had been the merchants who foresaw the loss of their tidewater trade,
but even more especially William Claiborne and his followers with their
own grand plan for colonization and trade on the backside of Virginia.
Working for them in addition to fear and prejudice during this clash
of rival plans was the rising sense of political independence in the
colony, an increasing determination to fight for the sovereignty of
possessed land and for “democrattical rights.”
The Virginians did actually have something of a legal brake that
they could apply on royal or noble license. They had their House of
Burgesses, which had been sitting since 1619 as the first popular
legislative assembly in America. Even after the king took over the
colony from the company the colonists had been successful in retaining
their little parliament. Somehow, with this bulwark of democracy, it
was easier to face up to the crown or to court favorites like Lord
Baltimore when impossible demands were in the making. And that is
exactly what happened, for the House of Burgesses backed the merchants
in every move they made to thwart the great lord’s plans, both in
Virginia and in England after he returned there.
Meanwhile, Captain Claiborne himself went to London where he obtained
additional backing for his project through the merchant adventurer,
William Cloberry. This wealthy man, together with Maurice Thompson and
other merchants, subscribed for the major share of the joint-stock
in the trading adventure. All agreed enthusiastically that through
Claiborne’s plantation it would be possible to drain off much of
the fur trade of the French in Canada. Cloberry well knew the
potentialities of the “backside of Virginia,” as he had formerly
adventured with the Kirkes in Canada.
Just to make sure that if Lord Baltimore later obtained his grant
he did not molest Claiborne, the partners in the trading adventure
obtained a commission under His Majesty’s signet of Scotland
authorizing trade in all territory “neere or about these partes of
America for which there is not allready a patent granted to others
for the sole trade.” It was drawn up by Sir William Alexander, the
Secretary for Scotland, who was entertained by Cloberry with bait in
the form of a proposition for interchange of trade between Virginia
and Nova Scotia. Sir William, making desperate efforts at the time
to extract a profit from his grant in America, saw in the Claiborne
venture a source of corn for his plantation at Port Royal.
In any event, the commission was confirmed by the King himself at
Greenwich, and when the Secretary of Virginia sailed back across the
ocean in May of 1631 to establish his plantation and launch his trading
adventure he went with the royal blessing.
In his ship, the _Africa_, cargoed with colonists and supplies,
Claiborne touched first at Kecoughtan and Accomac to attract additional
volunteers, and then late in August he planted his colony on Kent
Island, some hundred and twenty-five miles up the bay. Kent Island,
which lies against the Eastern Shore opposite present-day Annapolis,
was ideally situated for his purposes. He built a palisaded fort and
stocked his plantation with cattle, swine and poultry. With the arrival
of more farmers and traders from the lower settlements it was not long
before the colony had a church, a windmill, warehouses, and a shipyard
busily constructing shallops, wherries and pinnaces for the Indian
trade.
Despite a devastating fire that once destroyed all the buildings, death
from marauding savages, and sickness, as well as many other hardships,
the plantation flourished. In the spring its fields were green with
tobacco and corn, and its wharves were busy with trading boats and
bundles of furs. During the summer the season’s pelts were stretched
and leathered on rows of wooden hide racks inside the palisades before
being packed in great hogsheads for shipment to England. Then in the
autumn, after the harvesting, the sweet scent of tobacco wafted into
the fort from the drying sheds where the leaves hung curing on poles.
In the spring of 1632 Captain Nicholas Martiau, an ancestor of George
Washington, represented Kent Hundred in the House of Burgesses at
Jamestown, and the first English settlement within the present bounds
of the State of Maryland was recognized as a political unit of
Virginia, established within the assigned territorial limits of that
royal colony.
In the meantime, on the other side of the ocean, George Calvert died
before ever getting a charter to establish a palatinate of his own in
the Chesapeake. However, his efforts finally bore fruit. On June 30,
1632, two months after his death, a grant passed through the seals.
“Maryland” was to be a slice of Virginia extending from the Potomac
River northward to the 40th parallel which crosses the Delaware at
present-day Philadelphia. It was a feudal seigniory to be passed on
to the baron’s heirs, just as he had planned, and already it had made
its first descent, to his oldest son, Cecilius Calvert, second Lord
Baltimore.
