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Title: Pelts and palisades: The story of fur and the rivalry for pelts in early America

Author: Nathaniel C. Hale

Illustrator: Elmo Jones

Release date: July 17, 2022 [eBook #68540]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Deitz Press, Incorporated, 1959

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PELTS AND PALISADES: THE STORY OF FUR AND THE RIVALRY FOR PELTS IN EARLY AMERICA ***





The Author


Nathaniel C. Hale graduated from the United States Military Academy
at West Point in 1925. After serving in the Army, he resigned his
commission to enter business, but joined the Army again on the outbreak
of World War II. He was Commandant of an Officers Training School prior
to overseas duty with the Signal Corps. Since the war, Colonel Hale has
become well known as an author and historian. In 1952 he received the
annual award of the Society of Colonial Wars in New York for his book,
VIRGINIA VENTURER, which was cited as the outstanding contribution of
the year in the field of American colonial history. Colonel Hale and
his wife, both of Southern birth, make their home in the Rittenhouse
Square section of Philadelphia and spend part of their summers at their
cottage in Cape May, New Jersey.




_PELTS and PALISADES_




By the Same Author


VIRGINIA VENTURER

_A Biography of William Claiborne 1600-1677_

[Illustration: THE FUR TRADE FURNISHED THE MEANS OF CONTACT BETWEEN
WIDELY DIVERGENT CULTURES.]




  _PELTS and PALISADES_

  THE STORY OF FUR
  and the
  Rivalry for Pelts in Early America

  _By_

  _Nathaniel C. Hale_

  [Illustration]

  RICHMOND, VA.
  THE DIETZ PRESS, INCORPORATED




  COPYRIGHT BY
  NATHANIEL C. HALE

  © 1959


  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




To My Grandchildren




_Preface_


The story of fur is as old as the story of man. Some brief account of
ancient man’s quest for fur is included in the beginning of this book.
However, the main narrative is concerned with the rivalry for pelts in
early America.

The discoverers of our country came here looking for gold. They found
it in fur. After that the fur trade formed the pattern of exploration,
trade and settlement. It sustained the colonies along the Atlantic
seaboard until they could be rooted in agriculture and it was a
controlling factor in the westward movement of our population.

In the seventeenth century there was a seemingly insatiable demand in
Europe for beaver pelts, inflated in no small degree by early laws
prohibiting the use of cheaper furs in hat making. Since there was an
apparently inexhaustible supply of these pelts in America, the fur
trade quickly became the economic lifeblood of the colonies. On it was
laid the cornerstone of American commerce.

On it, too, was laid the cornerstone of European imperialism on
this continent, the prosecution of which was largely motivated by
the energies of the mercantile classes of the nations involved.
The merchants, their factors, and the fur traders, shaped colonial
policies. The statesmen only signed the implementing documents.

It was the trader in quest of beaver who first met and conducted
diplomatic relations with the Indians and who first challenged the
claims of competing nations. Indeed, it was this fur trader in the
wilderness, making allies and building palisaded trading posts, or
forts, who determined colonial borders and who largely influenced the
outcome of the imperialistic struggle for the continent.

That struggle culminated in the French and Indian War and that is the
event which ends the story in this book. _Pelts and Palisades_ does not
pretend to be a comprehensive study of the early American fur trade.
Its only intent is to illustrate in narrative form the significant
effect of that trade on the genesis of America and the westward
movement of its people.

Included in the narrative are frank accounts of merchants and
traders among our founding fathers who built their fortunes or their
reputations on fur. As all the men who were prominent in this activity
could not be named, only meaningful case histories that point up the
pattern of the early fur trade have been cited. Fortunately, there are
local histories, county and state, that do name most of these truly
pioneer Americans and credit them with their individual accomplishments.

The era of the early fur trade, typified by the white trader and
the Indian hunter, began drawing to a close after the French and
Indian War. The white trader then became the trapper and a whole new
conception of the fur trade in America developed as the frontier rolled
across the plains and on to the Rocky Mountains. Today we may be on the
threshold of still another era, that of the fur farmer.

In any case the fur industry continues to be big business in this
country, total activity at all levels--raw furs, dressing and dyeing,
and retail sales--being estimated at about one billion dollars. After
exporting some twenty million dollars worth of domestic pelts, the
United States annually consumes around two hundred million dollars
worth of raw furs altogether--this, according to a recent bulletin of
the Department of Commerce. About fifty percent of this consumption is
imported.

Our imports are chiefly Persian lamb and caracul, mink, rabbit and
squirrel. While the fur farms of this country produce great quantities
of mink, fox, chinchilla and nutria, our principal domestic production
of wild furs consists of muskrat, opossum, raccoon and mink. All other
wild furs including “King Beaver” of colonial times run far behind this
field.

Curiously enough, the lowly, unwanted muskrat of the seventeenth
century is now the “King” of the wild furs. Its main domicile is the
State of Louisiana. Because of the muskrat’s residence there Louisiana
produces many more pelts, all fur-bearing animals included, than any
other state in the union. Southern Louisiana is in fact one of the
most important fur producing areas on our continent. In that section
alone there are approximately twenty thousand local trappers of
muskrat, mink, otter and raccoon.

Altogether there are two million full or part-time trappers in the
United States, bringing in about twenty million pelts a year. There
are also some twenty thousand or more fur farms contributing several
million pelts annually, although fur farming had its inception in this
country not much more than thirty-five years ago. Additionally, there
are the raw fur imports. To transform all these pelts into dressed and
dyed furs and retail them to milady calls for the services of thousands
of additional people at manufacturing, jobbing and dealer levels.

Even as in ancient times such a great outpouring of commercial energy
and money for fur is mainly decreed by fashion. The arbiters of fashion
are fickle of course, but at a recent showing of designer collections
for women in New York it was said that fur and fur trimmings were
everywhere, with mink currently in most popular favor. As one newspaper
correspondent reported, hats were made of fur or trimmed with it; coats
were collared, cuffed, bordered or lined with it; suits wore wide
fur collars and revers; and evening gowns had deep hemline borders
of fur. And not so long ago in the _New York Times_ appeared a full
page advertisement for a chair upholstered in fur, “the world’s most
sumptuous hostess chair ... lavished with the enchanting elegance of
genuine mink!”

The author wishes to acknowledge the many kindnesses of those who
have been helpful to him. He is much indebted to the staffs of the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
He is also indebted to members of the General Society of Colonial Wars,
the Netherlands Society, the Colonial Society of Pennsylvania and the
Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia who have assisted
him in many ways. From papers he has delivered before these groups has
come much of the material used in this book. The author is also very
grateful to Professor Arthur Adams of Boston, Massachusetts for his
criticism and advice.

A bibliography of the works consulted in the preparation of the
manuscript is appended, special acknowledgement being due to Doctor
Amandus Johnson of Philadelphia for his published documentations of the
Swedish fur trade in the Delaware valley.

And, to his wife, Eliska, the writer of this book is very thankful for
her patient understanding during the many week ends that he spent on
the manuscript.

  NATHANIEL C. HALE

 _Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1959._




_CONTENTS_


                                                        _Page_

  PREFACE                                                  vii

  _Chapter_

     I. ROYAL ROBES AND BEAVER HATS                          1

    II. VIKINGS AND SKRAELINGS IN VINLAND                   16

   III. CODFISH LAND SPAWNS A FUR FRONTIER                  24

    IV. SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN LIGHTS A BLAZE OF RED TERROR    37

     V. ENGLAND MOVES TO EXTEND HER REALM                   44

    VI. CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH TAKES TO TRADE                   57

   VII. THE DUTCH PROFIT BY A MUTINY                        67

  VIII. CONCEPTION OF NEW ENGLAND                           82

    IX. THE PILGRIMS RELY ON GOD AND BEAVER                 91

     X. A BORDER FIXED ON THE COAST OF MAINE               107

    XI. THE BAY OF VIRGINIA                                114

   XII. KENT ISLAND AND THE BACKSIDE OF VIRGINIA           124

  XIII. NEW NETHERLAND’S SOUTH RIVER                       135

   XIV. SWEDISH INTERLUDE ON THE DELAWARE                  147

    XV. NEW NETHERLAND THREATENED WITHOUT AND WITHIN       164

   XVI. THE ENGLISH CLOSE THEIR COASTAL RANKS              180

  XVII. WESTWARD THE FUR FRONTIER OF AMERICA               186

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS                        205

  INDEX                                                    209




_PELTS and PALISADES_

  _Friend, once ’twas Fame that led thee forth
  To brave the Tropic Heat, the Frozen North;
  Late it was Gold, then Beauty was the Spur;
  But now our gallants venture but for Fur._

  JOHN DRYDEN, 1672.




I

_Royal Robes and Beaver Hats_


It might be said that man’s first true possession was the fur skin of
an animal.

Prehistoric mankind prowled the earth seeking food, shelter and
mates--only those needs intended by nature to preserve him and to
perpetuate his species. He had no accumulated wealth. Even his first
crude weapons, rocks and sticks, were expendable. He had nothing
material to treasure until he began to acquire coverings for his body.

Body coverings must have become useful to primitive man in the last
glacial period, during the very evolution of human society. His
earliest needs were doubtless served by the pelts of such cold-climate
animals as the reindeer and the bear. Once _Homo sapiens_, stretched
out on the floor of a chilly cave, experienced the warmth of fur skins
accumulated from these animals that he had eaten, it could have been
but a short step to using pelts as clothing. All the world was not cold
however.

In the middle latitudes early man knew little of thickly furred
animals, and had less need for warm garments. He used foliage, grasses
and eventually goat and sheep skins as skirts to hide his uncleanness.
It was probably no more than modesty, a primal sense of shame, that
first prompted him to cover himself. Later, as he learned to shape
and weave and to appreciate his art, he fashioned his clothing for
adornment.

Then it was that pelts stripped from bowed chiefs of the colder
countries came to be prized as rarities of beauty and usefulness, as
kingly trophies. Conquerors adopted them as ornaments and symbols of
victory and power. Fur became prime loot. For many generations of man,
while contacts between peoples remained essentially war-like, prize
pelts from the farthest corners of the known world were brought home by
warriors as evidence of their prowess and as tribute to their rulers.

Some rulers among the rising civilizations of the ancient world made
extravagant use of fur skins, especially the brightly hued pelts of the
big cats.

Tradition has it that the voluptuous Assyrian queen, Semiramis,
acquired eight thousand tiger skins during a plundering campaign in
India. Presumably, much of this loot was used to decorate the palace
and hanging gardens of sinful Babylon which this storied enchantress is
supposed to have founded.

Pharaohs and high priests of ancient Egypt used quantities of lion,
leopard and panther skins as ornamental and ceremonial pieces. Men of
high position draped these colorful pelts over their shoulders, tying
the paws in the back with ribbons. The tail of the lion was appended
animal-fashion by pharaohs to impart the beast’s qualities to the
wearer, and warriors stretched their frame-wood shields with leopard
skins. Extant today is a wall painting on a tomb of the eighteenth
dynasty which shows tax-paying Ethiopians bearing their tribute of
pelts to an Egyptian king.

And, when barter finally joined hands with a war as a better means
of contact between peoples, it was fur that helped bring it about.
Evidence of such military commerce emerges from the mists of Greek
antiquity. The legend of Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece is
in all likelihood the fanciful story of a fur trading expedition in the
thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C.

Some students of Greek mythology interpret the Golden Fleece as
symbolism of one kind or another. However, it is specifically
identified in the legend as the pelt of a golden ram and ornamental
pelts are shown in archaic bas-reliefs to have been an integral part of
Greek culture.

The perils encountered by Jason and his adventurers, as first related
by them, were probably intended to point up the difficulties of
their achievement and to help guard the secrets of their trade-route
discoveries. No doubt Greek hero worship contributed to the subsequent
embellishment of the legend. But, if like most other folk tradition
this epic of the Argonauts had its origin in some simple fact now
obscured by the telling, that fact must lie in the Golden Fleece
itself. Certainly, without its existence in some form, as the object of
the voyage, there would be no motivation--no story.

But of course there is a story, and a good one, even after eliminating
the delightful folk-tale embroidery.

For recognition of his right to the throne Prince Jason of Greece
bargained with his crafty uncle, King Pelias, to go on a dangerous
voyage to the Euxine Sea in search of the Golden Fleece. Jason planned
well. All the gods and great heroes of Greece came to his assistance.
With Juno’s help a ship called the _Argo_ was built for the expedition.
According to the legend it was capable of holding over fifty men, but
the building of a ship to accommodate half that number would have been
a gigantic accomplishment for those days. After manning the _Argo_ with
heroes selected for their particular talents in sailing, fighting and
overcoming special dangers of the voyage, Jason set out on his quest.

The Argonauts were involved in many perilous adventures after they left
Greece. Nevertheless, they negotiated the treacherous straits at the
entrance to the Euxine Sea and followed its shore until at great length
they came to the country of Colchis. There they bargained and fought
against tremendous odds for the Golden Fleece, much the same as fur
trading adventurers who crossed another unknown sea to a New World some
three thousand years or more later.

But, when Jason returned with the treasure and placed it at the feet
of Pelias, the king became very wrathful. It seems the fleece was no
longer golden.

This is entirely believable, whether it was lambskin or something else.
Assuredly, prime lambskin, even a mutated sort, could have had no more
lustre than royal baum marten, ermine, sealskin or other fine pelts
available to Jason in the region he had visited.

In any event Pelias thought he had a good excuse not to keep his end of
the bargain with Jason, a common enough denouement in itself, one that
has been acted out untold times in both history and fiction.

That is the plot of the legend, as related only to the probable fact
of the fleece’s existence. How the fleece came into being, that is,
how the golden ram descended from the heavens first into Greece and
then betook himself to the far off country of Colchis to be slaughtered
for his radiant coat, all would seem to lie in the realm of pure myth.
So would many other imaginative passages of the legend as recited
variously by bards who have embroidered on the tale. And, of course,
the episodic adventures of the Argonauts have little or no bearing on
the plot.

The story in its origin does appear to have been simply that of a
Greek expedition bent on military commerce in the Black Sea, the first
organized fur trading voyage in recorded history.

From the ancient Greeks, too, comes the English word which describes
the fur skin of an animal. Pelt, a contraction of peltry from the old
Anglo-French _pelterie_, is derived from the Greek _pelta_. A _pelta_
was a half shield made of the skin of an animal. It was carried by the
warriors of Greece and later by the Romans. A foot soldier armed with a
_pelta_ and a short spear or javelin was called a _peltast_. Hence also
the verb pelt, used to indicate repeated blows by striking or hurling
missiles, as against a _pelta_.

Although the Greeks had competition on occasion from the Persians and
others, they drove a great trade in the Black Sea for over a thousand
years. At the Bosphorus they founded Byzantium, one of the world’s best
known emporiums. Great quantities of fur trimmings for the tall bonnets
and robes of the Mesopotamians were traded there. The felting used so
extensively by the Scythians, as well as the valuable pelts which the
Israelites used as temple decorations and as offerings to the deity,
all passed through this famous fur market. And of course from Byzantium
came the pelts which the Greeks themselves used so extravagantly as
house decorations and body raiment, especially battle dress.

After the Romans took over Greece’s trade, they in turn carried on a
brisk commerce in pelts through Byzantium where lambskin, marten, sable
and ermine were exacted in vast quantities as tribute.

The market for pelts expanded tremendously under Rome’s driving demand
for luxuries. From the Slavic steppes and forests and from the shores
of the Black and Caspian Seas came all manner of pelts. Furs of the
finest quality--pure white ermine, black fox and silvery sable--along
with silks and gems, came by trade caravan from Mongolia and Cathay,
across the Asian wastes. Down the Nile from deep in Africa travelled
Ethiopians bearing their lion and leopard skins. Arabian traders,
having learned the law of the monsoon winds, crossed the Indian Ocean
to bring prime pelts as well as spices and other riches from Hindustan
and the Malay Archipelago to the Mediterranean.

Italy was the main center of the world’s commerce in pelts, with the
Romans reaching out not only for the far eastern trade in precious fur
such as sable and ermine but into northern Europe, to Flanders and even
into Scandinavia for beaver, otter and bear--and for more ermine. For
ermine was becoming the garment of state wherever royalty held court,
pure white ermine being held in highest esteem. Demand for this regal
fur far exceeded the means of supply. Not until the Germanic hordes
cycloned down from the north did the impetus of this Italian trade in
fine pelts abate.

Then all trade, culture, and even most western knowledge of the world,
shrank almost into oblivion. The Dark Ages settled down upon civilized
Europe.

       *       *       *       *       *

It took the impact of Mohammed’s vicious attack on Christendom and
Islam’s subsequent conquests in the Mediterranean to stir the western
world from its lethargy. The resulting Holy Crusades awakened curiosity
about Moslem luxuries and better ways of living. Western trade was
restimulated; merchants again began bidding up fine furs.

There was a new, stepped-up demand for ermine pelts by dignitaries of
the Church and other nobility. Fashion came to require quantities of
mantles and robes of the royal white, as whole systems of protocol on
the use of ermine were established. To indicate rank on state occasions
the lustrous white robes of the nobility were often decorated with the
ermine’s black tail tips or the paws of the black lamb. Decrees were
issued permitting peers to wear trimmings of the white fur on their
scarlet gowns. And, king and judge having originated as one, it was but
natural that the judiciary came to be permitted the use of white ermine
as the badge of high legal dignity, of purity.

The ermine, a slim little animal of the weasel family which produces a
semi-durable pelt of soft, glossy fur, is thought to have gotten its
name from Armenia, a fur center in ancient times. Medieval writers
often referred to the ermine as the Armenian rat. However it was the
breed inhabiting the northern latitudes of Asia that was most sought
after because of its snow-white fur.

In winter the live ermine’s coat ranges from creamy white in northern
Europe to pure white in parts of Siberia; the tip of its tail is always
black. During the summer the white fur usually darkens in varying
degrees to a yellowish brown except for the underparts of the animal’s
body. Medieval nobility’s choicest ermine pelts were those which were
all pure white, except of course for the black tail tips. Because these
came from Siberia they could be obtained only through eastern trade
channels.

To make terminal contacts with these eastern channels eager Italian
merchants risked their fortunes and their very lives. Eventually, like
most frontier traders, they won through by individual enterprise.
Commerce with the Moslems was a hazardous business however, even after
two rising emporiums of Italy, Genoa and Venice, built armed navies to
support it. But bartering and warring, sometimes between themselves,
the Genoese and the Venetians extended their trade and their navies
gained complete control of the Mediterranean, to make it once more the
main western highway of Eurasian commerce.

These encounters, with the Arabs and the ancient cultures they had
preserved, eventually reawakened a long dead interest in the far east
too. In the thirteenth century the Venetian traveler, Marco Polo,
penetrated beyond the Moslem barrier to the East, visited the Great
Kublai Khan in Cathay and returned to write a wondrous tale about what
he had seen in the Orient.

There was gold plate, and there were sapphires, rubies, emeralds and
pearls to be had in the far eastern countries, just as the ancients had
said. For proof, road-weary Marco Polo brought home with him samples
of these jewels sewed in the linings of his tattered clothing. Also,
in plenteous variety in the East he had found spices for seasoning
and deodorizing, commodities for which all Europe yearned desperately
during the middle ages.

And, Polo reported glowingly, there were silks, and priceless furs!

The clothes of the wealthy Tartars in the far east were for the most
part of gold and silk stuffs, lined with costly furs, such as sable
and ermine and black fox, in the richest manner. Robes of vair were
much to be seen also. These consisted of hundreds of tiny Siberian
squirrel pelts, the grey backs and white bellies of which were joined
together checker fashion. In winter the Tartars wore two gowns of
pelts, one with the soft, comforting fur inward next to their skin, and
the other with the fur outward to defend them against wind and snow.

Sable was esteemed the queen of furs in Mongolia. The dark,
silver-tipped fur of the Siberian sable was thick and silky, the
leather thin. According to Polo prime sable pelts, scarcely sufficient
to line a mantle, were often worth two thousand besants of gold.

However, ermine appears to have been preferred in India where
Ibn-Batootah, a famous Moorish traveller of the fourteenth century,
reported an ermine pelisse was worth a thousand dinars, or rupees,
whereas a pelisse of sable was worth only four hundred at the time.

In any case these two aristocrats of the weasel family, sable and
ermine, depending on the quality of their pelts, vied for favor among
the lords of the east, as did to some extent the rare black fox of the
icy regions in the far north.

Polo said that when the Grand Khan of the Tartar Empire quit his palace
for the chase he took ten thousand retainers with him, including his
sons, the nobles of his court, his ladies, falconers and life guards.
For this entourage great tents were provided, appointed luxuriously and
stretched with silken ropes. The Khan’s sleeping tents and audience
pavilions were covered on the outside with the skins of lions, streaked
white, black and red, and so well joined together that no wind or rain
could penetrate. On the inside they were lined with the costly pelts of
ermines and sables. The Venetian marvelled at the skill and taste with
which the inlaying of the pelts was accomplished.

When this intrepid adventurer travelled into northern Mongolia he
found the country alive with traders and merchants. “The Merchants to
buy their Furres, for fourteene dayes journey thorow the Desart, have
set up for each day a house of Wood, where they abide and barter; and
in Winter they use Sleds without wheeles, and plaine in the bottome,
rising with a semi-circle at the top or end, drawne easily on the Ice
by beasts like great Dogs six yoked by couples, the Sledman only with
his Merchant and Furres sitting therein.”

These fur traders showed the Venetian huge pelts, “twentie palms long,”
taken from the white bear in the far north. That was the Region of
Darkness, so-called because for “the most part of the Winter moneths
the Sun appeares not, and the Ayre is thick and darkish.” There, Polo
was told, the natives were pale, had no prince and lived like beasts.
But in the polar summer when there was continuous daylight they caught
multitudes of large black foxes, ermines, martens and sables.

Ibn-Batootah, who later travelled this country, told how the traders
bartered with the mysterious inhabitants of the far north.

After encamping near the borders of the Region of Darkness the traders
would deposit their bartering goods in a likely spot and return to
their quarters. The next day on returning to the same place they might
find beside their goods the skins of sable, ermine and other valuable
furs. If a trader was satisfied with what he found, he took it; if not,
he left it there. In the latter case the inhabitants of the Region
of Darkness might then on another visit increase the amount of their
deposit, or as often happened, they might pick up their furs and leave
the goods of the foreign merchant untouched.

So far as the traders were concerned these people of the far north with
whom they bartered might as well have been ghosts. The traders never
saw them.

The pelts of all the polar animals were lusher and finer and
consequently much more valuable than those found in the districts
inhabited by the Tartars. Because of this the Tartars were often
induced to undertake plundering expeditions in the Region of Darkness
for furs, as well as for domesticated animals kept by the natives
there. Invariably, it appears, the inhabitants simply sought safety
in flight from the raiders, putting up no fight and never showing
themselves.

Marco Polo said that lest the Tartar raiders lose their way during the
long winter night, “they ride on Mares which have Colts sucking which
they leave with a Guard at the entrance of that Countrey, where the
Light beginneth to faile, and when they have taken their prey give
reynes to the Mares, which hasten to their Colts.” Continuing, he said
that from this northern region came “many of the finest Furres of which
I have heard some are brought into Russia.”

About the mysteries of Russia, Polo learned little. But he was certain
that it was of vast extent, bordering in the north on the Region of
Darkness and reaching to the “Ocean Sea.” Although there were many fine
and valuable furs there, such as sable, it was not a land of trade he
reported.

How wrong he was about that!

       *       *       *       *       *

German merchants were long since firmly established with fur factories
in Russia, and Norse sea-rovers had first tapped the trade of that land
hundreds of years earlier.

During the dark centuries when western Europe was sinking in despair
fierce Vikings in their horned helmets were traversing the Slavic
lands, plundering as they went and dropping Arabian, Byzantine and
Anglo-Saxon coins which later marked their routes. By way of the Volga
and the Dvina the Norsemen brought back far-eastern spices and pearls
obtained on the shores of the Caspian Sea in exchange for amber and
tin. But chiefly they transported skins. They bartered Baltic furs for
lustrous Oriental pelts and frequently used both slaves and coinage as
media of exchange. By way of the Dneiper and other rivers they even
traded on the Black Sea, and at Byzantium, portaging their dragon boats
from stream to stream with marvelous facility.

In the ninth century the Norsemen established a truly great trading
city of their own at Novgorod. It was located on a table-land where
four main waterways of Russia converged to form trade routes to the
Caspian, Black and Baltic Seas. Here the Vikings, inter-marrying with
the natives, settled down and prospered in the riches of their commerce
with the farthest corners of the world. Furs and other oriental
luxuries, cloths, honey, spices, metals, and the wax consumed in such
quantities by the Christians, all passed through their hands.

Rurik, the Norse leader of these Russified Scandinavians, or
Varangians, built a castle and a fort at Novgorod in 862 to protect
the independence of the surrounding province, and thus was laid the
foundation of Russia.

An ancient chronicler tells also of the wicked, fabulous trading city
of Julin at the mouth of the Oder River on the Baltic Sea. The Saxons
called it Winetha (Venice). It was inhabited mainly by pagan Slavs. But
there were Norsemen there too, and in fact anyone could live and trade
in this emporium of the north so long as he didn’t declare himself a
Christian. Julin disappeared at an unknown date beneath the water due
to the encroachments of the sea. Trusting in the wealth of its trade
and despising God, it went the way of Sodom and Gomorrha according to
Christian bards.

In the eleventh century whatever did remain of Julin belonged to the
Christian Germans. German merchants, crossing the Elbe from the west,
colonized the Oder valley and other Slavic lands on the shores of the
Baltic. At Thorn in Poland they exchanged cloth and other goods for
ermine, sable, fox and calabar (grey squirrel). They even penetrated
Russia deeply for trade. At Novgorod they had a fur trading settlement
active enough to prompt expressive protestations from the pious Canon
Adam of Bremen.

“Pelts are plentiful as dung” in Russia, he wrote, but they are “for
our damnation, as I believe, for _per fas et nefas_ we strive as hard
to come into the possession of a marten skin as if it were everlasting
salvation.” According to him it was from this evil source in Russia
“that the deadly sin of luxurious pride” had overspread the west.

Indeed, by comparison with the self-mortifying Christian standards of
the time, luxury in dress was very pronounced among the rising German
merchants and their wives. It was even more so among the men than among
the women. The most conservative patricians and councillors wore cloth
hoods ostentatiously trimmed with beaver and other fine fur, and long
fur cloaks of exquisite quality. So proud were they of their finery
that the Councillors of Bremen once forged a document pretending to
prove that Godfrey of Bouillon during the First Crusade had vested them
with the right to wear fur and gold chains.

The Church frowned upon the use of fur by the laity or any except the
highest ecclesiastics. In fact, since early in medieval times the
wearing of fur by the common man had been regulated by severe laws. But
even among the Christians a man’s wealth and standing permitted its use
in some degree. As always in the past, fur was a symbol of power and
prestige. And, these German merchants were becoming a real power as
they gained a monopoly of the Baltic trade.

They formed a strong federation of the towns they had founded at the
river mouths along the south shore of their sea. Their luggers plied
the North Sea and the Thames in Britain. At Wisby on the important
Isle of Gothland they early established an emporium. From the first
Christian centuries barbarian Gothland had been the most active center
of Baltic trade. Now it was under the control of this Hanseatic League
of German cities which dominated the Baltic Sea and was soon permitting
no carrying bottoms there other than its own.

In the thirteenth century the enterprising Hansa towns had monopolistic
trade factories established not only in England and Scandinavia, and at
Novgorod in Russia, but at Pleskow and perhaps even at Moscow. Their
fur traders penetrated to the White Sea. Within another century they
had extended their operations beyond the Urals into Siberia as far as
Tobolsk and the River Taz. By then their bold assurance had gained them
factories or the protection of trade-guild concessions in Flanders,
France and Portugal. They were granted concessions even in Venice,
their great Italian rival, whose own trading galleys were in turn
annually invading England and Flanders.

But cruelty and haughtiness were born of the Hansa’s strength and
pride, and lasting enmities resulted.

German arrogance met its first tests at Novgorod. There the Hansa
traders incurred the everlasting resentment of the Russians, who in
an effort to cope with mounting indignities resorted to cheating the
Germans at every opportunity. Buying furs was risky business except
in well-lighted places where it was easy to test quality. Resentments
often flared into conflict, and the factory in Novgorod became a kind
of hostile encampment.

In spite of reduced returns, however, the Hansa merchants clung
tenaciously to their trading privileges in Russia for some time.
Not until Ivan the Terrible crushed the independent provinces and
consolidated the Russian Empire were the Germans finally driven out--in
the sixteenth century.

Then the Scandinavian powers revolted against the Hansa monopolies and
the cruelties of the Germans within their borders. During the wars
that followed the power of the Hanseatic League declined rapidly. With
feudalism breaking up on the continent in western Europe, men had been
freed for competitive commerce. It was the time of the Renaissance
and trading impulses were quickening everywhere. New maritime states,
sensing opportunity, had already risen to challenge the monopoly in the
Baltic. Danes, Dutch and even the commercially-retarded English had
been competing for the prize.

In England as early as 1404 a group of merchant adventurers organized
a company to carry trade to Baltic cities. But as it turned out the
agricultural English were not ready, for, although their sailors and
traders fought savagely during piratical encounters in the Baltic,
at home they were still hindered by their feudal system, a system
against which the Germans had early rebelled as being incompatible
with commercial enterprise. The absence of a large middle class, of
sufficient urban community life in England, forestalled any real
commerce.

The backward Englishmen didn’t have anything but lead, tin and cheap
skins to export, and they had to buy back some of that, reworked, at a
premium. On the continent at the time there was a saying: “We buy fox
skins from the English for a groat, and re-sell them the foxes’ tails
for a guilder.”

The Danes, situated strategically to cut the Baltic trade lane, fared
much better than the English. But in the end it was the Dutch who
succeeded the Hansa in carrying trade. The main lane of traffic from
Bruges in Flanders, over the North Sea, around the Danish peninsular,
and through the Baltic to Russia belonged eventually to Holland. So did
the remnants of the Hansa’s former fur trade at Novgorod.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dutch requirements for skins mounted rapidly with the coming of the
Renaissance. Even a brisk market for worn, discarded and inferior
pelts was maintained in Holland. The pinch for pelts came about as a
result of a tremendously stepped-up demand for fur in manufacture--in
the felting of hats!

