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Mid-Atlantic: Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland

group, had established numerous vil- lages along the Delaware River. (The Europeans would later refer to the Lenni Lenape as the Delaware Indians.) Lenape hunted, fished, and tended crops such as beans, corn, and squash. Nearby Algonquian-speaking tribes in the south included the Nanticoke and Assateague. In 1609 Englishman Henry Hudson, an explorer working for the Dutch East India Company, was the first European to discover the Delaware Bay and River. A year later, English sea captain Samuel Argall named the waters in honor of the gov- ernor of Virginia: Thomas West, Lord De La Warr. Although these two men were English, it was the Dutch who estab- lished the first European settlement in the region. In 1631, a group of settlers under captain David Pietersz de Vries landed along the Delaware Bay, just inland from the Atlantic. The 28 men planned to set up a whaling colony. They named it Zwaanendael, which is Dutch for “valley of the swans.” The following year, when de Vries returned

tion is about 44 inches (112 centime- ters) per year. History For thousands of years various Native American cultures inhabited today’s Delaware. By the 1400s, the Lenni Lenape, members of an Algonquian

Henry Hudson was an English sea captain who was hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a westward route to Asia. During his 1609 voyage, he explored the Atlantic coast of what today is Delaware.