touch at the cape that now bears his name. However, there appears to
have been a little hesitancy about making any further discoveries in
that direction that might be interpreted as encroaching on the English
settlements in Virginia. Maybe the Dutch traders were especially
cautious about disturbing the Virginians. It had been in the late fall
of 1613 that the fiery tempered Englishman, Captain Samuel Argall,
in a 16-gun frigate stopped off at Manhattan supposedly and forced
token acknowledgement of the supremacy of the Virginia government. The
Hollanders’ trade in Hudson’s River had been going very well; there had
been no need to beg trouble abroad.
Now, however, the Dutch felt that their claims were better established
by actual occupation on the northern river and no English were yet
known to occupy or even trade upon the southern river that Hudson
had discovered. Why not explore it with a view toward making further
discoveries which under the Hollanders’ charter would give them
additional trading privileges? And should they find their lost traders,
would not those three have made enough discoveries in the hinterland to
provide material for new claims--yes, even a new map of New Netherland?
So, Cornelis Hendricksen who now had the _Onrust_ in his charge went
out in that little yacht to investigate the prospects on the “South”
River and to see if he might find and ransom the three traders held
captive there.
Hendricksen’s voyage was entirely successful. After charting the west
shores of Delaware Bay, he entered the river and ascended it possibly
as high as present-day Philadelphia. The river’s banks abounded with
game, the country was pleasant, and the climate which was “the same as
that of Holland” delighted the crew of the _Onrust_. Above all, there
were ample prospects of a great traffic in pelts. On the banks of the
Christina where Wilmington now stands and at other places along the
shores of the Delaware River, Hendricksen drove a most profitable trade
with friendly Indians for “sable,” mink, otter and beaver.
And, meager though his report is in the matter of details, somewhere
along the river he was successful in ransoming his three captive
countrymen from the Minquas for “kettles, beads, and other merchandize.”
Hendricksen returned quickly to Manhattan and sailed for Holland.
There, he laid before his employers a report of his discoveries
“between the thirty-eighth and fortieth degrees of latitude,” together
with a map of New Netherland embracing the lower reaches of the
Delaware River as well as the hinterland discoveries of the three
traders he had ransomed. Excitedly, the merchants went before the
States General of the United Netherlands and prayed not only for an
extension of their special charter which was soon to expire but for an
extension of the geographical limits of New Netherland.
In the original charter, New Netherland had been described as “situated
in America, between New France and Virginia, the seacoasts of which
lie between the 40th and 45th degrees of latitude.” The Dutch claim
was thus neatly set down as the exact territory of the overlapping
claims of France and England on the Elizabethan theory that it was the
possession of neither of those countries as it was not occupied by
either of them.
Now the merchants wanted the limits extended by two degrees in the
south--to include the Delaware valley. Their arguments were impressive.
The Delaware had not been occupied by the English, or even explored by
them. What if Captain Samuel Argall had looked in on the bay and named
it for his English governor of Virginia? That was a year after Henry
Hudson had discovered it for the Dutch.
The States General demurred however, postponing any decision. There
were problems at home and abroad that took precedence, and within the
framework of a grand solution of those problems was a plan to create a
great western trading company similar to the Dutch East India Company.
Ever since the defeat of the Armada there had been those in the United
Netherlands who had urged striking at Spain’s sources of revenue in
the East and West Indies as the surest way to hasten that nation’s
decline. The Dutch East India Company, a military trading organization,
had been chartered with this in mind. That was before Spain virtually
acknowledged the independence of the Dutch Netherlands in 1609 by
agreeing to a truce. After that, however, the Peace Party in the Dutch
Netherlands had been strong enough to resist demands that a similar
company be organized to exploit America and harass the Spanish there.
It was considered dangerous to Holland’s newly gained peace and
independence to goad the Spaniards in that quarter--or to offend the
English, or the French either for that matter.
But the War Party led by Prince Maurice of Orange and the Calvinist
clergy, and backed by such important Flemish emigres as Amsterdam’s
great merchant, William Usselinx, wanted to resume the war with Spain
in order to gain complete independence for all the Netherlands.