In Holland, as in other countries crawling out of the Dark Ages, beaver
skin had been permitted as headgear to almost all who could afford it.
Beginning with the time that the wearing of hats became fashionable in
Europe this costly fur was used extensively for that purpose by people
of means. It would appear, in fact, that in England from the time of
Chaucer the word _beaver_ was practically synonymous with _hat_.

Now, felt hats, which had brims and other advantages over those
fashioned from pelts, were being pressed out in quantity by the
trade-conscious Dutch for world commerce. Dutch beavers, they were
called, and they came in a variety of shapes and quality.

Due to the peculiar matting quality of fur filaments, felting had been
a profitable manufacturing art for centuries. The Greeks had practiced
it. The Mongolians of Kublai Khan’s time used felt matting for tents;
rich Tartars sometimes furred their robes with pelluce or silk shag.
The Normans who wore felted articles of dress brought the art to
England.

Fur is made up of short, barbed hairs that are downy and inclined to
curl. Matting or felting, which would expose a live animal to cold and
storm, is prevented in most animal coats by relatively stiffer guard
hairs lying alongside the fur filaments and keeping them separated.
But, the ancients had learned that by first plucking the coarser guard
hairs from a pelt, the downy fur that remained could easily be removed
from the hide, processed, pressed into felt mats and blocked into any
shape.

Although many other furs were used in the manufacture of hats, the
best felts were of beaver. For one thing they were practically
indestructible. Discarded beaver hats could be worked over and made
like new. Then, a new method of combing out the fur filaments of the
beaver pelt was developed, to better utilize the skins. This left the
pelts with the guard hairs to be worked into stoles for clerics and
officials, and the combed-out fur fibers of course for the manufacture
of hats.

Dutch beavers for both men and women found their way to England, to
Baltic countries, to France, Portugal and into the Mediterranean.
These, as well as other products of the north, were eagerly sought
in trade-hungry Venice, until recently the mistress of a thriving
Mediterranean carrying trade.

Venice had reached this position of trade eminence in the Mediterranean
after a bitter, hundred years’ war to eliminate Genoa as her rival.
The most savage of the battles between the fine navies of these two
medieval states had been fought over the Black Sea fur trade. But then
the Turks, taking Constantinople in 1453, erected a toll-gate at this
ancient Eurasian cross-roads, and the bite they took as middlemen all
but stagnated world trade through the Mediterranean.

To make matters worse, the Portuguese, who had been exploring the south
Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa
in 1488. An alternative route to India and Malaya had been discovered!

But, although Italy’s hold on the fur trade and other oriental
traffic was broken, her own need for fine pelts and luxuries had not
diminished. Italian coffers were overflowing with the riches of past
commercial glory, while a golden age of elegance was blossoming in
Europe for those who could afford it.

One of the keynotes of the Renaissance, as illustrated in the art and
literature of the time, was an increasing appreciation of beautiful
furs. Throughout the western world wealthy women took to adorning
themselves with expensive pelts. If, as was said at the time, the
ermined luxury of a Queen of France was cast into the shade by the
furred splendor of a matron of Bruges, much more could have been
claimed for the oft-wed daughter of Pope Alexander in Italy.

When this young lady, Lucretia Borgia, was married to her fourth
husband, Alfonso de Ferrara, furs competed with jewels in dazzling
array. Although the marriage was celebrated by proxy, the
twenty-two-year-old bride wore a diadem of diamonds, thirty strings
of splendid pearls, a gown of ruby velvet edged with sable, and a
cloth-of-gold train lined with ermine. According to Sanuto, the
Venetian diarist, it took ten mules to carry the boxes containing
the furs of her trousseau, there being no less than forty-five robes
trimmed and lined with sable, ermine, rabbit, wolf and marten.

[Illustration: IN EUROPE THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS DEMAND FOR BEAVER FUR
IN THE MANUFACTURE OF FELT HATS.]

With the need for such elegance, it is small wonder that the cooped-up
western world, alive and vigorous by then, hailed the Portuguese
discovery of a new spice route to the East Indies and began casting
about in every direction for passages to the even greater riches of
Cathay.




II

_Vikings and Skraelings in Vinland_


By the closing years of the fifteenth century, not only were the
mercantile classes of western Europe thoroughly awake to the
possibilities of world trade, but a good number of other people were
beginning to think for themselves about the world around them.

If one could cross by land to China, which itself faced on the sea,
there must be ways to reach that fabulous country by skirting the land
masses of the world. In that manner the Portuguese had discovered an
all-water route to India and Malaya. Or, was there the possibility of
an even more direct passage to both China and the Indies by sailing
straight west across the ocean?

The ancients had said the world was a globe. Hundreds of years
before Christ, Greek philosophers were sure the world was round. One
of them, Eratosthenes, calculated the earth’s circumference to be
40,000 kilometers (amazingly enough today, within 9 kilometers of the
meridional figure!) And Strabo, a geographer who lived in the first
century, recorded that if it were not for lack of sailing equipment to
negotiate the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean one could travel from
Spain to India by keeping to the same parallel.

Of course this did not agree with the teachings of the scriptures which
spoke of the “four corners of the earth.” All during the dark ages
ignorant clerics of the Church preferred to think of the world as a
flat platter and pretended to forbid a contrary conception because it
did not conform with the Bible. The low level of western culture had
blindly accepted the thesis that the inner edges of this platter-like
world were inhabited by monstrous creatures, and beyond the edges--a
bottomless gulf!

On such grounds most people of the western world still resisted any
notion that the world was round. But there was a question in the minds
of many.

The Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Arabs had navigated the waters
of the Atlantic--so had the Irish and the Vikings who long since
discovered and colonized “islands” across the western sea--all
without falling off the edges of the world. The Arabs, even now, were
making the globes they had made for centuries for their sailors and
traders. Many learned men in the west, geographers and scientists,
were confident that the world was round; only recently at scholarly
Nuremberg a fine globe had been completed showing Asia right across
from Spain.

If there were “islands” they could be skirted, large though some
of them might be according to the legends and the sagas of ancient
mariners. Christopher Columbus, the Genoese sailor, must have heard
about these western islands at Iceland when he visited that old
Irish-Norse settlement in 1477. Certainly he must have heard much about
Greenland.

Greenland, a continent-like island in the west, had been colonized by
several thousand Norsemen in the tenth century under the leadership of
a red-headed, murderous Icelander named Eric Thorvaldson. From there
two of his sons, Leif and Thorvald, an illegitimate daughter named
Freydis, and a former daughter-in-law, Gudrid, with her new husband
Thorfinn Karlsefni, set out on even more daring trading and colonizing
expeditions to other great islands--“the western lands of the world.”

First, Leif, whose conversion to Christianity against his pagan
father’s will may have had something to do with his wish to get away,
made landings in America in 1003. To Leif it was “White Man’s Land”
or “Great Ireland,” for he knew that Christian Irish had preceded him
there. There is in fact some evidence today that Celtic missionaries
in staunch, hide-covered coracles, and others too, had been crossing
the sea and making settlements in America for five hundred years before
Leif Ericson sailed west from Greenland. But Leif’s visit is recorded
with much more credibleness.

In the tradition of his Viking ancestors Leif and his crew of
thirty-five men visited Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and appear to
have made their camp for the winter on Cape Cod where they built a
good house. There they leisurely cut timber and gathered vines for
cargo back to treeless Greenland. Some of the crew shaped a new mast
from a tall tree for their dragon ship. Others collected peltries. All
marvelled at the mildness of the new country’s climate.

Leif called the land surrounding his camp site “Vinland,” probably
because of the abundance of the greenbrier vines which grew there.
These made strong, flexible rope material when stripped of their thorns
and stranded together. On the other hand the name “Vinland” may have
been derived from the grape-vines and wineberries discovered there by
Leif’s family retainer, a “southerner” called Tyrker. If this slave
came originally from the Mediterranean area as his name might indicate
he may well have been the first to recognize grapes and demonstrate
their usefulness.

One thing is certain however; the addition of wine to Leif’s already
valuable cargo, when he embarked for Greenland the following year, made
his expedition most exciting--one to be emulated!

Ambitious Thorvald Ericson, for one, did not feel that the western
lands had been sufficiently explored by his brother. He set out in 1004
and spent two years in Vinland investigating the coasts and rivers. In
his Viking ship, the same one that Leif had used, the sagas seem to
say that he ranged north of Cape Cod along the Maine coast and south
through Long Island Sound.

The natives Thorvald met on his voyage were surprised whenever possible
and liquidated without quarter. Skraelings, he called them, meaning
shriekers or war-whoopers. No doubt the rough treatment afforded the
wild Skraelings was an approved medieval means of taking possession
of their fur skins with the least bother. In any case it ended in
Thorvald’s own death. One day hundreds of Skraelings in their canoes
suddenly attacked the Viking ship. Although the Norsemen drove them
off with much slaughter Thorvald was mortally wounded in his armpit
by an arrow. He was buried ashore that same day. His men returned to
Greenland the following year, in 1007.

It has been claimed that the encounter in which Thorvald was slain took
place at Mount Desert Island on the Maine coast. Somes Sound does seem
to fit the site of the battle as related in the saga. Certainly, great
numbers of natives could have been in the habit of congregating there
with their canoes during fur trapping season, for Mount Desert Island
was a favorite haunt of beavers and other fur bearers in past centuries.

In 1010 wealthy Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, who had urged
the project upon him, took something over 160 colonists from Greenland
to establish a permanent Norse trading settlement in the western land.
They went in dragon ships and round-bottomed cargo vessels loaded
with “all kinds of livestock,” including a bull. The men had headgear
adorned with horns, antlers or ravens’ wings. They wore short breeches
and were clad with leather armor. Pelts were wrapped about their legs.
The women wore girdled tunics. Heavy fur coats and lambskin hoods lined
with cat fur protected the voyagers, men and women alike, when the seas
were icy and the winds biting. Most of them survived to reach Vinland,
where Gudrid bore her husband a son, Snorri, the first autumn they
spent at Leif’s old house.

Snorri, who was to become the ancestor of a number of distinguished
men including three Icelandic bishops, appears to have been the first
European of record born in America.

At Vinland the Skraelings came with “packs wherein were grey furs,
sables, and all kind of peltries.” The bull having greatly frightened
them, it was some time before they loosened their bundles and offered
their pelts in trade. They wanted to exchange them for Norse weapons.
Karlsefni rejected this proposition. But the saga relates that he gave
them some milk, whereupon the red men wanted nothing else and barter
forthwith got under way.

In such manner was the first fur trade of record joined in America,
although one cannot resist wondering if the milk was spirituous.
Experienced Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had gained his fortune in other
parts of the world as a seafaring trader, may well have been the first
white man to practice this ancient trick of the trade on the naïve
native Americans.

Very soon after this first successful barter the aborigines came back
in much greater number than before with bundles of pelts and stood
outside the palisades which the Norsemen had been foresighted enough to
erect around their house in the meantime. Karlsefni, sensing the making
of another good bargain, instructed the women to offer more milk. The
Skraelings took it thirstily, pitching their bundles of furs over the
palisades. But then one of them tried to steal a Norse weapon and a
battle ensued during which many of the Skraelings were slain.

Evidently Karlsefni thought it was too dangerous at Vinland. It would
appear that he moved his colony the second year to a site probably on
the Hudson River. In the meantime according to some students he had
explored the country from its northernmost parts, where he mentioned
seeing “many artic foxes,” to the Chesapeake Bay, no doubt entering
many rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, possibly the
James, and identifying correctly the extent of the Appalachian mountain
range. There is reason to believe that he built shelters and maintained
a separate camp somewhere in the Chesapeake tidewater.

It may have been there, as the Norsemen told it, that swarthy,
ill-looking men with broad cheeks and ugly hair on their heads, came
in canoes and stared at them in amazement. Later, these same men came
back with “fur-skins and all-grey skins” wanting swords and spears in
trade. Evidently there was no milk in this camp, wherever it was, but
fortunately the natives finally agreed to take red cloth in exchange
for their pelts.

“In return for unblemished skins, the savages would accept a span
length of red cloth and bind it around their heads. Thus the trading
continued. When Karlsefni’s people began to run short of cloth, they
ripped it into pieces so narrow that none was broader than a finger,
but the savages even then gave as much for it as before, or more.”

And, so the trading continued, according to a version of the saga in
_Hauk’s Book_, until it ended in a battle as usual. Once more many of
the natives were killed. So were two of the Norsemen.

After three years Karlsefni abandoned the idea of a permanent
settlement. The Skraelings were too hostile. The Norse, with their
superior boats and shields, could cope with them on water. But on
land the red men were too numerous and had the advantage of surprise.
They couldn’t be held at bay--the Norsemen didn’t have the terrifying
firearms available to later colonists coming to America.

All of which may reasonably account for the dearth of Viking artifacts
on the eastern seaboard of America. The Norsemen kept close to the
shore-line, whether on the seacoast or on a tidewater river, building
their huts near the safety of their shielded dragon ships. Today, the
sites of those early camps may well be under water as the level of the
sea has risen at least five or six feet in the intervening time due to
glacial meltings.

A translation of the _Flatey Book_ saga relates that when Karlsefni’s
people returned to Greenland they “carried away with them much booty in
vines and grapes and peltries,” and that after this “there was much new
talk in Greenland about voyaging to Vinland, for this enterprise was
now considered both profitable and honorable.”

Not to be outdone in the matter of profit Freydis, the illegitimate
daughter of Eric the Red and with a heart as murderous as that of her
father, led an expedition to Vinland a few years later. Honor appears
to have had no part in her plans.

Freydis had a husband, but she made the plans. Before leaving
Greenland, she arranged with Leif for the loan of his house in Vinland
and induced two unsuspecting brothers of another family who had a
particularly fine ship to become her partners in the venture. These two
men were pledged to take only thirty warriors and their women. Freydis
had agreed to take a like number, but somehow she contrived to conceal
five extra men in her smaller ship.

After they arrived in Vinland, Freydis managed to keep the two groups
apart by fomenting antagonism. The brothers were forced to build a
separate house for their men and women. This house, together with too
much wine and heavy sleep, proved to be the means of their undoing--all
according to the Viking lady’s plan it appears. And what a red-handed
proceeding it was!

Freydis, with her husband’s grudging cooperation, succeeded in
murdering the two brothers in their house one night after shackling
their company. She had all of their men put to death and personally
wielded the axe that killed their five women when no one else would do
it. Then, taking her deceased partners’ fine trading ship, she returned
to Greenland with a rich cargo of furs, wine and lumber.

One shudders to think how she went about extracting the furs from the
Skraelings!

For two or three hundred years the Greenland republic maintained an
active trade between America and Norway, and with other countries, in
walrus hides, seal and fur skins, dried fish and whale fat. Norwegian
port records, as well as the sagas, testify to trade with “Markland,”
the name which had been given to Nova Scotia by Leif Ericson. There are
old church records which show that quantities of the pelts of animals
not indigenous to Greenland were exported from that country to Norway,
pelts that could have come only from the mainland of America. The bills
of lading listing church taxes which had been collected _in natura_
include elk, black bear, beaver, otter, ermine, sable, lynx, glutton
and wolf.

But, in 1261, the Greenland parliament renounced its independence and
swore allegiance to Norway. Independent traffic with other countries
was promptly curtailed. Subsequently the dominance of the Hanseatic
League through its monopolistic factory at Bergen, which took no
interest in Greenland, brought about a withering of all commerce
between Greenland and the continent.

Deterioration of the Greenlanders themselves came about through
malnutrition and intermarriage with the Eskimos who descended on their
settlements. Some who voyaged to America probably remained there and
were eventually absorbed by the natives. There is evidence that as late
as 1362 an expedition of Swedes and Norwegians, exploring westward in
the Hudson Bay, left their ship at the mouth of the Nelson River and in
their afterboats penetrated through Lake Winnipeg up the Red River into
Minnesota. An inscription on a rhune-stone, ostensibly left by them as
a marker, says they were being cut off by the savages at the time. But,
whether authentic or not, the storied voyage appears to be of little
commercial significance; the era of Viking trade in America was ended.

Among most scholars during the dark ages little notice had been taken
of the Norse discoveries, if indeed very much was known about them.
True, the chronicler Adam of Bremen had recorded the discovery of a
large island in the western sea, called “Vinland,” but then everyone
knew there were “islands” in the sea. Knowledge of any far-western
lands, even of Greenland itself, faded with the withering of trade.

Then Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, plowed the ocean straight
west in 1492 and returned to assert that as he had predicted the east
coast of Asia was six thousand miles nearer to Europe than most of the
world’s best geographers had estimated it to be.

A new, short route west to Asia! The news was electrifying to a now
thoroughly trade-conscious world. Spain, England, Portugal, France--all
took to the western sea.




III

_Codfish Land Spawns a Fur Frontier_


Christopher Columbus probably thought that “the western lands of the
world” explored by the Norsemen were island-like masses, similar to
Greenland, off the northern coast of Asia. From what he was able to
learn, especially on his visit to Iceland, he no doubt concluded that
these lands stretched far away to the southeast. He had a mariner’s
instinct for such things. Certainly he calculated his landfall in 1492
with amazing accuracy.

Columbus came among islands that he confidently took to be the Moluccas
off Asia. The continent lay just beyond.

But it was the wrong continent!

Although Christopher Columbus made four voyages, reaching the mainland
of South America in 1498, he never knew that he hadn’t really come upon
Asia--that the natives he encountered were not wild, borderland East
Indians.

In the meantime, a Genoese-born Venetian navigator sailing for an
English king landed on the North American coast in 1497 and claimed
the country for England. John Cabot was his English name. Cabot made
the North Atlantic crossing in a small bark called the _Matthew_ with
eighteen men, following the route of the Vikings, and landed first
somewhere near Cape Breton. After sailing northern coasts for a week he
decided the country was Siberia. Like Christopher Columbus, he returned
quickly to report that he had discovered a route to Asia.

Like Columbus too, John Cabot was given a fleet of trading ships and
was sent back the next year by an excited monarch and hopeful Bristol
merchants to collect the spoils of his discovery. His ships were
“fraught with sleight and grosse merchandizes, as course cloth, Caps,
laces, points, and other trifles.”

This time Cabot cruised the coast south, possibly as far as Cape
Fear, for signs of Cathay or India before he returned to England. He
carried back a few mangy furs taken in trade with the Indians--for the
surprised Indians could think of nothing much to give the white god
other than the clothes off their backs--but no gold, pearls, silks or
spices.

It was hard to believe that this was the Asia about which Marco Polo
had written.

It took another decade for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine astronomer
who had gone along on several Spanish and Portuguese voyages to the
western lands, to declare that they were in reality a new world. A
German savant named Waldseemuller who greatly admired Vespucci revised
the map of the earth. He drew in a new continental land mass between
Europe and Asia, and he honored Vespucci by calling it Amerigo’s
Land--in Latin, Terra America.

Meanwhile, Spain’s only world rival had not been neglecting the west.
Portuguese caravels reached Brazil as early as 1500 and explorers from
Portugal visited Labrador and Newfoundland in 1501. Within a few years
after John Cabot’s crewmen first told Bristol fishermen that the waters
off Newfoundland boiled with codfish, Portuguese fishing boats led the
way to those American waters.

Armed and battling, rival fishing fleets of the other European
countries followed them across the North Atlantic. Soon, almost a
hundred sail yearly were frequenting the fabulous Newfoundland banks
where fish could literally be hauled in by basket.

These fishermen, Normans, Bretons, Basques, Bristolmen, fell to
bartering with the natives when they went ashore to dry their catches.
In sailorly tradition they no doubt had a handy reserve of appealing
gew-gaws for any chance meetings with the opposite sex. One thing
leading to another, it was not long before looking-glasses, beads,
tin bells and other trinkets were being exchanged for the fur skins
that the natives wore. And the aborigines in turn were then lured into
trapping and curing prime skins for this trade.

So, along with their nets, the fishermen from Europe brought over more
substantial trade goods, such as knives, axes, fishhooks, combs and
colored cloth. Codfish Land, as they called it, began yielding up tidy
extra profits from a trade in sealskins, red and blue fox, otter,
beaver and marten. The bulk was small on the return trip; the merchants
at home paid well.

The first pelts of the American pine marten taken by the sailors
caused much excitement. They were mistaken for sable. At the time
Siberian sable was the most expensive of all furs traded in the great
international fur center at Leipzig. In Russia it was reserved for the
use of royalty only; in England noble women eagerly sought the precious
pelts as neckpieces. A sack, as the Russian traders called a robe of
Siberian sable, was worth more thousands of rubles than most western
royalty could afford.

But, although the pine marten did eventually become known as American
sable, the pelt of this little animal was never so precious as that of
his glistening, thick-coated Siberian cousin. For one thing the guard
hairs of his fur did not have the beautiful silver tips.

However, there was another marten, otter-like in its aquatic habits,
that turned out to have a much finer coat than its European and Asian
cousins. This one the fishermen learned to call mink. It was the name
already given in Finland to this scrappy little member of the weasel
family, for whose fur there was a premium market in western European
countries. The American wild mink with its thicker, silkier under fur
and its glossier guard hair was definitely more desirable, bringing a
better price.

Although Portuguese sailors had led the way to Codfish Land, Portugal
followed up her early advantages in America only half-heartedly. She
agreed to a Papal-sponsored division of the earth that left the new
world pretty much to Spain. The Portuguese suspected there was no short
route west to Asia. Anyway, they were doing very well in their own
sphere with their route to the east around Africa.

In the end the Pope’s line of demarcation was all right with the
Spaniards, too. By the time they were sure there was no centrally
located strait through America, they had turned up enough gold, silver
and other rich loot to keep them well occupied.

With medieval single-mindedness they were plundering, enslaving and
killing. It was the only way the criminal conquistadors knew to reward
themselves. Because the natives were accounted to be bloodthirsty
cannibals their enslavement or liquidation was looked upon with favor
by Spanish authorities. It also greatly simplified the acquisition of
aboriginal treasures and mines. Cruelties, so artfully practiced at
home, became sheer brutality when transferred to a frontier where the
number of victims seemed inexhaustible. Roasting alive, tearing by
hounds, dismembering, were all part of the customary Spanish pattern at
the time; it was just that these atrocities were committed with higher
frequency in America. Wholesale annihilation was the order of the day.

Spain was not so absorbed however that she did not make threatening
gestures against those who would intrude on her new possessions.
England, following up Cabot’s discoveries, made a prideful attempt to
launch a colonizing venture. But it died in birth. The Spaniards warned
against any encroachments in their American sphere and the English
admiralty was in no position to contest the point.

Not so, the French!

       *       *       *       *       *

Loot from the Aztec Empire proved too tempting to French captains of
swift, handy ships which had been commissioned as privateers. Armed
with official “letters of mark” to challenge Spanish depredations on
the high seas they found clever ways to exceed their authority when
they overhauled cumbersome, treasure-laden galleons from America.

It wasn’t too long before it was difficult to distinguish between a
French privateer and a plain pirate. And Francis I, winking broadly,
said he knew of no clause in Father Adam’s will which left all the new
world and its riches to his cousin Charles of Spain. Whereupon the
French monarch went further. He sent out a capable Florentine pilot,
Giovanni da Verrazano, to discover and claim lands in America, and if
possible to locate a passage to the Indian Ocean.

Verrazano, with a crew of fifty Normans in _La Dauphine_, made his
landfall in 1524 just above Spanish Florida. He coasted northward past
the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. It appears that he glimpsed the bay and
identified it as the great ocean of the East reaching to China; then he
sailed on to the Hudson River.

The natives encountered by the Frenchmen along the way were gentle and
playful. It was spring and Verrazano’s mariners succumbed to the beauty
of the Indian women who braided their hair and modestly covered their
loins with soft furs. Otherwise they were quite naked. The sailors gave
the aborigines toy bells, bits of paper and colored beads, and found
them in turn “very liberal, for they give away what they have.”

_La Dauphine_ left the Hudson River and continued on north, beyond
Cape Cod, to lands where the natives were found to wear Arctic bear
and seal skins. They were rude and truculent too, possibly as a result
of having encountered white men before. These wild men exchanged their
furs warily. They wanted only fishhooks, metal cutting tools and other
valuable trade goods.

When Verrazano returned home all he could show, of any tangible value,
were the furs he had taken in trade along the coast of America. But no
one in France was more than passingly interested in pelts; there was
the more immediate prospect of finding gold or reaching China.

While the French were preparing to follow up Verrazano’s coastal
discoveries with an inland venture the Spaniards looked on with a
jealous eye. They themselves explored northward in Verrazano’s track
to make sure there was no gold or a northwest passage to Cathay there.
They took furs and Indian slaves from the St. Lawrence Gulf. And they
actually tried a gigantic colonizing venture in the Chesapeake Bay
area. There was the chance that another Aztec Empire lay deep in the
interior of those parts!

This country to the north of Tierra Florida, the Spaniards called
Tierra D’Ayllon. For it was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a justice of Santo
Domingo, who had reconnoitered it and traded there for bison hides,
beaver, otter and muskrat.

In 1526 Ayllon made a settlement of several hundred men, women and
children at San Miquel, possibly on the James River, in the Bay of
Santa Maria as the Spaniards called the Chesapeake. He brought priests,
armored soldiers, black slaves and the usual instruments of torture to
the Chesapeake. But probably he didn’t erect protecting palisades about
his town. San Miquel was abandoned after the first winter, its captain
having perished. The benighted natives had not taken well to killings.
These were of a prouder race than the West Indian savages, and those
colonists who did not die at their hands or from disease were happy to
get back to sunny Santo Domingo.

There seemed to be no hope of finding gold or silver in Tierra D’Ayllon
anyway. From this time all the closely guarded, secret maps of the
Spaniards said so. Except for some further trade in the Potomac for
bison hides and pelts, and a fatal missionary effort on the peninsula
between the James and York Rivers by a band of brave Jesuit priests,
the Spaniards ceased active interest in the Chesapeake area for many
years. They were being kept much too busy in Florida and South America.
Newly discovered mines, interlopers in the Caribbean, and especially
French corsairs lying in wait along their rich trade routes--all
demanded attention.

The Frenchmen, however annoying their “privateers” were to the
Spaniards, were really only biding their time.

Francis I, as always, had a great many problems. But the most pressing
one was his need for gold--much more than his privateers and pirates
could safely plunder from Spanish galleons. He had his mind on America
itself as a solution.

Jacques Cartier, a stout Breton mariner of St. Malo who knew the
fishermen’s route to Codfish Land, was sent out by the French king in
1534, and again in 1535, to explore inland in America. He was to find
gold, or the elusive passage to the treasures of Cathay at least. Maybe
in the northwest, beyond Spanish claims, the new-found land was joined
to Tartary as some of the geographers said. By striking inland Cartier
might reach it.

On his first voyage of discovery Cartier explored the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and claimed the country, calling it New France. He found the
first Indians he met anxious to trade. They followed the French ships,
in their birch-bark canoes and along the shores, dancing and singing to
prove their friendliness, and holding up pelts on sticks. But the pelts
turned out to be “such skinnes as they cloth themselves withall, which
are of small value,” Cartier remarked.

However, he gave the aborigines ironware and other things, while they
danced about him, rubbed his chest and arms, and cast sea water over
their heads in ceremonies of joy. “They gave us whatsoever they had,
not keeping anything, so that they were constrained to go backe againe
naked, and made us signes that the next day they would come againe, and
bring more skinnes with them.”

Along the shores of the gulf wherever he went Cartier made friends with
the natives, giving to the women and children, little tin bells and
beads--to the men: hatchets, knives, frying pans. But he found no gold;
he located no passage to Cathay. When he embarked for his return to
France he took two wild men of “Canada” with him, inveigling them into
making the voyage by clothing them in shirts, colored coats and red
caps, and putting a copper chain about each of their necks.

These two, in France, assured the French king that far up the deep
river of Canada (the St. Lawrence) and beyond, there were walled
cities where people lived in houses--Hochelaga, and even more distant
Saguenay. Frontier towns of Tartary! They could be. When Captain
Cartier left with three ships in 1535 on his second voyage of discovery
he was instructed to “go west as far as possible.”

With the two Indians as guides, Cartier’s ships anchored finally in
the quiet waters below present-day Quebec. Close by was the village of
Donnacona, Indian “Lord of Canada,” who welcomed the white men even
more than the safe return of his two subjects. He wanted to trade.
But the French captain wasn’t much interested in Donnacona’s personal
wardrobe or any other pelts.

He made only a brief note of the great store of fur-bearing animals
in Canada--the martens, foxes, otters, beavers, weasels and badgers.
Then he pushed on. His was a more glittering objective. Up the swift,
narrowing river he toiled with a small party, part way in a little
pinnace and then in two long boats, until at length he reached
Hochelaga.

The walled city turned out to be a well-palisaded Indian village,
near the present site of Montreal, where some of the highly organized
Iroquois lived in their traditional long houses. That was all--except
that the Indians, noting the silver chain of Cartier’s whistle and a
French dagger handle of yellowish copper gilt, said that such metals
came from Saguenay. It was much farther inland, several moons travel.

But there were difficult rapids and the French captain couldn’t make
it. He was already a thousand miles inland. Winter was coming on. In
the end he returned downstream to the safety of his ships and the fort
his men had built on the river in Canada.

Plagued by scurvy and freezing with cold that winter, Jacques Cartier
had another failure on his hands. It was going to be difficult to
explain things at home. He treated with Donnacona for food and
medicine, for furs with which to protect his men from the cold, and for
information about the country to the west. The “Lord of Canada” was
anxious to please the white men, that is, in return for their skillets
and axes and their bright colored clothes. He provided the things they
wanted--and he talked too much.

Donnacona boasted that he had been to Saguenay. Truly, he swore, he had
seen there many of the things the Frenchmen valued so much--red rubies,
gold, silver--and the people were white men who went about clothed in
woolen cloths. Cartier brightened in the face of his troubles. Here, he
perceived, was eye-witness testimony on a royal level to the existence
of Saguenay and its treasures. When spring came he captured Donnacona
by a stratagem and “persuaded” the Indian king to go with him to France
for a visit.

Whether or not Donnacona really believed his own story about Saguenay,
he played the game effectively all the way for Jacques Cartier when he
was presented to the French monarch. No doubt he wanted to make sure
that he created the means of getting back to his native land. In any
event, he had been canny enough to bring along with him several bundles
of his best trade goods, consisting mostly of “Beavers, and Sea Woolves
skinnes.” Maybe, among other things, he had French squaws in mind for
his holiday abroad, as one old scribbler has suggested.

