|
The bedrock of the island is a diabase formed during the volcanic eruptions that created much of the bedrock of northern New Jersey, including the New Jersey Palisades, approximately 200 million years ago. As an island, Staten Island was formed in the wake of the last ice age. In the late Pleistocene between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, the ice sheet that covered northeastern North America reached to as far south as present day New York City. The lowland areas of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys are characterized by long alluvial flats.
In the Sixteenth Century, Staten Island was part of a larger area known as Lenapehoking that was inhabited by the Lenape, an Algonquian American Indians people also called the "Delaware". The segment of land he purchased from the Chiefs included the land on the west side of the South River from just below the Schuylkill; in other words, today's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, southeast Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. The Dutch had established deeds for the lands on the east side of the river (New Jersey), but not for the lands on the west side (Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania). Peter Minuit was to become the first governor of the newly established colony of New Sweden.
New Sweden, or Nya Sverige, was a small Swedish settlement along the Delaware River, and included parts of the present day American states of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The New Sweden Company was chartered and included Swedish, Dutch and German stockholders. A large number of the settlers were Finnish and Dutch although the first Dutch settlement of the New Netherlands colony was made on Manhattan in 1620. In an ensuing conflict in 1632, the Dutch settlement of Swanendael (Delaware) was wiped out by the Algonquins. Colonial settlement after 1600 progressively replaced the supposedly indigenous district of Norumbega with the European imposition of new regions: New France, New England, and the New Netherlands.