Usselinx particularly urged the necessity of challenging Spanish
hegemony in America. He wanted a government-sponsored Dutch West India
Company to prosecute the pursuit of gold and silver, the conduct of
the fur trade with the Indians and the destruction of the Spanish
commercial monopoly in the New World.
It was the probability of being forced into forming this company, a
company which would incidentally assume control over New Netherland,
that kept the States General from renewing the New Netherland Company’s
charter. Certainly, concern over possible friction with the English or
the French prevented any territorial broadening of the charter or of
the individual trading licenses which were issued after the charter’s
expiration.
By the New Netherland Company’s charter the States General had in
effect defined and acknowledged the borders of New France in the north
and Virginia in the south. They recognized that it would be bad enough
in the interior when the French realized that New Netherland traders
were aligning themselves with the Iroquois enemies of New France. But
it would be much worse to tangle with the English on the coasts--the
Virginians in the south, and now those other Englishmen preparing to
stake out “New England” in the north.
The Peace Party in the Netherlands didn’t want any trouble and they
wished the Orangers who had gone out to America would stay in the
valley of Hudson’s River, where no Englishmen had ever attempted to
trade for furs. However, that was not to be. The fur traders would push
on; the War Party would have its way.
VIII
_Conception of New England_
The Englishmen living already in America, in southern Virginia, were
more concerned about the Catholic Spaniards to the south of them than
about a few Dutch traders on an unknown river to the north. Jamestown
had been planted by the London Company with very much the same objects
that Raleigh had in mind when he planted Roanoke--a threat to New Spain
among other things. While the colony was young and relatively weak,
therefore, the Virginians lived in constant dread of themselves being
surprised and destroyed by the Spaniards.
Their neighbors in the south had a reputation for making short shrift
of heretics or any foreign colonies that might endanger Florida or
Spanish silver fleets. Some years earlier several hundred Huguenots
from France who planted a colony on the southern coast had been
butchered to the last man in a surprise attack.
Indeed, the Virginians’ fears were well founded. The Spanish admiralty
more than once nursed just such an action against the “English pirates’
nest” on the James River. That they didn’t attack was probably due to
their own increasing vulnerability, for the Spanish star had been in
decline since the destruction of the Armada.
To the north, the Virginians had mainly been concerned about the
French. The northern boundary of English “Virginia,” the 45th parallel,
cut through the Bay of Fundy, but the Frenchmen failed to observe this
delineation of the border. Whereas Dutch interlopers might be passed
off as no more than individual traders who could be ousted at will, the
government-backed traders of New France, firmly entrenched as they were
in the far north, needed special watching.
There was no English colony in those parts to forestall serious French
encroachment. The Plymouth Company had failed in its mission to settle
a plantation in northern Virginia.
It had been with the hope of finding gold or a trade route to the
Indian sea, or in lieu of that at least an outlet for English woolens,
that King James granted charters in 1606 to the London Company and
the Plymouth Company. The merchants of these two joint-stock trading
companies were to settle southern and northern Virginia respectively,
thus driving an English wedge of actual occupation between the vast
territorial claims of New Spain and New France. Under the direction of
Sir Thomas Smith of the London Company the southern colony, Jamestown,
was successfully planted. But in the north, on the border of French
Canada, the colonists sent over by the Plymouth Company failed. They
were too much in love with “El Dorado.”
There had been an unusually good prospect of trade in furs to tide over
the Plymouth Company’s plantation until it could become permanently
rooted by agriculture. Gosnold, Pring, Weymouth--all had predicted the
success of such a venture. But colonization failed. There was no John
Smith at Sagadahoc.
The settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec in Maine was made in 1607,
only a few months after the colonists of the London Company planted
themselves at Jamestown. The Sagadahoc venturers came in two ships,
mainly supplied by Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the Plymouth Company and
backed by the special patronage of another great merchant adventurer,
Chief Justice Sir John Popham. They built a palisaded fort which they
called Saint George, a storehouse and a church, and fifteen dwellings.
