Chapter IV: Part 4

Humbling every foe they met into complete submission the Iroquois enforced tribute and left a trail of carnage wherever they paddled their war canoes. They carried their conquests to the sea in the east, scourging the valleys of the Hudson and the Connecticut. Their chilling war cries sounded over the Great Lakes among the Eries, in the lower valley of the Delaware where lived the gentle Lenni Lenape, and down the length of the Susquehanna to the waters of Chesapeake Bay. War parties from their ancient forts forayed far to the south in the Valley of Virginia and crossed the Blue Ridge to follow the Piedmont plateau even into Carolina to take Catawba scalps and women.

For many generations the supremacy of the Iroquois had been acknowledged wherever their warriors went in search of victories and their national pride had grown with every conquest.

But now their own country was being invaded, from the north, from New France, by Huron and Algonquin enemies with the help of Champlain’s arquebusiers. And the Five Nations had sworn by the blood of the bear their undying enmity to these Frenchmen who first surprised them at Lake Champlain with their death-dealing firesticks.

It was the Mohawks, the proudest and bravest of the Iroquois and now the near neighbors of the Dutch, who had taken the brunt of that first Iroquois disgrace in 1609. Their portage path coming from the west terminated near Fort Nassau, and the Dutch traders didn’t find it difficult to cultivate them. Rankling with hatred against the French, the Mohawks were in a mood to be friendly with any gun-carrying white men who might become their allies.

Revenge of course is a powerful motive in the savage breast. On the other hand so is self-preservation. The risk of having enemies with the astonishing fireguns on both their flanks no doubt also entered into the Mohawks’ calculations.

In any case it wasn’t long before Dutch traders were fearlessly visiting villages deep in the country of the dreaded Five Nations, peacefully driving a great trade in furs while the savages learned to drink their fire-water and became better acquainted with the awesome weapons they carried.

In the meantime, late in 1615, the Iroquois did gain some satisfaction when Champlain and his Indian allies, after driving deep into their territory by way of Lake Ontario, were forced to withdraw in temporary defeat. A galleried and thickly palisaded fort at Lake Onondaga withstood the arquebuses, even though a movable tower was built by the attackers so that the Frenchmen might shoot down into the fort. Attempts by the Canadian force to fire the stockade proved unsuccessful too, due to contrary winds. And Champlain himself was so badly wounded during the battle that he had to be carried from the field on a litter of wickered branches.

After Fort Nassau was destroyed by a freshet of ice and water in 1617, a new trading post was established by the Dutch in the same vicinity but in a more secure position. This was on a commanding rise overlooking the Hudson at the mouth of the Tawasentha, later known as Norman’s Kill. It was here, as tradition has it, that the tacit agreement of friendship and trade between the Dutch and the Iroquois was actually formalized as a treaty of alliance and peace.

The Mohawks were the prime movers of the pact, sending invitations to a grand council of the sachems of the Five Nations as well as their subjugated neighbors in the east and south. With the smoking of the calumet a binding covenant was made between the factors of the Holland merchants and all the Indian tribes represented at the council. The supremacy of the Five Nations over their aboriginal neighbors was confirmed, and the Dutch promised “firegun” reprisals against any who broke the peace on the frontiers of New Netherland.

And there was peace of a sort--while the merchants in Holland filled their coffers and the Indians acquired guns. Only occasionally did armed fur factors find it necessary to enforce the pact and then often to their sorrow. Once, for instance, when a detail from the fort took the part of some offended Mohegans, the Mohawks retaliated fiercely. They managed to kill the Dutch commander and three of his men. Capturing the remainder of the party, they cooked and ate one of them and burned the others.

But in the main there was the kind of armed peace that permitted the fur traders to extend the frontiers of New Netherland and by their discoveries gain additional trading privileges under their charter. This they had to do if they were to beat the French and the English to the vast untapped fur stores of the interior.

Early in the history of Fort Nassau, a party of three adventurous traders, led by one “Kleynties,” penetrated deep into the hinterland. Travelling west up the Mohawk Valley, they appear to have stumbled upon the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and eventually to have reached Carantouan, a palisaded town of the Susquehannock Indians.

Carantouan, now known as Spanish Hill, was just south of the present-day border between New York and Pennsylvania. It was built about the terraced slopes of a gigantic mound. The platter-like top of this mound with its man-made entrenchments was said by the Indians to have been occupied once by awesome spirits who spoke with thunder and killed men by making holes through their bodies. The spirits could have been sixteenth century Spanish explorers from Chesapeake Bay taking refuge there while searching for gold.

Only a short time before the advent of the three Dutchmen in this vicinity Carantouan had been visited by a Frenchman, Etienne Brule. With a delegation of Hurons he safely traversed the country of the Five Nations to reach this stronghold of the Susquehannocks in 1615. He wanted them as allies for Champlain’s pending attack on Fort Onondaga. Like the Hurons, the Susquehannocks were kinsmen but bitter enemies of the Five Nations, and they agreed readily enough to help in the attack. However their war dances took too long and they arrived too late--after Champlain’s defeat.

Etienne Brule returned to Carantouan with his savage friends to do a bit of bartering and to examine into the possibilities of extending the fur trade of Canada to the Susquehanna. In fact he descended the length of that river into the upper waters of Chesapeake Bay. But because of the temperate climate there he took it to be the coast of Spanish Florida and discreetly turned back.

