New trading ventures in Maine and Connecticut
along with much-improved corn crops help the
Pilgrims to pay off their growing debts.
Liberation from an
onerous burden of debt was not as quickly achieved by the Pilgrims
as was the reaping of a satisfactory crop of corn or the establishing
of peace with their neighbors. For as hospitable as Holland had
been, 12 years of work in that country had not provided adequate
funds to finance a plantation in a distant new land.
Debt did not alarm Pilgrims, for they were conscientious, steady
workers and their modest manner of life was thoroughly thrifty.
They always felt certain they would, in time, be able to pay any
debts, and that most willingly.
Still, few of them would have judged that this would take a full
quarter of a century--and that even then, some of the leaders
would have to turn over their own houses and land to satisfy the
last of the creditors.
Fishing was at first believed to offer a speedy way to rid the
Pilgrims of debt. King James had had a shrewd question back in
1618, when the Pilgrims' friends were seeking royal approval of
the proposed colony. The king wondered what source of profit there
could be in Northern Virginia; Winslow reported that the answer
to his Majesty was, "Fishing."
The Pilgrims, whose early acquaintance with the sea was quite
limited, were convinced fishing would be the answer. Even in the
fall of 1623, when Winslow sent his Good News from New England to
be printed in London, he was still enthusiastic about it.
Fish in New England, he wrote, "was in as great abundance as in
any other part of the world." He added a persuasive argument:
If English merchants could enrich themselves by sending salt,
men and ships "at a great charge (cost)" to fish in New England,
what might the planters (Pilgrims) "expect when once they are
seated, and make most of their salt there, and employ themselves
as least eight months fishing?"
After another year's experience, though, the leaders of Plymouth
had a profoundly different attitude. Even Capt. Altham, at first
confident that there was easy profit to be made from the abundance
the New World had to offer, became more realistic about the difficulty
of converting abundance into profit after taking the Little
James to Narragansett Bay and returning with only a small
store of skins, "to my exceeding great grief."
As for the Pilgrims and fishing, Altham went on to say that he
found that they had lacked proper equipment, but that they also
had an even more serious problem: "How is it possible," asked
Altham, "that those men that never saw fishing in their lives
should raise profit by fishing?" A Plymouth colony investor himself,
Altham warned in a 1624 letter to his brother, "This I say to
you, that unless some other means be taken...no means of profit
can be raised to the adventurers for their money again."
That same year, Bradford gave his ultimate judgment on what fishing
had done for the plantation--an opinion prompted by the fact that
the 100-ton Charity was about to leave Plymouth to fish
off Cape Ann. The ship, as the adventurers desired, was to establish
a fish-curing stage (light wharf) on Cape under a new patent. "Fishing," declared
a disillusioned Bradford, "[is] a thing fatal to this plantation."
Bradford had reasons aplenty for his pessimism.[Yes, because most schooling fish migrate to warmer deep mid-Atlantic waters in late fall to early winter.] The Chairty,
whose departure from London had been delayed by disputes among
the adventurers, turned out to be "too late for the fishing season." Besides,
said Bradford, the ship's master was "a very drunken beast"; the
man sent from London to make salt was an incompetent; and the
ship's carpenter, sent to build boats--a good man--died of a fever
after building but two shallops.
Moreover, the Little James, after being forced by a storm
in Narragansett Bay to cast its mainmast overboard, was driven
by another storm upon rocks at Damariscove, and sank, with the
loss of the master and two sailors. The ship was later salvaged.
But all these costs were added to the Pilgrims' debt.
The Charity, on its March 1624 arrival in Plymouth, had
nevertheless brought something that would prove a tremendous benefit
to the plantation. Winslow, returning after a diplomatic mission
to England, had fetched with him "the first beginning of any cattle" in
New England--three heifers and a bull.
Recognition that the cattle were a godsend to Plymouth's prosperity,
however, would not occur for several years, when livestock became
one of the two main sources for the discharging of the Pilgrims'
ever-mounting debt.
The other source was fur, especially beaver, which would lead
to exploration, expansion and the establishment of trade. This
was also a slow development, because the Pilgrims on arrival were
"altogether unprovided for trade." Neither, Bradford continued, "was
there any amongst them that ever saw a beaver skin till they came
here and were informed by Squanto."
The Pilgrims had brought "a few trifling commodities," and later
acquired some beads and knives that helped in their earlier meetings
with the Indians. In addition, by the time Bradford gave his baleful
appraisal of fishing, the Pilgrims had learned how to bring in
plentiful harvests.
