Chapter III: Part 3

And it was this same John Smith who demonstrated how trade with the natives could be employed to get the country planted with Englishmen. Along with the usual trade for pelts he bartered successfully for Indian corn and other food stuffs. This kept the colonists alive until they were “seasoned” to the new land; then came the profits from organized fur trading to maintain them until agricultural settlement could be effected with some degree of economic success.

Prior to the coming of John Smith the English ventures in America had been one costly failure after another.

Among the earliest of these were the expeditions led by that enigmatic Yorkshireman, Martin Frobisher. Reputedly a successful privateer, it was also said that he knew how to hold his tongue. Maybe what he did tell gained in importance thereby. It might account for the otherwise unaccountable backing he obtained for three successive voyages to America. Many thousands of pounds sterling were wasted on these ventures by a usually hard-headed merchant named Michael Lok. A large part of the expenditure was underwritten by the queen, herself, and Elizabeth was not normally one to squander her silver.

Frobisher went out first in 1576 in search of a northwest passage. He succeeded only in discovering the bay, or “strait” as he called it, that bears his name before coming on “gold ore” in the form of bright, black rocks. Since the samples must have proved worthless on his return to England, his promise of a strait to Cathay was probably very impressive. Certainly the fur-clad Eskimo he brought back from the north side of the “strait” was accepted as an Asiatic. In any event, back he went to America the next year with three ships and the financial blessings of Lok’s newly formed Company of Cathay.

Martin Frobisher did some further exploring on this voyage, but not enough it appears to learn that his strait was only a bay. It is all very strange. An abundance of spiders in the region was taken as convincing evidence that gold-bearing ore was close at hand. In the end Frobisher loaded his ships with worthless black earth and returned to England. What he said, or didn’t say, must have been doubly impressive this time for the merchants evidently were not one whit discouraged. They backed him with a fine fleet, fifteen ships, for a third voyage in 1578.

A large band of miners was sent along this time by the company, and two hundred twenty men were provided for the purpose of planting a settlement on the “strait” that would protect both the mines and the route to Cathay. But, so anxious was everyone to dig for gold, the necessary buildings never did get erected. Again it is not clear what happened, but apparently all thought of settlement was abandoned.

Before the ice began to close in, Martin Frobisher set sail for home with all his company and another three hundred tons of fool’s gold, bankrupting the Company of Cathay.

Next there was Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He and his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, were the queen’s two favorite gallants among her soldiers of fortune. Both were brave men and both were intensely nationalistic. Sir Humphrey said that a man is “not worthy to live at all, that for feare, or danger of death, shunneth his country service, and his owne honour.”

Like other gentlemen marauders of England at the time Gilbert and Raleigh practiced piracy abroad because it was considered both patriotic and sportingly profitable to do so. They were particularly jealous of Spain’s sea commerce and lent support to raids on that country’s shipping with lucrative results. But when they personally led forays against the silver fleet they were none too successful. Humiliatingly enough, they were beaten off with severe losses.

Sir Humphrey, however, was good at drawing maps. Using a globe he showed the queen how interminably long were the southern routes to the Indian Ocean as compared with a great circle route to the northwest. This was true enough in theory--only there was land and ice to block the northern way. But Humphrey Gilbert didn’t let that bother him. He drew in a convenient strait, and once a thing is drawn in detail on a map it has a way of looking real, even to the artist who conceived it.

So the queen gave Gilbert a patent to “discover and inhabit” all the land in the west not occupied by another Christian prince. In the language of the time this meant to explore and occupy such land. And as an incentive the patentee was given absolute title to all the country he occupied, except of course for precious metals. One-fifth of that went to the crown.

Sir Humphrey planned to occupy Newfoundland as a starter. It was conveniently situated off the entrance to his strait--the Gulf of St. Lawrence!

Newfoundland had natural advantages for colonization. Englishmen were in fact already living there at some seasons--fishermen comfortably occupying their well-lardered huts alongside their drying frames. Domination of the fishing banks would surely prove profitable, Gilbert thought. Naval stores were plenteous too, according to all reports.

And everyone knew that Newfoundland was as rich in furs as Muscovy. Only a year or so earlier an English sea-captain, Richard Whitbourne, bound for the Gulf of St. Lawrence to kill whales, had put in at Trinity Harbor in Newfoundland. There he took so great a store of bears, beaver, otter and seal that after killing a few fish he returned forthwith to Southampton to sell his more profitable cargo. There were few of the difficulties in taking these furs that impeded trade with Russia.

However, when Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland at St. John’s in 1583, he showed small interest in fish, naval stores or furs.

Certainly, he was not much concerned with the potentials of the fur trade. That there were “foxes, which to the Northward a little further are black, whose furre is esteemed in some Countries of Europe very rich: Otters, bevers and marternes,” he seems to have acknowledged. And an American pine marten appears to have arrested his attention at least fleetingly. “The Generall had brought unto him a Sable alive, which he sent unto his brother Sir John Gilbert, knight of Devonshire.” But that was all.

From the first hour of his arrival at Newfoundland, Humphrey Gilbert showed deep interest only in metals. He commanded his miners to be diligent, and they obediently discovered what he took to be copper and silver. Excitedly loading one of his ships with a treasure trove of this ore, Sir Humphrey postponed the planting of Newfoundland. He sailed to discover other mines to the south under his patent.