After his return up the river to Carantouan, Brule set out for home. This time he was captured in the country of the Five Nations. When those savages discovered he was a Frenchman, they plucked his beard hair by hair, tore his nails loose with their teeth, and staked him out for fire-brand torture. But then, just before it was too late, Brule mysteriously won their favor, was roundly feted, and in the end was permitted to escape back to Huron lands. In 1618 he made his way to Three Rivers in Canada, where Champlain at the time was driving a trade for beaver pelts with the Indians, and there he reported his discoveries.

However, getting through the Iroquois country to Carantouan--and getting back to Canada--had been a dangerous exploit, one that not many French traders would desire to emulate, not unless Champlain first brought the Five Nations to complete submission by force of arms. That, of course, the great French captain was never able to do; if he had, probably the French would have overrun the valleys of the Susquehanna, the Delaware and the Hudson.

In the meantime, if the three lost Hollanders from Fort Nassau did wander into the Susquehannock stronghold, they managed to get out of it with their whole skins. Maybe, having missed Brule, they posed as friendly Frenchmen, or even as Englishmen with whom the Susquehannocks had previously enjoyed such satisfactory dealings through Captain John Smith. Eventually, however, they were taken by other Susquehannock Indians, or “Minquas,” and ended up on the lower reaches of the Delaware River as captives held for ransom.

From there, it appears, word of their predicament reached Manhattan and Fort Nassau.

At the time, the spring of 1616, the Dutch factors on Hudson’s River were anxious to explore this other great river to the south that Captain Hudson had also discovered. Already investigated were the rivers to the east and north. Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, a trader in the employ of Hoorn merchants, had sailed east along the coast as far as Martha’s Vineyard. Another trader out of Amsterdam, Captain Adrien Block, went even farther in a small 16-ton yacht called the _Onrust_ which he had built in New Netherland following the loss of his employers’ ship by fire. The little _Onrust_ sailed through Long Island Sound, ascended the Connecticut, explored other streams and the bays along the coasts, and rounded Cape Cod northward to latitudes above present-day Boston.

It was claimed that Captain May had also sailed far enough south to touch at the cape that now bears his name. However, there appears to have been a little hesitancy about making any further discoveries in that direction that might be interpreted as encroaching on the English settlements in Virginia. Maybe the Dutch traders were especially cautious about disturbing the Virginians. It had been in the late fall of 1613 that the fiery tempered Englishman, Captain Samuel Argall, in a 16-gun frigate stopped off at Manhattan supposedly and forced token acknowledgement of the supremacy of the Virginia government. The Hollanders’ trade in Hudson’s River had been going very well; there had been no need to beg trouble abroad.

Now, however, the Dutch felt that their claims were better established by actual occupation on the northern river and no English were yet known to occupy or even trade upon the southern river that Hudson had discovered. Why not explore it with a view toward making further discoveries which under the Hollanders’ charter would give them additional trading privileges? And should they find their lost traders, would not those three have made enough discoveries in the hinterland to provide material for new claims--yes, even a new map of New Netherland?

So, Cornelis Hendricksen who now had the _Onrust_ in his charge went out in that little yacht to investigate the prospects on the “South” River and to see if he might find and ransom the three traders held captive there.

Hendricksen’s voyage was entirely successful. After charting the west shores of Delaware Bay, he entered the river and ascended it possibly as high as present-day Philadelphia. The river’s banks abounded with game, the country was pleasant, and the climate which was “the same as that of Holland” delighted the crew of the _Onrust_. Above all, there were ample prospects of a great traffic in pelts. On the banks of the Christina where Wilmington now stands and at other places along the shores of the Delaware River, Hendricksen drove a most profitable trade with friendly Indians for “sable,” mink, otter and beaver.

And, meager though his report is in the matter of details, somewhere along the river he was successful in ransoming his three captive countrymen from the Minquas for “kettles, beads, and other merchandize.”

Hendricksen returned quickly to Manhattan and sailed for Holland. There, he laid before his employers a report of his discoveries “between the thirty-eighth and fortieth degrees of latitude,” together with a map of New Netherland embracing the lower reaches of the Delaware River as well as the hinterland discoveries of the three traders he had ransomed. Excitedly, the merchants went before the States General of the United Netherlands and prayed not only for an extension of their special charter which was soon to expire but for an extension of the geographical limits of New Netherland.

In the original charter, New Netherland had been described as “situated in America, between New France and Virginia, the seacoasts of which lie between the 40th and 45th degrees of latitude.” The Dutch claim was thus neatly set down as the exact territory of the overlapping claims of France and England on the Elizabethan theory that it was the possession of neither of those countries as it was not occupied by either of them.

Now the merchants wanted the limits extended by two degrees in the south--to include the Delaware valley. Their arguments were impressive. The Delaware had not been occupied by the English, or even explored by them. What if Captain Samuel Argall had looked in on the bay and named it for his English governor of Virginia? That was a year after Henry Hudson had discovered it for the Dutch.

The States General demurred however, postponing any decision. There were problems at home and abroad that took precedence, and within the framework of a grand solution of those problems was a plan to create a great western trading company similar to the Dutch East India Company.