It was some time before King Francis was able to get around to doing
much about the Indian king’s stories. In the meantime Donnacona
died. But Francis wanted to make the imagined treasures secure for
the French. The only way to do that was to colonize and fortify the
approaches through New France, to take possession of the land by
occupying it.

Realistic French merchants, like Jean Ango, were more interested in
the furs that had been finding their way back across the sea. However
colonization was an end they sought, too, if it provided a base for
their traders. It was a long way, across a dangerous ocean, to New
France.

With the support of both the king and the merchants, therefore, Jacques
Cartier went back to New France in 1541. The Sieur de Roberval followed
him in 1542. In their well-supplied fleets they transported several
hundred colonists, including many farmers, also soldiers, miners and
traders. Roberval’s expedition included some women. They planted near
Quebec, building forts there; both tried desperately to reach mythical
Saguenay. Each remained through only one Canadian winter among the now
hostile Indians.

Both leaders were more interested in finding quick treasure than in any
such prosaic business as fur trading. Cartier took back fool’s gold and
false diamonds found on the river’s bank near the forts. Rescue ships
had to be sent over from France with enough supplies to evacuate the
scurvy-ridden remnant of Roberval’s contingent.

It would be another sixty years before a permanent colony was planted
in these parts. But New France was held, nevertheless, for France. And,
curiously enough, by the very fur trade that had been so much ignored.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fishing barques from St. Malo, from Dieppe, Rouen, La Rochelle and
Havre, kept coming to America’s northern coasts every summer, hundreds
of them. They fished for cod on the banks, hunted walrus in the great
gulf, and caught whales in the lower parts of the St. Lawrence River.
Always, wherever they were, the mariners drove an ever increasing trade
with the Indians for valuable pelts. Over the sides of their ships and
on shore they bartered for marten, otter, fox and beaver.

Commerce flourished to such an extent through this individual
enterprise that ships’ captains frequently found it profitable to
turn all hands to bartering for pelts. It was a French vessel in 1569
at Cape Breton whose master drove a “trade with the people of divers
sortes of fine furs” that picked up the Englishmen, David Ingram and
his two companions, Richard Browne and Richard Twide. Along with a
large number of others these three had been abandoned ashore following
the defeat of their famous leader, John Hawkins, the slaver, in a
piratical engagement in the Caribbean with the Spaniards. Ingram and
his two friends, however, struck out into the Florida wilderness,
“crossed the River May,” and for twelve months beat their hazardous
way northward through lands never before trod by white men, until they
reached Cape Breton. They reported seeing “plentie of fine furres”
along the way.

Gradually the traffic in furs moved inland via the St. Lawrence as
occasional traders, adopting the native mode of travel by canoe, braved
the wilderness for choicer pelts. There being no soldiers or forts
to fall back on, these traders, born of the fishing fleets, found it
expedient to treat the Indians well. The Montagnais and the Algonkins,
who had been hostile since Cartier’s last visit, reciprocated in kind.
So did the Hurons, eventually. They were all hopeful of allies with
fire guns to help them against their powerful enemies, the recently
formed league of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, who inhabited parts
of the St. Lawrence valley in the west and the country to the south.

In 1581 a French bark, sent out exclusively for fur by the merchants
of St. Malo, pushed into the upper St. Lawrence. The profits of this
venture were so spectacular that organized bulk traffic got under way
immediately between France and the St. Lawrence valley.

Within three years Richard Hakluyt, the English geographer, was
writing, “And nowe our neighboures, the men of St. Maloe in Brytaine,
in the begynnyinge of Auguste laste paste, of this yere 1584 are come
home with five shippes from Canada and the contries upp the Bay of St.
Lawrence, and have broughte twoo of the people of the contrie home,
and have founde suche swete in the newe trade that they are preparinge
tenne shippes to returne thither in January nexte....”

Almost overnight New France became noted for its valuable export of
pelts, especially beaver. Hakluyt, writing from Paris about this time,
said that in one man’s house he had seen Canadian otter and beaver to
the value of five thousand crowns.

The French merchants mostly kept to the St. Lawrence valley, for
Canada and the valley region in the hinterland teemed with fur-bearing
animals. Furthermore, communication with the natives in the valley was
relatively easy because of their earlier contact with Frenchmen.

Of course dialects differed, but limited palaver in a language similar
to that of the Algonkin tribe was possible with all the Indians in
these parts except the Iroquois. Theirs was a different tongue. The
Algonkin tribe of Canada, however, was part of a great linguistic
family which came to be known as Algonquin and which stretched
irregularly over most of the northern woodland and as far south as Cape
Hatteras on the Atlantic seaboard.

Intrepid French traders often spent the winter in the wilderness with
the different tribes, to learn about their habits and dialects. If they
were to know what was really in the minds of the unpredictable savages
with whom they dealt, it was best to know as much as possible about
them and especially the exact meaning of their words. A good knowledge
of the dialect of a particular tribe might mean an advantage over a
competitor, a better profit, or even the difference between life and
death.

The lonely fur trader in his canoe with his Indian guides soon
symbolized the occupation of New France. The deeper he penetrated into
the country the farther the fame of his conquest spread abroad. New
France was more than a claim; without colonization it was becoming a
recognized French possession. Geographers so indicated it on their maps.

The front line of this French conquest was to become known as the
beaver frontier. The coast of the fishermen had been the first fur
trading frontier, but when that trade began moving rapidly inland and
_castor canadensis_ took over the chief victim’s role in the drama of
destruction, it became the beaver frontier. For _castor canadensis_
is not a highly reproductive animal and he is not a migrant. He is
also hindered from flight in the face of danger by the large capital
investment he has made in his home.

The beaver is an amphibious rodent whose natural environment is a
pond or a sluggish stream. An industrious home body, operating on a
self-imposed economy, he hews trees and builds protecting dams and
apartment houses in which he cohabits with other beavers, all under a
system of government much like man’s.

Physically, the beaver is distinguished by his thick coat of soft fur,
his hard, incisor-like teeth with which he can cut through the stoutest
oak, his palmated hind feet and his horizontally-flattened, scaly tail.

He depends very much on that tail, which probably was a model for
Indian canoe paddles. It serves him as a rudder when he swims and as
a balance for his awkwardly-proportioned body when he runs. As the
foreman of a community construction project he uses his tail with
telling effect to lash laggards in the matter of pushing logs about
or sealing crevices in structures with good, hard clay. Frequently it
comes in handy to smack the surface of the water as a warning that an
enemy approaches as well as a protest to the unwelcome intruder. No
sound impresses itself more sharply on the woodsman than the crash of
an angry beaver’s tail on the quiet waters of his home preserve.

The fur of this busy little animal was much in demand in the old world.
Not only was it preferred as a coating because of its beauty, warmth
and durability, but the hat industry then centering about La Rochelle
was requisitioning it in increasing quantities. With European reserves
being depleted, the lovely blue-brown, blanket-like pelt of the larger
Canadian animal found eager bidders in the French market at twenty or
more livres a pound, the average beaver pelt weighing one and a half to
two pounds.

Castoreum, an important by-product of the beaver trade at the time, was
much in demand too. Obtained in the spring from the perineal glands of
both male and female animals, it was used extensively by perfumers as a
base for the flower scents. It was also often used to catch the beaver
himself. During mating season both sexes of the beaver deposited the
pungent, sticky, yellow substance on spots regularly visited by other
beaver and added mud and dead leaves to form scent mounds. These served
the natives to locate runways; also to bait the intricate snares they
set in lieu of spearing, before the white man provided them with metal
traps.

The Indians of French Canada fell in readily with the white man’s
breathless pursuit of the beaver. They, themselves, had long since
learned the warmth and durability of his pelt. They used his sharp
teeth to point their cutting and scraping tools. They ate his flesh,
the tail of the beaver being considered a special delicacy. Now they
could trade his pelt and his castors for many wonderful things they
thought they needed--ironware, clothing, guns and brandy. It was not
difficult to persuade them to step up their war on the challenging
little animal that acted like a man.

This soon changed the Indian’s mode of life, making him more and more
dependent on the white man’s wares. Eventually it brought about the red
man’s destruction.

As old cultural habits began falling away and as hardware which the
Indian couldn’t make took the place of bone, wood and stone, he became
the prey of every evil white man who stood to gain from him. Always
deep in the Indian’s breast lay the revenge motive; always liquor
stirred his most primal instincts. The displacement of bows and arrows
by guns made it possible for him to kill off his aboriginal enemies
much faster. But he was dependent on the European’s continued help even
in that. Only the European could supply repair parts for the muskets
and furnish the required ammunition. It was a case of the red man
destroying himself with the white man’s culture.

The brass kettle had as much to do with it as guns or brandy--and
the process was not restricted to New France. The pattern was to be
repeated on every other American frontier, by the English, the Dutch
and the Swedes. The fur trade furnished the means of contact between
the two widely divergent cultures of white European and red American.
Profits were tremendous--on both sides, considering relative values.
But the trade led to the Indian’s self-destruction.

It also led to bitter rivalries among the white men.




IV

_Samuel de Champlain Lights a Blaze of Red Terror_


It was the first spectacular profits of the fur trade toward the close
of the sixteenth century that brought about a fresh and urgent need for
the colonization of New France.

The French government saw danger from jealous foreigners, Englishmen
in particular. Already the English had attempted settlements to the
south at a place called Roanoke. Greatly emboldened on the sea these
days they were admitting Spanish claims no more northerly than 34° and
French claims no more southerly than 45°. The land in between, from
Cape Fear to the Bay of Fundy, was claimed as English. All because John
Cabot had sailed that coast more than a century earlier!

Now English boats, too many of them, were poking about Newfoundland,
where England laid claim to certain discoveries, and even in the Gulf
of St. Lawrence itself. London merchants like Charles Leigh, ostensibly
on trading voyages in the great gulf, were boldly practicing piracy
against French as well as Spanish vessels. And Hakluyt, the English
geographer, was exhorting his countrymen to even greater competition.
“While the French, Bretons, Basques and Biscayans do yearly return from
these parts a manifold gain, we the English have merely stood still and
been idle lookers on,” he wrote provocatively.

French merchants, however, were not showing much inclination to
colonize the country; they saw no profit in underwriting such risky
ventures when things were going so well. It cost money to plant
colonies. Unencumbered competitive traders would probably profit as
much as those who did the planting.

The king saw it differently however. Unless something was done to
colonize the valley of the St. Lawrence, to fortify it, the great
trade of the French and the hoped-for route to Cathay stood to be
seized by foreigners. He resorted to offering monopolies.

Companies were given total rights to the fur trade in return for
promising to settle specified numbers of colonists a year. But no
volunteers as colonists appeared. When a company was given the fur
monopoly it had to take worthless tramps or convicts furnished by the
government and, as the merchants weren’t particularly interested in
colonization anyway, they didn’t bother much about these derelicts and
criminals once they had transported them to some desolate post in the
wilderness. Furthermore, independent traders, as well as the fishermen
who went ashore to barter, persisted in violating the monopolies. No
one was happy. So vociferous were the conflicting protests that the
king was forced to cancel the patents he granted one after another.

He didn’t begin to get the results he desired in New France until the
advent of Samuel de Champlain.

Champlain, born at Brouage on the Bay of Biscay in 1567, was the son
of a French naval captain and the nephew of a Spanish pilot major.
He served with French troops as a quarter-master before the Peace of
Vervins and later captained a Spanish transport conveying troops to
the West Indies. He was there for two years. Having an observant eye
he carefully sketched and mapped everything he saw in the Caribbean,
the account of his adventures even containing a suggestion of a Panama
Canal whereby “the voyage to the South Sea would be shortened by more
than 1500 leagues.”

When he first came to the St. Lawrence valley in 1603 as an advance
agent of a company with a fur trade monopoly, Samuel de Champlain held
the title of Geographer Royal, a brevet nobility. It had been conferred
upon him by Henry IV in recognition of his demonstrated ability to get
at the facts in America. Now a captain in the French navy he came with
instructions from the French monarch to bring back a true report on
the St. Lawrence valley. While others in the expedition spent their
time bartering with the aborigines, Champlain and Francois Grave, Sieur
duPont, a principal merchant of the company, set out to explore the
great waterway to the west and to get all the intelligence they could
about it.

Actually, they penetrated no farther west than Cartier had done, and
not so far as other traders in recent years, but Champlain judiciously
recorded what he learned from the Indians and made impressive
recommendations. Before returning to France he made a similar survey
of the regions about Gaspe and the Acadian Peninsula where there were
thought to be rich mines. His report, while recognizing the advantages
of establishing a trading post on the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers
as Dupont-Grave recommended, pointed out that the powerful league of
Iroquois nations barred the way to any farther penetration westward.
Too, the feasibility of a possible passage by this route to China was
complicated by rapids and ice.

It might be better to try for a more southerly passage, one that would
flank the war-like Iroquois, Champlain suggested. There were rivers on
the coast south of the St. Lawrence that might lead directly to the
lakes in the west--possibly to the western sea.

The new Huguenot head of the company, Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts,
favored this plan. He’d like to find a new entry into New France, one
free of the bitter cold of Canada, and one free of the jealousies of
the merchants who had pioneered in the St. Lawrence. The king fully
approved. The prospects of finding minerals in the more southerly parts
intrigued him. To make sure the company had sufficient ground in which
to operate he gave de Monts a patent extending from Cape Breton south
to present-day Philadelphia, from 46° north latitude to 40°.

The next few years were spent in making settlements in the Bay of
Fundy, at St. Croix and at Port Royal.

Scurvy and cold plagued the colonists even more than Basque pirates,
Hollanders and other poaching foreigners annoyed the company’s traders.
Trade was brisk nevertheless, with the furriers and hatters of Rouen
and Paris bidding up all the pelts that could be shipped to France.
In fact, prices rose so high that the Hatters Corporation of Paris
complained to the ministry.

Meanwhile, Champlain explored to the south of the French settlements
as far as Cape Cod for better sites. He found that Englishmen had been
investigating that coast, but he didn’t discover a river that led
inland to the lake country, skirting the terrible Iroquois. He didn’t
look south far enough. If he had found the Connecticut or the Hudson,
New England might today be populated by Frenchmen. And New Yorkers
probably wouldn’t have their Dutch ancestors.

In the end Champlain advised the king and the merchants that the
company should return to the St. Lawrence valley. Trading posts should
be established there, he said. With the help of native enemies of the
Iroquois he believed he could defeat the Five Nations--force them to
trade--force a way through to Tartary or the western sea.

This is what the company now proceeded to do. An expedition was sent
to the St. Lawrence in 1608. Dupont-Grave traded at Tadoussac with one
ship while Champlain in another set out to erect a factory at Quebec.
There, at the foot of the cliff where the river was narrow, he built a
trading post fort consisting of a two-story wooden building surrounded
by a large moat. Cannon which would carry across the river were placed
on mounds at the corners, and the surrounding land was cleared of
timber and brush against attack.

The going was rough, for _le capitaine_ tolerated no shirking of toil.
Some of his men conspired to murder him by poison, and, should that
fail, by “a traine of gunpowder.” This plot, he discovered in the nick
of time. One of the mutineers was hanged; the others were shipped back
to France, condemned to the galleys.

When the trading ships with their cargoes of beaver and “blacke
Foxes, which seeme to exceede Sables” returned to France in the fall,
Champlain remained behind at Quebec with twenty-eight men. But scurvy
and dysentery took its usual toll. Only eight remained by spring.
Nevertheless the French captain proceeded with his plan to invade the
country of the Iroquois. He made overtures to their ancient enemies,
the Montagnais and the Algonkin Indians.

“Notwithstanding, being a man, who is astonished with nothing, and of
a gentle conversation, knowing wisely how to acquaint, and accommodate
himselfe with those people, after having promised them, that when the
land of the Iroquois, and other Countries should be discovered, the
great French Sagamos (meaning our King) would give them great rewards:
he invited them to goe to warre against the said Iroquois, promising
(for himselfe) that he would take part with them. They (in whom the
desire of revenge dieth not, and who delight in nothing more then in
warre) passe their word unto him, and arme themselves about one hundred
men, for that effect, with whom the said Champlain, ventures himselfe,
accompanied with one man, and one of Monsieur deMonts his footemen.”

This alliance of 1609 was to have far reaching effects on the future
colonial history of America. It sparked a blaze of red terror along
the borders between Dutch and French, and between French and English,
wherever the competition for the fur trade was joined, that was not to
be extinguished for a hundred and fifty years.

News has a way of travelling fast in the wilderness, especially news
of a war alliance. The Hurons in the west were Iroquoian, but were
bitter enemies of the Five Nations. They wanted to be members of such
a promising war party, one with white men carrying the astonishing
“fireguns” that the nations of the enemy league had never before seen
or heard.

Down the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence the Hurons came to Quebec, with
furs to barter but with their tomahawks well sharpened. Champlain and
his savage allies gave them a resounding welcome. The French captain
traded with them and made a war pact. Then they all set off up the
St. Lawrence for the mouth of the Richelieu River, beyond which lay
the territory of the Five Nations. There, turning south in a flanking
movement, they ascended the Richelieu to reach the “Lake of the
Iroquois,” later to be called Lake Champlain.

The invaders proceeded with extreme caution after reaching the
lake, travelling only at night. However, the French captain had an
opportunity to observe something of the advanced state of civilization
of the Iroquois before the alarm was given. Their farms, sown with corn
and beans, were models of orderliness. Their palisaded forts, he noted,
contained buildings of three to four stories, similar to those he had
previously observed among the highly organized natives of Mexico.

Champlain must have had some premonition then that these intelligent
but bloodthirsty savages would prove far more troublesome than any
other natives the French had encountered in America.

When the battle was joined, the invading savages cunningly kept the
three Frenchmen hidden behind ranks until, by the sudden appearance of
white men with death-dealing thunder, the greatest consternation might
be created among the Iroquois. The effect upon the Iroquois was even
more dramatic than was anticipated. “On a sodaine, all was in disorder,
astonished at such a noise, and death so unexpected. Upon this feare,
the men of Kebec loosing no occasion, followed earnestly their enemies,
and killed about fiftie of them, whose heads they brought backe, to
make therewith merry feasts, and dances, at their returne, according
to their custome.” They also took back ten or twelve live prisoners
reserved for torture.

The Iroquois, when they recovered sufficiently from their shock to
learn more about white men and guns, became the irreconcilable haters
of the French. The flame blazed. And it would be fed even more by the
Frenchmen--by surprise arquebus massacres and the savagery of the white
men’s Algonkin and Huron allies.

Champlain went back to France that fall. Once more the monopoly
had been cancelled; the company had lost its exclusive patent. The
government was permitting free trade to all Frenchmen in the St.
Lawrence valley. However, the company decided to stick it out in the
face of this competition. Champlain became affianced, under a marriage
contract, to a girl of twelve who was to join him later as his wife,
and then he returned to Canada.

The French captain now carried the war to the Iroquois nations again,
successfully urging his Indian allies to help him push farther west.
All his battles with the Five Nations were not victories, for the
Iroquois were fiercely stubborn foes. However Champlain forced his way
to Lake Ontario and Niagara. He ascended the Ottawa and visited Lakes
Nipissing and Huron, blazing a trail west for the beaver traders to
follow. Because of his tireless efforts in the western wilderness the
economy of the new country rested solidly on the fur trade for many
years, and the beaver rightfully came to occupy a prominent place in
the Canadian coat of arms.

Samuel de Champlain became the first Governor of French Canada, the
ruler of all New France. But he didn’t find the western sea, or a
passage to China.

He did force the Five Nations of the Iroquois into alliances with the
enemies of the French, the incoming Dutch fur traders who furnished the
savages with guns, and then with the English. The story of the brutal
border wars that resulted is in large measure the story of the colonial
struggle for most of the American continent.




V

_England Moves to Extend Her Realm_


England came of age in the sixteenth century. Labor troubles helped to
bring this about.

When the tenants on demesne land asserted their right to sell their
labor to the best advantage, the lords in turn claimed their right to
use their lands to the best advantage. Since profitable sheep farming
required fewer laborers than ploughing and reaping, less and less
acres were kept in cultivation by the lords. Frustrated and starving,
the tenants were forced to abandon their homes and seek precarious
employment in the towns and cities.

But feudalism retreated before this shift to community life and
a nation of five million restless people emerged from its former
agricultural isolation. Although the sheep farmers and wool merchants
improved their capital fortunes at the expense of the poor laborers,
they had notwithstanding built up a great national industry. England at
last had something to sell!

In 1553 an expedition carrying woolens for trade with the Tartars
attempted unsuccessfully to reach Cathay by a northeast polar passage.
Defeated by ice and death, a surviving remnant did nevertheless manage
to reach the White Sea and to journey south into Russia to Moscow.
There they made a trade agreement of sorts with Ivan IV, called “the
Terrible.”

The merchant adventurers of England promptly set up the Muscovy Company
to handle what looked like a promising commerce with Russia and through
that country with the caravans of Persia. But the English never found
the Russians rewarding as either customers or middlemen. While their
czar was willing to sell furs, felts and naval stores, or wax and
honey, he wasn’t particularly interested in buying coarse woolens. His
subjects wore fur.

The subjects of the czar did indeed indulge themselves in both the
beauty and warmth of fur.

Except for the summer months Russians of quality went about in all
manner of furred luxury. From bearskin, lynx, squirrel, beaver, fox and
marten were fashioned their capes and bonnets, as well as their fine
tailored coats sporting decorative braid loops and toggles. Women wore
handsomely brocaded velvet coats lined and trimmed with expensive fur.
Nowhere in the western world did royalty make such extravagant use of
precious pelts. The nobility of Russia affected enveloping gowns and
pelisses of sable, ermine and vair. Esteemed above all other pelts for
certain wear was black fox. Nobles used this rare fur to make up their
distinctive wide caps enclosing tall felted bonnets in the fashion of
Babylonian hats.

Millions of lesser folk in Russia, wearing caps and buskins, and
shedding cloth tunics for long waistcoats of fur in the winter,
consumed vast quantities of muskrat, wolf, lamb skin and reindeer hide.

Still, there were plenty of pelts for export. They were in fact the
country’s chief commodity. Caravans from Siberia brought their cargoes
of fine pelts to the great market towns of Novgorod and Moscow. Ivan
the Terrible personally enforced a tribute of thousands of sables each
year from the western Tartars across the Urals. The value of Russia’s
fur exports to Turkey, Persia and the countries of Christendom reached
into millions of rubles yearly.

Trade with the Russians, however, was very unsatisfactory to the
English. For one thing Dutch competition bid up the prices of Russian
fur. Some pelts “cost more there with you than we can sell them for
here” the London merchants wrote ruefully to their factors in Russia.
Then there was the fickleness and downright trickiness of the Russians
who being “very mistrustful ... doe not alwaies speake the trueth,
and think other men to bee like them.” To these woes were added the
enormous difficulties of the icy northern route. They were almost
insuperable; yet the taxes imposed on cargoes through the Baltic by the
King of Denmark were unbearably high. It was all very frustrating.

In the end proclamations were published in England against the use of
foreign furs--and these laws were not entirely sumptuary.

True, the Renaissance had brought fashion consciousness to the middle
class Englishman to such an extent that it was often difficult to
distinguish between a noble and a well-furred commoner. There was
urgent need for proclamations to stop that. Often in the past such
proclamations had been necessary when the craze for furs mounted
inordinately. “Sabyls be for great estates” had been one historic royal
edict. Henry VIII, who decked himself lavishly with furs plundered from
the monasteries and indulged in cozily “furred nightgowns” for his
evening escapades, issued many a decree limiting the use of precious
pelts to the chosen few. Other monarchs had done the same thing.

Over and above this need for class distinction however, it irked the
relatively poor English royalty to be gouged in the market place for
one of its regal necessities.

From earliest Norman times imported furs had been used in England
to designate royal rank. Even before that, in the ninth and tenth
centuries, nobility and ranking clergy trimmed their garments with
beaver and fox. In the fourteenth century Edward III issued a decree
specifying ermine, symmetrically spotted with astrakan or other bits of
black, to be a royal fur. A whole set of heraldic tinctures was based
on fur. Ermine was represented by white flecked with black, variant
patterns and colors being termed ermines, erminois, pean and so forth.
Vair was shown as blue and white alternating in the manner of small
skins sewn together, some of its variants being counter-vair, potent
and counter-potent. Feudal lords of England had been inclined to treat
their equipage of furs as heirlooms, handing them down from generation
to generation.

The use of fur was so firmly embedded in English tradition that it
was not in the nature of things that the new restrictive laws now
promulgated would be accepted without protest. One English merchant put
it tellingly when describing presents of fur that had previously been
brought to Queen Elizabeth by a Russian ambassador.

“The Presents sent unto her Majesty were Sables, both in paires for
tippets, and two timbars, to wit, two times fortie, with Luzerns and
other rich furres. For at that time that princely ancient ornament of
furres was yet in use. And great pitie but that it might be renewed
especiall in Court, and among Magistrates, not only for the restoring
of an olde worshipful Art and Companie, but also because they be for
our Climate wholesome, delicate, grave and comely; expressing dignitie,
comforting age, and of longer continuance, and better with small cost
to be preserved, then these new silks, shagges and ragges, wherein a
great part of the wealth of the land is hastily consumed.”

Whether or not the merchant’s protest was heeded, it was in fact
prophetic in its suggestiveness.

The recent proclamations had decreed “that no furres shall be worn
here, but such as the like is growing here within this our Realme.”
Well, the “Realme” was about to be vastly extended.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now that England was no longer in a state of complete commercial
dependence upon the continent, ingenuity at home and pluckiness abroad
were rising to meet the challenge. Participation in world affairs was
eagerly sought. While adventurers of purse formed companies to trade
overseas, venturers of person took a sudden interest in such things as
ship design and ordnance. With an eye on plunder as well as legitimate
commerce shipwrights were trained to turn out swift and manageable
craft of small burden, well gunned for oceanic warfare and easy to
maintain.

Of course Mary Tudor, the Catholic Queen of England who succeeded her
father Henry VIII, had prohibited her countrymen from sailing west to
America. It wouldn’t have pleased Philip II of Spain. He married her to
extend his empire, not to share it.

But Englishmen had tasted salt water and they liked it. They liked it
even more after seeing the American silver, fifty thousand pounds of
it, that Philip sent to London as a wedding present. When Mary died
in 1558 after a short but bloody reign and her Protestant sister,
Elizabeth, ascended the throne, there was no holding those who wanted
to sail west.

Elizabeth, herself, applied no restraints. Like the French king,
Francis I, she winked broadly enough when her own newly toughened
mariners pirated Spain’s shipping and disputed that country’s
ascendancy even on the Spanish main. The destiny of empire was
beckoning the English. John Hawkins, the slaver, and Francis Drake, the
privateer, were only the forerunners of captains of their stripe who
were to make their country the mistress of the seas.

In the beginning it was envy of Spain, a thirst for silver and gold,
and the quest for a trade passage to Cathay that drove the English
westward, just as it had the French before them. Colonization, except
as an eventual means to an end, had no part in the French scheme--nor
in the English. The primary objects other than the harassment of Spain
were the discovery of mines and a northwest passage.

Colonization was visualized, when at all, only as occupation--to hold
the route to the mines or to Cathay against the possibility of foreign
claims.

Not until an English venturer in America by the name of John Smith
challenged the wasteful search for gold and demanded the development
of the country’s more obvious resources did it begin to dawn on
the merchant adventurers of England that colonization might be a
commercially desirable end in itself.

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.

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.

[Illustration: THE MERCHANTS FILLED THEIR COFFERS, WHILE THE INDIANS
ACQUIRED GUNS.]

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.

Wollaston would have taken all the servants and sold their time if it
had not been for one Thomas Morton. An educated man, a lawyer of sorts
with a bent for both pleasure and profit, Morton saw an opportunity for
greater gains in the fur trade than anyone had yet garnered. His plan
was to sell guns and liquor to the Indians in exchange for skins and to
let the devil take the hindmost.

Appealing to some of the worst rogues among Wollaston’s servants on
the promise that they would prosper Morton conducted a successful
mutiny. After all, who wanted to be sold into slavery in Virginia? Soon
thereafter, with his disreputable associates, Morton set up his own
trading post, calling it “Merrymount,” and commenced his illegal barter
with the Indians to the great consternation of the Pilgrims.

Beaver, otter and valuable deer skins found their way in great
quantities to the new truck house, while Merrymount became “a sort of
a drunkard’s resort and gambling hall” and worse. The jolly host of
Merrymount, revelling in “riotous prodigality,” had a great Maypole
erected for the entertainment of visiting factors who wanted to dance
and frisk with pleasurable Indian maids. Fishing and trading vessels
along the coast much preferred to do business with the open-handed
Morton rather than the close-fisted Pilgrims. Therefore, trading goods
were as easily come by at Merrymount as were beaver skins. Everyone was
quite happy about the situation except the fathers at Plymouth.

Morton had even discovered their profitable new trading grounds
in Maine. The first year the Pilgrims extended their fur trading
operations to Maine, in 1625, they gathered in 700 pounds of beaver
besides some other furs on the Kennebec, mostly in exchange for the
corn they had by then learned to grow at Plymouth. But now Morton was
outbidding them with his more attractive trading goods and getting
nearly everything of value in that vicinity too. The very existence of
the Plymouth Colony seemed to be at stake.

Complaints, cajolings and threats were of no avail. Morton, the
lawyer, was too clever. Something had to be done and force was the
final resort. Captain Standish was sent with some soldiers to arrest
the obnoxious neighbor on the charge that he was violating the royal
proclamation prohibiting trade in guns and powder.

“Captain Shrimp,” as Morton contemptuously called Standish, succeeded
in his mission only after a fight. He captured Morton and took him
to Plymouth. There he tried his best to have the erstwhile “host of
Merrymount” hanged. But in the end Morton’s only punishment was to be
shipped back to England.

As it came about, the Wessagusset area was no sooner eliminated as a
competitor for the beaver trade than the Pilgrims were faced with new
and much more formidable rivals in the same neighborhood. These were
the Puritans, the advance guard of whom arrived at Salem under Captain
John Endicott in 1628. As recruits of the great Massachusetts Bay
Company they were soon coming by the thousands. Under the leadership of
Governor John Winthrop they overran the Boston Bay region. And there
wasn’t much the fathers at Plymouth could do about these new neighbors
except to offer religious advice on the relative merits of Brownism and
Separation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The local competition for beaver now being almost overwhelming, the
Pilgrims found it necessary to go more and more afield to meet their
required quota of pelts. Excursions north to the Kennebec in Maine
were the most fruitful, not only because there was much fine fur to
be had from the natives there but because trading goods on occasion
could be obtained from fishing and trading ships off that coast. Once,
too, in exchange for corn the Pilgrims picked up four hundred pounds
worth of trucking stuff from some Englishmen who were abandoning their
plantation on Monhegan Island. And they acquired an additional stock of
truck from a French ship which had been wrecked at Sagadahoc.