But, unfortunately, he met with bad weather and his supply ship foundered. Even after changing his course for England, storms plagued his fleet. The “treasure” was lost, and Gilbert himself went down in the sea after having gallantly refused to abandon the men aboard his own leaking craft when he might have transferred to a safer consort ship. “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!” he cried out above the tempest at the last.

Sir Walter Raleigh took over his half-brother’s patent. Since there was no limit placed on the land to be explored and occupied, except that it should not be already occupied by another Christian prince, Raleigh had wide latitude in choosing a theatre for his operations. Newfoundland didn’t appeal to him. It wasn’t the most favorable site for what he had in mind.

The survivors of Sir Humphrey’s ill-fated expedition had been thoroughly interrogated; obviously it wasn’t silver that had been mined in Newfoundland. After all, precious metals didn’t come from the bleak coasts of the north, but from the warmer regions of the south where the Spaniards had discovered them. And that suited Raleigh’s purpose, as much as the rising hope that a passage to the Indian Ocean might also lie in those parts where Verrazano once claimed to have actually sighted the other sea. Those southern coasts were near New Spain!

For, what Raleigh really had in mind was a site close to the route of the Spanish treasure galleons. He wanted an English outpost, a garrisoned base, within easy striking distance of the silver fleets. That was the quickest way to riches and the surest means of destroying the power of Spain. The Caribbean was the Spaniard’s Achilles’ heel.

The first step in the achievement of this purpose was to be the planting of a colony.

A reconnaissance expedition, sent out by the southern route in 1584, chose the vicinity of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds near Hatteras for the settlement. Curiously, however, this party failed to recognize the poor harbor and stormy hazards of the location. Possibly it was just the first agreeable site they came upon as they coasted north from the borders of Spanish-held Florida. If they had gone on just a little farther they would have found Chesapeake Bay, a likely spot indeed.

In that case Virginia, as Raleigh called the new country in honor of his “virgin” queen, might have been successfully planted in the sixteenth rather than the seventeenth century.

However the reconnaissance expedition suggested Roanoke Island, near Cape Hatteras, bringing back glowing reports of the country, a few dark pearls and a good quantity of soft furs. “Chamoys, Buffe, and Deere skinnes” had been taken in trade with the friendly natives. A single bright tin dish given in barter had gained twenty skins, each worth all of a crown, and a copper kettle had gained as many as fifty. The voyagers also brought back two of the native inhabitants who were as anxious to please the white men with tales that found favor as was Chief Donnacona of Canada when he was taken to France, and probably for the same reasons.

Sir Walter Raleigh tried hard during the next three years to plant a colony at Hatteras, sending out one expedition after another. Everything failed. Storms contributed to the disasters as much as bad leadership and worsening relations with the Indians. But, mainly, the objectives were wrong.

It was the search for precious metals, the quest for a trade passage through to the Indian Ocean, the harrying of Spain, all coupled with a complete neglect of the country’s more obvious resources, that brought defeat. No one thought of growing food or trading with the Indians. The “colonists” were mostly fortune hunters, ex-soldiers and adventurers, bent on finding El Dorado in one form or another.

All except one--he was Thomas Hariot, a precise man and an observant one. Raleigh sent him out as geographer to the second expedition. Noting the resources of the country, he listed among other things wine, “medicinal” tobacco and furs as saleable exports. He made special mention of the fur trade potential.

“All along the Sea coast,” Hariot wrote, “there are great store of Otters, which being taken by weares and other engines made for the purpose, wil yeeld good profit. We hope also of Marterne furres, and make no doubt by the relation of the people, that in some places of the countrey there are store, although there were but two skinnes that came to our hands. Luzernes also we have understanding of, although for the time we saw none.”

But even Hariot, along with Ralph Lane, the governor of the colony at the time, listened gullibly to the tales of Indians who wanted to gain favor. While Sir Richard Grenville, the admiral of the Virginia fleet, raided the Spaniards in the West Indies, Lane and his men spent months of fruitless search in the interior for white pearls or mines, and followed many a river whose source might prove to be “near unto a sea.”

They explored north as far as the Chesapeake, entering the capes and looking for a channel that might be the passage, while one of their party, John White, made sketches of the region. The south side of the bay thus became well known in England about 1590 when White’s work was included in the first engraved map of Virginia published by Theodore de Bry. What the Englishmen failed to understand at the time, because they were more concerned with gold mines and channel passages, was that the Chesapeake tidewater represented a storehouse of valuable fur--muskrat, beaver, mink and otter--all in vast reserve.

Lane, however, was convinced that only “the discovery of a good mine by the goodness of God, or a passage to the South Sea, or some way to it, and nothing else, can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation.” If only he had realized that within easy reach there was far more quick gold in fur than the English would ever take out of America in ore!

A last contingent of Raleigh’s colonists, which included some women and children, provided one of history’s most mystifying episodes when the entire colony simply vanished from Roanoke Island. Among them was the first Christian child born in English Virginia, little Virginia Dare, granddaughter of the colony’s new governor, John White, the artist. The word “Croatan,” carved in “faire Romane letters” on a post of the abandoned stockade, was the only clue to the lost colony ever found by those who came later to search for it. A tribe of Indians by that name lived on a near-by island. Even this proved futile however, and the mystery has only darkened with the passing of the centuries.