Ever since the defeat of the Armada there had been those in the United Netherlands who had urged striking at Spain’s sources of revenue in the East and West Indies as the surest way to hasten that nation’s decline. The Dutch East India Company, a military trading organization, had been chartered with this in mind. That was before Spain virtually acknowledged the independence of the Dutch Netherlands in 1609 by agreeing to a truce. After that, however, the Peace Party in the Dutch Netherlands had been strong enough to resist demands that a similar company be organized to exploit America and harass the Spanish there. It was considered dangerous to Holland’s newly gained peace and independence to goad the Spaniards in that quarter--or to offend the English, or the French either for that matter.

But the War Party led by Prince Maurice of Orange and the Calvinist clergy, and backed by such important Flemish emigres as Amsterdam’s great merchant, William Usselinx, wanted to resume the war with Spain in order to gain complete independence for all the Netherlands. Usselinx particularly urged the necessity of challenging Spanish hegemony in America. He wanted a government-sponsored Dutch West India Company to prosecute the pursuit of gold and silver, the conduct of the fur trade with the Indians and the destruction of the Spanish commercial monopoly in the New World.

It was the probability of being forced into forming this company, a company which would incidentally assume control over New Netherland, that kept the States General from renewing the New Netherland Company’s charter. Certainly, concern over possible friction with the English or the French prevented any territorial broadening of the charter or of the individual trading licenses which were issued after the charter’s expiration.

By the New Netherland Company’s charter the States General had in effect defined and acknowledged the borders of New France in the north and Virginia in the south. They recognized that it would be bad enough in the interior when the French realized that New Netherland traders were aligning themselves with the Iroquois enemies of New France. But it would be much worse to tangle with the English on the coasts--the Virginians in the south, and now those other Englishmen preparing to stake out “New England” in the north.

The Peace Party in the Netherlands didn’t want any trouble and they wished the Orangers who had gone out to America would stay in the valley of Hudson’s River, where no Englishmen had ever attempted to trade for furs. However, that was not to be. The fur traders would push on; the War Party would have its way.

VIII

_Conception of New England_

The Englishmen living already in America, in southern Virginia, were more concerned about the Catholic Spaniards to the south of them than about a few Dutch traders on an unknown river to the north. Jamestown had been planted by the London Company with very much the same objects that Raleigh had in mind when he planted Roanoke--a threat to New Spain among other things. While the colony was young and relatively weak, therefore, the Virginians lived in constant dread of themselves being surprised and destroyed by the Spaniards.

Their neighbors in the south had a reputation for making short shrift of heretics or any foreign colonies that might endanger Florida or Spanish silver fleets. Some years earlier several hundred Huguenots from France who planted a colony on the southern coast had been butchered to the last man in a surprise attack.

Indeed, the Virginians’ fears were well founded. The Spanish admiralty more than once nursed just such an action against the “English pirates’ nest” on the James River. That they didn’t attack was probably due to their own increasing vulnerability, for the Spanish star had been in decline since the destruction of the Armada.

To the north, the Virginians had mainly been concerned about the French. The northern boundary of English “Virginia,” the 45th parallel, cut through the Bay of Fundy, but the Frenchmen failed to observe this delineation of the border. Whereas Dutch interlopers might be passed off as no more than individual traders who could be ousted at will, the government-backed traders of New France, firmly entrenched as they were in the far north, needed special watching.

There was no English colony in those parts to forestall serious French encroachment. The Plymouth Company had failed in its mission to settle a plantation in northern Virginia.

It had been with the hope of finding gold or a trade route to the Indian sea, or in lieu of that at least an outlet for English woolens, that King James granted charters in 1606 to the London Company and the Plymouth Company. The merchants of these two joint-stock trading companies were to settle southern and northern Virginia respectively, thus driving an English wedge of actual occupation between the vast territorial claims of New Spain and New France. Under the direction of Sir Thomas Smith of the London Company the southern colony, Jamestown, was successfully planted. But in the north, on the border of French Canada, the colonists sent over by the Plymouth Company failed. They were too much in love with “El Dorado.”

There had been an unusually good prospect of trade in furs to tide over the Plymouth Company’s plantation until it could become permanently rooted by agriculture. Gosnold, Pring, Weymouth--all had predicted the success of such a venture. But colonization failed. There was no John Smith at Sagadahoc.

The settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec in Maine was made in 1607, only a few months after the colonists of the London Company planted themselves at Jamestown. The Sagadahoc venturers came in two ships, mainly supplied by Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the Plymouth Company and backed by the special patronage of another great merchant adventurer, Chief Justice Sir John Popham. They built a palisaded fort which they called Saint George, a storehouse and a church, and fifteen dwellings. And their carpenters under the supervision of a shipwright named Digby constructed a thirty-ton pinnace, the _Virginia_, which crossed the ocean to England and came back later to Jamestown in the service of the Virginia Company.

Except for these few noteworthy accomplishments, however, everything went wrong at Sagadahoc. Fire destroyed most of the buildings and few survived the bitter cold of the first winter. George Popham, the president of the colony and a nephew of the chief patron, died. Trouble with French traders on the coast operating out of the Bay of Fundy was a source of much uneasiness, especially after a prominent French captain wintering at St. Croix was waylaid by the Englishmen and released only on his promise never again to trade for pelts in those parts. The weakened defenders of Fort St. George lived in fear of a surprise French attack--of bloody retaliation.