To the south along the coast they never met with much success. When
they had first gone out to Narragansett Bay on a trading voyage in
1623, for instance, the Indians there disdained their meagre offerings.
The Narragansett were much too happy with the goods being furnished
by the Dutch traders from Manhattan. Both the Narragansett and their
neighbors, the Pequot, held on to their furs for the Hollanders, and
they were powerful enough to get away with it. They had Dutch guns
and powder, as well as the Hollanders themselves if need be, to back
them up. In fact, by 1625 the Dutch had a fortified trading post on
an island in Narragansett Bay and two similar forts near-by on the
mainland.

Governor Bradford, in exasperation, gave out a warning that all the
region along the coast to the southeast of Plymouth was English
territory. He as much as demanded that the New Netherlanders stop
trading there. But it was useless. The Dutchmen simply ignored the
warnings. However they did offer to enter into direct trading relations
themselves with Plymouth and sent a mission there in 1627, with sugar,
linen and other goods, to talk it over.

This mission was headed up by Isaack de Rasieres, the chief trader as
well as the Secretary of New Netherland. Rasieres appears to have had
an ulterior motive in making the visit. He brought along a stock of
wampum, the strings of highly polished shell-beads that the Dutchmen
had been accustomed to getting from the Narragansett and the Pequot.
With wampum, Rasieres pointed out to the Pilgrims, he had been doing a
great business among Indians who didn’t have the means of manufacturing
it, especially along the Hudson River where Henry Hudson himself had
first discovered strings of shell-beads circulating as a kind of money.

The Hollander cannily suggested that wampum might be used to just as
great advantage on the Kennebec by the Pilgrims. No doubt, by this
means, he hoped to direct their attention more to Maine and away from
the Dutch trading preserves in Long Island Sound and the Narragansett
country. Offering to sell wampum to the Englishmen at a fair price,
probably he hoped also to keep them from dealing direct for it with the
Narragansett and the Pequot.

Although the Pilgrim fathers were a bit suspicious of Rasieres’
motives, nevertheless they did find the shell-money to be most
“vendable” on the Kennebec. So much so, in fact, that in a very
short time with the aid of this medium of exchange they were enabled
to cut off the fur trade of that region from the fishermen and other
independent traders who had been accustomed to barter there. In the
meantime they also developed their own sources of wampum among some of
the Massachusetts coastal tribes who, as it turned out, also possessed
the means of manufacturing it.

The Pilgrims secured their rights up the Kennebec River by obtaining
a patent to a strip of land fifteen miles wide on both sides of that
river. They built a trucking house at Cushenoc (Augusta) which they
kept stocked with coats, shirts, rugs, blankets, corn, biscuit, peas,
prunes, and other supplies. With the help of wampum for exchange they
drove a brisk trade among the Abnaki Indians in those parts. In 1630
they extended their operations even farther north, setting up a trading
post on the Penobscot River at Pentagoet, now Castine, Maine.

The Penobscot trading post originated as a private venture for which
the Pilgrim, Isaac Allerton, along with some partners in England
promoted a patent. Allerton, once a London tailor, had risen in
prominence at Plymouth in New England to stand second only to the
governor. It would appear that he and his overseas partners shared
the rights to trade in the territory north of the Kennebec with other
leading Pilgrims in return for the loan of wampum, shallops, supplies
and servants.

But the partnership accounts became jumbled, because of Allerton’s
financial deceits according to the Pilgrims. And Edward Ashley, the
“profane young man” sent out from England as factor, didn’t help things
by his personal conduct.

Actually, young Ashley did well enough in the bartering department,
acquiring over a thousand pounds of beaver and otter the first season.
However he seems to have gone native in the most offensive sense to
the Pilgrim fathers, living “naked” among the savages and committing
“uncleannes with Indean women.” Also, it was discovered, he was trading
shot and powder with the savages and not even accounting for the
profits from this unholy trade.

Such behavior, of course, could not be countenanced. Ashley was
arrested and shipped back to England by the Plymouth partners, while
they themselves took over complete operating control of the enterprise.

All of which was not to Isaac Allerton’s liking. Deserting the
partnership, he retaliated by setting himself up as a competitor in
Maine. In 1633 he settled some “base fellows” in a new trading post at
the mouth of the Machias River, close by the present Canadian border.
There he did his best to cut off Plymouth’s commerce with the more
northerly tribes who were then taking their furs to the Penobscot and
Kennebec trucking houses.

The Pilgrims had other competitors in Maine also. In 1630 a trading
post was established at Pemaquid Point under a patent obtained by two
English merchants for twelve thousand acres between the Damariscotta
and Muscongus Rivers. About the same time John Oldham and Richard Vines
obtained a grant at the mouth of the Saco River, which remained a most
profitable fur trading center for some years.

Then there was the Laconia Company, organized by Sir Ferdinando Gorges
and Captain John Mason to put new life in their Piscataqua colony.
Laconia, described as a vast hinterland area of rivers and lakes, was
an extension of their original patent to the “Province of Maine.”
Gorges and Mason now planned to send cargoes of Indian trucking goods
up the Piscataqua River into Laconia, to Lake Champlain, to be bartered
for peltries. Thus they hoped to compete with the Dutch and the French
for the hinterland trade.

Captain Walter Neale, as governor of the Laconia Company, and Ambrose
Gibbons, as factor, did very well from 1630 to 1633, establishing
several trading posts on the Piscataqua River. But they never reached
Lake Champlain. Maybe they had it confused with Lake Winnepesaukee.
In any case, as they discovered, the rivers of Maine flowed from the
north, not from the west, and they couldn’t penetrate deep enough into
the interior to tap the hinterland trade of the Dutch and the French.

Probably the most dangerous of the Pilgrims’ rivals in Maine about this
time was the trading post on Richmond’s Island off Cape Elizabeth.
Thomas Morton, the jolly host of Merrymount, had traded here as early
as 1627. After his banishment from America one of his most roguish
associates, Walter Bagnall, took over the island and is said to have
gained 1,000 pounds sterling from his trade in a period of three years.
Then this “wicked fellow” was murdered by the natives.

Bagnall’s successor, John Winter, also did a flourishing business on
Richmond’s Island as factor for some English merchants, employing some
sixty men at one time in both fishing and fur trading activities. The
records indicate that he was about as unscrupulous in his dealings as
was his predecessor, cheating and otherwise mistreating the Indians
at every turn. He charged them at the rate of thirty-three pounds for
a hogshead of brandy which cost him seven. For powder which cost him
twenty pence per pound he raised the rate to three shillings in trade.
But the natives preferred his goods.

In spite of such competition, however, Maine became the Pilgrims’ chief
source of furs. In one period of two years the trading post at Cushenoc
alone is known to have gathered in more than 7,000 pounds of beaver.
The route of the beaver-laden shallops from the Maine coast was indeed
Plymouth’s life-line. Wampum played no small role in the success of
this extended operation which was so vital to the colony’s existence,
although the tight control exercised over the fur trade by the Pilgrim
fathers was the main factor.

Always the peltry traffic had been invested in certain leaders at
Plymouth who managed the whole trade in the interests of the communalty
in order that the Pilgrims’ debt to the merchants in England might be
paid. In 1627 William Bradford, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, Miles
Standish and a few others in partnership undertook to assume this
entire indebtedness. In return, these “undertakers” were to enjoy any
and all profits from the traffic in peltries for six years. They were
empowered to do what they pleased with all furs and trucking goods
in the common store, and they alone were to use the colony’s trading
posts, truck houses and shallops.

From that time forward the Plymouth Plantation enjoyed real economic
success. In 1628 furs to the value of 659 English pounds were exported
in one cargo. Although no total figures are available for 1628 to 1630,
a very large amount of peltry went to England according to Governor
Bradford. From 1631 to 1636 over 12,000 pounds of beaver and 1,000
pounds of otter were shipped, most of which brought 20 shillings a
pound and none less than 14 shillings. Bradford said that the beaver
alone during these years brought 10,000 pounds sterling and that the
otter was more than sufficient to pay all costs of transport and
auction. Considering the size of the plantation this was indeed big
business.

In spite of the financial bungling of the partnership’s agents in
England, and even outright irregularities there, the debt was paid off.
Additional profits from the sale of beaver skins bought many other
things the Pilgrims needed, and in the end it was the earnings from the
fur trade that provided the foundation for Plymouth’s next economic
development, cattle farming.

In the meantime the Pilgrims’ profitable trade in furs on the Maine
coast and on rivers leading to the interior was jealously regarded by
the French who, after all, considered that territory within their own
limits. And neighboring French traders were doing something about it.




X

_A Border Fixed on the Coast of Maine_


The planting of trading posts farther and farther up the coast of Maine
by the New Englanders did not go unchallenged by the French. Although
in English eyes it had been well established ever since Captain
Argall’s raids in the Bay of Fundy that English claims to the coast now
extended well above the 45th parallel, even to the St. Lawrence valley,
no such admission had ever been made by the French. There were always
French traders in Acadia (Nova Scotia) who envisaged their preserves
as extending well down the coast of Maine and who intended to resist
further encroachments in those parts.

In fact, as it came about, these fur traders protected and maintained
the French claim to much of this coastal region during an incident of
the Thirty Years’ War which put most of New France under the English
flag for three years, from 1629 to 1632.

Prior to this episode the affairs of New France had reached a turning
point. In 1627 Samuel de Champlain’s difficulties became acute. That
year the Iroquois, his irreconcilable enemies, renewed their bloody
savagery in the interior, while along the coast the English were
closing off the very entrance to the valley of the St. Lawrence with
their plantations and trading posts and their increased shipping.

Although Champlain’s company had a good season in furs, collecting
22,000 that summer which could be sold in France at ten francs
each, the expense of operation had made the outlook none too bright
relatively for the shareholders who expected huge returns. Besides the
salaries of the Viceroy in France and of Champlain as his lieutenant
governing the colony, interpreters now cost as much as a thousand
francs a season and sailors six hundred, while factors and other
servants came correspondingly high. And there were other increased
expenses that bid fair to cut deep into profits.

As a result the directors of the company made things difficult for
their governor on the St. Lawrence. They particularly balked at his
urgent request for extra funds to strengthen the fortifications of
Quebec, even though only a wooden palisade and a few small cannon
protected the French trading post.

Champlain, with characteristic fortitude, made the best of his
difficulties. But he was most uneasy about the English at his doorway.
And well he might be!

As early as 1620 Sir George Calvert, English Baron of Baltimore, had
adventured a plantation in Newfoundland. Three years later King James
granted him quasi-regal proprietorship of the southeastern peninsula
of that island between Trinity and Placentia Bays. In 1627 he came out
with his family, built a fine house at Ferryland, and showed every
intention of establishing a great fur trading and fishing colony in the
form of a British dominion at this strategic gateway to New France.

Still more alarming were the activities of a Scotsman, Sir William
Alexander, who had been stirred by accounts of the founding of New
Spain, New France, New Netherland and New England to attempt the
founding of a New Scotland. In 1621, with complete disregard for French
claims, the English king had granted to him all the vast peninsula
between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of St. Lawrence! Today that
would be Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and part of Quebec Province. This
princely domain was to be divided into feudal-type Scotch baronies
complete with a hierarchy of hereditary titles.

Alexander’s attempts to establish permanent trading posts in New
Scotland, or Nova Scotia, were failures until 1628. That year
seventy-two of his colonists managed to set up for business at
Poutrincourt’s old quarters at Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy. There
they found themselves to be the near neighbors of a young French
fur trader at Cape Sable named Charles de la Tour who was under the
impression that the country belonged to him.

Monsieur La Tour had inherited his rights from Saint Just after that
pioneer finally returned to France in 1623. Since then he had been
living the independent life of a wilderness lord with French retainers
and aboriginal subjects, and he had no intention of yielding his estate
or fur-trading privileges to anyone, much less foreigners.

La Tour did not immediately attempt to oust Alexander’s Scots from Port
Royal as he was on much the weaker side at the time, but he did stand
firm and unsubmissive at Cape Sable and he resisted all efforts of the
English to bring him over to their side. This was not easy, for nearly
all of New France was soon in the hands of the enemy.

In 1628 a French colonizing fleet sent out by the Company of New France
under the aegis of Cardinal de Richelieu was captured by privateers
boldly operating in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with English letters of
marque. In another year Champlain’s worst fears were realized when this
same fleet of privateers, under the leadership of the Kirke brothers,
appeared before Quebec in force enough to insure its capitulation.

Champlain himself was taken prisoner at Quebec. But under the terms
of the surrender he marched out of the fort with his arms and all of
his own furs, as did other head men. The factors, servants and workmen
were allowed to take but one beaver skin each before the English took
over the factory. Then, after running up the English flag, the Kirkes
were said to have driven an immediate trade with Indians and others
remaining about the fort for some 2,000 skins in addition to those they
found in the storehouse. They even ended up with the pelts they had
allowed the starving garrison under the terms of surrender, taking them
in trade for food.

Sir William Alexander, uniting his interests with the Kirkes to form
the Scottish and English Company for the peltry trade of New France,
sent out a second fleet to Port Royal in 1629 under the command of his
son. When the fleet arrived nearly half the people who had been left at
Port Royal the year before were found to have died from one cause or
another. But young Alexander relieved the survivors, strengthened the
fort, and put new life into the colony. His vessels managed to acquire
a satisfactory number of pelts in the Bay of Fundy during that summer.
He also captured a French ship. And as further proof of the substance
of New Scotland he took back on his return voyage an Indian chief of
the region who wanted to conclude an alliance with the English king.

In the meantime it developed that shortly before Champlain’s
capitulation a treaty of peace had been signed between England and
France. But, although King Charles agreed very soon to restore Quebec
to the French under the terms of the treaty, the negotiations dragged
on for three years. During that time the Scottish Company continued
to drive a great trade for pelts on the St. Lawrence and elsewhere,
while the French pressed not only their claims to furs appropriated
from stores at Quebec after the actual signing of the peace treaty
but insisted also upon the return of all of New France. That included
Acadia of course and the evacuation of the fort at Port Royal.

At first, Charles was not disposed to disturb Alexander in his
occupation of “Nova Scotia.” In fact he encouraged the Scot to further
efforts in that direction. However, he needed gold at the time much
more than he needed another Scotland, so he was not reluctant to do a
little bargaining. When his wife’s brother, the French king, agreed to
pay a long overdue and substantial dowry, Charles agreed to return Port
Royal to the French. Sir William’s dream was thereupon finished. The
Scots demolished their fort, and young Alexander surrendered Port Royal
to the Chevalier Isaac de Razilly who had been sent out by the Company
of New France as governor of all Acadia.

This was a tremendous victory for Charles de la Tour and his French
fur traders, who had not only stubbornly maintained themselves during
the incident of the Scottish occupation of Acadia, but had managed
harassments intended to hinder further encroachments up the coast of
Maine by the Englishmen in those more southerly parts.

In 1631 the Frenchmen had paid a visit to the Pilgrims’ most northerly
outpost at Pentagoet on the Penobscot. Taking advantage of the absence
of the factor and most of his company, they were able to surprise a few
“simple” servants by a ruse. First, pretending they had “newly come
from the sea” and that their vessel was in need of repairs, a “false
Scot” among them fell to admiring the Englishmen’s muskets. Then,
talking the servants into letting them examine the guns, they gained
possession of the Englishmen’s weapons and promptly made away with
some four or five hundred pounds worth of Pilgrim goods, including
three hundredweight of beaver.

In time, however, after the ousting of the Scots from the Bay of Fundy,
the Frenchmen were able to do more than simply harass the Englishmen on
the coast of Maine. The truck house at Machias in Maine, built by Isaac
Allerton in 1633, was even more of a challenge than the Penobscot post
had been. Allerton had no sooner settled his traders there than “La
Tour, governor of the French in those parts, making claim to the place,
came to displant them, and finding resistance, killed two of the men
and carried away the other three and the goods.”

Allerton himself later went to Port Royal to protest. But he was
told by La Tour that “he had authority from the king of France, who
challenged all from Cape Sable to Cape Cod, wishing them to take notice
and to certify the rest of the English, that, if they traded to the
east of Pemaquid, he would make prize of them.” When Allerton asked to
see Monsieur La Tour’s commission the Frenchman replied that “his sword
was commission sufficient, where he had strength to overcome; where
that wanted, he would show his commission.”

And the French made good on their challenge, for in 1635 Monsieur
Charles d’Aunay, one of Governor Razilly’s lieutenants, came in a
man-of-war to the Pilgrims’ trading post on the Penobscot. By a show
of this force he took possession of the trucking house in the name of
the King of France. Making an inventory of the goods he found there at
prices he set himself, d’Aunay “made no payment for them, but told them
in convenient time he would do it if they came for it. For the house
and fortification etc. he would not allow nor account anything, saying
that they which build on another man’s ground do forfeit the same.”
Then he put the English traders in a shallop and sent them back to
Plymouth.

The Pilgrim fathers were enough upset about the loss of their goods and
trading post to do something violent about it. With the approval of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but without much in the way of material
assistance from their Puritan brethren, they hired “a fair ship of
above 300 tun well fitted with ordnance” to retake Pentagoet. This
ship was under the command of a Captain Girling. If the captain was
successful he was to have 700 pounds of beaver; if not, nothing. Along
with him went Captain Miles Standish and twenty Plymouth men in their
own bark to resettle their trading post after Girling had driven out
the French.

It would appear, however, that the French must have had notice of the
impending attack. So firmly were they entrenched behind earthworks
that Captain Girling’s gunfire could not dislodge them and all the big
ship’s powder was exhausted without effect. No landing was attempted.
Standish, frustrated, returned to Plymouth in his bark, and Captain
Girling went his own way.

The French now remained in permanent possession of what was soon known
as the “Mission of Pentagoet.” And so the line was finally drawn as a
practical matter between the English and the French on the Maine coast,
although England continued to maintain officially that it was more
northerly, at the 45th parallel.

Mutual distrust, born of the religious differences between
English Puritan and French Catholic, often erupted in charges and
counter-charges that sometimes threatened security on either side of
the line. In fact, fear of possible French aggression was in part
responsible for the eventual formation of the New England Confederation
in 1643. On the other side of the picture however, there was much
guarded trade between Frenchman and Englishman as it suited their
pocketbooks. As a matter of fact the Puritans actually traded with
the French conquerors of Pentagoet shortly after d’Aunay captured the
Pilgrim trading post.

But, even so, this coastal border created by the rival fur traders of
these two nations was maintained with only minor variations for years,
even after competition for the beaver trade was no longer the reason
for its existence.

Acadian fur traders and the rivers of Maine and Massachusetts that ran
in the wrong direction had effectively contained the English on the
northern coasts. The St. Lawrence River route to the interior, to the
great lake country that teemed with fur-bearers, remained safe to the
French traders, who resumed their profitable westward penetration of
the hinterland.

It remained to be seen, however, if the French could prevent the Dutch
of New Netherland and the English of Virginia from draining off this
hinterland trade. The Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna
Rivers all ran in the right direction to tap it.




XI

_The Bay of Virginia_


When Sir George Calvert, Baron of Baltimore, founded his province of
“Avalon” in Newfoundland he was partly motivated by religious urgings.
Being a Catholic convert he earnestly wanted to provide a haven in
the new world for the persecuted Catholics of England. But this court
favorite, who as the son of a humble Yorkshire farmer had figuratively
pulled himself up by his own bootstraps to ennoblement, was also a
profit-minded promoter. He expected a rich return on his newly gained
proprietorship.

However, after investing many thousands of pounds at Ferryland, Lord
Baltimore had little to show in the way of profits. The future, too,
looked as bleak as the cold Newfoundland winters, as barren as the
sterile soil. True, there were fish to be had for the taking--weather
permitting. But the trade in pelts was only fair, for the more
profitable fur frontier had long since passed into the interior of
Canada. And agricultural pursuits, the traditional support of English
feudal manors, were almost impossible due to the inclemencies of the
climate.

The Lord Proprietor of Avalon was soon looking southward, his eyes
resting appraisingly on Virginia. There, the warmer weather and richer
soil seemed to offer more appropriate conditions for the kind of
province he had in mind. There, in the lush tidewater of the Chesapeake
Bay country, he could hope for a better trade in pelts too.

As for possible profits from Newfoundland cod, he would gladly consign
them to those hearty fishermen who by nature were better able to cope
with the rigors of the northern climate!

So it came about that in 1629 his lordship wrote to King Charles asking
that a precinct of land in Virginia be granted to him with the same
quasi-regal privileges he enjoyed under his Newfoundland patent. Then,
without waiting for a reply, he embarked for Jamestown where he let it
be known that he was looking for a new plantation site, and forthwith
began cruising about Chesapeake Bay with the air of a man who was
confident that the king would approve his plans.

This was anything but politic. No Virginians, Anglican or Puritan,
wanted a Catholic in their midst. They didn’t want one even as a
neighbor in their great bay, and especially such an influential convert
as Baltimore. Who knew what Romish plot he might be promoting?

But even more alarming was the threat that this ambitious baron posed
to their fur trade in the Chesapeake.

       *       *       *       *       *

The tidewater had come to represent a treasure house of pelts to
the merchants and factors on the James River, at Jamestown and at
Kecoughtan, and to scores of traders plying their shallops and pinnaces
in the bay. On the York, the Rappahannock and the Potomac Rivers these
traders regularly visited the villages of the Indians, their shallops
returning to the James River plantations laden with skins. And across
the bay on the Eastern Shore there was still another lively fur trading
center at Accomac where beaver and muskrat abounded in the near-by
streams and marshes.

The most profitable branch of this trade was that in the Potomac River,
where the Spaniards of the sixteenth century had been the first of
record to barter with the natives for pelts and hides. Captain Samuel
Argall, who succeeded Captain John Smith in 1609 as the colony’s main
support for trade with the Indians, made several early visits to the
villages of the Patowomecks there. For hatchets and hoes, no doubt, he
took good quantities of beaver, otter, raccoon and deer skins as well
as the corn that was so badly needed at Jamestown. In 1612 he really
whetted the Patowomecks’ appetite for English goods when he produced a
copper kettle for their chief. Many English traders, with and without
permits, followed Captain Argall into the Potomac River, but especially
members of the Virginia Council who more or less controlled the
Chesapeake trade as a perquisite of office.

The Eastern Shore was opened up for trade in 1619 by Ensign Thomas
Savage who was one of the earliest professional factors in the
Chesapeake tidewater. He had spent several years as a youthful hostage
with Chief Wahunsonacock of the Powhatan Confederacy after having been
left with this old Powhatan in 1608 by Captain Christopher Newport.
During that time young Savage became a favorite of the natives and
learned much about the dialects and customs of the tribes in the
tidewater country. Later, when his services as an interpreter came to
be in demand by Virginia officials, he was commissioned an “Aunchient,”
or ensign, on the staff of the Master of Ordnance at Jamestown. It
was in this capacity on expeditions of discovery in the Potomac and
Patuxent Rivers and on the Eastern Shore that he began bartering on his
own account.

Like Captain John Smith before him, Ensign Savage learned of the great
trade in furs being had by the Frenchmen on the “backside of Virginia.”
In 1621 his account of their deeper penetration of the hinterland
reached the Virginia Company Council in London. At the same time the
company received reports of Dutch traders operating along the Virginia
coasts. A detailed account of this competition was rendered by Thomas
Dermer, the New England fur trader, who in addition to having paid
the visit to Jamestown went into the Delaware and Hudson Rivers. He
reported that in both those rivers he had “found divers ships of
Amsterdam and Horne who yearly had there a great and rich trade in
Furrs.”

The Dutch encroachments prompted a special letter, too, from the
governor and his council at Jamestown. They urged the company to
undertake “so certaine and gainefull” voyages for pelts as might be
made “to their infinite gaine” in the Delaware and Hudson, both of
which they pointed out were “within our lymits.” The Dutch interlopers
on the coasts were almost as challenging to the Virginians, now that
they themselves were well rooted, as was the possibility of French
competition creeping down the rivers that flowed into Chesapeake Bay
from the northern hinterland.

Almost--but not quite as challenging. For one thing, the settlers on
the James at this time had neither the ships to trade coastwise nor
the trade goods necessary to compete with the Dutch. More importantly,
however, right at their back door was the vast tidewater of the bay
and, beyond that, great stretches of lake country in the north, all
fertile with fur bearers to be had for the taking--provided they got
there before the French. This could be accomplished with home-made
shallops and less fancy trade goods than were needed to compete with
the Dutch.

So it came about that the Virginians left any exploitation of
the Delaware and Hudson Rivers to the merchants in England and,
individually with their more limited resources, extended their own
trading operations in their “Bay of Virginia.”

Scores of immigrants participated in this tidewater fur trade,
including a great many who had the advantage of a knowledge of the
Algonquin tongue because of having cohabited with the savages. Some of
the latter were no more than villainous runaways, cautiously returning
from sanctuary with the natives to share the profits of the boom in
pelts. Others, such as Robert Poole and Henry Spelman, had been left
with the Indians as hostages when they were youths, very much in the
same manner as Thomas Savage. Like him, they too had learned the
dialects and habits of various tribes, acted as spies for the English
colonists and then, later, were useful as interpreters.

Robert Poole traded professionally for the joint-stock, making voyages
in the company’s pinnace and rendering his accountings to the colony’s
treasurer at Jamestown. But he and Thomas Savage also obtained
commissions through members of the council and, renting shallops from
more prosperous colonists for voyages to the villages of the Indians,
did very well for themselves in this way. Probably neither of them
traded for pelts as extensively however as did Henry Spelman who
eventually managed to get financial backing in England and ships of his
own.

Young Spelman was the incorrigible scion of a distinguished English
family. According to his own testimony he had been sent out to Virginia
in 1609 at fourteen years of age because of “beinge in displeasure
of my fryndes and desirous to see other countries.” Captain John
Smith left him with Powhatan’s people, no doubt as the best way to
get rid of him. Henry Spelman was not as popular with the natives as
Thomas Savage, except perhaps with the Indian maidens. In fact he
appears to have escaped with his life only because of the intervention
of Pocahontas who, continuing her interest in white men after the
affair with Captain John Smith, succeeded eventually to marrying an
Englishman named John Rolfe.

Spelman’s entire career in the colony was one of manifold and
dangerous deceit. As a youth living with the Indians, he was accused
of treacherously laying a death trap for some of his fellow Englishmen
at Jamestown. Later, when he was employed as an official interpreter
for the colony, his tenure in office was cut short after he was tried
by the House of Burgesses and degraded from his rank for inciting
Opechancanough, the new Powhatan, against the English governor.

In 1622, when Opechancanough finally loosed his stored-up hatred
against the English, killing some three hundred fifty men, women and
children along the James River in a surprise massacre, Henry Spelman
and a trading partner, Captain Raleigh Croshaw, were bartering in
the Potomac. Opechancanough conspired with Chief Japazaws of the
Patowomecks to have the traders murdered. But the Patowomeck king
double-crossed the Powhatan. Instead of killing the Englishmen,
he entered into an alliance with them, permitting them to build a
fortified trading post on his lands.

All the evidence would indicate that Japazaws was a very wily
politician. He liked English kettles and knives as much as some of his
red neighbors disliked him, and he never did get around to knuckling
under to Opechancanough. No doubt the fort was a smart move on his
part. In any event, because of Japazaws’ need for white friends with
guns Captains Spelman and Croshaw escaped death.

Henry Spelman was not so fortunate the following year however. On a
trading voyage farther up the Potomac River, at the later site of
Washington, D. C., he was killed by the Anacostan Indians after being
captured in an ambush along with Henry Fleet and some other traders
and servants. Just a few days before his death Spelman had betrayed a
warrior who hazarded warning him of his own intended murder. It appears
he even witnessed the agony of the red man’s tortured execution. Then,
by some sort of final justice, he died at the hands of the same savages
to whom he had given over the kindly warrior.

_Aqua vitae_ may have had something to do with this murderous episode,
for, like the French and the Dutch before them and like the English
who were to follow in New England, some traders in Virginia taught the
savages to drink strong waters as a means of extracting a richer profit
during barter. And what a frightful chance they took!

Emotionally volatile and capricious by nature, the red man was even
more unpredictable of course when he was under the influence of liquor.
He might lose his trading sense to the advantage of the white men who
purposely plied him with _aqua vitae_ during the feasting that always
preceded barter, but when he realized he had been cheated he was apt
to reach for another jug and his tomahawk at the same time. No doubt
many a trader suffered a slow and bestial death while looking into the
bloodshot eyes of savages galled by stomach fires that he himself had
kindled.

Henry Fleet, who had been captured with Spelman, managed the
predicament in which he found himself with more skill than his friend,
indeed with some foresight. While no one in the colony heard from
him in over four years, and all thought he was dead, Fleet not only
contrived to escape execution by the savages, but spent his captivity
to real advantage. By the time he was finally released he had learned
enough about the Algonquin language and had become sufficiently
fraternal with his captors to engage in a profitable trade in skins
with them. Then, returning to London, where he had excellent family
connections, he acquired financial backing from William Cloberry and
other well-known merchants there. Afterward, as Captain Henry Fleet,
he traded in the Chesapeake for some years in his own ships and later
played a significant role in the genesis of the war between the
Virginians and Lord Baltimore over the fur trade.

       *       *       *       *       *

The central figure in that struggle was to be William Claiborne, an
ambitious and fiery young man who had been sent out to Virginia by
the company in 1621 as the colony’s surveyor. He served against the
Indians and rose rapidly to become a member of the governor’s council.
In 1626, after the English king took over the management of the colony
from the company, Captain Claiborne at twenty-five years of age
became Secretary of Virginia, the first to hold that office by royal
appointment.

This flattering preferment happened during the midst of the young
councillor’s activities to launch himself in the fur trade as a means
of supplementing his income. For a base of operations in the tidewater
he had just acquired a strategically located plantation at the mouth of
the James River. This was at Kecoughtan in Elizabeth City--now Hampton,
Virginia, the oldest continuous English habitation on the American
continent--a prime seventeenth century warehousing site.

