some refugee Englishmen who were determined to stay in America. The
Pilgrims had planted the first permanent settlement on the coast of New
England.
IX
_The Pilgrims Rely on God and Beaver_
The first permanent settlement made by the English on the northern
coasts of America owed its success to traffic in pelts.
Almost from the very beginning in the winter of 1620-21 the Plymouth
plantation was a fur-trading post, depending on beaver and otter skins
for the maintenance of its inhabitants. And, as Edward Channing has put
it, “In the end what saved the Plymouth colony from extinction and gave
the settlers a chance to repay the London merchants for their advances
was a well managed fur trade.”
Governor William Bradford himself recognized that the fur trade was
vital to the survival of his people in New England, saying “there was
no other means to procure them food which they so much wanted and
clothes also.”
This was only too true. Not only did a vicious system of communalistic
enterprise retard the production of food at Plymouth but the merchant
adventurers in England who backed the plantation insisted that
time-consuming agricultural activities be curtailed to a minimum,
promising to send over the needed food. In return for financing the
venture they wanted quick returns that could be gotten only from fish
and fur. Since the Plymouth colonists were never too successful at
fishing, in fact ill equipped for that pursuit, they had to depend on
the export of pelts to keep the merchants happy and to wangle supplies
and trucking goods enough to keep themselves alive.
Even with the help of the fur trade, however, this brave little band
of Brownist Separatists probably would not have survived the rigors of
the climate and the harsh New England coast except for the impelling
religious motive that brought them to America in the first place.
Persecuted for their beliefs and exiled from their homeland, they
had been maintained through many trials by a driving determination to
find sanctuary for themselves and their posterity--a place where they
could live and worship in the way they believed was most fitting in the
eyes of God. First, they fled to Holland, where at Leyden they enjoyed
immunity from interference by the authorities but too much intimacy
with their neighbors. In this their leaders saw a new danger. The
Dutch, they felt, were entirely too neglectful of God’s ordinances, and
the exiles became exceedingly fearful that “their posteritie would be
in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.”
Only in the New World where they would have no near neighbors did
there seem to be a solution to the problem. They thought of going out
to Guiana, and the Dutch even offered to underwrite their passage
to New Netherland to plant a colony there under the auspices of the
States General. But then some of their leaders learned that through the
Virginia Company a patent could be obtained for a private plantation
in America where they could live as Englishmen, yet “as a distincte
body by themselves.” Assured that they might have their own governor,
ordinances and mode of worship, subject only to the general government
of Virginia, they entered into conclusive negotiations with English
merchants to finance the venture.
One Thomas Weston was the leading backer of the proposed plantation,
obtaining the patent through the Virginia Company and promoting the
adventurers’ share of the joint-stock through a company of merchants
which he represented. Although the king balked at giving the exiles
liberty of conscience under his protection he did indicate that he
would not molest them. And of course the Virginia Company, the leaders
of which were mostly Puritan-tinged Genevans at heart, encouraged the
venture from the start, albeit with discretion.
So the business agreements were drawn up and signed and transportation
arranged. This included a stopover in England where the exiles
were joined by a major complement of indentured servants and other
“strangers” hired by Weston. The emigrants were to sail in two
ships from Southampton, but after a false start they settled on the
_Mayflower_ and this little ship put out alone across the sea late in
1620.
The _Mayflower’s_ destination was charted as the general vicinity of
Hudson’s River where a beginning was to be made on selecting a suitable
site for the new English plantation in Virginia. However, a landfall
was made at Cape Cod and, although a course was then actually set for
the mouth of the Hudson, the ship was brought about after navigation
difficulties and hints of mutiny and a decision was made to plant in
New England instead.
This was territory well known at the time of sailing as coming under
the jurisdiction of the proposed Council for New England which was
about to be created as successor to Sir Ferdinando Gorges’ old Plymouth
Company.