To cap the Englishmen’s difficulties they were unsuccessful in driving a trade of their own with the Indians. For one thing, their disgraceful personal conduct turned the savages against them. A licentious lot of brawlers to begin with, the Sagadahoc venturers went native without restraint, and the Indians who were certainly never prudish about lending their women recoiled in contempt. For another thing, the Frenchmen offered more for pelts, so the natives hid their furs from the Englishmen.

When spring came the Sagadahoc settlement was abandoned and the survivors returned to England with nothing to show for their efforts. It was all so discouraging that no money could be raised among the merchant adventurers of the Plymouth Company for further attempts at colonization, although each year thereafter Gorges sent trading vessels to the vicinity for pelts. To compete with the French these vessels had to be plentifully supplied with a variety of goods, trinkets, hatchets, colored cloths, and eventually even with guns and powder to exchange for furs.

Several years after Sagadahoc was evacuated the Vice-Admiral of Acadia, Saint Just, came down the coast and set up the arms of France on the most conspicuous height he could find near the Englishmen’s abandoned fort. Having thus officially proclaimed his jurisdiction over Maine, he returned to his headquarters at Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy, where it was his practice to exact a one-fifth share of all the furs collected.

Saint Just’s father, Sieur de Poutrincourt, had been granted the country originally by de Monts, and now held it under an independent patent from the king. Although, all in all, Poutrincourt and his son made a pretty profit from their patent, they met with difficulty in getting their full share of the furs being collected. Taxes of course are always unpopular, especially among frontiersmen. The traders across the bay at St. Croix were recalcitrant, and there were even more serious dissensions at Port Royal itself on this score.

Among the inhabitants of Port Royal were two lately-arrived Jesuit priests who had purchased part ownership in a trading vessel and were stirring up no end of trouble for Saint Just. One of these fathers, Pierre Biard, was particularly obstreperous, objecting to the vice-admiral’s profits, giving unwanted advice on trading, and even trying to take over control of the colony according to his enemies. He was accused of pitting Catholics against Huguenots, and he did actually bring about the excommunication of Saint Just. Some said he partook too freely of the bottle.

In any event, Father Biard accompanied Saint Just on his voyage along the southern coast and liked the lay of the country. He thought it offered special opportunities for a profitable trade in furs, and he felt that if he could but have a colony of his own there he would use the profits of trade with the savages for the maintenance of the Jesuits rather than let it be “lost in the hands of the merchants.”

Upon his return to Port Royal, Biard and his brother priest proceeded to do something about it. Writing to their patron at the French court, Madame deGuercheville, the Jesuits told her of their troubles and their aspirations. Whereupon that well-connected lady acquired a patent to the southern coast, granted the fathers their wish for a colony of their own and sent over a ship to settle them there at her expense. In the spring of 1613 the Jesuit colony was planted--Saint Sauveur it was called--on Mt. Desert Island in Maine.

But no sooner were the Frenchmen seated than they were murderously surprised by the English.

Captain Samuel Argall out of Jamestown in his heavily armed ship, the _Treasurer_, happened to be trading and fishing in the vicinity. Learning from the Indians of the presence of the French vessel at Mount Desert and the colony being planted there, he attacked so suddenly that he met with practically no resistance. Two Frenchmen were killed. Father Biard and fourteen others were taken to Jamestown as prisoners and the remainder were ordered by Argall to find their way home as best they could in any fishing or trading vessels they might happen upon along the coast.

There was great excitement at Jamestown when Captain Argall arrived there with his prisoners and the news about the French infringement on “English territory.” There was even more excitement when Father Biard proffered the information that Saint Just, after capturing an English ship, was fortifying Port Royal with thirty cannon. A “pirates’ nest,” Biard called it in his anger at Saint Just. Certainly it was a menace to the English the Virginia Council concluded.

So Argall was dispatched north again, this time to rout the French from the Bay of Fundy. On the way, he destroyed all vestiges of French occupation at Mt. Desert Island and at St. Croix; then he surprised Port Royal with the help of Father Biard who appears to have acted as his guide ashore. Coming upon the fort-like settlement at a time when most of the inhabitants were busy in the fields, Argall burned their houses and plundered their stores, leaving the Frenchmen almost destitute on the eve of winter.

The destruction was so complete that Sieur de Poutrincourt, who arrived from France in the spring, decided to collect what furs he could and transport his people back to France.

Madame deGuercheville gave up too. She attempted no new colony, contenting herself with protestations to the English king. But James let it be known that the Virginia Company was well within its rights, and there the matter ended.

Although Saint Just did return to Port Royal later to act as factor for some independent La Rochelle fur merchants and although young Dupont-Grave wintered at St. Croix on occasion to maintain desultory barter with the savages there, the French fur trade was now restricted in the main to the St. Lawrence Valley and the hinterland. Argall had effectually checked the advance south on the coast into the territory claimed by the English--for the time being.

Traffic on the “Northern Virginia” coast, below the Bay of Fundy, now fell almost exclusively into the hands of the English--except, of course, for that which the Dutchmen were pursuing in the vicinity of the Hudson River.

There is the relation in an uncorroborated promotional tract of the time that Captain Argall, in the late fall of 1613 on his return from Port Royal, stopped off at Manhattan where he is said to have caused the few Dutch traders he found there to submit to the English king and the government at Jamestown. If so, he no doubt took whatever furs they had as tribute and probably made other arrangements calculated to benefit his private purse. Samuel Argall, later knighted, was to become notorious for such devices.