Corn, completely homegrown, was superb barter. "They began now
highly to prize corn as more precious than silver," said Bradford, "for
money they had none, and if any had, corn was preferred before
it." The harvest of 1625 was abundant, and the year so pleasant
that Bradford declared that the Pilgrims had
"never felt sweetness of the country till this year."
The Pilgrims then tried something new: carrying corn in one of
the shallops that the Charity's carpenter had built after they
had "laid a little deck over her midships to keep the corn dry."
Having no seamen, Bradford sent the dauntless Winslow and some
other old planters to Maine--the route that Winslow had sailed
to seek food from the fishing fleet during 1622, the year of near-starvation.
This time, he went to seek trade.
There are few more courageous or daring episodes in our early
history than Winslow's sailing to the Kennebec River, and miles
up this strange river to the present site of the capital of Maine,
Augusta, then an Indian village called Cushnoc. "God preserved
them,"
said Bradford, and the expedition "brought home 700 pounds of
beaver...having little or nothing else but this corn which themselves
had raised out of the earth." The Pilgrims had thus arrived at
the threshold of extensive trading.
Meantime, particularly in 1624-1626, the financial arrangements
between the Pilgrims and the adventurers were undergoing drastic
change.
Purse strings in London, far from liberal from the start, had
tightened when the Mayflower returned without profit.
To keep the Pilgrims' only source of credit, Robert Cushman--a
Pilgrim deacon who stayed behind when the colonists left the Old
World--had come over on the Fortune in late 1621 to get the Pilgrims
to sign (which they did) the harsh terms they had rejected when
the Mayflower was about to leave Southampton.
The fact that the Pilgrims loaded the Fortune with "good
as full as she could stow and two hogsheads of beaver and otter
skins" loosened purse strings in England despite the fact that
the ship was pillaged by French pirates, who seized and then released
the vessel on its way back.
Weston's withdrawal from the joint stock company was followed
by that of others, as the voyages of the Anne, the Little
James and the Charity failed to produce anticipated
profits.
Two years of cross-ocean negotiations, conducted by Isaac Allerton
for the colony, produced a new agreement that was signed on Nov.
16, 1626.
Only 42 of the original 70-odd adventurers signed in London. Some
had withdrawn for reasons other than lack of profit. Official
persecution of religious dissent had been increasing in England
under the second Stuart king, Charles I. Adventurers responsive
to it, and sensitive about the colonists' Separatism, had blocked
the Pilgrims' beloved pastor, Rev. John Robinson, and others of
the Leyden congregation from getting to Plymouth.
Under the new agreement, Gov. Bradford and seven other Pilgrim
leaders, calling themselves the "undertakers," agreed to pay off
1800 English pounds at 200 pounds each year at the Royal Exchange
in London, besides "some 600" more pounds in other debts. This
made possible a 1627 division of land in Plymouth among the 156
colonists, with each group of six receiving a cow, two goats and
some swine. The undertakers were granted full control--a monopoly--of
the colony's trade for six years so as to discharge the debt "which
lay so heavily"
on the colony.
To make trading easier, the Pilgrims in 1627 built a small pinnace
at Manomet, then on Buzzards Bay, "a place 20 miles from the plantation." Bradford
had first seen Manomet in January 1623, when seeking corn. He
went roughly along the route of the present Cape Cod Canal, up
Scusset Creek on the east to the short carrying place and then
down the small Manoment River to Buzzards Bay on the west.
The Pilgrims also built, near the bay in Manomet, a "house of
hewn oak planks, called Aptucxet, where they kept two men, winter
and summer, in order to maintain trade and possession." Those
words are in an eyewitness account from the secretary of New Amsterdam
(Manhatten), Isaack de Rasieres, who in October 1627--after an
exchange of letters with Bradford--came via Aptucxet to Plymouth
to discuss trade.
The Dutch had converted trading posts into settlements at Albany
in 1624 and New Amsterdam in 1626. De Rasieres on this visit introduced
the Pilgrims to wampum (shell beads used as money by the Indians)--in
the hope, he said, of getting the Pilgrim trade for it, thus keeping
them from discovering the fur trade with the Indians living to
the westward. But, pressed by debt, the Pilgrims went ahead anyway.
Some Indians who had been driven from the Connecticut River valley
by rival Indians, the Pequots, urged the Pilgrims to trade for
furs. In the summer of 1632, fearless Edward Winslow became the
first Englishman to sail up the Connecticut River for discovery
and trade. Winslow even selected the site where the Pilgrims would
the next year found Windsor, one of Connecticut's oldest settlements.
