The Burning of Hoornkil
In late 1673, Lord Baltimore launched a plan to brutally punish Hoornkil’s residents for their frequently changing allegiances.
Three weeks before Christmas, Captain Thomas Howell came across the Chesapeake to the small town, purportedly to “protect the settlement from the Dutch.” Howell and his forty troops lived off the meager supplies of the community for eighteen days, then briefly left.
On Christmas Eve, Howell returned with his heavily armed horsemen. They assembled the forty-seven men, women and children of Hoornkil by the stream, confiscated their weapons and tortured one settler, Haraman Conelison, to reveal where he had hidden a store of beaver pelts. Then, one by one, Howell’s troops burned their eleven homes to the ground, including Wiltbanck’s at the Preserve and that of his neighbor, Sam Russell.
Only a single thatch barn near the inlet, used to store wheat, failed to catch fire and was spared. All the settlers’ sloops and barques along the canal were destroyed, and any farm animals Howell could catch were seized. The colony’s fields of winter wheat and stacks of corn were torched.
Howell then drove his troops three miles down the coast to the Rhoads’ farm in Rehoboth with its house, seventy-foot-long tobacco shed and milk hut. Rhoads and his family were given fifteen minutes before it and the other buildings were set afire. The soldiers even torched the inside of the home to hasten its burning. In Helms’s own words, “They burned and left us in unbearable conditions ... Neighboring red men wept when they saw the spile [sic] what the inhabitants had suffered by their own countrymen.”
When Howell’s troops departed, the villagers surveyed the damage. All the homes and their contents had been destroyed. The wheat fields were blackened and smoking. The men had no weapons for hunting and no boats from which to fish. In the bitter cold of winter, the community’s first need was for warmth. Bonfires were lit, and women and young children sheltered in the barn as the men salvaged supplies.
John Rhoads declared he would make a heroic trek to seek supplies. His choices were to go inland, to Maryland, through friendly Nanticoke country, or upriver to Fort Casimir through land frequented by the hostile Minqua Indians, who prowled the South River by canoes to conduct raids and terrorize the Siconese. Both settlements were sixty miles away. Since help could be delivered more quickly by boat, Rhoads and a fellow settler, Thomas Tilley, decided to go north, without any weapons, hoping to return with supplies within several weeks.
Helms remained with the dejected, famished settlers. A number of the women were “with child” and unable to travel. Others left Hoornkil altogether. For those Dutch who stayed, their famed perseverance would be fully tested. After many days with no sign of help, a trapper arrived on foot with the tragic news that Rhoads and Tilley had been ambushed and killed by the Minquas on their route upriver. They had never reached Fort Casimir.
Helms was now forty-seven years old. His family included two sons, twelve and ten, plus a two-year-old daughter and an infant son, Isaac. He had already acquired well over one thousand acres of land. Although exhausted and physically handicapped, his only option was to stay and start over again.