But if the Dutch traders, reflectively smoking their pipes, acceded to his demands while the guns of the _Treasurer_ pointed at their huts, they lost little time in expanding their beaver trade along the eastern and northern coasts once the hot-headed Englishman left. The very next spring they began the prosecution of a highly profitable business in and about Long Island Sound, up the valley of the Connecticut, and in the Narragansett country. The Indians as far east as Buzzard’s Bay acquired special longings for Dutch sugar, liquor, ornaments, cloth and firearms, and the Hollanders were able to maintain a virtual monopoly on this trade for some years.

Captain John Smith didn’t see anything of these Dutch competitors when he visited northern Virginia in 1614. But then he traded along the coasts no farther south than Cape Cod. The only foreigners he encountered were a couple of poaching French ships bartering with the Indians for pelts some forty leagues below the mouth of the Kennebec River.

Being recovered from his wound and being much interested in planting an English colony in the north, Captain Smith had helped promote enough capital to supply two ships for this voyage. Of course the venture’s immediate object was not colonization. No money could have been raised for that. Rather it was to “Take whales and make tryalls of a Myne of Gold and Copper,” Smith said. “If those failed, Fish and Furres was then our refuge.”

The venturers discovered no mines. And, although there were plenty of whales in sight, they weren’t able to catch any. The English hadn’t yet learned to whale. So, while the sailors turned to fishing, John Smith set out with eight or nine men in a shallop to investigate the country, to map the bays and rivers, and to trade with the natives--in preparation for the colonization he secretly planned.

He ranged the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, and “got for trifles neer 1100 Bever skinnes, 100 martins and neer as many Otters.” Most of these were acquired within a distance of twenty leagues, he said, for “Eastwards our commodities were not esteemed, they were so neare the French who affords them better.” At Sagadahoc, at the mouth of the Kennebec, there was competition from an English vessel belonging to Sir Francis Popham, son of the chief justice. This fur-trading ship “had there such an acquaintance, having many yeares used only that porte, that the most parte there was had by him.” And of course to the southwest were the two French trading vessels.

The country, Smith later reported, was populated by “Moos, a beast bigger than a Stagge; Deere, red and Fallow; Bevers, Wolves, Foxes, both blacke and other; Aroughconds (raccoons), Wild-cats, Beares, Otters, Martins, Fitches, musquassus (muskrats) and diverse sorts of vermine, whose names I know not.”

“Of the Musk Rat,” he predicted, “May bee well raised of their goodnesse. Of Bevers, Otters, Martins, Blacke Foxes, and Furres of price, may yearely be had 6 or 7000: and if the trade of the French were prevented, many more.”

With the title of Admiral of this “New England,” of which he had drawn an exceptionally detailed and accurate map, Captain Smith was sent out the next year by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and others of the Plymouth Company. This time he never reached his objective, being captured by pirates and once more experiencing perils enough for many another adventurer’s lifetime. With his usual luck and ingenuity however he managed to escape, and returned to England to write about his ventures.

Unable to get any further backing for his colonization schemes John Smith never returned to America. Thus it never came about that he encountered the Dutch interlopers for whose original presence in “Virginia” he had been responsible through his friendship with Henry Hudson. However, one of Smith’s companions on his last voyage, Thomas Dermer, was sent out again by Gorges in 1619. And Dermer paid a visit to the Dutch at Manhattan.

After arriving in America and sending a cargo of furs and fish from Sagadahoc back to England, Dermer set out in a small open pinnace of five tons burden to follow the coast south to the Chesapeake. The account of his voyage is almost as interesting as one of Captain John Smith’s epics.

Among other adventures on his way down the coast, Dermer “redeemed” two Frenchmen from the Indians. These men, after having been shipwrecked off Cape Cod and captured with others by the Indians, had survived three years of being “sent from one sachem to another to make sport with.” Dermer himself was taken during a fight with the savages but successfully contrived an escape with the aid of some hatchets which his compatriots used as ransom bait.

Following a winter at the plantations on the James River, Dermer then returned to New England via Manhattan where he stopped off, probably upon the urging of Jamestown officials, to see what the Dutch traders were about. There he discovered a “multitude” of factors busy with furs, and he found plenty to indicate that the Hollanders were permanently settling themselves in the land.

The English fur trader pointed out to them that they were on English soil, but the Dutchmen replied that “they understood no such thing, nor found any other nation there; so that they hoped they had not offended.” Since he was in no position to challenge them further Dermer contented himself by warning them not to continue their occupation as his own countrymen would soon take possession of what they, the Dutch squatters, were calling “New Netherland.”

Whereupon Thomas Dermer withdrew, eventually to have his story laid before the English merchants at home, while the Hollanders promptly went about widening the coastal head of the wedge they had driven between southern Virginia and northern Virginia, the country now called New England by the Englishmen.

Cornelis Jacobsen May explored south again that very summer. He even entered the James River. Then he revisited the cape he had first sighted a few years earlier and which now bears his name. Entering Delaware Bay this time however, he charted its shores, and following in Hendricksen’s path he ascended the river to trade and more thoroughly investigate it also.