Although Kent Island was obviously within the limits of the grant to
Baltimore, neither William Claiborne nor the Council at Jamestown
doubted the legality of Virginia’s claim upon the island. The Maryland
charter expressly limited Baltimore’s rights to land “hactenus
inculta,” that is, hitherto uncultivated. Kent of course was cultivated
and had been for some time.
Two years later, however, when Cecilius’ younger brother, the
twenty-eight-year-old Leonard, brought the first colonists over to
plant on the Potomac River he promptly let it be known that Captain
Claiborne must submit to his government. Kent Hundred, he said, came
under the jurisdiction of the Lord Proprietor of Maryland. Furthermore,
licenses from Lord Baltimore were to be required of anyone trading
within the precincts of Maryland. Not only was Kent Island to be
delivered up to his government at St. Mary’s on the Potomac, but the
trading post in the Susquehanna River on mountainous little Palmer’s
Island, which Claiborne had planted in 1633, was to be given over. The
Marylanders, it appeared, planned to build their own ships for the
Indian fur trade and to set up magazines in their colony that they
might “make thereby a very great gayne.”
Cecil, Lord Baltimore, in fact laid much stress on the fur trade in his
instructions to Leonard, consigning to his brother for his own account
in trade with the natives a quantity of trucking stuff consisting of
“coarse freeze, small groce glass beads, box, Ivorye, and horne Combes,
brass kettles, axes, hoes, hawkes bells, and sheffeeld knives.” Before
the palisaded fort at St. Mary’s was completed, the Maryland pinnace,
_Dove_, was sent out to follow the “trade of beaver through all parts
of the precincts of this province.”
Under Cyprian Thorowgood, Lord Baltimore’s traders paid a visit to the
Virginians’ trading post on Palmer’s Island, which was manned by an
interpreter named John Fullwood and a negro slave. However, the men
from St. Mary’s “had a little falling out with the Indians” who never
did take well to them. When Thorowgood threatened a small Kent Island
shallop he found trading there, the Indians showed signs of siding with
the Virginians and in the end the shallop was permitted to depart with
its load of skins.
Although the Kent Islanders had taken in 3,000 skins during the first
part of the 1634 season, the Marylanders, due to the lateness of their
arrival that spring, took altogether “only 298, weighing 451 pounds,
together with 53 muskrat and 17 other skins.”
Even so, Leonard Calvert was much encouraged, and he sent out shallops
for more skins late in May. He also wrote home that he was certain
that he could obtain a large part of the trade of the “Massawomecks”
(Iroquois) who, he said, dwelt ten days journey to the north and had
formerly traded with the Kirkes in Canada. He urged however that
much more trucking stuff be sent over as “there is nothing does more
endanger the loss of commerce with the Indians than want of truck to
barter with them.”
The site of Calvert’s capital near the mouth of the Potomac River was
an old trading ground of Virginia traders, including Claiborne, Fleet
and Harmar. Once, Harmar had outwitted Fleet there to the tune of three
hundredweight of beaver, when he persuaded the Yowaccomoco Indians
to let him have the skins they were holding for his rival by telling
them that Fleet was dead. The trick worked so well in fact that Harmar
then went up the river spreading the report that Captain Fleet was
dead, with the result that he made “an unexpected trade for the time,
at a small charge, having gotten fifteen hundredweight of beaver, and
cleared fourteen towns.”
Up the Potomac were the important towns of the Piscattaways. Beyond
them lived the Anacostans who once held Henry Fleet captive and with
whom he later traded. The Anacostans, like the Susquehannocks, were
blood relatives of the Iroquois. But they too were now castoff and
acted as buffers between the war-like Five Nations and the Algonquin
tribes to the south. Through the Anacostans, Fleet hoped to make
contacts with the Iroquois, tap the Canada trade, and drain it down
the backside of Virginia through the Potomac River. He had run into
trouble, however, due to the jealousies of the Piscattaways and
others in the lower valley who didn’t want to be bypassed. They had
no objection to acting as middlemen, but they objected to the white
men taking their truck up the valley and dealing directly with their
enemies.