In the favored position of a member of the council Claiborne was
joining such enterprising venturers as Raleigh Croshaw, Abraham
Peirsey, John Chew and Samuel Mathews in profiting from the Chesapeake
fur trade. These merchants furnished guides, interpreters, maps,
supplies and trucking stuff not only to seasoned traders already on the
bay but to those naively adventurous souls who came out from England
with their warrants to barter with the savages. It was a lucrative
business, particularly for one who also had influence to peddle in the
matter of commissions, licenses and taxes.

However, Captain Claiborne’s ambitions soared much higher with his
appointment as Secretary of His Majesty’s Colony of Virginia. In this
capacity he was second only to the governor in the colony’s hierarchy
of prestige and power, and he was in a position to dispense direct
patronage. His trade horizon broadened measurably.

With the acquisition of additional lands on the Eastern Shore, a
perquisite of the Secretary’s office, he began doing business on that
side of the bay with promising traders like Daniel Cugley and Charles
Harmar, as well as with Thomas Savage, who then lived on land given
him there by his genial friend, Debedeavon, the Laughing King of the
Accomacs. And these rugged frontiersmen together with their friends
supported the ambitious young secretary in plans he broached to set
up a great new plantation somewhere in the northernmost reaches of
the bay, a Virginia Hundred which would serve as a base for far-flung
trading operations on the backside of Virginia--to challenge both the
Dutch and the French in the hinterland.

Beginning in 1627 Claiborne made several exploratory expeditions in the
Chesapeake preparatory to implementing these plans. Since the governor
and his council had authority to grant commissions for discovery and
trade with the Indians between the 34th and 41st parallels, it was no
trick at all for Mr. Secretary to arrange to go whither he pleased
in the pursuit of his objective. Also, it would appear, he had less
trouble than most in dealing with the savages. He seemed to have a way
with them.

On his voyages into the Potomac and other near-by rivers of the
tidewater, where the natives were already accustomed to bartering
with the Virginians, Indian dugouts filled with braves would escort
Claiborne’s boat to a village site or runners would appear along the
banks to show the way. There would be drummings, smoke signals and
whooping. When the village was reached the entire population might be
in evidence, standing about in groups exhibiting their brown beaver,
otter, marten, or deerskins by holding up the pelts on poles and
otherwise making friendly gestures.

Usually the savages were almost naked. During the hot spring months of
the trading season few of them wore much more than little aprons, with
possibly feathers or some English ornaments tied on their heads. On
sunny days their bodies glistened with grease and oil; often they were
streaked with the red and orange dye of pocones root in honor of the
distinguished white visitors with the intriguing trade goods.

Sometimes, to prove their friendship, the warriors of a tribe would
come dancing to the beat of their drums and singing their peace song
all the way down to the water’s edge. A priest might be among them,
cavorting about with clattering deer hooves tied around his ankles and
rattling dried gourds filled with pebbles and shells. Or even some
squaws might join in the greetings with loops of bells, thimbles or
pieces of brass which they shook in cadence with the drums.

Always, however, the Virginians had to be watchful for ambuscades, no
matter how friendly things appeared. Only if women and children were
much in evidence was it considered reasonably safe to beach a boat and
proceed with the preliminaries of barter.

Exasperating in their tediousness, these preliminaries had to be
accepted with casualness, else the barter might be off. A great trader
like Captain Claiborne must first engage in seemingly endless pantomime
and orations. After that he had to offer through his interpreter gifts
of axes, knives or hatchets for the chief of the tribe and his head
men, and this must be followed by a distribution of blue beads, bells
and other trinkets among the chief’s wives. But it was the feasting
that took up most of the time. In fact, when a really good catch of
beaver was on hand trading seldom commenced until the second day.

Then, when the goods were finally unloaded, the natives would insist
on viewing it at leisure, tumbling and tossing it over and over again
and stealing whatever they could. If objections were raised, however,
no barter might be joined. Or worse, the savages might “fall out” with
the Englishmen, and killings would result. Therefore, the members of
the bartering detail had to be constantly on the alert to prevent as
much stealing as possible, while their companions stood guard by the
boat with arms in readiness to provide cover for a quick retreat in
case of necessity. After the bartering actually got under way, every
cunning device and ruse was employed on each side to outwit the other.
Suspicion was mutual, and well it might be, for the natives were quick
to learn “English tricks.”

Claiborne was especially successful in the northern reaches of the
bay where contacts were made with fierce hunting tribes from the
hinterland. They brought out decorative panther skins, bundles of tough
bison hides which would serve as leather, and huge bearskins for use
as robes, blankets and floor coverings. Occasionally for mere trifles
they offered sparkling stones and rare gems that would eventually bring
fancy prices from the London jewelers who set them in gentlemen’s rings.

There were even black beaver and sable skins available in the
northernmost bay villages. Sables (American pine marten) brought up
to twenty shillings a pair. One full grown black beaver was worth as
much, whereas a brown beaver pelt weighing two pounds never brought
more than fourteen shillings in the Virginia market at the time. There
were stacks of the cheaper pelts to be had in the northern villages
too--wild-cat, red fox and the little musquash (muskrat). The time
would come in America when the lowly muskrat would be the backbone of
the fur industry, but the smaller varieties in the seventeenth century
sometimes brought only two shillings a dozen--with cods. The cods of
muskrat served for good perfume in England. In Virginia they only added
to the stench of Indian stews!

Wherever the English traders went in the Chesapeake there was no
escaping the hospitality of the feast. And much Indian food was
anything but palatable. Stinking jerked venison swarming with maggots
had to be eaten if offered, however. Gobbets of greasy meat with the
suspiciously foul odors of a communal stew pot must be swallowed. An
Indian could understand why a white trader might decline the offer of a
squaw as a bed fellow for the night but never the refusal of food at a
feast.

Captain Claiborne’s crowning business achievement at this time was
the establishment of trading relations with the giant Susquehannocks
who had previously bartered their fine pelts with Captain John Smith.
These proud and intelligent savages, Iroquois by blood, inhabited the
valley of the Susquehanna River through which the Englishmen hoped
to gain access to the northern lake regions. Claiborne made trading
pacts with their great chief in 1629, the meetings taking place at the
mouth of the river on the mountainous little island which today serves
as a bridge anchor for fast trains and automobiles speeding over the
Susquehanna River between Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Indeed, the Secretary of Virginia was well on his way to consummating
his grand plan for a Virginia Hundred in the upper Chesapeake as the
hub of a great fur-trading empire, when Lord Baltimore appeared on the
scene.

Now, obviously, the English baron had much the same idea as the
Virginians, except in one important respect. He didn’t plan to come
under Virginia’s jurisdiction. He intended to have a province of his
own--and that a slice of Virginia territory--over which he would rule
independently and for which he would be answerable to no one except the
king.

It was an impossible situation for the Virginians. But not for George
Calvert. The First Baron of Baltimore felt that he knew well enough how
to get things done at the English court, and he didn’t intend to let
any muddy colonials stand in his way!




XII

_Kent Island and the Backside of Virginia_


At the time of Lord Baltimore’s arrival the Virginians were already
suffering from mass hypertension induced by fear. Early in the summer
of 1629 there had been another massacre along the James River, and no
sooner had this Indian uprising been quelled than rumors were rife that
the Spaniards were about to attack.

Captain Claiborne led the colonial forces against the offending
Pamunkeys of the Powhatan Confederacy in an effort to “utterly
exterpate” them, that being the settled policy of the colony. No
thought had been given to any further trade with these neighboring
savages since the first bloody massacre they committed in 1622. The
Pamunkeys were fair game and in 1629 the English soldiers “obtained
more spoil and revenge than they had done since the great massacre.”

But even more pressing than the Indian war that year was the feverish
urgency about rebuilding and fortifying the fort at Point Comfort
to protect the plantations against a surprise attack from Florida.
Nervously on the alert for Spanish spies and treachery, the protestant
Virginians not only didn’t trust the intentions of their Catholic
neighbors to the south, they didn’t trust their own king. After all,
they no doubt reasoned, Charles did have a Catholic wife! And didn’t
he have as his new advisor, William Laud, the Bishop of London, who
everyone knew was trying to reconcile the English Church to Rome?

The bigotries of the seventeenth century were indeed unreasoning. But
they were very real to the Virginians in their lonesome outpost of
civilization. To them Spaniard and Catholic were one.

Now into their midst came Lord Baltimore! Had he not once connived with
Gondomar, the hated Spanish ambassador, to bring about the marriage of
the baby Prince Charles to the Infanta Maria of Spain? Maybe he was
in league now with Spain under some subtle arrangement made by King
Charles himself. Anything was possible to the fear-ridden colonists on
the James.

To dispose of this unwelcome intruder, without the risk of too greatly
offending the king, they had to have something fool-proof on which to
hang their collective hats. In the end, they offered Baltimore the
prescribed oath of allegiance and supremacy, making it mandatory for
him to subscribe to the supreme authority of the English sovereign in
all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. He refused to take the oath
and so was ordered to leave the colony.

       *       *       *       *       *

Always in the front rank of the opposition to Lord Baltimore of course
had been the merchants who foresaw the loss of their tidewater trade,
but even more especially William Claiborne and his followers with their
own grand plan for colonization and trade on the backside of Virginia.
Working for them in addition to fear and prejudice during this clash
of rival plans was the rising sense of political independence in the
colony, an increasing determination to fight for the sovereignty of
possessed land and for “democrattical rights.”

The Virginians did actually have something of a legal brake that
they could apply on royal or noble license. They had their House of
Burgesses, which had been sitting since 1619 as the first popular
legislative assembly in America. Even after the king took over the
colony from the company the colonists had been successful in retaining
their little parliament. Somehow, with this bulwark of democracy, it
was easier to face up to the crown or to court favorites like Lord
Baltimore when impossible demands were in the making. And that is
exactly what happened, for the House of Burgesses backed the merchants
in every move they made to thwart the great lord’s plans, both in
Virginia and in England after he returned there.

Meanwhile, Captain Claiborne himself went to London where he obtained
additional backing for his project through the merchant adventurer,
William Cloberry. This wealthy man, together with Maurice Thompson and
other merchants, subscribed for the major share of the joint-stock
in the trading adventure. All agreed enthusiastically that through
Claiborne’s plantation it would be possible to drain off much of
the fur trade of the French in Canada. Cloberry well knew the
potentialities of the “backside of Virginia,” as he had formerly
adventured with the Kirkes in Canada.

Just to make sure that if Lord Baltimore later obtained his grant
he did not molest Claiborne, the partners in the trading adventure
obtained a commission under His Majesty’s signet of Scotland
authorizing trade in all territory “neere or about these partes of
America for which there is not allready a patent granted to others
for the sole trade.” It was drawn up by Sir William Alexander, the
Secretary for Scotland, who was entertained by Cloberry with bait in
the form of a proposition for interchange of trade between Virginia
and Nova Scotia. Sir William, making desperate efforts at the time
to extract a profit from his grant in America, saw in the Claiborne
venture a source of corn for his plantation at Port Royal.

In any event, the commission was confirmed by the King himself at
Greenwich, and when the Secretary of Virginia sailed back across the
ocean in May of 1631 to establish his plantation and launch his trading
adventure he went with the royal blessing.

In his ship, the _Africa_, cargoed with colonists and supplies,
Claiborne touched first at Kecoughtan and Accomac to attract additional
volunteers, and then late in August he planted his colony on Kent
Island, some hundred and twenty-five miles up the bay. Kent Island,
which lies against the Eastern Shore opposite present-day Annapolis,
was ideally situated for his purposes. He built a palisaded fort and
stocked his plantation with cattle, swine and poultry. With the arrival
of more farmers and traders from the lower settlements it was not long
before the colony had a church, a windmill, warehouses, and a shipyard
busily constructing shallops, wherries and pinnaces for the Indian
trade.

Despite a devastating fire that once destroyed all the buildings, death
from marauding savages, and sickness, as well as many other hardships,
the plantation flourished. In the spring its fields were green with
tobacco and corn, and its wharves were busy with trading boats and
bundles of furs. During the summer the season’s pelts were stretched
and leathered on rows of wooden hide racks inside the palisades before
being packed in great hogsheads for shipment to England. Then in the
autumn, after the harvesting, the sweet scent of tobacco wafted into
the fort from the drying sheds where the leaves hung curing on poles.

In the spring of 1632 Captain Nicholas Martiau, an ancestor of George
Washington, represented Kent Hundred in the House of Burgesses at
Jamestown, and the first English settlement within the present bounds
of the State of Maryland was recognized as a political unit of
Virginia, established within the assigned territorial limits of that
royal colony.

In the meantime, on the other side of the ocean, George Calvert died
before ever getting a charter to establish a palatinate of his own in
the Chesapeake. However, his efforts finally bore fruit. On June 30,
1632, two months after his death, a grant passed through the seals.
“Maryland” was to be a slice of Virginia extending from the Potomac
River northward to the 40th parallel which crosses the Delaware at
present-day Philadelphia. It was a feudal seigniory to be passed on
to the baron’s heirs, just as he had planned, and already it had made
its first descent, to his oldest son, Cecilius Calvert, second Lord
Baltimore.

Although Kent Island was obviously within the limits of the grant to
Baltimore, neither William Claiborne nor the Council at Jamestown
doubted the legality of Virginia’s claim upon the island. The Maryland
charter expressly limited Baltimore’s rights to land “hactenus
inculta,” that is, hitherto uncultivated. Kent of course was cultivated
and had been for some time.

Two years later, however, when Cecilius’ younger brother, the
twenty-eight-year-old Leonard, brought the first colonists over to
plant on the Potomac River he promptly let it be known that Captain
Claiborne must submit to his government. Kent Hundred, he said, came
under the jurisdiction of the Lord Proprietor of Maryland. Furthermore,
licenses from Lord Baltimore were to be required of anyone trading
within the precincts of Maryland. Not only was Kent Island to be
delivered up to his government at St. Mary’s on the Potomac, but the
trading post in the Susquehanna River on mountainous little Palmer’s
Island, which Claiborne had planted in 1633, was to be given over. The
Marylanders, it appeared, planned to build their own ships for the
Indian fur trade and to set up magazines in their colony that they
might “make thereby a very great gayne.”

Cecil, Lord Baltimore, in fact laid much stress on the fur trade in his
instructions to Leonard, consigning to his brother for his own account
in trade with the natives a quantity of trucking stuff consisting of
“coarse freeze, small groce glass beads, box, Ivorye, and horne Combes,
brass kettles, axes, hoes, hawkes bells, and sheffeeld knives.” Before
the palisaded fort at St. Mary’s was completed, the Maryland pinnace,
_Dove_, was sent out to follow the “trade of beaver through all parts
of the precincts of this province.”

Under Cyprian Thorowgood, Lord Baltimore’s traders paid a visit to the
Virginians’ trading post on Palmer’s Island, which was manned by an
interpreter named John Fullwood and a negro slave. However, the men
from St. Mary’s “had a little falling out with the Indians” who never
did take well to them. When Thorowgood threatened a small Kent Island
shallop he found trading there, the Indians showed signs of siding with
the Virginians and in the end the shallop was permitted to depart with
its load of skins.

Although the Kent Islanders had taken in 3,000 skins during the first
part of the 1634 season, the Marylanders, due to the lateness of their
arrival that spring, took altogether “only 298, weighing 451 pounds,
together with 53 muskrat and 17 other skins.”

Even so, Leonard Calvert was much encouraged, and he sent out shallops
for more skins late in May. He also wrote home that he was certain
that he could obtain a large part of the trade of the “Massawomecks”
(Iroquois) who, he said, dwelt ten days journey to the north and had
formerly traded with the Kirkes in Canada. He urged however that
much more trucking stuff be sent over as “there is nothing does more
endanger the loss of commerce with the Indians than want of truck to
barter with them.”

The site of Calvert’s capital near the mouth of the Potomac River was
an old trading ground of Virginia traders, including Claiborne, Fleet
and Harmar. Once, Harmar had outwitted Fleet there to the tune of three
hundredweight of beaver, when he persuaded the Yowaccomoco Indians
to let him have the skins they were holding for his rival by telling
them that Fleet was dead. The trick worked so well in fact that Harmar
then went up the river spreading the report that Captain Fleet was
dead, with the result that he made “an unexpected trade for the time,
at a small charge, having gotten fifteen hundredweight of beaver, and
cleared fourteen towns.”

Up the Potomac were the important towns of the Piscattaways. Beyond
them lived the Anacostans who once held Henry Fleet captive and with
whom he later traded. The Anacostans, like the Susquehannocks, were
blood relatives of the Iroquois. But they too were now castoff and
acted as buffers between the war-like Five Nations and the Algonquin
tribes to the south. Through the Anacostans, Fleet hoped to make
contacts with the Iroquois, tap the Canada trade, and drain it down
the backside of Virginia through the Potomac River. He had run into
trouble, however, due to the jealousies of the Piscattaways and
others in the lower valley who didn’t want to be bypassed. They had
no objection to acting as middlemen, but they objected to the white
men taking their truck up the valley and dealing directly with their
enemies.

Fleet’s problems were further complicated by the arrival of the
Marylanders. It would appear that as a means of protecting his trade
interests in the Potomac valley, he associated himself with them in
the fur trade, agreeing to pay the ten percent tax demanded by the
proprietary on all skins acquired from the Indians.

This, of course, William Claiborne and other Virginians would not agree
to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Captain Claiborne refused to submit to Lord Baltimore or to pay
the tax on skins, he found himself accused of having incited the
Indians against the Maryland settlement on the Potomac. Henry Fleet,
it turned out, was the instrument of this accusation. Possibly he was
hoping in this way to hasten the elimination of his major competitor
for the backside trade.

However, the accusation against Claiborne was later proved false on
the testimony of the Indian chiefs themselves. They said that it was
actually Captain Fleet who had talked against the Marylanders--all
of which might indicate that some original scheme concocted by Fleet
to hang on to his Potomac trade had backfired. Father Andrew White,
a restless Jesuit priest who was much involved in the fur trade with
the natives as a means of supporting the Jesuits’ mission in Maryland,
always insisted that Captain Fleet “had been a firebrand to inflame the
Indians against us.”

The new Governor of Virginia, Sir John Harvey, also co-operated with
the Marylanders. For reasons of his own he gave them cattle and
supplies and assisted them against Claiborne whom he had relieved of
his office as secretary. All of which was very much to the disgust of
the Virginians who eventually “thrust” the governor out of office for
treason to their interests and sent him packing back to England.

It was charged that Harvey had even encouraged Calvert’s men to fire
on Kent Island shallops and confiscate their furs. In any case, this
the Marylanders did almost from the time of their arrival in 1634, and
during all the remainder of that year piracy and lawlessness ruled the
Chesapeake.

Armed pinnaces out of St. Mary’s commandeered Claiborne’s smaller
shallops and took his furs. His men were evicted from their traditional
trading grounds with gun and sword. But the fort on Kent Island was not
attacked, and the Virginians had time not only to make it more secure
but to erect a second fort on another part of the island to prevent
surprise. They also began building larger boats, including a pinnace
called the _Long Tayle_, that could carry more fighting men and heavier
weapons in addition to a cargo of pelts.

The _Long Tayle_ was the first real ship built within the present
boundaries of Maryland. She had a crew of twenty men. Her guns were
chambers and falconets for ball shot, and murderers--the little cannon
into the muzzles of which could be jammed scraps of iron, rocks, or
almost anything lethal that might be handy for standing off boarding
parties.

The Kent Islanders launched the hostilities in the spring of 1635 when
John Butler, Claiborne’s brother-in-law, captured a Maryland boat
loaded with pelts taken from Palmer’s Island. Soon after, Captain
Thomas Smith went out in the _Long Tayle_ to trade for beaver with
an Indian village on the south side of the Patuxent River. Since this
village was not more than half a dozen miles overland from the Maryland
capital, it is not strange that Calvert learned of the _Long Tayle’s_
presence. He promptly sent a sufficient force of soldiers to surprise
the Kent Islanders and take them and their pinnace.

Captain Claiborne retaliated just as promptly. He dispatched
Lieutenant Radcliffe Warren down the bay in a fast wherry, called the
_Cockatrice_, with a vengeful crew of thirteen men. They tried to
recapture the _Long Tayle_. However they couldn’t get at her under the
guns of Calvert’s fort at St. Mary’s where she lay protected. But then,
Warren heard that a Maryland pinnace, the _St. Helen_, was trading
alone in the Pocomoke River on the Eastern Shore. So he set out after
her.

Entering the Pocomoke, he sighted the Maryland pinnace and splashed a
ball from his falconet beside her. She hove to quietly. He was closing
in to board when, suddenly from a nearby cove, another pinnace bore
down on him. Her decks were razed and her crew were presenting arms. It
was the _St. Margaret_, Calvert’s largest boat, commanded by his chief
trader and councillor, Captain Thomas Cornwallis.

Lieutenant Warren had little time to consider the probability that he
was the victim of a well-laid trap. Falconets cracked out their sharp
reports. Chambers barked. The surrounding marshes of the Pocomoke
reverberated with the din of oaths, shots and belching murderers as the
three boats became environed with fire and smoke. Warren himself was
killed. Three others died in the fight, and many were wounded on both
sides. Only the greater maneuverability and speed of the badly battered
_Cockatrice_ accounted for its escape back to Kent Island.

Claiborne and his men were bitter about the unexpected outcome of
Warren’s expedition. They soon had an opportunity for revenge however.
Just a few weeks later they learned that Cornwallis was again bartering
in the Pocomoke, together with his aide, Cuthbert Fenwick, and some
other well known Maryland traders. Two boats were sent this time to
trap the Marylanders. Captain Thomas Smith, recently escaped from
St. Mary’s and now master of the _Cockatrice_, went in escort with a
newly enlisted Virginia pinnace under the command of Philip Taylor.
They succeeded in capturing the big Maryland boat and its crew in a
naval action that was later described as “felonie and piracie” by Lord
Baltimore’s government.

The next day Taylor was in the Potomac River for a try at recapturing
the _Long Tayle_. He carried what might be described as a letter of
marque and reprisal given him by William Claiborne. The Marylanders,
however, turned the tables on him. They captured Taylor along with his
pinnace.

But in the meantime Governor Harvey had been placed under arrest by the
Virginia Council and put on a ship for England. When Claiborne arrived
from Kent Island late in May of 1635 with news of the bloody encounters
on the bay, the acting governor, John West, at once sent a mission to
St. Mary’s to apprize Calvert of Harvey’s arrest and to demand that the
Marylanders “desist their violent proceedings.”

Leonard Calvert took pause at this unexpected development. His younger
brother, George, as well as his councillor, Jerome Hawley, had been
contending all along that Claiborne had some right on his side.
Violence was certainly not accomplishing anything. Maybe, Calvert may
have conjectured, his brother in England could do better through the
courts.

So it came about that the mission was successful in imposing a truce
on Maryland that lasted for two years. Prisoners and confiscated boats
were exchanged. Claiborne, now married and settled with his family, was
left unmolested in the possession of his island home and undisturbed in
his trading activities. Another windmill was built, and another church,
better to serve the two growing communities on Kent Island. Besides an
enormous number of pelts traded locally for private accounts and for
the maintenance of the plantation, furs to the value of 4,000 pounds
sterling were shipped to England for the company partners there.

But then, Captain Claiborne found it necessary to go to England, for
Lord Baltimore had powerful friends. It looked as if he might get a
legal decision against the Virginians through the Lords Commissioners
of Plantations. Claiborne turned over all his operations to a partner
who had recently arrived from England representing the joint-stock
company, and went to London to fight for his rights. No sooner had he
left however than this partner, one George Evelin, managed to betray
Kent Island into the hands of his enemies.

Although the main fort was traitorously delivered up, the island was
not yielded quietly or easily. Repeated military expeditions to subdue
the inhabitants were made by Leonard Calvert before Captain Thomas
Smith and others were finally captured in 1638 and hanged as pirates
and rebels. Claiborne himself, _in absentia_, was attainted by the
Maryland Assembly of the “grievous crimes of pyracie and murther,” and
“all his lands and tenements, goods and chattels” were forfeited to
the Lord Proprietary. Evelin took his share of the loot, even digging
up some of Claiborne’s fruit trees and transplanting them to the manor
that Lord Baltimore granted him near St. Mary’s in payment for his
services.

In another few years, due to continued disturbances, Kent Island was
to be laid waste without hope of recovery, the mill and the forts
destroyed, its former population scattered abroad.

Soldiers armed with ordnance taken from Kent were also sent in 1638
to Palmer’s Island in the Susquehanna River where they “utterly
ruined” the plantation and reduced the palisaded fort which had been
built there the previous year. They seized all of Claiborne’s goods
and chattels. Leonard Calvert himself, following the expedition,
triumphantly supervised the conversion of this trade outpost to “Fort
Conquest” of Maryland. The spoils were divided. Claiborne’s bonded
servants, cattle and other goods at Palmer’s Island went to John
Lewger, Secretary of Maryland. His books were sequestered by a petty
officer, as was a wooden chest belonging to the unfortunate Captain Tom
Smith.

Gone was the “Plantation in the Sasquesahonoughs Country” at the mouth
of the river, for which Captain Claiborne had been willing to pay the
king a rental of fifty pounds sterling a year including rights “to the
head of the said River, and to the Grand Lake of Canada to be held in
fee from the Crown of England.” In fact, forever gone was the “greate
trade of beaver and other furrs which Claiborne might have had with the
mountayn Indians which live upon the lakes of the river of Canada.”

The Marylanders carried on a profitable local fur trade, in spite
of Indian disturbances, for some years. But they were no threat to
the French or the Dutch as they were never successful in tapping the
northern lake-country trade on the backside of Virginia through either
the valley of the Susquehanna or the Potomac. Their relations with the
Indians were not up to it, and they were more inclined to agricultural
pursuits anyway.

The French were therefore able to continue their penetration of America
without the interference they might have had from the Virginians who
settled Kent and Palmer’s Islands. In fact, they were now almost
unmolested in an encirclement of the English colonies that would not
stop until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River. And the
Dutch were undisturbed by the Marylanders even in the neighboring
valley of the Delaware, where they were now settling and trading in
pelts under the very noses of Lord Baltimore’s people who claimed
jurisdiction over some of those parts.

By the end of the century the fur frontier in Maryland had almost
disappeared and the trade was no longer important in the economic life
of the colony. The average value of skins exported per year didn’t
exceed 650 pounds sterling. By then the Governor of Maryland was
declaring that “this Countrey is an open Country and deales generally
in Tobacco and not in furrs.”




XIII

_New Netherland’s South River_


The charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly
over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and
appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines,
build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of
twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this
fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands
bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels.

Although the company was chartered in 1621, it did not commence
operations until 1623. But then, during the next six or seven years,
its success was phenomenal in the matter of profits--from waging war
against Spain. So much so, that by 1629 its directors in Amsterdam were
prone to speak slightingly of New Netherland, their trading colony
in North America. “The trade carried on there in peltries is right
advantageous but, one year with another, we can at most bring home
fifty thousand guilders,” they complained.

For a plantation which at the time numbered no more than 300
inhabitants this would seem to be most productive, especially when
compared to what the English had done in either Virginia or in New
England. It was paltry enough, however, when compared with the loot
of Spanish colonial strongholds that fell to the conquering Dutch
merchants, or when weighed against the spoils of Spain’s silver fleet
that Admiral Peter Heyn had captured in the name of the West India
Company. In one fell swoop he took seventeen galleons laden with
bullion and merchandise to the value of fourteen millions of guilders!
From that operation alone the investors received a dividend amounting
to well over half of the company’s paid-up capital.

Experienced Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, who had been appointed
the first managing director of the West India Company’s colony in
America, acted primarily as a chief fur factor for the company. During
1624, the first and only year of his governorship, he sent home pelts
which brought 27,000 guilders. The next year his successor did even
better. In 1626, the year that Peter Minuit received the formal title
of Director General of New Netherland and purchased Manhattan from the
Indians, one ship for Amsterdam was cargoed with “7246 beaver skins,
178¹⁄₂ otter skins, 675 otter skins, 48 minck skins, 36 wild cat skins,
33 mincks, 34 rat skins.” It also carried some oak and hickory to
timber-hungry Holland.

This, incidentally, is the earliest known true manifest of a ship
clearing from the present port of New York. In terms of today’s money
the skins brought well over one hundred thousand American dollars. A
right advantageous trade indeed!

In the spring of 1624 some thirty families, mostly French-speaking
Walloons from the lower provinces fleeing persecution by Spanish
inquisitors, had come over with Captain May in the _New Netherland_.
They came as the plantation’s first real colonists, to raise livestock,
to put their spades into the earth. May, as well as his successor,
was charged with “spreading out” and more formally occupying New
Netherland. It would prevent any further trouble with England about the
possession of that country, it was hoped, since the English themselves
had expounded the doctrine that “occupancy confers a good title by the
laws of nations and nature.” In the case of their North American colony
the Hollanders could afford a point of agreement on such a doctrine.

A part of this 1624 expedition is said to have been landed on Manhattan
Island. Although the evidence has been attacked, it is not at all
unlikely that May did promptly put some of the _New Netherland’s_
passengers ashore at Manhattan to begin the replacement of any
temporary works there. There must have been a truck house or two, huts
and possibly even palisades in need of rehabilitation for permanent,
year-round occupancy. The immediate occupation of such a strategic
location at the mouth of the river could hardly have been neglected
anyway, especially as it was necessary at the time to escort from the
harbor a poaching French ship whose captain seemed bent on going
ashore to set up the arms of his king and take possession of the
country.

In any case, some eighteen families were conveyed up the Hudson to a
previously selected site a few miles above the redoubt at Norman’s
Kill. In this more convenient location a new fort was built, while
the Walloons settled around it. Fort Orange, as they called this
plantation, was within the limits of present-day Albany, New York. Here
the Mohegans, as well as the Iroquois, came immediately with presents
of beaver and other peltry to confirm their alliance with the Dutch,
and the old trade continued to flourish under the new management of the
West India Company.

It would appear that about this time a group of May’s people also went
up the Connecticut River to establish a trading post near the present
site of Hartford and to begin the construction of Fort Good Hope there.
But the building of this outpost lagged. It was some years before the
fort was completed and manned. When that came about, in 1633, Fort Good
Hope had become a focal point of rivalry between the Dutch and the
New Englanders for the beaver meadows of the Connecticut valley and a
question mark in the matter of resolving jurisdiction over the country.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the time of the planting of Fort Orange another part of May’s
expedition, including some of the Walloon families, was dispatched
to the Delaware, or South River, as the Hollanders now called it to
distinguish it from the Hudson, their great North River.