By the following year, 1621, the English ambassador at The Hague was before the States General calling attention to the trespassers on “English” territory in America. But his protests received scant hearing. The lowlanders’ grand design for the west was now in process of completion--the West India Company had been chartered--and a government for New Netherland was being organized. Already an official seal for the new province in America had been engraved, the figure of a beaver, fittingly enough, its central theme.

In the meantime however part of the Dutch claim had been occupied by some refugee Englishmen who were determined to stay in America. The Pilgrims had planted the first permanent settlement on the coast of New England.

IX

_The Pilgrims Rely on God and Beaver_

The first permanent settlement made by the English on the northern coasts of America owed its success to traffic in pelts.

Almost from the very beginning in the winter of 1620-21 the Plymouth plantation was a fur-trading post, depending on beaver and otter skins for the maintenance of its inhabitants. And, as Edward Channing has put it, “In the end what saved the Plymouth colony from extinction and gave the settlers a chance to repay the London merchants for their advances was a well managed fur trade.”

Governor William Bradford himself recognized that the fur trade was vital to the survival of his people in New England, saying “there was no other means to procure them food which they so much wanted and clothes also.”

This was only too true. Not only did a vicious system of communalistic enterprise retard the production of food at Plymouth but the merchant adventurers in England who backed the plantation insisted that time-consuming agricultural activities be curtailed to a minimum, promising to send over the needed food. In return for financing the venture they wanted quick returns that could be gotten only from fish and fur. Since the Plymouth colonists were never too successful at fishing, in fact ill equipped for that pursuit, they had to depend on the export of pelts to keep the merchants happy and to wangle supplies and trucking goods enough to keep themselves alive.

Even with the help of the fur trade, however, this brave little band of Brownist Separatists probably would not have survived the rigors of the climate and the harsh New England coast except for the impelling religious motive that brought them to America in the first place.

Persecuted for their beliefs and exiled from their homeland, they had been maintained through many trials by a driving determination to find sanctuary for themselves and their posterity--a place where they could live and worship in the way they believed was most fitting in the eyes of God. First, they fled to Holland, where at Leyden they enjoyed immunity from interference by the authorities but too much intimacy with their neighbors. In this their leaders saw a new danger. The Dutch, they felt, were entirely too neglectful of God’s ordinances, and the exiles became exceedingly fearful that “their posteritie would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.”

Only in the New World where they would have no near neighbors did there seem to be a solution to the problem. They thought of going out to Guiana, and the Dutch even offered to underwrite their passage to New Netherland to plant a colony there under the auspices of the States General. But then some of their leaders learned that through the Virginia Company a patent could be obtained for a private plantation in America where they could live as Englishmen, yet “as a distincte body by themselves.” Assured that they might have their own governor, ordinances and mode of worship, subject only to the general government of Virginia, they entered into conclusive negotiations with English merchants to finance the venture.

One Thomas Weston was the leading backer of the proposed plantation, obtaining the patent through the Virginia Company and promoting the adventurers’ share of the joint-stock through a company of merchants which he represented. Although the king balked at giving the exiles liberty of conscience under his protection he did indicate that he would not molest them. And of course the Virginia Company, the leaders of which were mostly Puritan-tinged Genevans at heart, encouraged the venture from the start, albeit with discretion.

So the business agreements were drawn up and signed and transportation arranged. This included a stopover in England where the exiles were joined by a major complement of indentured servants and other “strangers” hired by Weston. The emigrants were to sail in two ships from Southampton, but after a false start they settled on the _Mayflower_ and this little ship put out alone across the sea late in 1620.

The _Mayflower’s_ destination was charted as the general vicinity of Hudson’s River where a beginning was to be made on selecting a suitable site for the new English plantation in Virginia. However, a landfall was made at Cape Cod and, although a course was then actually set for the mouth of the Hudson, the ship was brought about after navigation difficulties and hints of mutiny and a decision was made to plant in New England instead.

This was territory well known at the time of sailing as coming under the jurisdiction of the proposed Council for New England which was about to be created as successor to Sir Ferdinando Gorges’ old Plymouth Company.

Quite likely, William Bradford and other leaders of the expedition had come to have their doubts about settling in the vicinity of the Hudson River, a territory in dispute between England and Holland. But in addition it would appear that before the sailing they had received secret assurance that Gorges and the reorganized New England company would welcome a colony planted within their jurisdiction, and that a proper patent would be no more than a legal formality once the Council for New England was commissioned. Certainly the chief investor in the enterprise, Thomas Weston, favored New England. In the final days of preparation he had expressed a strong preference for New England rather than Virginia, due he said to the established fisheries and fur trade, as well as other commercial prospects there.

In any event, when word reached England that the Pilgrims had settled themselves at Plymouth in New England, no one seems to have expressed the slightest surprise. Nor is there any record of an explanation coming from Plymouth--just as if none was thought to be necessary.

All of which would make it appear likely that the planting at Plymouth was no accident, but premeditated to some extent by merchants of the New England company in connivance with leading partners in the adventure. Possibly there was more than a hope that some calculated incident would bring it about. If so, the navigation difficulties and threats of mutiny provided incident enough--or excuse enough to satisfy those not in on the plan!