Other English ventures in America also ended in failure. Beginning in 1585 Captain John Davis, an expert navigator, went out three times in quest of a northwest passage to Cathay. He penetrated farther north than anyone before him to discover the straits that bear his name, never fully realizing that beyond lay only pack ice. Captain George Weymouth followed Davis’ track in 1593, meeting eventual defeat.

Weymouth tried again for a northern passage in 1602; so did Captain John Knight in 1606 while exploring for gold and silver mines. Ice and mutiny stopped Weymouth. Knight simply disappeared ashore one day.

Not long after the turn of the century Captain Charles Leigh led a daring expedition to South America in an attempt to establish a base of operations in what is now French Guiana. Only a remnant survived a massacre by the natives in 1605 to straggle back to England.

The coast of North America from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia also came in for more investigation at this time. Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey, was sent out by James I in 1603. He visited the Chesapeake Bay area, possibly hoping to find survivors of the Roanoke colony, only to be killed himself by Indians when he landed with a shore party.

Others explored in the vicinity of Cape Cod and northward, Bartholomew Gosnold, going out to that coast in 1602, and Martin Pring in 1603. They found no mines, but they took back to England quantities of cedar, sassafras and furs. Gosnold’s cargo of pelts obtained from the Buzzard’s Bay area included beaver, marten, otter, “Wild-cat skinnes very large and deepe furre,” seal, deer, black fox, rabbit and “other beasts skinnes to us unknowen.”

Pring was more interested in sassafras trees, but he later wrote that the furs of certain wild beasts in those parts “being hereafter purchased by exchange may yield no smal gaine to us. Since as we are certainly informed, the Frenchmen brought from Canada the value of thirtie thousand Crownes in the yeare 1604. Almost in Bevers and Otters skinnes only.”

A great deal of sassafras was cut and stowed aboard their ships by these two captains. Sassafras brought fancy prices at the time as a cure for the French pox as well as a specific for certain other diseases. But such windfall importations glutted the London and Bristol markets, seriously depressing the price.

Both Gosnold and Pring brought back the usual tales about a passage to the South Sea and the fertility of the land. So Captain George Weymouth went over in 1605, visiting the Maine coast where he explored for colonization sites. He also drove a good though hazardous trade for pelts. In one instance, “for knives, glasses, combes and other trifles to the valew of foure or five shillings, we had 40 good Beavers skins, Otters skins, Sables, and other small skins which we knewe not how to call.”

These were the interlopers who had alarmed the French traders then settled in the Bay of Fundy. Before Weymouth left Maine, Champlain was making his own exploration southward along the coast as far as Cape Cod. He learned enough to decide that all the English ventures had been failures. They had discovered no mines, no passage, and, although they had made a temporary camp or two, no colony was yet planted. Obviously, the Frenchman surmised, the English had found nothing of great value to the south or they would be trying to occupy that coast. Champlain turned back, convinced that the best prospects lay in the valley of the St. Lawrence.

But then, late in 1606, three small ships put down the Thames, bound for America. Aboard, in addition to the crews, were a hundred or more men committed to colonizing an English plantation in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay. One of these was Captain John Smith, soldier and adventurer extraordinary--and, fortunately, a forthright man who spoke his mind.

VI

_Captain John Smith Takes to Trade_

When Captain John Smith arrived in America early in 1607 he was but freshly turned twenty-seven years of age. And he was in serious trouble--a prospect for the gibbet, in fact, because of alleged treason. On the voyage over he had plotted to supplant those in charge, or so it was charged by his enemies in the expedition.

But, when the sealed instructions from the London Company were opened that spring in Virginia, it was learned that John Smith himself was to be a member of the council in the government of the colony. In the end he had to be given his rightful position of authority at Jamestown where the colony was planted.

It had always been thus with young Smith. By just such amazing experiences he had succeeded in raising himself from the status of a poor tenant farmer’s son in Lincolnshire to that of soldier and “gentleman.”

Unfortunately, however, at this period in England’s history such social climbing, though countenanced and legitimate enough, had not quite come to be “accepted.” It provided fertile ground for the cultivation of jealous enemies.

Still, John Smith had probably packed more thrilling experiences and hairbreadth escapes into his life than anyone else in the realm. He had warred in far-off countries, engaged in sea fights and been forced to ship with Barbary pirates. An award of a coat of arms and the princely sum of fifteen hundred gold ducats had come to him from Transylvania where, like a knight of old, he cut off three Turks’ heads in single combat. He had escaped death from wounds on a middle-eastern battlefield, only to be enslaved by the Turks. This hard fate was mitigated somewhat by the favors of a high-born Turkish lady who acquired him as a slave. But then her brother mercilessly shackled him off to the land of the Tartars. From there, however, Smith succeeded in making a miraculous escape after killing his cruel master.

The fiction-like pattern was to be repeated over and over again in the new world. Captured by the Indians of Virginia, Smith saved himself from a tortured death by an ingenious oration and his flare for the dramatic. Later, in the nick of time, he won the love of the young Indian “princess,” Pocahontas, who rescued him from having his brains beaten out by her father, Powhatan. He escaped from this predicament only to find the living remnant of his distressed comrades in the fort at Jamestown again ready to hang him, this time for allegedly having gone over to the enemy. And so they would have done, if it had not been for the timely arrival of the admiral of the Virginia fleet, Captain Christopher Newport, returning from England with more colonists and stopgap supplies.