And their carpenters under the supervision of a shipwright named Digby
constructed a thirty-ton pinnace, the _Virginia_, which crossed the
ocean to England and came back later to Jamestown in the service of the
Virginia Company.
Except for these few noteworthy accomplishments, however, everything
went wrong at Sagadahoc. Fire destroyed most of the buildings and
few survived the bitter cold of the first winter. George Popham, the
president of the colony and a nephew of the chief patron, died. Trouble
with French traders on the coast operating out of the Bay of Fundy
was a source of much uneasiness, especially after a prominent French
captain wintering at St. Croix was waylaid by the Englishmen and
released only on his promise never again to trade for pelts in those
parts. The weakened defenders of Fort St. George lived in fear of a
surprise French attack--of bloody retaliation.
To cap the Englishmen’s difficulties they were unsuccessful in driving
a trade of their own with the Indians. For one thing, their disgraceful
personal conduct turned the savages against them. A licentious lot of
brawlers to begin with, the Sagadahoc venturers went native without
restraint, and the Indians who were certainly never prudish about
lending their women recoiled in contempt. For another thing, the
Frenchmen offered more for pelts, so the natives hid their furs from
the Englishmen.
When spring came the Sagadahoc settlement was abandoned and the
survivors returned to England with nothing to show for their efforts.
It was all so discouraging that no money could be raised among the
merchant adventurers of the Plymouth Company for further attempts at
colonization, although each year thereafter Gorges sent trading vessels
to the vicinity for pelts. To compete with the French these vessels had
to be plentifully supplied with a variety of goods, trinkets, hatchets,
colored cloths, and eventually even with guns and powder to exchange
for furs.
Several years after Sagadahoc was evacuated the Vice-Admiral of Acadia,
Saint Just, came down the coast and set up the arms of France on the
most conspicuous height he could find near the Englishmen’s abandoned
fort. Having thus officially proclaimed his jurisdiction over Maine,
he returned to his headquarters at Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy,
where it was his practice to exact a one-fifth share of all the furs
collected.
Saint Just’s father, Sieur de Poutrincourt, had been granted the
country originally by de Monts, and now held it under an independent
patent from the king. Although, all in all, Poutrincourt and his son
made a pretty profit from their patent, they met with difficulty in
getting their full share of the furs being collected. Taxes of course
are always unpopular, especially among frontiersmen. The traders across
the bay at St. Croix were recalcitrant, and there were even more
serious dissensions at Port Royal itself on this score.
Among the inhabitants of Port Royal were two lately-arrived Jesuit
priests who had purchased part ownership in a trading vessel and
were stirring up no end of trouble for Saint Just. One of these
fathers, Pierre Biard, was particularly obstreperous, objecting to the
vice-admiral’s profits, giving unwanted advice on trading, and even
trying to take over control of the colony according to his enemies. He
was accused of pitting Catholics against Huguenots, and he did actually
bring about the excommunication of Saint Just. Some said he partook too
freely of the bottle.
In any event, Father Biard accompanied Saint Just on his voyage along
the southern coast and liked the lay of the country. He thought it
offered special opportunities for a profitable trade in furs, and he
felt that if he could but have a colony of his own there he would
use the profits of trade with the savages for the maintenance of the
Jesuits rather than let it be “lost in the hands of the merchants.”
Upon his return to Port Royal, Biard and his brother priest proceeded
to do something about it. Writing to their patron at the French court,
Madame deGuercheville, the Jesuits told her of their troubles and their
aspirations. Whereupon that well-connected lady acquired a patent to
the southern coast, granted the fathers their wish for a colony of
their own and sent over a ship to settle them there at her expense. In
the spring of 1613 the Jesuit colony was planted--Saint Sauveur it was
called--on Mt. Desert Island in Maine.
But no sooner were the Frenchmen seated than they were murderously
surprised by the English.
Captain Samuel Argall out of Jamestown in his heavily armed ship,
the _Treasurer_, happened to be trading and fishing in the vicinity.
Learning from the Indians of the presence of the French vessel at Mount
Desert and the colony being planted there, he attacked so suddenly
that he met with practically no resistance. Two Frenchmen were killed.