Then, in 1633, Winslow was elected governor, replacing Bradford
temporarily. In September of that year Winslow sent a different
leader, Lt. William Holmes, to Connecticut.
To get ahead of the English, the Dutch had three months earlier
established a "slight fort and planted two pieces of ordnance" at
present Hartford. But despite Dutch threats to fire on them, Lt.
Holmes and his Pilgrim companions sailed a short way upriver to
the Windsor site they had bought from the Indians. On Sept. 26,
they "clapped up" the small frame house they had brought in their
bark and surrounded it with a palisade.
Here the Pilgrims traded for furs until 1637. By then they had
sold off most of their land to the more numerous emigrants coming
westward from the Puritan colony of John Winthrop had founded
in 1630 in Boston.
On the Penobscot River in Maine, the Pilgrims' debt grew heavier
when French colonists from Acadia, which encompassed much of Canada's
present maritime region, in 1631 robbed, and in 1635 took over,
the Pilgrim trading post near present Castine--a venture in which
the Pilgrims had been reluctantly involved by Isaac Allerton.
On the Kennebec River, however, profits from the fur trade contributed
heavily to clearing the Pilgrims of debt.
AFTER WINSLOW'S DISCOVERY OF AN INDIAN village
below the falls of the Kennebec, Allerton in 1628 secured a patent
in London so that the Pilgrims could have a solid claim to the
area.
The Pilgrims erected a house on the site of present Fort Western,
which is diagonally across the river from Maine's state capital.
They stocked it with corn, and with commodities that fishermen
had traded to them: "coats, shirt rugs, and blankets, biscuits,
peas, prunes, etc."
The Dutch had been right about Wampum. The Pilgrims could scarcely
obtain enough for the eager inland Indians.
However, Allerton's patent proved to be so "ill bounded," leaving
the Cushnoc area open to rivals, that the Pilgrims sought a renewal.
And on Jan. 13, 1630, the Warwick Patent, though it pertained
chiefly to the Plymouth colony, also clearly defined the Kennebec
grant. (This precision was most likely attributable to Winslow's
extensive knowledge of the Indians and the wilderness.) The patent
covered miles along the Kennebec River at present Augusta, and
15 miles inland on either side of the river.
Literally, tons of beaver and other furs were freighted for years
from here to the British market through the Pilgrims' partners
in London. After the new, 1626 agreement was signed, there were
four of the London adventurers who functioned as the Pilgrims'
factors--receiving, storing and selling shipments, and purchasing
requested commodities. These Londoners also acted as partners
and provided credit.
As Pilgrim trade expanded, so did the record of transactions.
The Pilgrims, not highly experienced as businessmen, were completely
trusting. Cross-Atlantic differences arose as the record grew
increasingly lengthy and confusing.
A profoundly embarrassing development was the Pilgrims' coming
to believe that Isaac Allerton, long their agent in dealing with
the adventurers, had, as Bradford expressed it, "played his own
game." They felt that losses and expenses he had incurred on his
own had been charged to them. Winslow was chosen to replace Allerton
as agent, and Allerton left the plantation and went to Marblehead,
where he operated a fishing fleet.
The sums involved exceeded by many times the 1800 English pounds
mentioned in the 1626 agreement. Plymouth and London disagreed
basically on the size of the debt. Despite the quantity of records
extant, a positive judgment is elusive. The records were sloppy,
with some items being charged three times. Fluctuations in prices
and usurious interest rates--as high as 50 percent--produced misunderstandings,
sharp letters, and even had the London adventurers suing one another.
In time the leaders in Plymouth, though they felt they had "to
sustain the greatest wrong," were growing aged and "were loath
to leave these entanglements upon their children." So, in a
"composition by mutual agreement" on Oct. 15, 1641, the parties
on both sides of the ocean fixed the amount of the debt. And when
the Londoners signed it, in 1642, they benevolently agreed that
their proceeds were to be used for church purposes in both the
new Bay colony and in the Plymouth colony.
One of the Londoners did hold out, demanding payment on a separate,
disputed debt. Finally, in 1645, Bradford and his fellow undertakers,
to terminate all claims, agreed to pay this demand despite the
fact that even one of the claimant's fellow adventurers declared
that there existed no "good proof" for it.
The claim was paid by Bradford, Winslow, Standish and others selling
some houses of their own and many acres of land, both in Plymouth
and in the newer towns of Rehoboth and Marshfield. At last, title
to the haven for which the Pilgrims had been sacrificing and patiently
laboring was completely theirs.