Delivered from the gallows once more, Captain Smith was subsequently to be asked to assume the highest office in the colony, that of president, because he was the only man with ingenuity enough to keep his comrades alive while enforcing discipline.

It was a poorly chosen group of colonists--these original Jamestown venturers. Fully half of them were gentlemen of sorts bent only on a quest for riches. A handful of craftsmen, a few boys and a brawling lot of seaport loafers and ex-soldiers who were indisposed to agriculture or any peaceful pursuits completed the ill-balanced company. They came to find gold and they expected to relieve the natives of it quickly, if not to scoop it up by the handful along the banks of Virginia’s rivers. Instead, they met with hostile Indians, killing diseases and famine.

Not more than one out of four who pioneered the settlement at Jamestown survived the first few months in America.

The joint-stock company that sent them out, backed by the patronage of King James I and headed by one of the greatest of England’s merchant adventurers, Sir Thomas Smith, only had the usual primary objectives in view--the discovery of mines and a northwest passage to Cathay. The instructions of the London Company, in fact, dwelt on these things, while saddling the colony with a communalistic form of government that encouraged idleness, bred suspicion and brought about deadly factional disputes. Malarial fevers, dysentery and typhoid laid many of the venturers low. Famine and attacks by the natives completed a grim toll of death.

While others remained behind the palisades of the fort, bemoaning their fate and dying helplessly to prove it, Captain Smith was on the rivers and in the forests laying the foundations of successful trade with the Indians and sizing up the country’s resources. Resolutely, he foraged among the natives for needed corn and other food. With a few men in a barge he explored and mapped the entire Chesapeake Bay and tidewater region, realistically recording Virginia’s natural resources with a view toward making the plantation self-supporting.

And when he assumed the stewardship of the colony in the fall of 1608, following two presidents who had failed miserably, John Smith, the soldier of fortune, truly became John Smith, the colonizer. To do this, under communalism, he had to become a virtual dictator. But his rule was as honest and as ingenious as it was arbitrary. These qualities of leadership coupled with his understanding of the true nature of Virginia’s resources and of the need for a firm foundation of trade relations with the natives saved the plantation from extinction. The colony on the James River became the first permanent English settlement in America.

For that matter, it was the British Empire’s first permanent colonial settlement anywhere in the world.

The tidewater Indians with whom Smith had to deal mostly belonged to a group of Algonquian tribes known as the Powhatan Confederacy. Ruling this confederacy was a tyrannous old chief, himself called Powhatan, who was held in considerable awe by his subjects. From each of the tribes under his domination Powhatan demanded an annual tribute consisting mainly of beads and skins and bits of the decorative copper that was so scarce in his kingdom.

Beads were used by the Indians not only for adornment but as a form of currency. As Captain Smith observed, they were the cause of “as much dissention among the Salvages as gold and silver amongst the Christians.” Their manufacture by the natives did indeed call for a high degree of skill, each bead being cut individually from shell, then polished and drilled with crude stone tools. When strung together in belts or arm’s length ropes they were known universally among the Algonquin nations of the eastern seaboard as wampum.

In Virginia wampum strings of white beads made from cockle shell were called roanoke, whereas strings of beads cut from conch shell, dark purple in color, were called peake. Generally speaking the latter were worth ten times as much as the former. The natives used their wampum, or shell money, in barter among themselves to such an extent that the white men found it very convenient as a means of promoting their own fur trade. Often they would trade their wares with a rich tribe for wampum, and then exchange this shell money with a less prosperous tribe for furs.

The collecting of skins for taxes, or tribute, was of course a device older than history. The Romans employed it to collect taxes from barbarian subjects; so did the pharaohs of prehistoric Egypt in gathering tribute from the upper Nile valley. Powhatan could demand pelts in some variety. A contemporary chronicler among the first settlers at Jamestown noted that within the great chief’s kingdom the forests and streams abounded with bears, foxes, otters, beavers, muskrats and “Deere both Red and Fallow.”

The skins of these animals were the tidewater Indians’ most necessary and useful commodity next to food. Mainly they were necessary as clothing in winter, but they were also used as adornment by chiefs and priests, and for many ceremonial purposes. They were utilized, too, as closures and decorations for the Indians’ long-houses. And soft hide leather, such as buckskin, came in for a variety of aboriginal hunting and household requirements, as well as for garments and footwear.

Actually Powhatan’s common subjects often went quite naked, except for skins worn much like aprons. However, when it was cold, they wore _matchcores_--an Indian word for garments of fur which was later turned into “match-coats” by the English.

At his first meeting with Powhatan, Smith found the old savage blanketed with a _matchcore_ of raccoon skins. One of the priests was “disguised with a great Skinne, his head hung round with little Skinnes of Weasels and other vermine.” Many of the better sort of savages, such as werowances and chief men, affected mantles of carefully dressed deerskin, some painted and embossed with white beads or bits of copper. Others who were opulent had _matchcores_ made from squirrel, beaver, muskrat and otter, the last being held in highest esteem.

Women wore fur blankets of beaver and otter, or tastefully fringed and embroidered skin skirts, appropriate to the season. Children usually went naked, although marriageable maidens, twelve to fifteen, modestly covered their loins at least. Pocahontas herself is referred to on one occasion as being girdled with soft otter skins.