Quite likely, William Bradford and other leaders of the expedition
had come to have their doubts about settling in the vicinity of the
Hudson River, a territory in dispute between England and Holland. But
in addition it would appear that before the sailing they had received
secret assurance that Gorges and the reorganized New England company
would welcome a colony planted within their jurisdiction, and that a
proper patent would be no more than a legal formality once the Council
for New England was commissioned. Certainly the chief investor in the
enterprise, Thomas Weston, favored New England. In the final days of
preparation he had expressed a strong preference for New England rather
than Virginia, due he said to the established fisheries and fur trade,
as well as other commercial prospects there.
In any event, when word reached England that the Pilgrims had settled
themselves at Plymouth in New England, no one seems to have expressed
the slightest surprise. Nor is there any record of an explanation
coming from Plymouth--just as if none was thought to be necessary.
All of which would make it appear likely that the planting at Plymouth
was no accident, but premeditated to some extent by merchants of
the New England company in connivance with leading partners in the
adventure. Possibly there was more than a hope that some calculated
incident would bring it about. If so, the navigation difficulties and
threats of mutiny provided incident enough--or excuse enough to satisfy
those not in on the plan!
* * * * *
The savages in and about Plymouth Harbor, so named by Captain John
Smith some six years earlier, did not exactly welcome the _Mayflower’s_
passengers. Their experience with white men had been none too rewarding
over the years and these new arrivals were proving no exception. From
their hiding places the natives watched the very first exploring
parties that came ashore from the ship steal caches of Indian corn and
rifle the graves of the dead.
Small wonder it is, therefore, that almost before the Pilgrims laid
eyes on a savage they were treated to thievery in kind and the weird
shrieks, or war whoops, with which these same “Skraelings” had
challenged the invading Vikings centuries earlier. But when the attacks
came they were easily repulsed by English firearms.
In the meantime, after the landing at Plymouth in that winter of
1620-21, some of the natives were enticed out of hiding by offers
of bright baubles and other gifts. On one occasion “a pot of strong
water” was employed. Then, with thunder-making cannon mounted ashore
to awe their wild hosts, the Pilgrims were finally able to enter into
negotiations for beaver skins and food supplies under a kind of armed
truce.
But the Indians of this section were very poor and very few. A
pestilence originally spread among them by Frenchmen had all but wiped
them out in fact. It was necessary for the Pilgrims to look abroad for
the pelts which they had quickly realized would be their chief means of
support if they were to survive in this strange land.
Beaver skins would pay their debts, buy for them in England the
additional supplies they needed, even serve as a medium of exchange
in obtaining corn and beans from the savages themselves. In the guise
of exploration, therefore, military commerce was commenced as soon as
possible with neighboring tribes along the coast.
In this the diminutive military commander at Plymouth, Captain Miles
Standish, had an invaluable aide--an Indian named Squanto who had come
to the fort and offered his services as ally and interpreter.
Squanto spoke English almost as fluently as the white men. Twice he
had been to England, once having dwelt for some time with a London
merchant. He was first taken there by Captain George Weymouth in 1605.
Returned to his native land nine years later by Captain John Smith,
Squanto had been no more than set free when he was kidnapped along with
some other natives by an English captain named Hunt and sold in the
Spanish slave market at Malaga. However, through the intercession of
local friars, he managed to get to London again. Captain Thomas Dermer
then returned him once more to Cape Cod, not many months before the
Pilgrims arrived.
Finding his own people wiped out by the pestilence, Squanto sought
refuge with a neighboring tribe. But when he learned of the presence
of the Englishmen at Plymouth he went to them, to be gratefully
acknowledged as “a speciall instrumente sent of God for their good
beyond their expectation.”
Guided by this Indian the Pilgrim traders went farther and farther
afield. In September ten armed men sailed up to Boston Harbor in a
shallop and obtained a quantity of beaver from the Massachusetts
Indians. So successful was the barter that the women of the tribe
impulsively removed their beaver coats to exchange them for the bright
baubles of the white men. Giggling maidens, bedecked only with strings
of beads we are told, were left behind by the “sober-faced” Pilgrims
when they sailed away.