Up the South River, on its east bank, at a strategic trading site also
previously selected by Captain May, a new Fort Nassau was built. It was
opposite the confluence of the Schuylkill River and the Delaware, the
tongue of land on which Philadelphia was later founded by William Penn
but which at the time of the Dutch arrival was the seat of probably
the largest Lenni Lenape community in the valley. There, at Passyunk,
lived the great chief of all the lower river Indians. Fort Nassau, the
new Dutch trading post across the Delaware River, stood at the mouth of
Timber Creek within the present limits of Gloucester, New Jersey.

Some soldiers and traders, together with a few of the Walloon farmers
and their families who were originally to have settled a farming
plantation on the lower west side of Delaware Bay, were eventually
installed at Fort Nassau. There, they established trade relations with
the natives. Others, it is said, with the addition of new recruits from
Holland the following spring, were sent still higher up the river to
build a house and operate a trading station on Verhulsten Island, near
the present site of Trenton. This island, at the head of navigation
just below the falls, was named for Captain May’s successor in 1625,
William Verhulst, who made his headquarters on the South River. The
site of the falls was an important Indian crossing from the valley of
the Hudson, where the Lenni Lenape traditionally traded with other
tribes.

The Lenni Lenape Indians, later called the Delaware by the English,
were an Algonquin nation that inhabited all the immense valley of
the Delaware. Tribal relatives occupied important villages even in
the lower valley of the Hudson River. Relatively peaceful, the Lenni
Lenape made their homes beside placid streams, in grass-matted huts
thatched with the bark of cedar, the men fishing and hunting while
their women tilled gardens of corn, beans, tobacco and squash. The men
hunted fur-bearing animals whose pelts would be useful for winter body
coverings. The women scraped the pelts with stone tools and dried them
on wooden stretching racks, rubbing the animals’ brains and livers into
the skins to help in the suppling process.

All was not quiet and peace for the Lenape however. They were subject
to terrifying raids by the Susquehannocks (Minquas, the Dutch called
them) as well as by the Iroquoian relatives of the Susquehannocks who
lived farther up the valley of the Susquehanna River. These fearsome
marauders stole their women, burnt their houses and devastated their
gardens. Trapping beaver and muskrat for blankets or hunting the
raccoon too far away from native grounds was a precarious venture
for Lenape braves. In fact, some tribes had fled their more isolated
villages for the safety of Passyunk on the Schuylkill before the white
men came. Others, on the west bank of the lower river, had crossed over
the Delaware to settle on the safer east bank.

So it was that at the coming of the Dutch these river Indians welcomed
the Europeans’ guns. And the deliberative Hollanders bought land and
made trade treaties with them while, at the same time, probing for
avenues of trade with the Lenapes’ enemies, too. Although there were
muskrat, mink, ordinary otter and some brown beaver on the South River,
the Dutch well knew from previous dealings with the Iroquois that there
were vast stores of the finer black pelts, both beaver and otter, and
valuable “lion skins” cached in the “forts” of the Susquehannocks
and their northern relatives. However, on the lower Delaware, it was
principally muskrat that the Lenape had to offer, the market value of
which was but a fraction of other pelts.

The muskrat, a bushy-furred member of the rodent family, resembles
nothing so much as a big wharf rat. This was something with which the
seagoing Dutchmen were only too familiar. As a matter of practice they
referred to the kindred fur bearers in America simply as “rats.” Like
the Englishmen they also marketed both the pelts and the musky cods,
the fluids of which were useful for perfumes and as demothing agents.

Muskrats frequent tidewater marshlands and swamps. Their hind feet
are oar-like, being slightly webbed and set obliquely to the legs,
permitting a swivel action that propels them through the water. They
steer themselves with their tails which are flattened sidewise. The
Indians hunted and trapped these animals along their waterside runs
very much as they did the beaver. And they often dumped the skinned
carcasses of the “rats” into the communal stew pot, much to the disgust
of the traders who had to partake of the feast which always preceded
barter.

In the early days of the Dutch occupation on the South River, as it
turned out, the Hollanders were not too successful in opening up trade
with the Susquehannocks and their Iroquois relatives of the hinterland.
The Susquehannocks were too busy subjugating the Lenni Lenape. By the
time things settled down, after most of the lower river Indians had
taken flight or been made tributary, the Susquehannocks were bartering
in a more convenient market. They were selling pelts at the mouth of
their own river among the English in the Chesapeake Bay.

On the other hand, the furs of the lower Delaware River Indians were
not hard to come by, even when they were good. Brown beaver by the
bundle, when the Lenape had it, might be taken for a white clay pipe
worth a mere pittance. To an Indian who had not yet learned the true
value of such a tobacco pipe, with its smoothly beautiful bowl and
straight stem, it was a treasure to accompany him to his grave. And,
as for the Dutchman’s iron and his colored cloth, his liquor, his
firearms, and especially the clothes he wore, these all represented
unbelievable wealth to the savage. Quick to learn that he could acquire
such amazing riches for a few animal skins, he would risk traffic with
his aboriginal enemies if necessary to get the kinds of pelts the white
men wanted.

But it was entirely different when it came to the food for which the
Dutch in their early occupation of the Delaware valley had to depend
on their native neighbors. Although the Lenape were perfectly willing
to part with their own furs, and sometimes took extraordinary risks to
get more of them, it was another matter when it came to corn and beans.
With the Minquas constantly raiding, no treasure could tempt a Lenape
chief to give up what little corn he might have to keep his people from
starving.

It was this difficulty, coupled with the squeeze put on New Netherland
by greedy directors of the West India Company, that soon brought about
the recall of the South River settlers to Manhattan. One small yacht,
the directors contended, would adequately take care of the South River
trade at much less cost than maintaining garrisons there under the
conditions with which they had to contend.

Anyway, it was asserted, the need for formal occupation of this distant
outpost was less necessary now that England had joined the Netherlands
in the war against Spain. All ports of each country were open to
merchantmen and warships of the other, and both were committed to
maintain fleets that were finally to rid the world of Spanish might.
Under the circumstances the English would hardly risk offending their
ally by disturbing any part of the Netherlands’ province in America.

So, after the government of New Netherland was formally taken over
in 1626 by Peter Minuit, who forthwith installed a “Battery” on the
southern tip of Manhattan Island for protection against the Spaniards
and named the place “Fort Amsterdam,” the South River was all but
abandoned as a plantation. Now and then Dutch factors put ashore at
Fort Nassau to occupy it temporarily as a trading post, but by 1628 all
the Walloon farmers had returned to the North River.

There, at Fort Amsterdam, the company now concentrated its own
colonists and centralized the control of its fur trade, while promoting
another scheme for the permanent planting of the outlying districts
with farmers at no expense to itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

The no-expense colonizing scheme was not a new one among the colonial
powers of Europe, except for its dressing.

Members of the West India Company who at their own expense planted the
unoccupied provinces of New Netherland were to become “patroons,” that
is, proprietors of little colonial principalities with feudalistic
“privileges and exemptions.” By transporting and settling a specified
number of colonists, black slaves qualifying as such, a rich if
otherwise undistinguished merchant of Amsterdam could elevate himself
to the worshipful status of a feudal lord. Of course he had first to
purchase his land from the Indians in conformance with Dutch policy. A
little _aqua vitae_ and a few jackets sufficed usually to keep that a
relatively minor expense however.

There was only one hitch. A patroon could not engage in the fur trade.
He had freedom of trade in any merchandise “except beavers, otters,
minks, and all sorts of peltry.” The commerce in pelts was to remain
the company’s monopoly.

Because of this restriction the early patroonships were destined to
failure. Trade in furs was needed to help root a new plantation in the
soil, as had already been proved so often on the wild American coasts.
Only one of the early patroonships survived, Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s
colony in the Albany area. And it was the illegal pursuit of private
fur trade that suckled Rensselaerwyck through its infancy.

The earliest patroonship for which land was chosen in New Netherland
was patented on the “South River” in 1630. Samuel Godyn and Samuel
Blommaert, leading members of the company, were original partners in
this venture which later included Captain David Pieters de Vries among
others. Their original manor tract, called Swanendael, lay west of Cape
Henlopen in Delaware Bay, but the proprietorship was later extended
to the opposite shore including Cape May. The bay, reportedly, was a
favorite haunt of whales, many having been sighted there in the past.
It was decided that whaling would be a profitable enterprise in lieu of
fur trading to support the plantation in its infancy.

The first colonizing expedition to Swanendael arrived in the spring of
1631 and planted at Whorekill, on present-day Lewes Creek, just above
Cape Henlopen. Although the whaling proved a failure that year, the
ship that brought over the colonists returning to Amsterdam with no
more than a sample of oil taken from a dead whale found on the beach,
it was said that the settlers did seed their land and had a fine crop
by July. But then, as the story goes, a piece of tin was the instrument
of their undoing.

They had emblazoned a small sheet of this metal with the arms of
Holland and attached it to a pillar which was erected to proclaim
their possession of the land. An Indian chief, happening along,
appropriated the tin, probably with the idea of converting it into a
shiny tobacco pipe. That savage whim, it was claimed, set off a chain
of misunderstanding that ended in his own death and the massacre of the
Dutch. Only one of the thirty-three settlers survived the carnage.

The Hollanders had built a brick house which should have served
them well as a fort. They were also supposed to have surrounded
the house with palisades, a requirement of the time, and to have
had an Indian-fighting mastiff handy for just such an emergency.
However, according to those who later argued with the company over
responsibility for the failure of the Swanendael patroonship, the
settlers at Whorekill were caught and butchered individually one
day while laboring in the fields, unable to reach the safety of the
palisades reportedly erected--while their fierce dog was unfortunately
chained at the house.

If Whorekill, which may be translated as Harlots’ Creek, acquired its
name as indicated, one cannot resist wondering whether playful Indian
squaws, too much _aqua vitae_ and vengeful braves might have had
something to do with the demise of the Dutchmen. Certain it is that
these first Europeans “left other reminders of their brief sojourn on
the bay besides their skeletons,” for later Dutchmen who visited in
this vicinity “with their goods where they traded with the Indians ...
got the country dutyes, otherwise called the Pox.”

When Captain David de Vries came over as patroon in the winter of
1632-33 he built a lodging hut ashore, constructed “sloops” for whaling
and set up a kettle for rendering oil. But although his harpooners
killed a few whales, they were small and almost worthless for oil. The
whale fishery was an economic failure.

Meanwhile, for some reason, Captain De Vries made peace with the
savages who had slaughtered the original settlers on the Whorekill.
There was no retaliation, surprisingly enough, for whatever happened
on the creek the previous year. De Vries explained that the natives
promised to provide him with food. But apparently they didn’t do so.

The Dutch patroon ascended the South River to barter for corn and
beans. Twice during the winter he visited abandoned Fort Nassau where
many Indians congregated on the news that he was in the river. However
there was the usual difficulty about food. The Lenape were anxious
to trade skins for his merchandise, even pausing in flight from the
terrible Minqua to do so, but few of them were willing to part with
corn.

De Vries did buy some of their pelts, though without much enthusiasm.
Under an ambiguous agreement the company had recently made with the
patroons, they were permitted to barter for pelts where no company
factories were maintained. However, all skins taken under this
arrangement had to be delivered at Fort Amsterdam for processing and
shipment by the company to Holland. Such transactions were therefore
not too satisfactory from an overall profit standpoint.

With the coming of spring, the Patroon of Swanendael went down the
coast to call on the neighboring English at Jamestown for enough
supplies to evacuate his people. The small profit on the pelts he had
taken represented the only gain from the patroonship. It wasn’t too
long afterward that the continuing wrangle over fur trading privileges,
and other contentions, ended in the proprietors of Swanendael selling
out their interests to the company, without having made any further
attempt at colonization.

At the time of De Vries’ visit to the old Dutch works at Fort Nassau,
he learned much to his surprise that an English shallop with seven or
eight traders from Virginia had preceded him there. All the Virginians
had been killed by the Lenape. Some of the chief men among the savages
were jauntily wearing their victims’ jackets when they came to call on
the Dutch patroon aboard his yacht that winter.

On the subsequent visit to Jamestown, which may have been prompted as
much by curiosity concerning this invasion of the South River as by the
need of supplies, Captain De Vries was told by Governor Harvey that
these Virginians had indeed gone on an exploring voyage in those parts.
And, although Harvey said there was no reason for Virginia traders to
disturb the Hollanders, he nevertheless maintained the English claim to
the Delaware valley and intimated that other countrymen of his would be
going there too.

Shortly after this, when De Vries stopped off at Fort Amsterdam with
his furs and the alarming news about the English, the Dutch provincial
council dispatched an expedition once more to occupy Fort Nassau. A
new house was built there and other improvements were made during the
summer. Arendt Corssen, who went along at this time as the company’s
commissioner in charge, also purchased from the Lenape a tract of land
across the Delaware from Fort Nassau. There, probably on the west
bank of the Schuylkill River and within the limits of present-day
Philadelphia, he built a house and established a trading post.

This post of course promoted a more convenient trade with the western
Minquas. It was also designed, no doubt, to serve as added evidence of
the company’s maintenance of factories in the South River valley.

However, no English having appeared on the river during the summer
and the Swanendael patroonship being inactive, these lonely outposts
of the company were again deserted during the winter of 1633-34. A
fur trader’s life in the winter wilderness, cooped up in a house
surrounded by snow and unpredictable savages, must have been anything
but enviable. The Hollanders on the South River could hardly be blamed
for preferring their warmer and gayer quarters on Manhattan.

But then, in the summer of 1634 when no Dutch were about, an Englishman
named Thomas Young sailed up the Delaware and planted the arms of his
king ashore. He had come directly from England to trade in “Virginia,”
under a license from the king, with special designs on the valley of
the Delaware. Governor Harvey of Virginia lent all possible assistance
to him when he stopped off in the Chesapeake to build trading shallops
and gather information for his venture.

Captain Young traded extensively for beaver, otter and lesser furs,
and he was much impressed by the abundance of elk and deer skins
available in the Delaware valley. However, his ambition was to discover
a northwest passage to the South Sea and he had secret instructions
authorizing him to explore the Delaware, challenge any Dutch
encroachment there, and plant forts to occupy the land if he wished to
do so. He was stopped of course by the falls. Although he established
an English post at Eriwoneck, where his lieutenant recorded that “we
sate down,” the adventure was given over after a year or two.

Young himself was later captured by the French of Canada when, in his
continuing quest for the elusive passage to the Orient, he ascended the
Kennebec River, portaged to headwaters of streams that took him to the
St. Lawrence and found himself unexpectedly before Quebec!

The English post that Captain Young established on the Delaware at
Eriwoneck was opposite present-day Philadelphia. It is frequently
mentioned as having been on Pennsauken Creek. However, since the
Eriwoneck tribe appears to have been living close by if not at the site
of Fort Nassau, it is more likely that the English captain simply “sate
down” in the deserted Dutch fort. In view of his mission any other
course would appear to have been inexpedient.

Captain Young discreetly makes no mention of Dutch works on the river,
probably to avoid any perplexity over the Elizabethan theory about
occupation proving right of possession. But his report admits of two
contacts with Dutch traders. First he ran into a trading vessel from
Manhattan which he accosted and chased from the river. Then a fresh
expedition from Fort Amsterdam, which he reported had been sent to
“plant and trade heere” by the Hollanders, was similarly forced to
retire by the English captain.

Although the Dutch traders didn’t put up any fight in the face of
Thomas Young’s well-gunned ship that summer, it was a different matter
the next year when an English deserter brought word overland to Fort
Amsterdam that a party of Virginia traders was occupying Fort Nassau.

An armed bark was immediately dispatched to the South River. It
recaptured the fort and made prisoners of the Englishmen, about fifteen
altogether including their leader, George Holmes. These captives, after
being transported first to Fort Amsterdam where no one could decide
what to do with them, were finally returned to Kecoughtan in Virginia.
The New Netherlanders then installed and maintained a permanent
garrison of traders at Fort Nassau under the management of Jan Jansen
with Peter May as his assistant. All of which so discouraged other
Virginians, who at the time were planning to follow in Holmes’ track,
that they abandoned the project.

However, across the ocean, venturers of still another nationality were
preparing to invade New Netherland’s South River. The Swedish people,
aroused to territorial expansion by their late King Gustavus Adolphus,
wanted a bridgehead in America. Profit-minded merchants, with the fur
trade uppermost in their minds, were moving eagerly to accommodate
them.




XIV

_Swedish Interlude On the Delaware_


Peter Minuit, erstwhile governor and chief fur trader of New
Netherland, was a man of energy and special talent for colonial
administration. Although he had been discharged from his post in
Dutch America after a disagreement with his employers, the directors
of the West India Company, his administration there had been virile
and efficient. It was therefore quite natural that he should be a bit
vindictive toward the people who had treated him so unfairly. And,
because of his driving energy, it would have been quite as unnatural
for him to remain idle for long.

So it was that he sought out Samuel Blommaert who, embittered by
the failure of his Swanendael patroonship, also felt he had reason
for complaint against his former associates in the West India
Company. According to Blommaert, it was their parsimonious policies
on such matters as the fur trade and military protection for new
plantations that had caused the fiasco at Whorekill. Anxious now
to show up the stupidity of their management, he was attempting to
form a Dutch-Swedish opposition company under Swedish protection for
operations in the “West Indies.”

When Minuit came on the scene, with his firsthand knowledge of New
Netherland, things began to happen fast. Blommaert’s project quickly
crystallized into a fur trading company with the specific intent of
colonizing the valley of the South River where the patroon himself had
formerly adventured. It remained only for Minuit to offer his expert
services as leader of such an expedition to the Swedish crown, and
royal sanction and assistance were forthcoming for the venture.

“Pierre” Minuit, for that is what the Hollanders often called him
when he was their governor in New Netherland, had been born a French
Huguenot in the German city of Wessel. It is not strange that his
nationalism was therefore elastic enough to meet almost any demands of
his ambition and ability. About the only point at which Minuit might
have hesitated in those bigoted times would have been an association
with Catholics. Certainly, to serve under the banner of Sweden, a
protestant nation allied in the crusade against Spain, required a
minimum degree of adaptability, especially as Sweden’s official excuse
for a colony in America was that it would provide a base for attacking
the common enemy at his weakest spot.

Half the subscriptions for the venture in “New Sweden” were raised in
Sweden and half in Holland, with Samuel Blommaert the largest single
subscriber. Although the Swedish government furnished two well-armed
ships, _Kalmar Nyckel_ and _Gripen_, as well as all other weapons and
ammunition, the cost of the expedition to the company ran to 33,000
florins by the time it sailed from Gothenburg in the closing days of
1637.

If Minuit was lucky however, a single Spanish prize would be enough
to cancel out this unexpectedly high debt. Otherwise the New Sweden
Company looked to the Indian fur trade to pay it off in a season or two.

Almost half of the invested capital was for cargo that consisted mainly
of the merchandise needed for the Indian trade. Axes, hatchets, adzes,
knives, tobacco pipes, looking-glasses, cheap trinkets, duffels and
other cloth weaved in Holland were purchased by Blommaert and shipped
to Sweden where they were loaded aboard the two ships. So were a few
tools for farming, as well as some spirituous liquors and wines to be
traded either in Virginia or the West Indies for tobacco. The tobacco
was to be brought into Sweden where people had lately developed a taste
for it. But the furs would be sold in Holland, a better market for
foreign skins.

No act of fate guided Peter Minuit to the site he chose for the Swedish
beachhead in America. It was on Minquas Kill, a little stream from
the west emptying into the estuary of the Delaware River. The Indians
from whom the stream acquired its name had often used its course
in their raids against the Lenape. Minuit doubtless knew all about
Minquas Kill from reports he had received from Dutch traders when he
was Governor of New Netherland. He knew it was navigable by small
boats almost to the borders of the Minqua country, where a trade might
be joined for the rich pelts then finding their way to the English on
Chesapeake Bay. Also, he well knew that the site he selected on this
stream was a protected though strategic one from which, once fortified
and garrisoned properly, further encroachment on the Dutch West India
Company’s South River preserves might be safely launched.

For a kettle and other trifles Minuit bought enough land from a local
sachem to erect a couple of houses, emplace some cannon and palisade
“Fort Christina”--which was named in honor of the Queen of Sweden and
which was the beginning of Wilmington, Delaware. Then, he managed to
attract a few other Lenape chieftains from up and down the Delaware
who were perfectly willing to cede all the land that he wanted for New
Sweden in return for the colorful merchandise he offered.

There was some argument later about these “deeds,” that is, after they
were “lost.” Not only was their geographical extent challenged, which
the Swedes claimed to be the west side of the Delaware from Duck Creek
up to the Schuylkill; but other purchasers, in particular the Dutch to
whom the Lenape were equally accommodating, laid claim to identical
grants from the Indians. The English did too, in at least one case.

Of course the Hollanders came down the river from Fort Nassau, shortly
after the Swedes arrived, to find out what was going on. But Minuit,
experienced in handling them, gave it out that he was only stopping in
Minquas Kill for wood and water on his way to the West Indies. In this
he was telling the truth, strictly speaking, for he and both of his
ships were moving on to that part of the new world to exchange their
liquor for tobacco and to try for Spanish prizes before returning to
Europe. What he neglected to say was that he was building a fort to
be left garrisoned with 24 men, collecting return cargoes of furs and
leaving a sloop on the river to collect more.

Peter May, at the time in charge of Fort Nassau during Jan Jansen’s
absence at Fort Amsterdam, learned the truth when Minuit’s little
trading boat tried to slip past the Dutch outpost to barter for pelts.
May wouldn’t let the sloop ascend the river, and he sped Indian
runners overland to Manhattan with news of the Swedish invasion.
Whereupon newly-arrived Governor Kieft dispatched Commissary Jansen
back to his South River headquarters with many loud protests and
threats against the Swedes, but not much in the way of force to back up
his fulminations.

The New Netherland governor even issued a menacing proclamation. In
view of the close political and economic ties between Sweden and his
country, he couldn’t believe that the Swedish queen had authorized
Minuit to build forts “or to trade in peltries on the South River,” but
in any event, he proclaimed, the Dutch West India Company would defend
its rights by bloodshed if the Swedes did not withdraw.

Peter Minuit was undeterred by all of this however. He went about
finishing his fort and collecting his peltries, and there wasn’t really
anything the Dutch could do about it. They claimed that he “drew all
the skins to him by his liberal gifts,” and that as a result of his
“underselling” their losses ran to 30,000 guilders.

While Minuit was still on the Delaware that spring of 1638 he sent
the _Grip_ down to Jamestown to try to barter liquor for tobacco.
However the Governor of Virginia, Sir Francis Wyatt, who probably
looked askance at the usurpation of English claims on the Delaware,
diplomatically found excuses for not trading with the Swedes. He said
he would refer the matter to his king, and that ended it. The _Grip_
returned to Minquas Kill, transferred the liquor to the _Kalmar Nyckel_
and set out in search of a fat Spanish galleon.

Soon thereafter, the _Kalmar Nyckel_ also took aboard 710 beaver,
otter and bear pelts, which had been collected from the Indians, and
laid a course for the West Indies to trade the liquor for tobacco.
Peter Minuit sailed in this ship. He left Mans Kling in command of
Fort Christina, with Hendrick Huygen as commissary in charge of the
provisions, merchandise and Indian trade. Huygen maintained excellent
relations with the Indians and would appear to have opened up trade
with the Minquas. He bartered for food as well as furs, and the first
permanent white settlement in the present State of Delaware was able
to sustain itself for two years before any further relief came from
Sweden.

In the meantime, New Sweden’s founder had lost his life in the West
Indies. While the _Kalmar Nyckel_ was in harbor at St. Christopher’s
Island, Minuit went aboard a ship out of Rotterdam as the guest of its
skipper. A hurricane came up suddenly and drove this ship out to sea.
It was never heard of again.

Peter Minuit’s untimely death was an irreparable loss to the Swedes. He
would have made a capable governor for their colony in America, which
might have turned out quite differently had he remained in charge.

After a fruitless year on the track of the silver fleet the _Grip_
returned to New Sweden in the spring of 1639, took on a miscellaneous
lot of over 1,500 fur skins and sailed for Sweden. All the skins were
reshipped to Holland for merchandising, where the _Kalmar Nyckel_ had
already unloaded its cargo of pelts. Altogether, these first furs from
New Sweden brought 15,426:13:8 florins into the coffers of the company
according to Dr. Amandus Johnson, the American-Swedish historian.

The Dutch West India Company, at last awakening to the perils facing
New Netherland from foreign encroachment, now took more positive steps
to encourage immigration. The directors promised land and free trade
in the colony to private persons and made their promise firm by an
official proclamation. It was announced that anyone could henceforth
trade in pelts, as well as other merchandise, upon payment of fifteen
per cent tax and freight charges on all exports.

This lure to promote individual enterprise under the flag of Holland
quickly brought Dutchmen from the Netherlands as well as “strangers”
from Virginia and New England into the colony. After being on the
verge of economic collapse because of the company’s mismanagement, New
Netherland began to prosper again, especially those parts about the
North River. The newly liberalized policy was too late, however, to
have any effect in offsetting the invasion of the South River under the
Swedish flag.

Swedish reinforcements, men and women, began arriving in 1640. Even
some Hollanders came over and took up land near Fort Christina, their
leader being paid a salary by the Swedish government as the commandant
of his people. Among contingents of new settlers from Sweden itself
were some who came unwillingly. Such were the Finns, those hearty,
pioneering outlaws who had been roving Sweden, poaching game and
destroying forests, and rudely mocking all efforts to curb their
depredations. Many of them were rounded up and “persuaded” to emigrate,
along with some native “criminals” whose most serious offenses appear
to have been unpaid debts, adultery, and draft-dodging.

But these unwilling emigrants quickly adapted themselves after they
arrived in the new country. They rendered good service clearing the
land, hewing trees and building houses. Back of Fort Christina typical
Scandinavian houses went up, the first “log cabins” ever seen in
America, with the timbers notched so that the carefully tailored logs
lay flat and close at the joints. These primitive but highly efficient
cabins soon became the symbol of the American pioneer--the fur trader
as well as the farmer.

The trading limits of New Sweden were extended to the Falls of the
Delaware on the north and to Cape Henlopen on the south by new
purchases from the Indians. Traffic in pelts, always the chief business
of the colony, was prosecuted with real vigor. With the arrival in 1643
of a vigorous new governor, Johan Printz, the Swedes began establishing
trading posts and forts up and down the river in their expanded
territory. And there just weren’t enough Hollanders under the flag of
the Dutch West India Company at Fort Nassau to stop them, no more in
fact than twenty at any time.

The Swedes went out even to the Minqua country in the valley of the
Susquehanna, competing with the Dutch for the luxuriant pelts from the
northern lake country. Traders with Hendrick Huygen penetrated the
northwestern hinterland over 200 miles. Most often however the Minquas,
or Susquehannocks, who no longer went to the Marylanders in Chesapeake
Bay, came with great bundles of their fine pelts to trade at Fort
Christina, for they found that the Swedes were more liberal than either
the Dutch or the English, not only with trade goods but with sewan, or
wampum.

Always the Swedes gave the Minquas generous measures of shell strings
in exchange for beaver. Whether it was common white roanoke made from
the cockle shells found in quantity along some local beaches, valuable
peake strung with purple conch shell, or a variety of the even more
highly prized Long Island wampum, measurements were uniformly generous.
And since fathoms, ells and yards were roughly estimated by using
the length of one’s arm, the giant Susquehannocks did very well for
themselves.

Resourceful as usual, the Dutch began manufacturing false wampum
to meet the competition. But the savages were quick to detect the
counterfeit and wouldn’t accept it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, some English traders from the New Haven Colony, which was
being hemmed in and cut off from the Indian trade of New England, had
come down to test out the prospects on the Delaware River and were very
much impressed. George Lamberton, Nathaniel Turner and others decided
to form a company to purchase land about the Schuylkill River as well
as the unoccupied country stretching northward from Cape May. As usual
the natives obliged them, regardless of prior deeds, and the New
Englanders soon had a colony at Varkens Kill, now Salem Creek in New
Jersey.

Everything might have been all right if the Englishmen had remained on
the land they bought on the east side of the river. But this was not
destined to be. Although there were some twenty families who cleared
land and planted crops in 1641 at Varkens Kill, these people were
primarily fur traders. They discovered that the east side of the river
was too far from the trading grounds of the Indians. The next year they
established a fort, building dwellings and a truck house, on the west
side of the river at the mouth of the Schuylkill.

This trading post, located on Province Island in present Philadelphia,
was on land claimed by both the Swedes and the Dutch. Actually it must
have incorporated whatever was left of the abandoned Dutch installation
built there originally by Arendt Corssen in 1633. In any case the men
from New Haven, after starting a lively Indian trade, made it clear
that they would countenance no competition within their newly acquired
precincts.

The Swedes and the Dutch, who had been operating under a kind of armed
truce in this area, united promptly in the face of this threat to their
common interest. Two armed sloops were sent out by the Council of New
Netherland, and Jan Jansen with the cooperation of the Swedes attacked
and burned out the interlopers. George Lamberton managed to escape in
his pinnace with a few of his people. But most of the New Englanders
were captured and shipped off to Manhattan as prisoners.

Lamberton, however, like most English traders, was a man of tenacity
and courage. Certainly he was persistent when he thought he saw a good
thing. The very next year he was back in the river again. This time,
unfortunately for him, the atmosphere was even more hostile. That
hot-tempered, national-minded Governor of New Sweden, Johan Printz, had
arrived in the meantime--all four hundred imperious pounds of him!

“Big Belly” Printz, as the Indians called him, came with the fire of
patriotism in his eye. He was not one to stand for any nonsense from
foreigners. As a good diplomat he maintained a neighborly friendship
with the Dutch, as he had been instructed to do, that is, so long as
they were no military threat to New Sweden and so long as they could be
outwitted in the Indian trade. But the English--those aggressive and
stubbornly nationalistic colonizers--were another matter.

So, in 1643, when George Lamberton once more sailed up the Delaware in
his pinnace, he was to find himself in real trouble.

Intercepting some Minquas en route to Fort Christina with their furs,
Lamberton induced them to trade with him. Whereupon the Swedish
governor invited him to dinner in order to arrest him, the charge being
that of having bribed the Minquas with cloth and wampum to massacre the
Swedes and Dutch. For a while it looked as if the Englishman might have
a short life.

