Pieter Cornelis Plockhoy was a Dutch Mennonite and social reformer, born in the city of Zierikzee circa 1625. He moved to Amsterdam in 1648, where he became well known in the city’s intellectual circles. In 1658 he went to London where he tried unsuccessfully to gain the support of Oliver Cromwell, the antiroyalist Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, for the establishment of utopian settlements in England. Plockhoy returned to Netherlands in 1661 and in 1662 concluded a contract with the Amsterdam magistrates for the establishment of a settlement on the South (Delaware) River in the colony of New Netherland. In exchange for financial support, Plockhoy was required to recruit 25 settlers. He hoped to establish a community of at least one hundred adults; and this pamphlet, with its glowing descriptions of the colony and its abundant natural wealth, was intended to attract emigrants. On July 28, 1663, Plockhoy and forty other Dutch Mennonites disembarked at Hoerenkil (also known as Zwaanendael, Dutch for "valley of swans"), near present-day Lewes, Delaware, to establish the colony. Thirteen months later, the Dutch lost New Netherland to the British, and British soldiers under the command of Sir Robert Carr "destroyed the quaking society of Plockhoy to a naile," as one eyewitness put it. Plockhoy survived the raid and died in Philadelphia some thirty years later.