Father Biard and fourteen others were taken to Jamestown as prisoners
and the remainder were ordered by Argall to find their way home as best
they could in any fishing or trading vessels they might happen upon
along the coast.
There was great excitement at Jamestown when Captain Argall arrived
there with his prisoners and the news about the French infringement on
“English territory.” There was even more excitement when Father Biard
proffered the information that Saint Just, after capturing an English
ship, was fortifying Port Royal with thirty cannon. A “pirates’ nest,”
Biard called it in his anger at Saint Just. Certainly it was a menace
to the English the Virginia Council concluded.
So Argall was dispatched north again, this time to rout the French
from the Bay of Fundy. On the way, he destroyed all vestiges of French
occupation at Mt. Desert Island and at St. Croix; then he surprised
Port Royal with the help of Father Biard who appears to have acted
as his guide ashore. Coming upon the fort-like settlement at a time
when most of the inhabitants were busy in the fields, Argall burned
their houses and plundered their stores, leaving the Frenchmen almost
destitute on the eve of winter.
The destruction was so complete that Sieur de Poutrincourt, who arrived
from France in the spring, decided to collect what furs he could and
transport his people back to France.
Madame deGuercheville gave up too. She attempted no new colony,
contenting herself with protestations to the English king. But James
let it be known that the Virginia Company was well within its rights,
and there the matter ended.
Although Saint Just did return to Port Royal later to act as factor
for some independent La Rochelle fur merchants and although young
Dupont-Grave wintered at St. Croix on occasion to maintain desultory
barter with the savages there, the French fur trade was now restricted
in the main to the St. Lawrence Valley and the hinterland. Argall had
effectually checked the advance south on the coast into the territory
claimed by the English--for the time being.
Traffic on the “Northern Virginia” coast, below the Bay of Fundy, now
fell almost exclusively into the hands of the English--except, of
course, for that which the Dutchmen were pursuing in the vicinity of
the Hudson River.
There is the relation in an uncorroborated promotional tract of the
time that Captain Argall, in the late fall of 1613 on his return from
Port Royal, stopped off at Manhattan where he is said to have caused
the few Dutch traders he found there to submit to the English king and
the government at Jamestown. If so, he no doubt took whatever furs
they had as tribute and probably made other arrangements calculated to
benefit his private purse. Samuel Argall, later knighted, was to become
notorious for such devices.
But if the Dutch traders, reflectively smoking their pipes, acceded to
his demands while the guns of the _Treasurer_ pointed at their huts,
they lost little time in expanding their beaver trade along the eastern
and northern coasts once the hot-headed Englishman left. The very next
spring they began the prosecution of a highly profitable business in
and about Long Island Sound, up the valley of the Connecticut, and in
the Narragansett country. The Indians as far east as Buzzard’s Bay
acquired special longings for Dutch sugar, liquor, ornaments, cloth and
firearms, and the Hollanders were able to maintain a virtual monopoly
on this trade for some years.
Captain John Smith didn’t see anything of these Dutch competitors
when he visited northern Virginia in 1614. But then he traded along
the coasts no farther south than Cape Cod. The only foreigners he
encountered were a couple of poaching French ships bartering with the
Indians for pelts some forty leagues below the mouth of the Kennebec
River.
Being recovered from his wound and being much interested in planting an
English colony in the north, Captain Smith had helped promote enough
capital to supply two ships for this voyage. Of course the venture’s
immediate object was not colonization. No money could have been raised
for that. Rather it was to “Take whales and make tryalls of a Myne of
Gold and Copper,” Smith said. “If those failed, Fish and Furres was
then our refuge.”
The venturers discovered no mines. And, although there were plenty of
whales in sight, they weren’t able to catch any. The English hadn’t
yet learned to whale. So, while the sailors turned to fishing, John
Smith set out with eight or nine men in a shallop to investigate the
country, to map the bays and rivers, and to trade with the natives--in
preparation for the colonization he secretly planned.
He ranged the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, and “got for
trifles neer 1100 Bever skinnes, 100 martins and neer as many Otters.”