But, although “Big Belly” set himself up as inquisitor, prosecutor
and judge, he couldn’t make his accusation stick before a mixed court
of English, Dutch and Swedish commissioners in the face of 400 beaver
skins Lamberton produced as evidence of his peaceful barter. In the
end Printz could only fine the New Englander double duty on the beaver
skins he had taken in trade and let him go. As a parting threat
however, he told Lamberton that his pinnace would be confiscated if
ever he traded again in New Sweden without authorization.

Then the corpulent but vigorous governor turned his full attention to
tightening Swedish control of the river, with a view toward gaining a
monopoly of the fur trade for his company.

On the east side of the Delaware, where he pretended to the same land
claimed by the New Englanders, he constructed a stronghold which he
named Fort Elfsborg. It was an imposing earthwork, emplaced with 8
twelve-pound guns and a mortar. Located on waterside just below Varkens
Kill and garrisoned by thirteen men, Fort Elfsborg not only asserted
Printz’s authority over a sickly remnant of the New Haven Englishmen
still there, but gave him military control of the river. Even Dutch
vessels on their way up to Fort Nassau were compelled to lower their
flags before the guns of the Swedish fort, their skippers no doubt
muttering curses against “Big Belly” who now “held the river locked for
himself.”

On the west side of the river the governor strengthened Fort Christina,
the fur emporium of New Sweden where the general storehouses were
maintained. He moved his own headquarters however to a much grander
manor setting farther upstream at Tinicum Island.

There, on this water-bound river bank, over which sleek airliners now
wing low, in and out of close by Philadelphia Airport, he built a
riverside fort of hemlock logs “laid one upon another” and a princely
“hall” for himself. Fort New Gothenborg, he named this new capital,
which was little more than half a dozen miles from Dutch Fort Nassau
across the river. To Fort New Gothenborg the Swedish governor hoped to
attract most of the Indian traffic that he now shared grudgingly with
the New Netherland traders.

For a while the strategy proved highly successful, especially after
Printz established a trading post on the near-by Schuylkill to control
that important artery of traffic from the hinterland. There, on
Province Island, from which the English had so recently been ousted,
he built a blockhouse of his own and mounted “stone cannon” on it.
These were the vicious little “murderers” of the time, whose broad
iron mouths could be jammed with stones or anything else lethal that
might be handy to spray attackers at close range. Other buildings too
were later erected at Province Island, but in the spring of 1644 the
blockhouse served for stores, and also as quarters for Lieutenant Mans
Kling and the traders stationed there.

The Dutch traders under Jan Jansen at Fort Nassau, frustrated by lack
of numbers as well as by restraining orders from Fort Amsterdam, now
could only stand by watching and biting their nails, while taking
whatever crumbs of the Indian trade their Swedish neighbors deigned to
share with them.

This same year of 1644 some merchants of Boston, with the backing
of Winthrop and the Court of Massachusetts, formed a company to
discover the great Lake of the Iroquois by ascending the Delaware
River. Some dozen years earlier, Captain Walter Neale of the Laconia
Company had failed in his efforts to reach the lake via the rivers of
Maine. At least the Delaware ran in the right direction, toward that
“inexhaustible” supply of beaver, something it was now conceded no
Maine or Massachusetts rivers did.

A well-equipped pinnace was actually sent out to the Delaware. However,
just what happened on the river is vague. Certainly neither the
Swedes nor the Dutch wanted English traders on their “backside.” A
few tentative shots were fired, but apparently some wisely dispensed
liquor accomplished more than force. In any event the New Englanders
were “entertained,” one way or another, first at Fort Elfsborg by the
Swedes and then at Fort Nassau by the Dutch, and in the end they were
persuaded to turn back. They returned to Boston in their pinnace, at
great loss to the chagrined investors in the enterprise.

       *       *       *       *       *

Under Johan Printz’s able direction Swedish trade flourished throughout
the Delaware valley. Fine cargoes of beaver and other pelts were
shipped across the sea. Some went to Sweden, but the market was never
good there for foreign pelts and most were auctioned in Holland. Great
quantities, however, were sold locally in America for needed supplies.
And, we are told, “otter coats” and “elkskin trousers” were common
articles of dress among the Swedes themselves.

Like the Pilgrims, the Swedes could not have maintained themselves
but for the beaver trade. Their attempts to cultivate tobacco were
unsuccessful. Neither did they grow sufficient food for themselves.
And little enough help came from home. For nearly six years after the
winter of 1647-48 there was no relief ship nor even any official word
from Sweden to its earnest governor in America. A relief expedition
sent out in 1649 was wrecked en route in the Spanish West Indies, its
people tortured and enslaved. Printz had to depend on his Dutch and
English neighbors for supplies. And there was only one thing of value
to give them in exchange for this subsistence--beaver.

The problem of the Swedes was to monopolize the Indian beaver trade
while depending upon competitors not only for subsistence supplies but
for the very trucking merchandise required for the Indian trade. Dutch
traders, as well as English, were therefore welcome on the Delaware so
long as the Swedes could act as middlemen between them and the natives
who had the beaver pelts.

English traders of this type were particularly active in New
Sweden--Virginians and New Englanders, and some roving independents
like Isaac Allerton, the former Pilgrim father who made so much trouble
for his associates at Plymouth. Allerton, as a matter of fact, made his
headquarters at this time with the Dutch at Fort Amsterdam.

John Wilcox and William Cox were among other colonial merchants who
purveyed fowling pieces, sailcloth, duffels, cheese and brandy to
the Swedes in exchange for beaver skins. They also provided Printz
with trucking goods, such as knives, kettles, axes, hoes, cloth, red
coral and sewan, or wampum. Among many such entries in the company
books, reported by Dr. Amandus Johnson, is one for 220 yards of sewan
purchased from an Englishman for 140 beaver skins valued at 800 florins.

William Whiting, a Hartford merchant, collected 1,069¹⁄₂ pounds of
beaver worth 4,277 florins from the Swedes on one trading expedition to
the Delaware in 1644. Captain Turner and Allerton, who made frequent
trips there, purveyed cloth, barley seed and other grain, millstones,
beer, leather and wampum for the Indian trade, all in exchange for the
Swedes’ beaver. Several trading boats were also sold to the Swedes, a
small one being exchanged for 98 skins, and larger barks bringing five
to ten times as many.

Printz frequently sent his own people with beaver to New Amsterdam, and
even to New England, to buy trade goods, livestock, rye, corn, lime,
and other supplies. His chief commissary, Hendrick Huygen, usually
headed up the expeditions to Manhattan. At the Dutch capital the going
rate for corn, which was not always to be obtained direct from the
Indians, was one beaver pelt for three bushels. Evidently the Swedes
found this exchange less onerous than toiling with the plow.

On one trip to the Dutch capital Huygen bought seven oxen for 124
beaver skins valued at 868 florins, a cow for 22 skins worth 154
florins, and 75 bushels of rye for 32 skins valued at seven florins
each. It cost him only ten skins to get this livestock to New Sweden,
five being paid out to two Hollanders who led some of the oxen
cross-country, and five to the Governor of New Netherland whose sloop
delivered the remainder on the Delaware. On another trip, in addition
to oxen, Huygen bought a horse for thirty skins. He even settled for
his expenses at New Amsterdam with beaver, paying out nine skins for
board and five for lodgings to the inn-keeper on one occasion, while
having the storm-torn sails of his boat repaired for another six skins.

The Swedes never did root their colony in agriculture. For one thing,
it was just too easy to rest the entire economy on the beaver trade,
and somehow the habit persisted even after the fur frontier had
passed into the hinterland. A visiting Indian convert from New France
once accused them of being more concerned with fur trading than with
converting his red kinsmen to Christianity. The charge was true enough.
It might have been leveled in fact at almost any colonials of the time.
But probably it wasn’t even of passing interest to the beaver-hungry
Swedes.

A lesser reason for the agricultural failure was that there never
seemed to be enough Swedes to man farms. The total population
of the colony--soldiers, traders, farmers, servants, women, and
children--amounted to no more than two hundred fifty at any time during
Governor Printz’s tenure. And losses by death were not offset by
reinforcements from home. In the spring of 1648 a census of all male
inhabitants of age counted up to only seventy-nine. These seventy-nine
were not all Swedes by a large number.

When Peter Stuyvesant arrived in America as governor of the Dutch,
the inherent numerical weakness of the Swedes was at once apparent to
him, for he was an experienced soldier. He also knew that because of
changing conditions abroad there was less reason for being so friendly
and neighborly. With the war against the Catholics drawing to a close,
the alliance was breaking up, and Holland was no longer favoring
Swedish shipping. The two countries were becoming bitter competitors.

The new Dutch governor had a personality that was every bit as colorful
as that of his soldier counterpart in New Sweden. Having lost a leg
in action, and being of an arrogant and tyrannical nature, Stuyvesant
stamped about affectedly on a silver-banded pegleg, swishing a
rattan cane to emphasize his commands. But he was also as zealously
nationalistic and as company-minded in the administration of his
colonial post as was Johan Printz.

It was predestined that hot-tempered “Big Belly” and autocratic
“Peg-Leg” would clash. They did--almost immediately.

Printz, it appears, replaced his blockhouse on Province Island with a
much stronger installation, Fort Korsholm, armed with cannon and manned
with a garrison of soldiers. Andries Hudde, who had succeeded Jan
Jansen as Dutch commissary on the South River, reported to Stuyvesant
that he was now absolutely cut off from the Schuylkill and that the
Swedes were “hindering” all other Dutch trade with the Indians in the
river valley.

Furthermore, Hudde said, the Swedes had spoiled the trade anyway,
for the Indians now insisted on two fathoms of white sewan and one
fathom of purple sewan for a beaver. And, since a fathom was commonly
estimated as the span of a man’s outstretched arms, the natives were
sending “the largest and tallest among them to trade with us.” This
made the barter “rather too much against” him, the Dutch commissary
complained, as every fathom amounted “to three ells!”

Stuyvesant, to Hudde’s surprise, instructed him to take the initiative
against the Swedes, telling him it was now well known that the Swedes
could expect no succor from home, and that he should go into the
Schuylkill and erect a stronghold there for his own traders.

Backed by this authority the South River commissary, who was of an
aggressive nature anyway, went into the Schuylkill with enthusiasm. In
May of 1648 he began building a log house surrounded by palisades at
Passyunk, on the lands purchased by Corssen in 1633. He called it Fort
Beversrede (Beaver Road Fort). Located within the limits of present-day
Philadelphia, on the east bank of the Schuylkill, Fort Beversrede not
only challenged the Swedish monopoly of the Schuylkill trade but it
restrained some of Printz’s people who were now probing east and north
of that stream.

Governor Printz reacted violently as might have been expected. He
sent out several chastising expeditions of armed men who tore down
palisades, destroyed surrounding forests and burned houses being built
about the new Dutch trading post. But there doesn’t appear to have been
too much blood shed, and the whole affair ended up amusingly enough
when the Swedes constructed a blockhouse of their own on the riverside
within a dozen feet of the gates to the Dutch fort. Evidently the six
nervous Hollanders who manned Fort Beversrede looked the other way
during this operation. In any case, after the Swedish blockhouse went
up, thirty-five feet in length, the Hollanders in their fort didn’t
have “the sight of the water on the kill” that they were supposed to
dominate.

It is easy to imagine that this was almost too much for Stuyvesant.
However, he was cautioned by his employers in Holland to arm himself
with some patience before using force against the Swedes. But then,
becoming increasingly irritated by further trespasses, the governor
determined to send both ships and troops to the South River as a
convincing show of strength. In 1651 he dispatched eleven ships with
arms and supplies around the coast, while he marched overland with 120
soldiers to Fort Nassau where the fleet met him.

There ensued much on-the-spot argument among the Dutch, the Swedes, and
the Indians, about their overlapping land titles. But it all ended up
with the Dutch becoming the masters of the South River, their troops
being much the most persuasive consideration in the case.

Stuyvesant sailed down the river to a likely site on the west bank just
below Fort Christina, landed two hundred men and erected a commanding
fortification which he named Fort Casimir. Located on a peninsula, near
present New Castle, Fort Casimir was 210 feet long and was mounted
with twelve guns, some of which came from Fort Nassau, now dismantled.
Two warships were also stationed in the river and several English
trading-boats were taken as prizes since England and Holland were at
war. All traders on the South River were now compelled to pay duty to
New Netherland.

Printz’s situation deteriorated rapidly as Dutch trading factors
overran New Sweden, monopolizing the beaver commerce. With pitifully
few remaining subjects, desertions having cut the total population to
less than a hundred souls, the governor had to leave Forts Elfsborg and
Korsholm unmanned and rotting. Now that he was without trade goods even
the Indians turned against him, boldly committing depredations within
the limits of the colony.

The people, growing mutinous, openly accused “Big Belly” of avarice
and brutality. They claimed that by their enforced labor he had filled
his storehouses at Tinicum Island with skins for his personal profit.
But he tore up a petition of their grievances and had their leader
convicted of treason. Then he heatedly dared the others to complain
again.

As to the charge of brutality, things were probably no worse nor any
better than the time a party of Indians was hired in New Sweden to
track down some settlers who deserted. These luckless subjects, who
had first tried unsuccessfully to desert to the Dutch, fled toward
the English settlements on the Chesapeake. The savages did their job
well--and efficiently--bringing back only the heads of those who
resisted capture.

The Swedish governor could only protest the Dutch usurpation of his
life-giving trade in the face of the military odds against him and his
own internal problems. His government was left intact however, and he
bided the time that reinforcements would arrive. But none came, nor
even any word. In the end he asked to be relieved. When there was no
reply to his request Johan Printz, at last disillusioned and completely
frustrated, finally took it on his own authority in 1653 to relinquish
his post and sail for home.

Once, some years earlier when Printz was a young officer in the Army
of Sweden, he had been dismissed from the service for surrendering his
post without authority. When he left America under similar conditions,
it is said that he took the precaution of getting a letter of
recommendation from Peter Stuyvesant to the Dutch West India Company,
just as insurance.

The year after Printz sailed away reinforcements did at long last
arrive in New Sweden, and with them came a new and impetuous governor
named Johan Rising. Finding Fort Casimir in the embarrassing position
of being without gunpowder and greatly underestimating the general
situation of the Dutch in New Netherland, Rising made the mistake of
reducing the fort to Swedish rule and pledging the loyalty of some of
the Dutchmen there.

Infuriated, the Directors of the Dutch West India Company sent a fleet
of ships and two hundred veteran soldiers across the sea to their
governor at New Amsterdam. They ordered him to gather all possible
additional forces before the Swedes could be reinforced and “exert
every nerve to avenge that injury, not only by restoring affairs to
their former situation, but by driving the Swedes from every side of
the river.” Stuyvesant responded with alacrity. In September of 1655 he
was under sail for the South River with a fleet of seven armed ships,
land artillery for besieging batteries, and several hundred soldiers.

Captain Sven Skute who was the commandant at Fort Casimir, now called
Fort Trinity by the Swedes, had greatly strengthened the fortifications
there in anticipation of the attack. Shot and powder were stored in
good supply, as were all other necessities for defense. Skute had
written orders from the Council at Fort Christina not to let the enemy
pass.

But, when the Dutch flotilla sailed up the river and anchored above the
fort, Sven Skute didn’t fire a shot. Stuyvesant was permitted to mount
his batteries ashore without interference. After the Swedish stronghold
had been completely surrounded and cut off, Skute sent out word that
his men were going to defend the position. Governor Stuyvesant replied
that if a single Hollander became a casualty there would be no quarter
for any Swede in the fort. Whereupon Captain Skute capitulated under
terms that permitted him to walk out with his “personal property.” His
men had mutinied, it appears.

Leaving Captain Dirck Smith in command of the fort, now renamed Fort
Amstel, the Dutch moved on to the Christina. There Stuyvesant repeated
his maneuver, investing the fort and the entire Swedish settlement.
While he and Rising parleyed, Dutch soldiers pillaged the countryside
as far north as Tinicum Island, where Johan Printz’s ambitious
daughter, married to a pliable husband, now held forth at Printz Hall
in the style of her father. The Hollanders killed livestock, plundered
houses and left the women “stripped naked” in their beds, or so it was
said.

Governor Rising’s situation was hopeless. He had only a small supply of
ammunition, most of it having been sent to Fort Trinity. He was faced
not only with the Dutch guns pointing at his fort but with increasing
desertions to the enemy. Stuyvesant was demanding complete evacuation
of the position or the oath of loyalty to Holland from all Swedish
subjects.

In the end the Swedish governor could only agree to surrender, with
transportation guaranteed for those who did not wish to remain as Dutch
subjects. The governor himself did not fare too badly. It appears that
his private property, like that of Captain Skute, was respected under
the terms of the capitulation and that it was promised he would be
landed in “England or France.”

New Sweden was no more. No longer did the Dutch at New Amsterdam have
to worry about Swedish competition on their South River, much less the
envelopment of Fort Orange in the north by Swedish penetration of the
hinterland.

What the Dutch had to worry about now, other than the Indians in
the vicinity of Manhattan who were getting a bit out of hand, were
Englishmen--especially the New England traders pressing them in the
north. And that was becoming quite a worry!




XV

_New Netherland Threatened Without and Within_


Nowhere in America was there a better situation for a great fur
emporium than Manhattan Island. There, converging into a protected
harbor which was easily accessible to seagoing ships, were arteries of
fur traffic that tapped both hinterland and coastal trade. Indeed, the
beaver trade that originated at Manhattan in the round-bellied Dutch
ships of the seventeenth century was the genesis of a commerce that was
to make New York the greatest seaport in the world.

But, although the Hollanders at New Amsterdam had this material
advantage and were exploiting it with all their energy, their
occupation of New Netherland was insecure to say the least. In English
eyes they were squatters on English territory, and the English had the
physical means to do something about it whenever they wished.

Logically, of course, the Englishmen had a very poor case. In the light
of their own Elizabethan theory that occupation of a territory was
necessary to back up any claim of possession, the Dutch title to New
Netherland was certainly valid. The Hollanders had searched out and
settled the country. The Englishmen had not bothered to do either. Yet,
stubbornly, they had never once conceded Dutch sovereignty.

Naturally, they had to come up with a new interpretation of Elizabeth’s
historic pronouncement. It took the following line of reasoning. James
I had long since defined Virginia as extending from the 34th to the
45th parallel, and, in fact, had granted it by charter to two great
joint-stock companies of London and Plymouth before Captain Hudson
ever went out to America for the Dutch. Such an act of sovereignty
could be considered equivalent to taking possession of that territory!
Therefore the Dutch were intruders!!

And, a quarter of a century after this “act of sovereignty,” parts of
Dutch New Netherland--Connecticut, Long Island and the west bank of the
Delaware River--were being reconveyed by the original English patentees
or the king himself, all without benefit of having yet been settled by
Englishmen.

That no official action was taken to eject the Hollanders can be
attributed to the alliances of the Thirty Years’ War. However, the
time was not too far away when England and Holland, relieved of their
compacts, were to become deadly rivals. Already, in fact, patriotic
Englishmen smarted with the knowledge that a foreign country which had
to import its timber for shipbuilding, and one which had so recently
been helped to independence by them, was growing rich on a carrying
trade that should be in British bottoms. The ultimate conquest of New
Netherland was a foregone conclusion as far as they were concerned.

Meanwhile, pressure on New Netherland from individual traders with the
backing of London and New England merchants prepared the way for the
anticipated military action.

       *       *       *       *       *

The pressure on New Netherland began in 1633 when a trading vessel
from England invaded the Hollanders’ North River for furs. Her name
was the _William_. She was the first English ship ever to ascend the
Hudson. At the time, the annual returns there were estimated at 16,000
beaverskins, and no one was better qualified to appreciate this rich
business than the factor in charge of the _William_; for, he was none
other than a former Dutch commissary on the Hudson, Jacob Eelkens,
who himself had driven a great trade with the Indians at Fort Orange.
In 1623 however, after incurring the displeasure of the West India
Company, he had been summarily discharged. Now he was in the employ of
English merchants, William Cloberry and Company of London, and he was
of a mind to square accounts.

Defying both Governor Wouter van Twiller and the threatening guns on
Manhattan, Eelkens proclaimed haughtily that the Hudson River belonged
to England and then proceeded upstream. Van Twiller didn’t fire on him.
In fact, the irresolute Dutch governor broached a cask of wine while
he deliberated on the situation. Not until he had been roundly twitted
for timidity by his drinking companions did he acquire enough spirit to
dispatch three ships with some soldiers after the renegade Hollander.
By the time this force caught up with Eelkens, he was anchored near
Fort Orange, where he had established a well-stocked trucking station
ashore and was enjoying a lucrative trade for beaver with the natives,
all at the expense of the frustrated Dutch commissary there.

Van Twiller’s soldiers, upon their arrival, arrested the turncoat
interloper, and the _William_ was convoyed back down the river to
Manhattan where all the pelts aboard were confiscated. Then Eelkens,
protesting loudly, was escorted with his empty ship out of the Narrows,
never again to bother his countrymen on the Hudson.

But this same year, 1633, there was pressure of a more serious nature
on the Dutch. It came overland, and it was not to be repulsed so easily.

The fur traders of New England hankered for the beaver that abounded in
the valley of the Connecticut River where the Hollanders were taking
annually some 10,000 skins. Of course Dutch Captain Adrien Block
had discovered and explored the Connecticut, or “Fresh Water” as he
called it, in 1614. And since fur traders from New Amsterdam bartered
traditionally on the river, even establishing a temporary trading
post and laying out the foundations of Fort Good Hope near the site
of present-day Hartford in 1623, there was not much question in their
minds about the jurisdiction of New Netherland. Admittedly, however,
they had made no permanent settlements.

Neither had the English who now coveted the valley’s beaver meadows.
However, they had lately done some exploring and liked what they found.
Edward Winslow of New Plymouth went up the river in 1632 and was so
impressed that he selected a site for a house. And John Winthrop of the
Bay Colony let it out that because his colony extended “to the south
sea on the west parte,” the Connecticut River, or the greater part of
it anyway, belonged to Massachusetts under its charter.

So the Hollanders at New Amsterdam, a bit alarmed, bestirred
themselves to complete the fort which had been commenced by them some
ten years earlier. After buying “most of the lands on both sides” of
the Connecticut River from the Indians, they built a strong house of
yellow bricks at their old trading post and set up two cannon there to
secure the river above them.

But, even while their commissary, Jacob van Curler, was building
this fort in 1633, it was being enveloped by the New Englanders. Fur
traders from Massachusetts Bay fought their way straight west through
the wilderness that summer to reach the upper Connecticut valley north
of Fort Good Hope. In the fall a party of Pilgrims from New Plymouth
sailed up the river from the south for the same purpose.

It was John Oldham, an adventurous trader of ten years experience
in New England, who pioneered the way for the English. With three
companions he blazed what was to become known as the “Old Connecticut
Path” from Watertown in Massachusetts to the Connecticut River. On
his return he made an enthusiastic report on the valley and its
beaver meadows, while delegations of Mohegans from the Connecticut
valley offered alliances and otherwise made things most attractive to
prospective settlers. They wanted the men of Massachusetts, or any
other white men with guns, to settle among them. It was the only way
they knew to even scores with their recent conquerors, the Pequots.

There were 4,000 Englishmen clustered about Massachusetts Bay at
the time and quite a few were of a mind to get away. Puritanical
intolerance, given free rein in this new American colony, was making
too much of a strait jacket out of life for many of them. Connecticut
sounded almost too good to be true. Some of the bold ones began making
plans to migrate to the bounteous valley the following year.

In the meantime Winslow’s people at New Plymouth moved more quickly.
With them fresh beaver territory was always a pressing necessity.
Their very survival as a colony depended on their fur exports. They
also sensed profit in taking sides with the Mohegans. Whereas the
Massachusetts men cautiously avoided any complicating alliances with
the Connecticut valley Indians, the Pilgrims in their desperate anxiety
for pelts were quite willing, as usual, to involve themselves in
inter-tribal disputes. In this case it led to most unhappy results for
the traders, the farmers, and their families. Some have claimed that it
was the genesis of the fierce war between the Pequots and the white men
that exploded a few years later.

In any event, by early September of 1633 Captain William Holmes of
New Plymouth, carrying a prefabricated house frame in “a great new
bark,” was on his way up the Connecticut River. Undaunted by the Dutch
fort and the Hollanders, who “threatened [him] hard, yet ... shot
not,” Captain Holmes sailed past Fort Good Hope and erected his house
above it at Windsor. There his people established a trading post that
prospered at once on upriver furs at the expense of the Dutch traders
below them. Strongly palisading this post, Holmes and his company then
stood firm against a force of seventy Hollanders who were sent from New
Amsterdam to eject them.

The Pilgrim coup was short-lived however. Competition from Boston had
even more to do with this than Indian troubles, for in another three
years a wholesale exodus from Massachusetts to the Connecticut was
under way, over 800 people already having moved west to the fruitful
valley. In the forefront of this migration were the fur traders, but
farmers followed them to found Wethersfield and other towns. Invading
Windsor, they swallowed up the small band of their Pilgrim brethren
there.

The Puritans completely surrounded the isolated Dutch trading post
at Hartford. But, although the New Englanders on the Connecticut at
this time outnumbered the population of all New Netherland, they
made no attempt to oust the garrison of Hollanders in their midst.
Some twenty men, sent out by the younger Winthrop from Boston, did
however take possession of the Dutch claims about the mouth of the
Connecticut. There they tore down the arms of the States General which
had been affixed to a tree and contemptuously engraved “a ridiculous
face in their place.” When a Dutch sloop came from New Amsterdam
to dislodge them, it was compelled to withdraw in the face of two
cannon threateningly mounted ashore. The Boston men then went about
constructing fortifications and buildings which they called Fort
Saybrook.

After that the English had control of the river and, as they thought,
easy access also to the beaver trade “of that so pleasant and
commodious country of Erocoise before us.”

One Puritan merchant, William Pynchon, who was to found a great
fortune in the Indian trade, now spearheaded the economic attack on
New Netherland’s northern flank. Because of his relentless search for
fur he did more than any other man to defeat the Dutch traders and to
expand the frontiers of Massachusetts.

William Pynchon was one of the original company of twenty-seven
grantees of Massachusetts. For their concession these adventurers
were committed to pay the crown one-fifth of all the gold and silver
ore found within the limits of the grant. Pynchon, however, wasn’t
interested in ore. He was of a more practical bent of mind. He traded
with the Indians near Boston from the start, supplying them with guns
and ammunition in exchange for their beaver.

Although this trade in guns was carried on with the court’s approval,
Pynchon was severely criticized for doing it, fined in fact. Annoyed
about this, dissatisfied anyway with the dwindling fur trade about the
bay, and not being particularly in sympathy with the rigid Calvinism of
the church he had helped to found there, Pynchon’s eyes turned westward.

This keen-minded, resolute man was probably one of John Oldham’s
financial backers when that extraordinary adventurer pioneered the
Connecticut Path. Pynchon himself made a trip up the Connecticut River
by shallop in 1635 and chose a location for a trading post near the
Indian village of Agawam. Somewhat above the other river towns which
were being laid out, this strategic site was relied upon to intercept
most of the Indian trade from the north and west.

Early in 1636 Pynchon with his son-in-law, Henry Smith, led a group of
traders overland to Agawam. They shipped their goods by water. For 18
fathoms of wampum, and 18 each of coats, hatchets, hoes and knives,
with “two extra coats thrown in for good measure,” land was purchased
from the Indians, and a trading settlement was established. It wasn’t
too long before every one was calling this trading post Springfield, in
honor of its founder’s home town in England.

In the resolutions which were framed for the government of Springfield
a provision was shrewdly included to limit the population. This was
intended to prevent an influx of farmers who would spoil the fur trade.
Actually, the founder brought out only twelve families. As a result of
his plan the main business of Springfield for many years was the beaver
trade.

There was a provision in the resolutions, too, for obtaining a
minister, Pynchon himself acting in this capacity until the Reverend
George Moxon was finally installed. It is recorded of this good
parson that when he did arrive he preached a sermon that lasted for
twenty-eight days. It is also a matter of record that an early purchase
for the church was an hourglass. But whether its purpose was to impose
a time limit or to insure good measure is not stated.

Travelling extensively by canoe and on horseback, William Pynchon
bartered with many tribes for beaver, otter, marten, mink, muskrat,
raccoon, lynx, and fox. And, tactfully using Algonquin tribes as
middlemen, it wasn’t too long before he tapped the Iroquois trade. By
1640 he had established one of his agents, Thomas Cooper, at Woronoco,
later the site of Westfield, “where the Indians brought not only their
own furs, but also furs which they obtained from the Mohawks.” When
this happened, the Dutch no longer had a monopoly of the furs of the
Iroquois.

Of course Pynchon’s tremendous gains meant some real losses to the new
towns below Springfield, which in 1639 had created a government of
their own when they drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. In
an effort to checkmate Pynchon, and bring the trade of the valley to
Hartford instead, Connecticut now granted to Governor Edward Hopkins
and William Whiting “liberty of free trade at Woronoco and at any place
thereabouts ... all others to be restrained for the terme of seven
years....” But Massachusetts came to Pynchon’s rescue, resisted the
Connecticut grab, and eventually established through the Commissioners
of the United Colonies that Woronoco was within its bounds.

Later, the Connecticut people tried another tack. They declared an
impost on all pelts and other goods that Pynchon shipped down the
river, a tax that could have ruined him. However, they voted to remove
this excise when the Massachusetts authorities, in retaliation, levied
a large duty on Connecticut goods coming into Boston harbor. And
William Pynchon went on to expand the fur frontier of Massachusetts to
the north and the west, and through his beaver trade to become one of
the richest men in New England.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, the Puritan migration was taking other avenues of expansion
in the direction of New Netherland, along the shores of Long Island
Sound. These routes, too, followed the paths of fur traders who as
usual broke through the wilderness to make pacts with the natives or to
fuse the wars that cleared the way for settlement.

The Narragansett country and Long Island Sound were of course
traditional Dutch trading preserves. But as early as 1632, New Plymouth
established a truckhouse at Sowamset, now Barrington, Rhode Island, and
in the following year daring John Oldham, filled with “vast conceits
of extraordinary gaine,” was driving a trade on his own account much
farther to the west in Long Island Sound. Oldham did business with
both the Pequots and the Narragansetts, the latter taking so kindly
to him and his trucking goods that they offered him free land for the
establishment of a permanent trading post among them.

Three years later however, on a trading voyage in the Sound, Oldham was
murdered at Block Island by Indians under Pequot control. His boat was
plundered and two English boys with him at the time were carried off
into captivity. This episode fused the Pequot War, the chief results of
which was a bloody purge by the New Englanders that cleared the shores
of the Sound for settlement.