* * * * *

The savages in and about Plymouth Harbor, so named by Captain John Smith some six years earlier, did not exactly welcome the _Mayflower’s_ passengers. Their experience with white men had been none too rewarding over the years and these new arrivals were proving no exception. From their hiding places the natives watched the very first exploring parties that came ashore from the ship steal caches of Indian corn and rifle the graves of the dead.

Small wonder it is, therefore, that almost before the Pilgrims laid eyes on a savage they were treated to thievery in kind and the weird shrieks, or war whoops, with which these same “Skraelings” had challenged the invading Vikings centuries earlier. But when the attacks came they were easily repulsed by English firearms.

In the meantime, after the landing at Plymouth in that winter of 1620-21, some of the natives were enticed out of hiding by offers of bright baubles and other gifts. On one occasion “a pot of strong water” was employed. Then, with thunder-making cannon mounted ashore to awe their wild hosts, the Pilgrims were finally able to enter into negotiations for beaver skins and food supplies under a kind of armed truce.

But the Indians of this section were very poor and very few. A pestilence originally spread among them by Frenchmen had all but wiped them out in fact. It was necessary for the Pilgrims to look abroad for the pelts which they had quickly realized would be their chief means of support if they were to survive in this strange land.

Beaver skins would pay their debts, buy for them in England the additional supplies they needed, even serve as a medium of exchange in obtaining corn and beans from the savages themselves. In the guise of exploration, therefore, military commerce was commenced as soon as possible with neighboring tribes along the coast.

In this the diminutive military commander at Plymouth, Captain Miles Standish, had an invaluable aide--an Indian named Squanto who had come to the fort and offered his services as ally and interpreter.

Squanto spoke English almost as fluently as the white men. Twice he had been to England, once having dwelt for some time with a London merchant. He was first taken there by Captain George Weymouth in 1605. Returned to his native land nine years later by Captain John Smith, Squanto had been no more than set free when he was kidnapped along with some other natives by an English captain named Hunt and sold in the Spanish slave market at Malaga. However, through the intercession of local friars, he managed to get to London again. Captain Thomas Dermer then returned him once more to Cape Cod, not many months before the Pilgrims arrived.

Finding his own people wiped out by the pestilence, Squanto sought refuge with a neighboring tribe. But when he learned of the presence of the Englishmen at Plymouth he went to them, to be gratefully acknowledged as “a speciall instrumente sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”

Guided by this Indian the Pilgrim traders went farther and farther afield. In September ten armed men sailed up to Boston Harbor in a shallop and obtained a quantity of beaver from the Massachusetts Indians. So successful was the barter that the women of the tribe impulsively removed their beaver coats to exchange them for the bright baubles of the white men. Giggling maidens, bedecked only with strings of beads we are told, were left behind by the “sober-faced” Pilgrims when they sailed away.

By November, when the first “supply” ship, the _Fortune_, arrived from England, the colony at Plymouth had acquired enough beaver and otter skins to pack two great hogsheads worth 300 pounds sterling for export. These pelts represented over sixty per cent of the total value of the vessel’s return cargo, the remainder consisting of clapboard. By this one shipment the Pilgrim Fathers estimated they were paying off almost half of their debt to Weston and his partners and insuring the prompt return of the additional supplies they so much needed by then.

But unfortunately, as they later learned, the _Fortune_ was intercepted by a French privateer before she reached England and all her cargo confiscated!

Long before this first supply ship came to Plymouth the Pilgrims had been in want of food. Their meal was gone, and other rations were rapidly dwindling under their communalistic system. But when the ship arrived it brought only letters of gratuitous counsel from their merchant backers in England and more “hungrie bellies” to be fed. There was practically nothing aboard in the way of food and clothing or truck for barter with the savages.

Already half-starved, the colonists were in really dire straits as winter approached. Many of them sickened and death stalked the huts and cottages at Plymouth. With Indian alarms and unaccountable fires creating a general state of anxiety, fear and suspicion lay heavy on those who lived. Probably the only thing that prevented a complete collapse was the diversion brought about by enforced labor on strengthening the fortifications of the plantation.

Before the first snow, the Narragansett tribe which had not suffered from the plague boldly sent in a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin. It was an open challenge to war. The Pilgrims were plucky enough to replace the arrows with bullets and send the snakeskin back to the Narragansett, but they were nevertheless thoroughly frightened and hastened to palisade their fort and buildings with a strong wall of high pales.

Relations with the natives was under constant strain. Most of the early commerce with them for pelts and food was a bloody business. But, as explosive and unprincipled as was the red-headed little military captain, Miles Standish, it was Squanto who caused much of the trouble.

It seems that the Indian interpreter was overly ambitious to become a great sachem and seized on any opportunity to eliminate a red rival to his pretensions by provoking hostilities. Captain Standish never did like Squanto, and Bradford himself later stated that the interpreter “sought his own ends and played his own game, by putting the Indians in fear and drawing gifts from them to enrich himself, making them believe he could stir up war against whom he would, and make peace with whom he would.”

Although some temporary relief in the matter of food could be obtained from trading and fishing boats off the Maine coast and by other local expedients, it was plain for all to see that the economy, indeed the very existence of Plymouth, depended on fur. Fishing had failed completely as a source of income. Only as a fur-trading post could the plantation be maintained, for only by the export of pelts could sufficient supplies and trading goods be obtained and the debt to the merchant adventurers paid off. So, in the spring of 1622, an expedition went out once more to the Massachusetts and commerce of a sort was resumed--along with hostilities. Some few pelts were thus obtained by the Pilgrims in spite of their almost total lack of trading goods.