About most of the great Bay of the Chesapeake, on his expeditions, Captain Smith found “Wilde Cats ... Martins, Powlecats, weessels and Minkes.” When he explored the Eastern Shore he discovered it to be thickly inhabited by “Otters, Beavers, Martins, Luswarts and sables.” Truly, the tidewater literally swarmed with fur bearers.

In the northernmost reaches of the bay Smith managed to trade with the giant Susquehannocks. “Their attire,” he recorded, “is the skinnes of beares and Woolves, some have Cassacks made of Beares heades and skinnes that a man’s necke goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the beare fastened to his shoulders behind, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, and at the end of the nose hung a Beares Pawe: the halfe sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of Beares and the armes through the mouth, with pawes hanging at their noses. One had the head of a Woolfe hanging in a chaine for a Jewell.”

These majestic savages came from the banks of the Susquehanna River, the headwaters of which reached to the territory of the Five Nations in the lake country of French Canada. As castoff relatives of the Iroquois, the Susquehannocks lived in palisaded forts along the river where they were subjected to constant raiding by their bloodthirsty kinsmen. Hoping to make allies of men with fire guns, they presented Captain Smith with many fine gifts in trade, including bearskins and robes of various furs sewn together. Most significantly, however, they had with them French hatchets, knives and pieces of iron and brass which they said they had acquired in trade from tribes who bartered directly with white men on the River of Canada.

This news, gained by Smith in 1608, about the encroachments of French trade on the “back-side of Virginia” probably did more than anything else to awaken Englishmen to their own fur trading possibilities in America. Everyone knew that the French were driving a highly profitable trade with the savages up the valley of the St. Lawrence. What hadn’t been known was how deep they had penetrated into the new continent, or the direction taken.

In English minds Virginia stretched northward by land or sea to the 45th parallel at least, even though French charters presumed to encompass territory as far south as 40°. In less than five years English guns would rout French Jesuits and traders attempting a settlement at Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine, and an expedition from Jamestown would destroy the older plantations of the French fur merchants at St. Croix and Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy itself. Within that length of time the Virginians would be well rooted and competitive as a result of their own good trade in furs, a trade that would expand rapidly in the Chesapeake tidewater.

But for the time being, in view of their critical problems of existence, there was little they could do about either the fur trade or the Frenchmen, except to nurse their jealousy. It was natural enough that they were envious of French successes, especially as the hoped-for mines in Virginia seemed to be retreating farther and farther into the hinterland and the prospects of finding a passage to the other sea in the Chesapeake area were diminishing daily. However, staying alive was their immediate problem.

Already Captain Smith had spoken out strongly against the fruitless search for gold--“guilded dirt,” he called it contemptuously. As president he would not permit the supply ships to be cargoed with more of the worthless yellow soil or mica-tinctured dirt that they had been ferrying back to England. And, although he still thought there was the probability of a passage farther north or possibly a short overland route between rivers to the other salt sea, he frankly admitted that his own exploration had been entirely unrewarding in this respect.

No English explorer before John Smith had dared to be so honest. And Smith went even farther.

Now he had courageously despatched a very blunt note to his employers, the merchant adventurers of the company in London, telling them the truth about their El Dorado. It was a note that must have startled those comfortable gentlemen right out of their starched ruffs. Certainly it was disillusioning to gold-hungry investors already so heavily committed. But by its very forthrightness it was also soberingly effective, for the merchants promptly took John Smith’s advice, even though they didn’t thank him for his seeming impertinence.

There might be iron in Virginia, Smith had written in effect, but there was no gold, and neither was there any immediate prospect of the discovery there of a short route to Cathay and India. However, a profitable plantation could be cultivated by earnest husbandry and the realistic development of the country’s natural resources for trade. Agricultural products, furs, timber, naval stores, iron and possibly other products of local industries could eventually be shipped home in exchange for English woolens and coarse cloths.

In the meantime of course the president had his hands full just foraging for food enough to keep his charges alive. While people were dying of famine, company profits of any kind had to wait--even those to be gained from organized fur trading for which there was considerable pressure from the natives. The red men were always much more interested in trading their furs than their food. They never raised more of the latter than was needed for their own minimum requirements. Smith had to resort to stratagem and even to a kind of military commerce on more than one occasion to separate them from their corn.

So the Indians, with their pelts to barter, turned to the sailors who manned the transport ships, and the mariners readily accommodated them. These hands knew how to turn a quick profit in the golden fleece. They learned first, when the fishing fleets began crossing the oceans, to Newfoundland and elsewhere--and later, when English ships took to the seas to trade with other nations. As far back as 1560 merchants in England were complaining to their factors in Russia about the sailors’ aptitude for smuggling furs.

“Foxe skins, white, blacke, and russet will be vendible here,” they wrote. “The last yere you sent none; but there were mariners that bought many. If any mariners doe buy any trifling furres or other commodities, we will they shall be registered in our pursers bookes, to the intent we may know what they be.”

In Virginia the mariners not only entered into direct negotiations with the natives, by swapping goods over the side of a ship with savages in canoes or by stealing ashore for a dangerous rendezvous, but they carried on barter through colonists who secretly assumed the roles of factors in return for favors from the home-bound mariners. One mariner, according to Captain Smith, confessed to having obtained enough pelts in this manner on one voyage to net him thirty pounds sterling at home. That was a tidy sum for an ordinary sailor to acquire in those days, legitimately or otherwise.