Fleet’s problems were further complicated by the arrival of the
Marylanders. It would appear that as a means of protecting his trade
interests in the Potomac valley, he associated himself with them in
the fur trade, agreeing to pay the ten percent tax demanded by the
proprietary on all skins acquired from the Indians.
This, of course, William Claiborne and other Virginians would not agree
to do.
* * * * *
When Captain Claiborne refused to submit to Lord Baltimore or to pay
the tax on skins, he found himself accused of having incited the
Indians against the Maryland settlement on the Potomac. Henry Fleet,
it turned out, was the instrument of this accusation. Possibly he was
hoping in this way to hasten the elimination of his major competitor
for the backside trade.
However, the accusation against Claiborne was later proved false on
the testimony of the Indian chiefs themselves. They said that it was
actually Captain Fleet who had talked against the Marylanders--all
of which might indicate that some original scheme concocted by Fleet
to hang on to his Potomac trade had backfired. Father Andrew White,
a restless Jesuit priest who was much involved in the fur trade with
the natives as a means of supporting the Jesuits’ mission in Maryland,
always insisted that Captain Fleet “had been a firebrand to inflame the
Indians against us.”
The new Governor of Virginia, Sir John Harvey, also co-operated with
the Marylanders. For reasons of his own he gave them cattle and
supplies and assisted them against Claiborne whom he had relieved of
his office as secretary. All of which was very much to the disgust of
the Virginians who eventually “thrust” the governor out of office for
treason to their interests and sent him packing back to England.
It was charged that Harvey had even encouraged Calvert’s men to fire
on Kent Island shallops and confiscate their furs. In any case, this
the Marylanders did almost from the time of their arrival in 1634, and
during all the remainder of that year piracy and lawlessness ruled the
Chesapeake.
Armed pinnaces out of St. Mary’s commandeered Claiborne’s smaller
shallops and took his furs. His men were evicted from their traditional
trading grounds with gun and sword. But the fort on Kent Island was not
attacked, and the Virginians had time not only to make it more secure
but to erect a second fort on another part of the island to prevent
surprise. They also began building larger boats, including a pinnace
called the _Long Tayle_, that could carry more fighting men and heavier
weapons in addition to a cargo of pelts.
The _Long Tayle_ was the first real ship built within the present
boundaries of Maryland. She had a crew of twenty men. Her guns were
chambers and falconets for ball shot, and murderers--the little cannon
into the muzzles of which could be jammed scraps of iron, rocks, or
almost anything lethal that might be handy for standing off boarding
parties.
The Kent Islanders launched the hostilities in the spring of 1635 when
John Butler, Claiborne’s brother-in-law, captured a Maryland boat
loaded with pelts taken from Palmer’s Island. Soon after, Captain
Thomas Smith went out in the _Long Tayle_ to trade for beaver with
an Indian village on the south side of the Patuxent River. Since this
village was not more than half a dozen miles overland from the Maryland
capital, it is not strange that Calvert learned of the _Long Tayle’s_
presence. He promptly sent a sufficient force of soldiers to surprise
the Kent Islanders and take them and their pinnace.
Captain Claiborne retaliated just as promptly. He dispatched
Lieutenant Radcliffe Warren down the bay in a fast wherry, called the
_Cockatrice_, with a vengeful crew of thirteen men. They tried to
recapture the _Long Tayle_. However they couldn’t get at her under the
guns of Calvert’s fort at St. Mary’s where she lay protected. But then,
Warren heard that a Maryland pinnace, the _St. Helen_, was trading
alone in the Pocomoke River on the Eastern Shore. So he set out after
her.
Entering the Pocomoke, he sighted the Maryland pinnace and splashed a
ball from his falconet beside her. She hove to quietly. He was closing
in to board when, suddenly from a nearby cove, another pinnace bore
down on him. Her decks were razed and her crew were presenting arms. It
was the _St. Margaret_, Calvert’s largest boat, commanded by his chief
trader and councillor, Captain Thomas Cornwallis.