But then came a “providence of God.” A trading ship, coasting the shores from Virginia to New England, came into the harbor with a large store of English beads and knives aboard.

The captain, however, drove a hard bargain with the desperate colonists. Shrewdly sensing the situation, he hiked the prices of his trading goods; in fact, he “would sell none but at dear rates and also a good quantity together.” The Pilgrims were forced to buy, paying away their store of coat-beaver at three shillings per pound which, as it happened, “in a few years after yielded twenty shillings.” Still, by this means, they were fitted again to barter for beans and corn--and more beaver.

* * * * *

For the next three or four years the Plymouth plantation was engaged in hand-to-mouth expedients to squeeze enough revenue from the fur trade to meet the demands of its economy.

All of this was made the more trying because of the evils of the communalistic system under which the colony was operated. A first step toward the private ownership of land was taken in 1623, when each man was permitted to set a little corn “for his owne perticuler,” but it was some years before this reform was fully realized. However, of more concern to the Pilgrims was the increasing pressure from a variety of English competitors for the fur trade along the coast.

Always a bit disturbing had been the freebooting interlopers who operated along the coasts, particularly in Maine. These Englishmen, bartering generously with trinkets, colored cloth and ironware, were also not averse to trading guns and powder with the Indians, a practice frowned upon by the king.

Partly because of the trade in firearms, but mainly because the freebooters were cutting into the monopoly of the august Council for New England, that body obtained a royal proclamation forbidding trade in furs and fish without a license. As it turned out however the merchants were unsuccessful in enforcing the edict. Captain Francis West, the Admiral of New England, who was sent out to stop the trespassing returned only to report that he found the traders to be “stuborne fellows.”

In the meantime a number of patents and licenses were being granted through the Council for New England along the northern coast.

Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, as adventurers, were granted the “Province of Maine,” all the land lying between the Merrimac and the Kennebec Rivers. As early as 1623 David Thompson, “a Scottish gentleman,” went out with a few servants and established a fur-trading post at the mouth of the Piscataqua, near the present site of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Said to have been accompanied by his wife and children, he “built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarily with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians....” Thompson nevertheless carried on a flourishing business with the natives for otter and beaver, as did Christopher Levett who built a fort-like emporium for the same kind of military commerce in Casco Bay the following year.

More obvious competitors to the Pilgrims had been getting footholds in the country of the Massachusetts Indians. Samuel Maverick had a palisaded trading post on Noddle’s Island (East Boston) wherein he mounted “four murtherers to protect him from the Indians.” Under the muzzles of these wicked little cannon he drove a most profitable private trade. And David Thompson himself moved to Boston Bay in 1626, building a truck house on the island which ever since has been known by his name.

Although these more or less distant and individual competitors cut into the Plymouth Colony’s business to some degree, they were not exactly strangling the economy and they were not neighbors in the bothersome sense. However, the Pilgrims viewed with real alarm all attempts of English traders to establish themselves in the near-by lower end of Boston Bay. That, they judged, belonged to them and was necessary to their survival as well as their cherished privacy.

Their one-time friend, Thomas Weston, had been the first to try to plant a trading post there, at Wessagusset, in 1622. Weston, who had sold out his interest in the Plymouth Plantation, first sent over some men to trade for his “perticuler,” that is, not for the plantation’s account. Shortly afterward he obtained a patent to plant a colony of his own at the lower end of Boston Bay.

The colony his men established at Wessagusset, now Weymouth, was entirely too close to the Pilgrims for their comfort, not only because it forthwith severed a major artery of their fur trade but because it put the pinch on Plymouth for food. Weston’s “rude fellers” were more interested in consorting with Indian squaws, according to the Pilgrims, than in grubbing for their own food. Also, disturbingly enough in itself, these newcomers setting themselves down as near neighbors were Anglicans.

According to the record the Pilgrims discovered a conspiracy among the savages to massacre the Englishmen at Wessagusset. Possibly, as some say, they simply invented the plot. Be that as it may, they rushed to the assistance of their unsuspecting white neighbors. Then, under the pretense of joining with the Massachusetts in feasting and trading, they conducted a surprise massacre of their own among the natives. During this murderous affair Captain Standish cut off the head of one Massachusetts brave of some renown for his previous insults to the Pilgrims and took it back to Plymouth where he stuck it on a pole for all to see. After that it was much too dangerous for Weston’s traders to remain at Wessagusset.

The following year Sir Ferdinando Gorges’ son, Captain Robert Gorges, with a commission from the Council of New England as general governor of the country brought over some people and occupied Wessagusset as a fur-trading post. But things did not go well for him either. Gorges soon abandoned the place and his people scattered, some going to Virginia. A few, however, remained in the vicinity and set up a trading post at Nantasket (Hull) which was made permanent by the frequent addition of discontents from Plymouth.

Still later, in 1625, a shipload of colonists, composed mostly of indentured servants under the command of a Captain Wollaston, came to Boston Bay. The captain set up a trading post close by Wessagusset at Quincy. By 1627 he too had given up. The difficulties, whether of the Pilgrims’ secret connivance or not, were too great. He gathered up most of the servants and sailed for Virginia where he sold their indentures at a very good profit.