By November, when the first “supply” ship, the _Fortune_, arrived from
England, the colony at Plymouth had acquired enough beaver and otter
skins to pack two great hogsheads worth 300 pounds sterling for export.
These pelts represented over sixty per cent of the total value of the
vessel’s return cargo, the remainder consisting of clapboard. By this
one shipment the Pilgrim Fathers estimated they were paying off almost
half of their debt to Weston and his partners and insuring the prompt
return of the additional supplies they so much needed by then.
But unfortunately, as they later learned, the _Fortune_ was intercepted
by a French privateer before she reached England and all her cargo
confiscated!
Long before this first supply ship came to Plymouth the Pilgrims had
been in want of food. Their meal was gone, and other rations were
rapidly dwindling under their communalistic system. But when the ship
arrived it brought only letters of gratuitous counsel from their
merchant backers in England and more “hungrie bellies” to be fed. There
was practically nothing aboard in the way of food and clothing or truck
for barter with the savages.
Already half-starved, the colonists were in really dire straits
as winter approached. Many of them sickened and death stalked the
huts and cottages at Plymouth. With Indian alarms and unaccountable
fires creating a general state of anxiety, fear and suspicion lay
heavy on those who lived. Probably the only thing that prevented a
complete collapse was the diversion brought about by enforced labor on
strengthening the fortifications of the plantation.
Before the first snow, the Narragansett tribe which had not suffered
from the plague boldly sent in a bundle of arrows wrapped in a
snakeskin. It was an open challenge to war. The Pilgrims were plucky
enough to replace the arrows with bullets and send the snakeskin back
to the Narragansett, but they were nevertheless thoroughly frightened
and hastened to palisade their fort and buildings with a strong wall of
high pales.
Relations with the natives was under constant strain. Most of the early
commerce with them for pelts and food was a bloody business. But,
as explosive and unprincipled as was the red-headed little military
captain, Miles Standish, it was Squanto who caused much of the trouble.
It seems that the Indian interpreter was overly ambitious to become a
great sachem and seized on any opportunity to eliminate a red rival to
his pretensions by provoking hostilities. Captain Standish never did
like Squanto, and Bradford himself later stated that the interpreter
“sought his own ends and played his own game, by putting the Indians in
fear and drawing gifts from them to enrich himself, making them believe
he could stir up war against whom he would, and make peace with whom he
would.”
Although some temporary relief in the matter of food could be obtained
from trading and fishing boats off the Maine coast and by other local
expedients, it was plain for all to see that the economy, indeed
the very existence of Plymouth, depended on fur. Fishing had failed
completely as a source of income. Only as a fur-trading post could
the plantation be maintained, for only by the export of pelts could
sufficient supplies and trading goods be obtained and the debt to the
merchant adventurers paid off. So, in the spring of 1622, an expedition
went out once more to the Massachusetts and commerce of a sort was
resumed--along with hostilities. Some few pelts were thus obtained by
the Pilgrims in spite of their almost total lack of trading goods.
But then came a “providence of God.” A trading ship, coasting the
shores from Virginia to New England, came into the harbor with a large
store of English beads and knives aboard.
The captain, however, drove a hard bargain with the desperate
colonists. Shrewdly sensing the situation, he hiked the prices of his
trading goods; in fact, he “would sell none but at dear rates and also
a good quantity together.” The Pilgrims were forced to buy, paying away
their store of coat-beaver at three shillings per pound which, as it
happened, “in a few years after yielded twenty shillings.” Still, by
this means, they were fitted again to barter for beans and corn--and
more beaver.
* * * * *
For the next three or four years the Plymouth plantation was engaged in
hand-to-mouth expedients to squeeze enough revenue from the fur trade
to meet the demands of its economy.
All of this was made the more trying because of the evils of the
communalistic system under which the colony was operated. A first step
toward the private ownership of land was taken in 1623, when each man
was permitted to set a little corn “for his owne perticuler,” but it
was some years before this reform was fully realized. However, of more
concern to the Pilgrims was the increasing pressure from a variety of
English competitors for the fur trade along the coast.
