| Chapter XIV
Success in exploration and trade
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.
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