The Three Lower Counties: Delaware.%--If you look at the map of the British Colonies in 1764, you will see that Pennsylvania was the only English colony which did not have a seacoast.

This was a cause of some anxiety to Penn, who was afraid that the settlers in Delaware and New Jersey might try to prevent his colonists from going in and out of Delaware Bay.

To avoid this, he bought what is now Delaware from the Duke of York.
The three lower counties on the Delaware, as the tract was called, had no boundary.

Lawfully it belonged to Lord Baltimore.

But neither the Dutch patroons who settled on the Delaware in 1631, nor the Swedes who came later, nor the Dutch who annexed New Sweden to New Netherland, nor the English who conquered the Dutch, paid any regard to Baltimore's rights.