Most of these were acquired within a distance of twenty leagues, he
said, for “Eastwards our commodities were not esteemed, they were so
neare the French who affords them better.” At Sagadahoc, at the mouth
of the Kennebec, there was competition from an English vessel belonging
to Sir Francis Popham, son of the chief justice. This fur-trading ship
“had there such an acquaintance, having many yeares used only that
porte, that the most parte there was had by him.” And of course to the
southwest were the two French trading vessels.
The country, Smith later reported, was populated by “Moos, a beast
bigger than a Stagge; Deere, red and Fallow; Bevers, Wolves, Foxes,
both blacke and other; Aroughconds (raccoons), Wild-cats, Beares,
Otters, Martins, Fitches, musquassus (muskrats) and diverse sorts of
vermine, whose names I know not.”
“Of the Musk Rat,” he predicted, “May bee well raised of their
goodnesse. Of Bevers, Otters, Martins, Blacke Foxes, and Furres of
price, may yearely be had 6 or 7000: and if the trade of the French
were prevented, many more.”
With the title of Admiral of this “New England,” of which he had drawn
an exceptionally detailed and accurate map, Captain Smith was sent
out the next year by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and others of the Plymouth
Company. This time he never reached his objective, being captured by
pirates and once more experiencing perils enough for many another
adventurer’s lifetime. With his usual luck and ingenuity however he
managed to escape, and returned to England to write about his ventures.
Unable to get any further backing for his colonization schemes John
Smith never returned to America. Thus it never came about that he
encountered the Dutch interlopers for whose original presence in
“Virginia” he had been responsible through his friendship with Henry
Hudson. However, one of Smith’s companions on his last voyage, Thomas
Dermer, was sent out again by Gorges in 1619. And Dermer paid a visit
to the Dutch at Manhattan.
After arriving in America and sending a cargo of furs and fish from
Sagadahoc back to England, Dermer set out in a small open pinnace
of five tons burden to follow the coast south to the Chesapeake. The
account of his voyage is almost as interesting as one of Captain John
Smith’s epics.
Among other adventures on his way down the coast, Dermer “redeemed” two
Frenchmen from the Indians. These men, after having been shipwrecked
off Cape Cod and captured with others by the Indians, had survived
three years of being “sent from one sachem to another to make sport
with.” Dermer himself was taken during a fight with the savages but
successfully contrived an escape with the aid of some hatchets which
his compatriots used as ransom bait.
Following a winter at the plantations on the James River, Dermer
then returned to New England via Manhattan where he stopped off,
probably upon the urging of Jamestown officials, to see what the Dutch
traders were about. There he discovered a “multitude” of factors busy
with furs, and he found plenty to indicate that the Hollanders were
permanently settling themselves in the land.
The English fur trader pointed out to them that they were on English
soil, but the Dutchmen replied that “they understood no such thing,
nor found any other nation there; so that they hoped they had not
offended.” Since he was in no position to challenge them further Dermer
contented himself by warning them not to continue their occupation as
his own countrymen would soon take possession of what they, the Dutch
squatters, were calling “New Netherland.”
Whereupon Thomas Dermer withdrew, eventually to have his story laid
before the English merchants at home, while the Hollanders promptly
went about widening the coastal head of the wedge they had driven
between southern Virginia and northern Virginia, the country now called
New England by the Englishmen.
Cornelis Jacobsen May explored south again that very summer. He even
entered the James River. Then he revisited the cape he had first
sighted a few years earlier and which now bears his name. Entering
Delaware Bay this time however, he charted its shores, and following in
Hendricksen’s path he ascended the river to trade and more thoroughly
investigate it also.
By the following year, 1621, the English ambassador at The Hague
was before the States General calling attention to the trespassers
on “English” territory in America. But his protests received scant
hearing. The lowlanders’ grand design for the west was now in process
of completion--the West India Company had been chartered--and a
government for New Netherland was being organized. Already an official
seal for the new province in America had been engraved, the figure of a
beaver, fittingly enough, its central theme.