Always a bit disturbing had been the freebooting interlopers who
operated along the coasts, particularly in Maine. These Englishmen,
bartering generously with trinkets, colored cloth and ironware, were
also not averse to trading guns and powder with the Indians, a practice
frowned upon by the king.
Partly because of the trade in firearms, but mainly because the
freebooters were cutting into the monopoly of the august Council
for New England, that body obtained a royal proclamation forbidding
trade in furs and fish without a license. As it turned out however
the merchants were unsuccessful in enforcing the edict. Captain
Francis West, the Admiral of New England, who was sent out to stop the
trespassing returned only to report that he found the traders to be
“stuborne fellows.”
In the meantime a number of patents and licenses were being granted
through the Council for New England along the northern coast.
Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, as adventurers, were
granted the “Province of Maine,” all the land lying between the
Merrimac and the Kennebec Rivers. As early as 1623 David Thompson,
“a Scottish gentleman,” went out with a few servants and established
a fur-trading post at the mouth of the Piscataqua, near the present
site of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Said to have been accompanied by
his wife and children, he “built a Strong and Large House, enclosed
it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being
stored extraordinarily with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the
Indians....” Thompson nevertheless carried on a flourishing business
with the natives for otter and beaver, as did Christopher Levett who
built a fort-like emporium for the same kind of military commerce in
Casco Bay the following year.
More obvious competitors to the Pilgrims had been getting footholds
in the country of the Massachusetts Indians. Samuel Maverick had a
palisaded trading post on Noddle’s Island (East Boston) wherein he
mounted “four murtherers to protect him from the Indians.” Under the
muzzles of these wicked little cannon he drove a most profitable
private trade. And David Thompson himself moved to Boston Bay in 1626,
building a truck house on the island which ever since has been known by
his name.
Although these more or less distant and individual competitors cut into
the Plymouth Colony’s business to some degree, they were not exactly
strangling the economy and they were not neighbors in the bothersome
sense. However, the Pilgrims viewed with real alarm all attempts of
English traders to establish themselves in the near-by lower end of
Boston Bay. That, they judged, belonged to them and was necessary to
their survival as well as their cherished privacy.
Their one-time friend, Thomas Weston, had been the first to try to
plant a trading post there, at Wessagusset, in 1622. Weston, who had
sold out his interest in the Plymouth Plantation, first sent over some
men to trade for his “perticuler,” that is, not for the plantation’s
account. Shortly afterward he obtained a patent to plant a colony of
his own at the lower end of Boston Bay.
The colony his men established at Wessagusset, now Weymouth, was
entirely too close to the Pilgrims for their comfort, not only because
it forthwith severed a major artery of their fur trade but because it
put the pinch on Plymouth for food. Weston’s “rude fellers” were more
interested in consorting with Indian squaws, according to the Pilgrims,
than in grubbing for their own food. Also, disturbingly enough in
itself, these newcomers setting themselves down as near neighbors were
Anglicans.
According to the record the Pilgrims discovered a conspiracy among the
savages to massacre the Englishmen at Wessagusset. Possibly, as some
say, they simply invented the plot. Be that as it may, they rushed to
the assistance of their unsuspecting white neighbors. Then, under the
pretense of joining with the Massachusetts in feasting and trading,
they conducted a surprise massacre of their own among the natives.
During this murderous affair Captain Standish cut off the head of one
Massachusetts brave of some renown for his previous insults to the
Pilgrims and took it back to Plymouth where he stuck it on a pole for
all to see. After that it was much too dangerous for Weston’s traders
to remain at Wessagusset.
The following year Sir Ferdinando Gorges’ son, Captain Robert Gorges,
with a commission from the Council of New England as general governor
of the country brought over some people and occupied Wessagusset as a
fur-trading post. But things did not go well for him either. Gorges
soon abandoned the place and his people scattered, some going to
Virginia. A few, however, remained in the vicinity and set up a trading
post at Nantasket (Hull) which was made permanent by the frequent
addition of discontents from Plymouth.