It was bad enough that the colonists abetted the sailors’ enterprise. Inflation invariably resulted when the settlers traded individually with the natives. But worst of all, in most cases the supplies being bartered had been pilfered by the sailors from company stores aboard ship.

Smith railed against this “damnable and private trade,” when the colony was in such desperate need for food, and even for the very articles sold to the Indians. He recognized the profits to be made from the fur trade, as he well proved both in Virginia and later in New England. In this particular instance it was just that corn came first.

John Smith’s tenure in Virginia ended in the fall of 1609 when he was seriously wounded by an accidental gunpowder explosion. He was invalided home to England. But not before his enemies had taken advantage of his agonized prostration to plot his murder. This treachery was thwarted by Smith’s usual fortune in such crises, the plot being discovered and exposed in the nick of time to save his life.

In the meantime, however, the thoroughly aroused merchants in London had reorganized the company, taking a more realistic approach to the problems of colonization as John Smith suggested, and had appointed an influential governor with fuller authority to rule their plantation. The new governor’s advance representatives had already been dispatched to depose the outspoken young president who was so critical of the company’s policies.

But Captain Smith’s task in Virginia was completed. Through his efforts, almost singlehanded, the English at last had a beachhead on the American continent.

Settlers came now in great numbers--traders, merchants and farmers. The communalistic plan under which the colony had been governed by the company was abandoned, and a venturer to Virginia was given an opportunity to share in the profits of his labor. He could acquire land of his own, through bondage if necessary, something he had little chance of ever doing in England. And he could establish a family; many women now immigrated to reinforce further the first two brave females who arrived in 1608.

Meanwhile, as John Smith’s historic beachhead was expanded, the fur trade continued to set the usual pattern of exploration, trade and settlement.

Mariners with an experienced eye for marketable pelts came to Virginia in increasing numbers--hardy, courageous men who were prepared to take incredible risks in the pursuit of beaver, otter, bear and the big Virginia muskrat. By 1620 there were nearly one hundred fur traders operating in and about the Chesapeake Bay, according to an official of the colony. They plied their shallops and pinnaces up unexplored tidewater streams and rivers to find the villages of the unpredictable savages, hazarding their very lives to learn the ways and language of the aborigines, and to trade with them. They established wilderness trading posts, building palisaded forts which later came to be occupied by merchants and farmers and became permanent settlements.

These fur traders found the profits attractive enough to offset the dangers--not only those posed by their early contacts with the red men but those threatened by rival Englishmen during much of the seventeenth century.

At times rival traders proved much more dangerous than the aborigines. The Englishmen were to fight among themselves, often with piratical and bloody fury, over the fur trade of the Chesapeake tidewater and for possession of the Susquehanna and Potomac River routes to the lush lake country of the north where the Frenchmen bartered for pelts.

But while the Englishmen were thus engaged among themselves on the backside of Virginia some foreign traders moved in as their neighbors on the coast, first on the Hudson and then on the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers. These were the Dutchmen, who forthwith enjoyed a most profitable commerce in pelts with the natives and began settling themselves in complete possession of all those parts of “Virginia.”

VII

_The Dutch Profit by a Mutiny_

In the late summer of 1609 a Dutch ship, the _Half Moon_, was cruising the coasts of America. It had an English master. The merchants of the Dutch East India Company had engaged the Englishman, Captain Henry Hudson, to search for a northeastern passage to China over the frozen top of the world. Instead, he sailed their ship west.

A mutiny compelled him to change his course, or so he later claimed. It seems that his twenty-man crew, mostly Dutch, had been accustomed to warmer seas. They refused to brave the northern cold.

Henry Hudson himself probably had come to recognize the impracticability of the Arctic route. No longer did he hold to the notion that because the sun shone continuously at the north pole for five months of the year temperate waters for navigation would be found there, that is, once the first belt of Arctic cold was pierced. Twice before, for English merchants of the Muscovy Company, he had tried for that northern route only to be frustrated by ice-choked seas--and mutinous crews.

The mutinies went unpunished it appears. Certainly, this was a most unusual outcome for the times. Such uncommon laxity on the part of an English ship’s master, together with Hudson’s similar behavior on subsequent occasions, could lead to the conclusion that he was too weak a disciplinarian ever to have been trusted with command.

Or, maybe this famous explorer was both dissembling and highhanded enough to manage always to have his way, even if it was necessary to employ such devious means as fomenting rebellions to his authority to achieve his secret purposes.

The latter is a tempting surmise. But if it is correct, Hudson may have tried it once too often.

On a later expedition to America as master of an English ship he perished at the hands of his crew. He and his young son along with a few loyal sailors were set adrift in a shallop in the great bay that bears his name, never to be heard of again.

Be all of this as it may, by fortunate circumstance or by pre-meditation Hudson had with him on his memorable voyage in 1609 a map that had been sent to him from Virginia by Captain John Smith. And there was a letter that had come with the map from his adventurous friend suggesting that a passage to China might be found in the west above 40° where Smith himself had “left off.” Everything pointed to a big sea on the backside of Virginia. Many of the Indians Captain Smith met on his explorations had confirmed its existence (their version no doubt of the Great Lakes). And there was much evidence of navigable rivers paralleling the Susquehanna above 40°. They probably led toward this sea!