Lieutenant Warren had little time to consider the probability that he
was the victim of a well-laid trap. Falconets cracked out their sharp
reports. Chambers barked. The surrounding marshes of the Pocomoke
reverberated with the din of oaths, shots and belching murderers as the
three boats became environed with fire and smoke. Warren himself was
killed. Three others died in the fight, and many were wounded on both
sides. Only the greater maneuverability and speed of the badly battered
_Cockatrice_ accounted for its escape back to Kent Island.
Claiborne and his men were bitter about the unexpected outcome of
Warren’s expedition. They soon had an opportunity for revenge however.
Just a few weeks later they learned that Cornwallis was again bartering
in the Pocomoke, together with his aide, Cuthbert Fenwick, and some
other well known Maryland traders. Two boats were sent this time to
trap the Marylanders. Captain Thomas Smith, recently escaped from
St. Mary’s and now master of the _Cockatrice_, went in escort with a
newly enlisted Virginia pinnace under the command of Philip Taylor.
They succeeded in capturing the big Maryland boat and its crew in a
naval action that was later described as “felonie and piracie” by Lord
Baltimore’s government.
The next day Taylor was in the Potomac River for a try at recapturing
the _Long Tayle_. He carried what might be described as a letter of
marque and reprisal given him by William Claiborne. The Marylanders,
however, turned the tables on him. They captured Taylor along with his
pinnace.
But in the meantime Governor Harvey had been placed under arrest by the
Virginia Council and put on a ship for England. When Claiborne arrived
from Kent Island late in May of 1635 with news of the bloody encounters
on the bay, the acting governor, John West, at once sent a mission to
St. Mary’s to apprize Calvert of Harvey’s arrest and to demand that the
Marylanders “desist their violent proceedings.”
Leonard Calvert took pause at this unexpected development. His younger
brother, George, as well as his councillor, Jerome Hawley, had been
contending all along that Claiborne had some right on his side.
Violence was certainly not accomplishing anything. Maybe, Calvert may
have conjectured, his brother in England could do better through the
courts.
So it came about that the mission was successful in imposing a truce
on Maryland that lasted for two years. Prisoners and confiscated boats
were exchanged. Claiborne, now married and settled with his family, was
left unmolested in the possession of his island home and undisturbed in
his trading activities. Another windmill was built, and another church,
better to serve the two growing communities on Kent Island. Besides an
enormous number of pelts traded locally for private accounts and for
the maintenance of the plantation, furs to the value of 4,000 pounds
sterling were shipped to England for the company partners there.
But then, Captain Claiborne found it necessary to go to England, for
Lord Baltimore had powerful friends. It looked as if he might get a
legal decision against the Virginians through the Lords Commissioners
of Plantations. Claiborne turned over all his operations to a partner
who had recently arrived from England representing the joint-stock
company, and went to London to fight for his rights. No sooner had he
left however than this partner, one George Evelin, managed to betray
Kent Island into the hands of his enemies.
Although the main fort was traitorously delivered up, the island was
not yielded quietly or easily. Repeated military expeditions to subdue
the inhabitants were made by Leonard Calvert before Captain Thomas
Smith and others were finally captured in 1638 and hanged as pirates
and rebels. Claiborne himself, _in absentia_, was attainted by the
Maryland Assembly of the “grievous crimes of pyracie and murther,” and
“all his lands and tenements, goods and chattels” were forfeited to
the Lord Proprietary. Evelin took his share of the loot, even digging
up some of Claiborne’s fruit trees and transplanting them to the manor
that Lord Baltimore granted him near St. Mary’s in payment for his
services.
In another few years, due to continued disturbances, Kent Island was
to be laid waste without hope of recovery, the mill and the forts
destroyed, its former population scattered abroad.
Soldiers armed with ordnance taken from Kent were also sent in 1638
to Palmer’s Island in the Susquehanna River where they “utterly
ruined” the plantation and reduced the palisaded fort which had been
built there the previous year. They seized all of Claiborne’s goods
and chattels. Leonard Calvert himself, following the expedition,
triumphantly supervised the conversion of this trade outpost to “Fort
Conquest” of Maryland. The spoils were divided. Claiborne’s bonded
servants, cattle and other goods at Palmer’s Island went to John
Lewger, Secretary of Maryland. His books were sequestered by a petty
officer, as was a wooden chest belonging to the unfortunate Captain Tom
Smith.