Still later, in 1625, a shipload of colonists, composed mostly of
indentured servants under the command of a Captain Wollaston, came to
Boston Bay. The captain set up a trading post close by Wessagusset at
Quincy. By 1627 he too had given up. The difficulties, whether of the
Pilgrims’ secret connivance or not, were too great. He gathered up most
of the servants and sailed for Virginia where he sold their indentures
at a very good profit.
Wollaston would have taken all the servants and sold their time if it
had not been for one Thomas Morton. An educated man, a lawyer of sorts
with a bent for both pleasure and profit, Morton saw an opportunity for
greater gains in the fur trade than anyone had yet garnered. His plan
was to sell guns and liquor to the Indians in exchange for skins and to
let the devil take the hindmost.
Appealing to some of the worst rogues among Wollaston’s servants on
the promise that they would prosper Morton conducted a successful
mutiny. After all, who wanted to be sold into slavery in Virginia? Soon
thereafter, with his disreputable associates, Morton set up his own
trading post, calling it “Merrymount,” and commenced his illegal barter
with the Indians to the great consternation of the Pilgrims.
Beaver, otter and valuable deer skins found their way in great
quantities to the new truck house, while Merrymount became “a sort of
a drunkard’s resort and gambling hall” and worse. The jolly host of
Merrymount, revelling in “riotous prodigality,” had a great Maypole
erected for the entertainment of visiting factors who wanted to dance
and frisk with pleasurable Indian maids. Fishing and trading vessels
along the coast much preferred to do business with the open-handed
Morton rather than the close-fisted Pilgrims. Therefore, trading goods
were as easily come by at Merrymount as were beaver skins. Everyone was
quite happy about the situation except the fathers at Plymouth.
Morton had even discovered their profitable new trading grounds
in Maine. The first year the Pilgrims extended their fur trading
operations to Maine, in 1625, they gathered in 700 pounds of beaver
besides some other furs on the Kennebec, mostly in exchange for the
corn they had by then learned to grow at Plymouth. But now Morton was
outbidding them with his more attractive trading goods and getting
nearly everything of value in that vicinity too. The very existence of
the Plymouth Colony seemed to be at stake.
Complaints, cajolings and threats were of no avail. Morton, the
lawyer, was too clever. Something had to be done and force was the
final resort. Captain Standish was sent with some soldiers to arrest
the obnoxious neighbor on the charge that he was violating the royal
proclamation prohibiting trade in guns and powder.
“Captain Shrimp,” as Morton contemptuously called Standish, succeeded
in his mission only after a fight. He captured Morton and took him
to Plymouth. There he tried his best to have the erstwhile “host of
Merrymount” hanged. But in the end Morton’s only punishment was to be
shipped back to England.
As it came about, the Wessagusset area was no sooner eliminated as a
competitor for the beaver trade than the Pilgrims were faced with new
and much more formidable rivals in the same neighborhood. These were
the Puritans, the advance guard of whom arrived at Salem under Captain
John Endicott in 1628. As recruits of the great Massachusetts Bay
Company they were soon coming by the thousands. Under the leadership of
Governor John Winthrop they overran the Boston Bay region. And there
wasn’t much the fathers at Plymouth could do about these new neighbors
except to offer religious advice on the relative merits of Brownism and
Separation.
* * * * *
The local competition for beaver now being almost overwhelming, the
Pilgrims found it necessary to go more and more afield to meet their
required quota of pelts. Excursions north to the Kennebec in Maine
were the most fruitful, not only because there was much fine fur to
be had from the natives there but because trading goods on occasion
could be obtained from fishing and trading ships off that coast. Once,
too, in exchange for corn the Pilgrims picked up four hundred pounds
worth of trucking stuff from some Englishmen who were abandoning their
plantation on Monhegan Island. And they acquired an additional stock of
truck from a French ship which had been wrecked at Sagadahoc.