The Swedes sought to extend their influence by creating an agricultural (tobacco) and fur trading colony to bypass French, English and Dutch merchants.

Disgruntled after being dismissed from his post, he led a Swedish expedition to a location which he knew to be strategic as well as a thorn in the side of his former employers.

As a reprisal, the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant sent an army to the Delaware River, which obtained the surrender of the Swedish forts.

Saint Barthélemy is the only Caribbean island to have been historically a Swedish colony for any significant length of time, Guadeloupe only having been one briefly, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

As a result of Sweden's support of France's enemies during the Napoleonic Wars, the island of Guadeloupe was ceded to king Charles XIV John personally, not to his Swedish state.

[citation needed] During the time of Sweden's colonisation of Africa's Gold Coast, the small Swedish slave trade began.

It would later be rejuvenated in 1784, when Sweden's monarch, Gustav III, began negotiations with France with a view to creating a new alliance between the two countries.

Gustav offered Gothenburg as an entrepôt to the French, in exchange for the Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy, in addition to subsidies.

However, these two islands were inhabited by such a diverse group of people from European backgrounds, that French and English were also accepted official languages.