So Henry Hudson, contriving to cooperate with the mutineers aboard his ship and in flagrant disobedience to the specific instructions of his Dutch employers, sailed west instead of northeast.

After surviving a storm that tore away her foremast the _Half Moon_ made a landfall in America off Newfoundland where she came among a fleet of French fishing boats taking cod on the banks. Captain Hudson salted a few fish for his own stores, and then put down the coast of Nova Scotia to Maine. There, at Penobscot Bay, he had a new pine mast cut and proceeded to relieve some French-speaking Indians of their stock-in-trade without benefit of barter.

“We espied two French shallops full of the Countrey people come into the Harbour,” his clerk wrote, “but they offered us no wrong, seeing we stood upon our guard. They brought many Beaver skinnes, and other fine Furres, which they would have changed for redde Gownes. For the French trade with them for red Cassockes, Knives, Hatchets, Copper, Kettles, Trevits, Beades and other trifles.... We kept good watch for feare of being betrayed by the people, and perceived where they layd their shallops.... In the morning we manned our Scute with foure Muskets, and sixe men and tooke one of their Shallops and brought it aboard. Then we manned our Boat and Scute with twelve men and Muskets, and two stone Pieces or Murderers, and drove the Salvages from their Houses, and tooke the spoyle of them, as they would have done of us. Then we set sail....”

If the Dutchmen left hurriedly it was probably in fear of revenge. Maybe the Indians showed signs of retaliating. After all, the natives of this coast must have been getting annoyed by the ways of white men, considering that this sort of thing had been going on, sporadically, since the first Norsemen invaded their land some six hundred years earlier.

The _Half Moon_ sailed on south to Cape Cod, which the crew noted had been “discovered by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602.” Here, the sailors made sport of an Indian they brought aboard, getting the savage so drunk that “he leapt and danced.” After that Captain Hudson put out to sea once more, to arrive off the Capes of Virginia about the middle of August.

He nosed into the Chesapeake, possibly with the intention of visiting his friend Smith, but caution seems to have won out over the risk of exposing his Dutch-owned vessel to agents of the rival London Company. Being an Englishman himself, Henry Hudson knew only too well that the merchants of his native country made little distinction between a foreign competitor and a foreign enemy, especially when they had guns like those at Jamestown. He might risk disobeying his Dutch employers but not losing their ship--not before he’d made his grand discovery of a passage to the Orient. Perhaps, too, he turned a little sensitive about sailing under a Dutch flag with information furnished by a fellow Englishman.

So, a convenient “storm” blew the _Half Moon_ back out to sea, and Hudson made his way northward, first to penetrate the Delaware River to shoal water, and then on to explore the river that now bears his name.

Numerous Europeans had visited this great river before him. The Norsemen under the leadership of Thorfinn Karselfni in 1011 may have been the first. Certainly in 1524 the Frenchman, Verrazano, and his amorous crew stopped off there to mingle with the friendly natives. Not many months afterward a Portuguese captain, Estevan Gomez, sailing for Spain, probably put into the river’s mouth. In fact, Spanish archives are said to indicate that during the sixteenth century many Spanish ships used the harbor for watering and refitting on their fishing and fur trading trips between Newfoundland and New Spain.

But Henry Hudson ascended the river as far as it was navigable and recorded what he observed and what he did. He it was who took back to Europe the first news of the vast store of fur skins to be had there. And that is what opened the valley of the Hudson to trade and settlement.

His memorable exploration of the river got off however to an inauspicious start in the Lower Bay. Here, it was recorded, “the people of the Countrey came aboord of us, seeming very glad of our comming, and brought greene Tobacco, and gave us of it for Knives and Beeds. They goe in Deere skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper. They desire Cloathes, and are very civill.” Yet, Hudson did not trust them, and mutual suspicion quickly clouded the atmosphere. There was fighting and a sailor was killed. Later, some Indians who came aboard were kidnapped. They were plied with liquor and dressed in red coats while the sailors made crude sport of them. Two were kept prisoners.

But then, after passing the Narrows and entering the river, the _Half Moon_ stopped off at Manhattan to find the natives there most hospitable in spite of any news they may have had about the fights in the Lower Bay. With their women and children they swarmed about the little Dutch yacht in a bid for friendship and trade. Captain Hudson, however, now believing that he had at long last entered on the strait that led to “Zipangu where the palace roof was covered with gold,” did not tarry long to barter for pelts.

Certainly, he didn’t let the escape of the two captive Indians delay the passage of the _Half Moon_ upstream, even though these savages swimming ashore made provocative signs of derision and scorn toward the white men.

It wasn’t until it became disappointingly obvious that he had reached the head of ship navigation that Hudson took time for barter. This was in the vicinity of present-day Albany. Here he again found the natives both hospitable and anxious to trade. In one instance, when he went ashore to eat fat dog meat with a chief of the country, the Indians broke their arrows and cast them into the fire to prove their friendship. Later they came flocking aboard, bringing beaver and otter skins which they exchanged for glass beads, knives and hatchets.

