to find ten or twelve of those creatures lying within a comparatively short distance of a spring, while great numbers of squirrels | |||