Gone was the “Plantation in the Sasquesahonoughs Country” at the mouth
of the river, for which Captain Claiborne had been willing to pay the
king a rental of fifty pounds sterling a year including rights “to the
head of the said River, and to the Grand Lake of Canada to be held in
fee from the Crown of England.” In fact, forever gone was the “greate
trade of beaver and other furrs which Claiborne might have had with the
mountayn Indians which live upon the lakes of the river of Canada.”
The Marylanders carried on a profitable local fur trade, in spite
of Indian disturbances, for some years. But they were no threat to
the French or the Dutch as they were never successful in tapping the
northern lake-country trade on the backside of Virginia through either
the valley of the Susquehanna or the Potomac. Their relations with the
Indians were not up to it, and they were more inclined to agricultural
pursuits anyway.
The French were therefore able to continue their penetration of America
without the interference they might have had from the Virginians who
settled Kent and Palmer’s Islands. In fact, they were now almost
unmolested in an encirclement of the English colonies that would not
stop until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River. And the
Dutch were undisturbed by the Marylanders even in the neighboring
valley of the Delaware, where they were now settling and trading in
pelts under the very noses of Lord Baltimore’s people who claimed
jurisdiction over some of those parts.
By the end of the century the fur frontier in Maryland had almost
disappeared and the trade was no longer important in the economic life
of the colony. The average value of skins exported per year didn’t
exceed 650 pounds sterling. By then the Governor of Maryland was
declaring that “this Countrey is an open Country and deales generally
in Tobacco and not in furrs.”
XIII
_New Netherland’s South River_
The charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly
over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and
appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines,
build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of
twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this
fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands
bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels.
Although the company was chartered in 1621, it did not commence
operations until 1623. But then, during the next six or seven years,
its success was phenomenal in the matter of profits--from waging war
against Spain. So much so, that by 1629 its directors in Amsterdam were
prone to speak slightingly of New Netherland, their trading colony
in North America. “The trade carried on there in peltries is right
advantageous but, one year with another, we can at most bring home
fifty thousand guilders,” they complained.
For a plantation which at the time numbered no more than 300
inhabitants this would seem to be most productive, especially when
compared to what the English had done in either Virginia or in New
England. It was paltry enough, however, when compared with the loot
of Spanish colonial strongholds that fell to the conquering Dutch
merchants, or when weighed against the spoils of Spain’s silver fleet
that Admiral Peter Heyn had captured in the name of the West India
Company. In one fell swoop he took seventeen galleons laden with
bullion and merchandise to the value of fourteen millions of guilders!
From that operation alone the investors received a dividend amounting
to well over half of the company’s paid-up capital.
Experienced Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, who had been appointed
the first managing director of the West India Company’s colony in
America, acted primarily as a chief fur factor for the company. During
1624, the first and only year of his governorship, he sent home pelts
which brought 27,000 guilders. The next year his successor did even
better. In 1626, the year that Peter Minuit received the formal title
of Director General of New Netherland and purchased Manhattan from the
Indians, one ship for Amsterdam was cargoed with “7246 beaver skins,
178¹⁄₂ otter skins, 675 otter skins, 48 minck skins, 36 wild cat skins,
33 mincks, 34 rat skins.” It also carried some oak and hickory to
timber-hungry Holland.
This, incidentally, is the earliest known true manifest of a ship
clearing from the present port of New York. In terms of today’s money
the skins brought well over one hundred thousand American dollars. A
right advantageous trade indeed!
In the spring of 1624 some thirty families, mostly French-speaking
Walloons from the lower provinces fleeing persecution by Spanish
inquisitors, had come over with Captain May in the _New Netherland_.
They came as the plantation’s first real colonists, to raise livestock,
to put their spades into the earth. May, as well as his successor,
was charged with “spreading out” and more formally occupying New
Netherland. It would prevent any further trouble with England about the
possession of that country, it was hoped, since the English themselves
had expounded the doctrine that “occupancy confers a good title by the
laws of nations and nature.” In the case of their North American colony
the Hollanders could afford a point of agreement on such a doctrine.