Still, the Englishman and his Dutch mate decided to test some of the chief men of the country for possible treachery by getting them intoxicated in the privacy of the _Half Moon’s_ cabin. One of them got so drunk that he finally dropped to the floor unconscious. The subsequent raising of this savage from the “dead” created such an impression on his fellows that they brought tobacco, venison and shell money to the white captain in gratitude. They also wanted to get drunk again.

Indeed, after Captain Hudson had reluctantly turned his ship’s prow downstream in disappointment over not finding the long sought passage to the South Sea, he was besieged by chief men of the country who wanted more _aqua vitae_. They brought women aboard who “behaved very modestly,” and they made it clear to the captain that whatever he wanted in their land was his.

So Hudson now concentrated on acquiring the only thing of value he recognized--pelts. As the _Half Moon_ proceeded leisurely down the river he traded in earnest with the “loveing countrey people,” encouraging any who had furs to offer in exchange for knives and beads to come aboard. The story is vividly logged.

On reaching the Highlands the “people of the Mountaynes came aboord us, wondring at our ship and weapons. We bought some small skinnes of them for Trifles.” But here real trouble started when an Indian in a canoe “got up by our Rudder to the Cabin window,” and stole a couple of shirts.

“Our Masters Mate shot at him, and strooke him on the breast, and killed him. Whereupon all the rest fled away, some in the Canoes, and so lept out of them into the water. We manned our Boat, and got our things againe. Then one of them that swamme got hold of our Boat, thinking to overthrow it. But our Cooke tooke a Sword, and cut off one of his hands, and he was drowned.”

The next day as the _Half Moon_ approached Manhattan the savages attacked in force. From their canoes and from the shore they launched showers of arrows. Foremost among them was one of the two natives who had been misused and held captive on the trip up the river until the escape. He led repeated assaults on the yacht. But the red men’s fury was feeble in its effect. The white men easily drove them off with musket and falcon shot, killing ten or more of them, and proceeded on their way.

Putting the river behind him Captain Hudson sailed for Europe, but not without much debate on the high seas about the _Half Moon’s_ destination port. The crew once more threatened him brutally according to Hudson’s reports.

Here again “mutiny” served to resolve an awkward situation. The captain needed a safe haven while explanations were worked out, as much so as his recalcitrant crew. Disobedience when crowned with success is usually forgiven, but added to Henry Hudson’s disobedience was failure. No passage to China had been found.

After having agreed to winter in Ireland, Hudson managed to put into Dartmouth in England. From there he wrote a report of his voyage for the Directors of the East India Company at Amsterdam. And then, opportunely, his countrymen stepped in to rescue him. They “detained” him in England as one who had information of value to his own country, while the _Half Moon_ was returned to its owners in Holland.

The Dutch East India Company, preoccupied with its profitable spice trade and its search for a shorter route to the East, promptly wrote off the cost of the voyage and closed the account. It was said at the time that all Hudson did in the west was to find a river and exchange his merchandise for some furs. But it was precisely those furs and the report of the harbor and river, all unexploited by any Europeans, that brought independent Dutch fur traders to the Valley of the Hudson the very next year.

* * * * *

Amsterdam merchants who bartered European and Eastern goods in Muscovy for furs had quickly taken note of the new possibilities in the west. There were no duties to pay the savages in America, such as those imposed on trade by the Czar. And a shipload of pelts could be had on Hudson’s River for an insignificant outlay of beads and trifles--as the French were doing on their great river in Canada. No time was lost in organizing a trial adventure.

In a ship loaded with “a cargo of goods suitable for traffic with the Indians,” and manned by some of Hudson’s own crew of the previous year, traders from Holland arrived at Manhattan in 1610. They found the savages there no less capricious than before, just as dangerously unpredictable, but obviously anxious to barter their pelts for the white men’s goods. After driving a profitable trade, it is said, the Dutchmen promised that “they would visit them the next year again, when they would bring them more presents, and stay with them awhile,” adding however that “as they could not live without eating, they should then want a little land of them, to sow seeds, in order to raise herbs to put in their broth.”

And so they did, coming each year, quite likely building a palisaded truck house and huts on Manhattan Island as early as 1613 to serve as a depot. Trading posts were established farther up the river and light-drafted shallops invaded the creeks and bays of the interior. Beavers were butchered wholesale by natives eager for hatchets, baubles and liquor. Within a few years furs were being collected in such quantity during the winter months that early spring ships from Holland could count on being cargoed along Hudson’s River with as many as seven thousand pelts.

To further this profitable trade and to encourage discovery in “New Netherland” the States General at The Hague granted a temporary charter of special privileges to merchants of Amsterdam and Hoorn who had formed a western trading association known as the United New Netherland Company.

By 1614 Hendrick Christiansen, a fur factor in the employ of Amsterdam merchants, had established a permanent trading post on Hudson’s River near the present site of Albany. Fort Nassau, as it was called, was well palisaded and moated, equipped with two large guns and eleven swivels, and garrisoned by a dozen armed traders. All were necessary precautions. The trading post was located on the border of the fiercest of all Indian tribes, the dreaded Mohawks of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Relatively peaceful tribes, Algonquian Mohegans and others, occupied most of the Hudson Valley east of the river and south of Fort Nassau along both banks. But the interior to the north and west was the home of the Five Nations, the terrible Iroquois: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. From palisaded forts deep in this hinterland their bloodthirsty young warriors sallied forth regularly to terrorize their neighbors.