The campaign commenced against the Pequots in 1637 quickly became a
hundredfold more terrible than the murderous episode the white men set
out originally to avenge. Under the leadership of Captain John Endicott
of Massachusetts, a devastating blow was first delivered at Block
Island. A hundred men went there with him in three ships. They burned
the native wigwams, spoiled the corn, and slew all the Indians they
could catch. Then they repaired to the mainland, where they invaded the
heart of the Pequot country and repeated their brutal chastisement of
the red men.

This grim Puritan punishment came close to uniting all the Indians in
those parts against the English. Only the diplomacy of Roger Williams,
who traded for furs with the Narragansetts while preaching the gospel,
prevented the great Narragansett tribe from joining the Pequots in the
fierce revenge they now took against any isolated Englishmen they could
find. Meanwhile the Pequots scourged the countryside--until, by a final
campaign, the New Englanders set out to remove this powerful tribe from
the face of the earth!

An army composed mostly of mercenary savages was assembled by the
Englishmen for this gory task. It originated with a party of ninety
white men from the Connecticut River towns under the command of John
Mason. Together with an equal number of Mohegans, they went down to
Fort Saybrook to meet Captain John Underhill who had been sent from
Massachusetts with twenty soldiers. This nucleous force then proceeded
to the Bay of the Narragansetts where it was joined by some 500 of
those savages, all bent on scalps and loot. From the bay the army
marched overland to the Mystic River to attack one of the chief Pequot
towns, occupied at the time by some six or seven hundred men, women and
children.

The English and their Indian allies took the inhabitants of the town
by surprise. They put the torch to the wigwams before the sleeping
natives could offer any resistance. All who were not burned to death
were slaughtered as they tried to escape--all except seven who managed
to escape and seven others who were taken captive. It was a terrible
affair--for the Pequots. Only two Englishmen died in the encounter.

Another main body of the Pequots was routed soon afterward. But that
did not end the bloody harassment. A month later, a large force from
Massachusetts under Captain Stoughton, together with Captain Mason’s
Connecticut men, surrounded all that remained of the once powerful
tribe. This occurred in a swamp at Fairfield where the remnant of the
tribe had taken refuge. The warriors put up a brave fight, but the odds
were too great against them. Those few who escaped this final butchery
were divided among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, never more to be
called Pequots.

The shores of the Sound west of Fort Saybrook were open now to
settlers. A wave of migration from Boston resulted in the founding of
New Haven, Stratford, Norwalk, Stamford, and other towns. The New Haven
people, forming their own government, even spread across the Sound
to Long Island which, of course, had long been occupied only by the
Hollanders, whose traders exploited the natives there for the wampum so
essential in the beaver trade.

To halt this encroachment on the very nerve center of their trading
territory, the Dutch hurriedly purchased from the Indians all the
country that remained open between Manhattan and the oncoming English,
acquiring legal title to additional lands on Long Island as far west
as Oyster Bay as well as to all that triangle of territory between the
Hudson and the Sound south of Norwalk. The latter comprised much of
present Westchester County. However the English encroachment along the
north shore of the Sound, as a practical matter, was halted no farther
east than Greenwich.

Only in the Narragansett country, after 1640, did the Dutch hang on to
any substantial beaver trade east of Greenwich. Rhode Island, by then
well populated with Englishmen, tried to keep them out. However, the
Dutch simply supplied the Indians there more generously with rum and
guns--in return for beaver. So did some interloping but enterprising
Frenchmen. And so did some of the New Englanders themselves, for that
matter. Nowhere was the competition for beaver more keen or more
dangerous than in Rhode Island.

English laws at the time sincerely prohibited the sale of liquor or
firearms to the savages. But such laws were difficult to enforce on a
wild frontier where uncontrolled profits could be scooped up so easily.
Roger Williams was later to write that he had “refused the gain of
thousands by such a murderous trade.” Some of his neighbors in the
wilderness and even some of his own trading associates had no such
scruples however.

Richard Smith who became wealthy on the Indian trade was a man of
this stripe. He and Roger Williams, along with John Wilcox, “a
sturring, driving, somewhat unscrupulous fellow,” began trading in the
Narragansett country as early as 1637. Each of them built trucking
houses on the much-traveled Pequot and Narragansett Trail at the site
of present-day Wickford. As trading practices sharpened over the years,
neither Smith nor Wilcox hesitated to meet the increasing demands of
the natives for liquor and powder. Williams was revolted. In 1651,
when he was about to go to England, he sold his house and trading
interests to Smith for 50 pounds sterling. That left Smith without any
competition for this lucrative fur trade, as he had bought out Wilcox
some years earlier.

Men like Smith and Wilcox furnished tinder for many flaming atrocities
in Rhode Island. But their murderous trade was “the most profitable
employment in these parts of America ... by which many persons of mean
degree advanced to considerable estates.” Rhode Island was truly one of
the most fertile of all beaver grounds--while it lasted. That was until
1660. By then the beaver was all but exhausted, while, with the help
of the white man’s goods, the Indian trapper was well on the way to
destroying himself too.

It had been the same of course on every fur frontier in America. In
Rhode Island the fateful process of the aborigine’s extinction was
just exaggerated in dreadful degree. As native drinking increased,
atrocities mounted and bloody retaliation followed. Yet, in spite of
this terrible situation, the English themselves came to recognize wine
and spirits as the chief staple of the Indian trade, while futilely
putting new laws on their books intended to limit the natives’
consumption!

For their part the Hollanders never had any compunction about
distributing hot waters or firearms among the savage neighbors of the
New Englanders, who after all seemed bent on taking over all of New
Netherland. Protected by ships, of which the Rhode Islanders had none,
the Hollanders drove a continuing trade at their long-established posts
in Narragansett Bay, especially at Dutchmen’s Island which they had
fortified. As late as 1647 the natives were transporting their pelts
in canoes to Dutchmen’s Island, where it was said they could lay in
a supply of strong waters sufficient to keep an Indian village in an
uproar for a week and acquire all the guns and powder they wanted.
And the Dutch continued to trade in the bay for some years after that,
until the beaver of Rhode Island was almost exhausted.

In fact at no time, until 1650, did the New Netherlanders give up any
part of their claims south of Cape Cod, even though they hadn’t been
able to stem the overland flood of English traders and settlers. In
1647 they did seize an Amsterdam ship, trading at New Haven without a
license from the Dutch West India Company, and brought her into New
Amsterdam where she was confiscated in spite of excited protests from
New Haven. On land, however, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Furthermore, troubles at home, especially with the savages, kept them
close to the valley of the Hudson after 1640.

       *       *       *       *       *

Curiously enough, the New Netherlanders’ troubles at home beginning in
1640 sprang largely from their sale of firearms to the distant Iroquois.

These lake country Indians, with practically inexhaustible supplies of
the finest beaver, thought nothing of offering as many as twenty heavy
skins in exchange for a musket. The great profit in this traffic had
proved irresistible to the Dutchmen. So the authorities at Manhattan
often winked at the illegal purveyance of arms and powder by their
traders to such faraway savages. If their consciences bothered them at
all, they were comforted by the knowledge that their Iroquois allies
maintained a bulwark against competitive traders from French Canada, as
well as against the enveloping English.

At the same time however, prompted strictly by self-preservation, the
New Netherlanders clamped down hard on any “bosch-lopers” who sold
arms among their Algonquin neighbors. This was good policy for the
Hollanders of course, but it left the river tribes at the complete
mercy of their ancient and terrible Iroquois enemies, especially the
Mohawks, who descended upon them periodically to collect taxes.

Added to this touchy situation was the asininity of a reckless Dutch
governor, one William Kieft, who himself attempted to collect taxes
from these same river Indians for the support of his fortifications on
Manhattan. When he adopted wholesale butchery and the surprise tactics
of the Iroquois to enforce his demands for tribute, things became
explosive. The Dutch found themselves waging a sanguinary five-year war
against local tribes who in turn managed to terrorize Manhattan and the
surrounding plantations.

This war, though sporadic and spotty, was fought with a thirst for
blood on both sides. Massacres and other atrocities were committed by
reds and whites alike, as the Indian league against the Hollanders
spread up the Hudson above the Highlands. In 1643 a shallop coming down
from Fort Orange with four hundred beaver skins taken in trade with
the Mohawks was plundered, to signal a general massacre that resulted
in the virtual evacuation of all the outlying plantations in the lower
valley as surviving colonists fled to Fort Amsterdam.

It took a final annihilating blow, no less terrible than the recent
English offensive against the Pequots, to end the war. And it was
Captain John Underhill who delivered it with the same dreadful
efficiency he had demonstrated during the Pequot campaign. Underhill,
now a Boston “heretic” living under the jurisdiction of the West India
Company, led 150 Dutch soldiers into the mountainous region north
of Stamford where the remnant of the Indian league against the New
Netherlanders had a strongly palisaded town. When it was all over 700
Indian corpses darkened the snow. The Dutch lost 15 men.

Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s patroonship far up the Hudson was spared
the tomahawk during these Indian troubles. There, where the shrewd
Amsterdam jeweler had purchased lands about Fort Orange embracing most
of two present-day New York counties, the neighboring Mohawk allies of
the Dutch provided complete protection from Algonquin depredations.
While all was pandemonium on the lower river, both agriculture and
trade flourished at Rensselaerwyck.

Nowhere in New Netherland, in fact, was there a livelier trade in
pelts then or at any other time than at Van Rensselaer’s manor. And
nowhere was this trade more unlicensed. In 1644 it was estimated that
between three and four thousand furs had been carried off the manor
illegally during a twelve month period. That is, illegally carried off
in the eyes of the patroon, although he himself was shipping out pelts
illegally as far as the authorities at Manhattan were concerned.

Van Rensselaer, however, recognized no jurisdiction from that quarter.
He asserted that he held his patroonship directly from the States
General and that he would buy and ship furs as he pleased without
regard to any laws or taxes proclaimed by the West India Company’s
representatives at New Amsterdam. And so he did.

He even built a fort of his own on a Hudson River island where he
emphasized the independence of his feudal domain by enforcing the
medieval principle of “staple right.” Every passing vessel, except
those of the Dutch West India Company, must pay duty or deposit its
cargo of pelts ashore where the patroon might buy these “staples” on
his own terms. The skippers must strike their colors too, in homage to
the lord of Rensselaerwyck.

Van Rensselaer also made it clear that company as well as private fur
traders were to keep off his property. This caused much bitterness.
Fort Orange, about which the patroon had established his domain, was
the official post of the Dutch West India Company, the emporium where
their traders traditionally bartered for beaver with the Iroquois.
After Rensselaerwyck was established Fort Orange continued to be
the commercial center of this profitable trade, so much so that the
flourishing little trading village which sprang up there under the
very cannon of the fort, and which was to grow into the strategically
important city of Albany, was originally christened Beverwyck. Kiliaen
van Rensselaer of course had no jurisdiction over Fort Orange, the
company’s private precinct, but he considered Beverwyck within his
domain. The resulting rivalry between his traders and the company’s
representatives, with guns for the savages as bait for beaver, was
anything but neighborly.

The company’s management at Manhattan only quickened the tension when
on occasion the authorities there confiscated firearms en route to the
patroon of Rensselaerwyck. In one case, in 1644, a ship out of Holland
for Rensselaerwyck was discovered to be carrying 4,000 pounds of powder
and 700 guns intended for the Indian trade, and these munitions were
seized with considerable show of propriety. But what then happened to
them is not stated, although one well-informed old chronicler suggests
that they got along probably in due course to the Iroquois as usual
in return for their precious beaver. In any event, the confiscation
represented only one slight interruption in the continuous flow of
these murderous trade goods to the lake-country Indians.

The feud between the company and the patroonship on the upper Hudson
really settled down to cases in 1648 after Kiliaen van Rensselaer
died and his young son’s contumacious new commissary, Brandt van
Slechtenhorst, took over the management of Rensselaerwyck. For, in the
meantime, that little snappish captain, Peter Stuyvesant, had arrived
in New Netherland as the West India Company’s Director General.

Stuyvesant was by way of being a reformer, so long as the reforms were
in the company’s trade interests. One of his first acts to attract more
settlers was to permit the popular election of “Nine Men” who, when
called upon, were to assist the governor and the council in matters
concerning the general welfare. But when the “Nine Men” proposed to
serve the general welfare without being called upon by the governor,
Peter Stuyvesant proceeded to knock them down. And when the right of
appeal to the home government was suggested, the governor stamped about
arrogantly on his pegleg and dared anyone to try it. He said he would
make the appealer “a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland, and
let him appeal in that way!”

Brutally dictatorial though he may have been, the new governor was
earnest nevertheless in all things, reforms included. He took very
effective steps, for instance, to check the smuggling of beaver into
New England where it could be traded tax-free for European goods. And,
while setting up tighter export controls, he also increased the tax
on furs. Furthermore, he not only forbade the sale of liquor to the
natives but he tried his best to enforce the contraband on firearms for
use as trade goods.

Naturally, such policies were obnoxious at Rensselaerwyck, where
gun-running was popular and company taxes were not. There too the
commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, headstrong in pretensions
to complete independence of the company, was itching to prove his
insubordination.

So, when Stuyvesant, with his penchant for issuing autocratic
proclamations, decreed a certain fast day not to van Slechtenhorst’s
liking, the Commissary of Rensselaerwyck pounced upon it, rejecting it
as an invasion of “the right and authority of the Lord Patroon.” When
the governor went up the river to challenge his adversary he was met
with open defiance.

It was Stuyvesant’s edict then that “no new ordinances affecting trade
or commerce within the colony were to be made, unless with the assent
of the provincial authorities.” Also, with regard to the company’s
jealously guarded “precincts” about Fort Orange, no more buildings
were to be erected at Beverwyck within range of the guns of the
fortifications. Such encroachments on the company’s precincts rendered
the fort insecure, the governor claimed. And further, he ordered, the
wooden palisades of the fort were to be replaced with a stone wall, the
stone to be quarried on an adjoining tract of land.

Van Slechtenhorst’s reply to all this was that he would build wherever
he pleased because all the land around belonged to the patroon. He
noted sarcastically that the patroon’s own trading house had once
stood on the very border of the fort’s moat. No sooner had Stuyvesant
departed than the wilful commissary went right ahead erecting houses,
“even within pistol shot” of the palisades. Furthermore, he forbade the
quarrying of stone for new walls to replace the palisades.

The feud, continuing unabated, was eventually referred to Holland where
the States General sustained the Governor of New Netherland on every
point. Although by this action the aspirations of the patroonship
for independence were dashed beyond hope, van Slechtenhorst resisted
stubbornly until 1652, when he was arrested and transported down to
Manhattan. In the end also, the village of Beverwyck was officially
declared free, to become a part of the “precincts” of Fort Orange.

Meanwhile, for Governor Stuyvesant, there was the more vital problem of
the New Englanders who were hungrily gnawing away at Dutch fur trading
territory.




XVI

_The English Close Their Coastal Ranks_


All during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper
Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action
against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no
easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad.
After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy
of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the
two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United
Colonies of New England,” even without Cromwell’s soldiers, could
overrun New Netherland with ease if they took concerted action. That
possibility had been implicit in the founding purpose of their alliance
in 1643.

It was a fact that defense against the Indians had motivated the New
Englanders not much more than the animosity they nurtured against their
Dutch neighbors, an animosity born of rivalry for the fur trade. After
the alliance, English fur factors became even more aggressive. The men
of New Haven, who were especially bitter about being cut off from the
Indian trade, boldly encroached on Dutch preserves when they ascended
the Housatonic valley and set up a trucking station on the Naugatuck
River within sixty miles of Fort Orange. And traders from the upper
Connecticut valley probed deeply into traditional Dutch territory in
their efforts to tap the beaver stores of the Iroquois.

But, in the years immediately following the formation of the league,
there was not enough unanimity of purpose among the New Englanders to
attack the foreigners who were standing in the way of their expanding
beaver traffic. For one thing, at that time, the dominant member of
the confederation was not too directly affected by Dutch resistance.
Massachusetts’ main inland fur traffic from Boston did not approach
Dutch territory, and her chief fur merchant, Simon Willard of Concord,
who spearheaded this traffic up the Merrimac River had yet to reach
even Lake Winnepesaukee, itself far separated from New Netherland
frontiers by natural boundaries.

Of course all New Englanders protested about the “murderous” Dutch
trade in arms for beaver. William Pynchon protested even about the
Hollanders supplying the distant Iroquois with firearms. But since all
the colonies of the confederation were guilty in some degree of this
practice, it is questionable whether the complaints sprang as much from
moral considerations as they did from vexation over the diversion of
beaver pelts to the more freehanded Hollanders.

In any case, while the New Englanders protested so virtuously about
the Dutch trade in firearms, they complained strenuously also about
Stuyvesant’s new excises on furs, and they took the occasion to pass
laws excluding the Hollanders from any trade with Indians under
their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction, it seemed, now comprehended
everything along the coast east of Greenwich and unlimited claims to
the interior. This brought about a diplomatic showdown.

Governor Stuyvesant, in high bluff, journeyed to Hartford in 1650 for
a meeting with the Commissioners of the United Colonies. He offered a
valiant front, opening the negotiations with a letter of considerations
signed at Hartford but dated “in New Netherland.” When the New
England commissioners took exception, Stuyvesant explained that, as
the substance of the letter was agreed upon in Council at Manhattan,
it was so dated. However, if the commissioners would cease speaking
of Hartford “in New England,” he would not date his letters “in New
Netherland.”

This was not to be his only retreat. His territorial claims east
along the coast retreated from Cape Cod to Greenwich in the face of
accomplished fact. And he could only agree to a stabilization of the
border between New England and New Netherland at about where it had
been fixed already by English traders. Roughly, this was a line running
northerly from the vicinity of Greenwich that was at no point to come
within ten miles of Hudson’s River. The only Dutch reservation east of
that line was the Fort Good Hope trading post.

It was all very humiliating. However it appeared to have the redeeming
feature of halting by treaty any further encroachment on the heart of
the Dutch trading preserves. The all-important Iroquois trade was saved.

But only for the time being, as it turned out. Significantly enough,
although the treaty signed at Hartford was eventually ratified by the
States General in Holland, the English government never did get around
to doing so. It wasn’t necessary. England planned to take all of New
Netherland, in due time.

Meanwhile, the pressure on New Netherland was renewed, while the treaty
itself was violated, even repudiated, by the New Englanders.

To begin with, Cromwell’s Navigation Act was passed in 1651. It decreed
that goods imported into England must come in English ships or ships
belonging to the country in which the goods were produced. Since this
was specifically directed against the Dutch carrying trade, it soon
plunged England and Holland into a naval war, from which England may be
said to have emerged the victor even though she was soundly thrashed at
sea. But, although the British fleet had to take refuge in the Thames
while an exulting Dutch admiral sailed up and down the Channel with
a broom tied to the masthead of his flagship, the Navigation Act was
maintained in force.

While all this was going on overseas, New Haven and Connecticut
clamored for the conquest of their “noxious” Dutch neighbors.
So alarmed was Peter Stuyvesant in 1653 that he made last-ditch
preparations for the coming English onslaught. It was at this time
that the famous wall of palisades was built along the line of what
is still called “Wall” Street. This pale was intended to hinder any
possible land envelopment of New Amsterdam by the English. But once
again Massachusetts held back. She prevented outright war in America by
refusing to join in a military offensive against New Netherland.

The boundaries set up by the Treaty of Hartford were violated however.
By 1655 the English had pushed across the line at Greenwich, well into
present-day Westchester County. By 1659 Massachusetts itself was ready
to repudiate the treaty.

In that year, it appears, the Hollanders made the mistake of
objecting too vigorously to being divested of the bulk of their
beaver trade by Boston merchants. The Bay Colony, claiming unlimited
western boundaries, had granted a tract in the Hudson valley to
merchants interested in establishing a fur trading post close by Fort
Orange itself. Then, as if this was not offensive enough to the New
Netherlanders, the Boston men boldly requested free use of the Hudson
River waterway to reach their new property. The overland route was too
difficult, they explained.

When Peter Stuyvesant angrily refused this request the Boston traders
persisted, bringing their case before the Commissioners of the United
Colonies. Whereupon those gentlemen announced airily that “The
agreement at Hartford that the English should not come within ten miles
of Hudson’s River, doth not prejudice the rights of the Massachusetts
in the upland country, nor give any rights to the Dutch there!” Only
the excitement generated by the Restoration in England quelled the
ensuing controversy long enough to forestall a local conflict.

This same year, only four years after the Dutch conquest of New Sweden,
English pressure commenced from the south. There, Governor Fendall
of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland colony was invading the Delaware valley
with men and ultimatums. He demanded that “the pretended Governor of
a people seated in Delaware Bay, within his Lordship’s Province ...
depart forth!” Otherwise, he declaimed, that part of his lordship’s
province “would be reduced to its due obedience under him.”

Stuyvesant, of course, refuted the Maryland claim. He pointed out
that Lord Baltimore’s patent gave him rights only to lands hitherto
uncultivated by Christians. But the English pressure in that quarter,
once commenced, was maintained with the same stubborn persistence as
that on the New England front. The British were closing their ranks on
the eastern seaboard of America. The squeeze was on New Netherland.

The Dutch governor fought desperately for the life of his colony. He
had been plagued with Indian uprisings in the valley of the Hudson,
pirates in Long Island Sound and English plotters in New Amsterdam
itself. Now the very life’s breath of his colony was being squeezed
out, for, in addition to the loss of Indian trade to the trespassing
Englishmen, Peter Stuyvesant also had to contend with the stifling
effects of the new British Navigation Acts. These laws had not been
relaxed in any degree since Cromwell’s death. On the contrary, they had
been tightened upon the restoration of the crown.

But, since the Navigation Acts were almost as obnoxious to the English
colonies as they were to the Dutch, ways were found in America to
circumvent them. Intercolonial trade practices developed that soon
baffled the monopoly-minded merchants of London and Bristol. Stuyvesant
discovered, for instance, that he could exchange negroes and “other
merchandise” for Virginia tobacco, and then reship the English product
via New Amsterdam. Thus, goods intended for British bottoms were being
carried by the Dutch to foreign markets, in spite of the English
navigation laws.

Under these circumstances, from the British viewpoint, there was
only one thing left to do. Whatever remained of Dutch authority and
jurisdiction in America would have to be stamped out by military force.
To accomplish this the English had only to take the Hudson River. It
was not only the main highway to the fur stores of the Iroquois, it was
the key to military control of the continent. And it could be seized at
small cost, the Council of Foreign Plantations suggested.

Whereupon James, Duke of York, persuaded his brother, Charles II,
to grant him title to various lands in America including all the
territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, and to finance
an expedition against New Amsterdam. The English did not bother even to
declare war, since, as the king curiously put it, New Amsterdam “did
belong to England before, but the Dutch drove our people out of it.” A
conglomeration of assumptions hardly warranted by any facts!

Someone has written that the conquest of New Netherland by the force
sent out by the Duke of York was “a mere bit of bellicose etiquette.”
Others have been more direct, calling it “bold robbery.” In any case,
when Colonel Richard Nicolls arrived off Fort Amsterdam in the late
summer of 1664, with four frigates and five times the fire power of
Stuyvesant’s guns, New Amsterdam became New York without a shot being
fired. So did Fort Orange up the river. It only remained then for
Sir Robert Carr to descend upon the Delaware settlements to force the
allegiance of all those seated there, and New Netherland ceased to
exist.

The English had closed ranks on the coasts of America. British colonies
now stretched out in line, unbroken by foreigners, from Spanish Florida
to French Canada--one united front--for trade, for war.

British demands at Fort Amsterdam having proved to be moderate,
the Dutch remained as good subjects, thus establishing the early
cosmopolitan character of Manhattan. Many of the burghers had openly
sided with the English anyway during the surrender negotiations,
apparently with the happy prospect of ridding themselves of their
waspish little governor. Stuyvesant himself, retiring to private life,
developed a warm friendship with his English successor, Governor
Nicolls, each apparently holding the other in high esteem.

And, in the official seal of New York, full recognition was given to
the little furred animal that had so properly occupied a prominent
place in the seal of the Dutch colony. _Castor canadensis_ appeared
twice, in fact, within the shield of the British seal. Even after the
American Revolution, after the eagle had supplanted the crown in the
seal of New York, these two beavers remained there as a permanent
reminder of the important role of fur in the genesis of our greatest
port.




XVII

_Westward the Fur Frontier of America_


With the elimination of New Netherland in 1664 the main obstacle to
British colonial policy had been removed. Laws providing for a more
closely knit relationship between the colonies and the mother country,
such as the Navigation Acts, could be enforced. Soldiers now backed
up the merchants. Indeed, from this time the expansion of England’s
imperial trade system in America would proceed at the point of a gun.

That it would expand however, and solidly, was because the English had
what it took in addition to guns. They possessed all those stubborn
qualities required of true empire builders, of colonizers. The farmers
who pressed hard behind the fur traders were land-hungry, persistent
and numerous. They kept the beaver traders, and the soldiers, on the
move.

Although the English flag waved over America in 1664 from Spanish
Florida to French Canada, it was planted only along the coast. The
farthest inland post was Fort Albany on the Hudson, formerly Dutch Fort
Orange. Beyond that, however, lay the boundless hinterland, a seemingly
inexhaustible fur frontier to be rolled westward toward the South Sea,
toward China!

Of course there was the matter of protecting the English flanks against
the Spaniards and the French. On the left flank, in the south, this had
been accomplished by the Carolina Patent which extended England’s claim
in those parts far below Cape Fear to 31°, and later even farther,
although Spain did manage to keep the border north of its stronghold
at St. Augustine. On the right flank the French coastal boundary had
been neatly settled, or so the British colonials thought, when the
northernmost limit of the widely scattered lands granted to the Duke of
York was placed at the St. Croix River, roughly 45°, which had been
England’s traditional claim there.

[Illustration: THE TRADERS KEPT PUSHING THEIR BIRCH-BARK CANOES DEEPER
INTO THE WILDERNESS.]

Then, too, there was the matter of the French traders already in the
northwestern hinterland. But, since England had inherited the Dutch
trade with the Iroquois, those fierce savages were counted upon to act
as buffer allies in the interior, to keep the French trade routes north
of the lake country.

It was quite a surprise therefore to the British colonials when their
penetration of the interior had hardly begun before Frenchmen were
harassing their right flank. Their coastal border on the St. Croix
River was forced back once more below the Penobscot, while in the
interior the Mohawk valley itself was raided by French troops trying to
wrest more southerly routes from the Iroquois.

And this was only the beginning of a bloody rivalry between the English
and the French for fur and dominion in America, a rivalry that would
keep the evershifting borders aflame for almost a hundred years--to
culminate finally in the decisive French and Indian War of the
eighteenth century.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Frenchmen of the seventeenth century who followed the paths blazed
by Samuel de Champlain had extended those paths farther and farther
into the hinterland. Fur traders, explorers, soldiers, and Catholic
priests who not infrequently bent to the paddles for discovery entirely
on their own, all took part in this invasion of America.

Of course the Frenchmen who came to America were not colonizers, not
true empire builders. There were few farmers among them. In the main
they were adventurers. But they had grand plans, and they knew how to
strike bargains and make treaties with the natives. So, although their
lines of communication were much too thinly held, they kept pushing
their birch-bark canoes deeper into the wilderness for trade and
dominion.

In 1634, one of Champlain’s interpreters, Jean Nicollet, voyaged across
the waters of Lake Michigan to establish trade with the natives in the
Wisconsin region. He had supposed they would be an Oriental people,
and his appearance at Green Bay in a damask gown richly embroidered in
the Chinese manner impressed the Dacotahs no less than the thunder and
lightning of his pistol. Believing him to be a white god, the savages
were humbly acquiescent to Nicollet’s demand for skins, and he took
full profit from the situation.

In another twenty-five years two intrepid fur-traders, Pierre
Exprit Radisson and his sister’s husband Medard Chouart, Sieur des
Grosseilliers, had looked upon the waters of the upper Mississippi
River. Trading and hunting with the Sioux, they explored much of the
vast country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. On this
same expedition, it would appear, while his partner was ill in winter
camp, Radisson investigated the region about Lake Superior and learned
of Cree trade routes from that lake to the Great Bay of the North
(Hudson’s Bay). In the end, after many blood-curdling adventures,
he and his brother-in-law returned home to Three Rivers on the St.
Lawrence with a fortune in beaver skins.

They were soon off again, however, on another extended trading
expedition, this time to build a palisaded fort among savage tribes
living north of Lake Superior and eventually to cross the wilderness
to Hudson’s Bay. Radisson’s account of the perils encountered on this
venture puts one in mind of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece--and
the tale’s denouement is no less reminiscent of that ancient Greek
legend. In any case, the brothers-in-law took along a particularly
fine supply of merchandise on this expedition into what is now
northwestern Ontario--knives, hatchets and swords, ivory combs and tin
looking-glasses, awls, and needles--all those things designed to send
the red men in breathless pursuit of beaver. And, when they returned
home, they had the greatest single cargo of pelts ever before seen
in America. Their convoy included a great fleet of fur-laden canoes,
requiring hundreds of Indians to paddle them.

Such a kingly treasure was too much for the grasping French governor
at Quebec to resist. What he couldn’t take away from Radisson and
Des Grosseilliers in taxes he took away in fines. This, he informed
them, was because they had gone on their journey without his personal
permission. The share left for the two traders, who had taken the
risks, opened the country and brought back the beaver, hardly
compensated them for their labor. They quit Canada in disgust to cast
their lot with the English, the important consequence of which was the
birth of the great Hudson’s Bay Company.

Radisson and his brother-in-law first spent some time trying to
interest merchants in Nova Scotia, then under British control, in
establishing a fur trading post on Hudson’s Bay. An expedition did set
out in an English ship but the captain turned back on encountering ice
floes, due to the lateness of the season. Then the Frenchmen went to
Boston, where they gained considerable interest in their project but
not enough capital to launch it. Finally, in England, they obtained
sufficient backing from Prince Rupert, cousin of King Charles II, to
finance such a costly adventure.

In 1668 a trading post was established “at the bottom of Hudson’s Bay,”
in the southernmost part of James Bay, and the first cargo of furs to
arrive in England was magnificent enough to insure a royal charter.
The king granted domain over all the vast area drained by waters
flowing into Hudson’s Bay to Prince Rupert and seventeen associates,
incorporating them in 1670 as the “Governor and Company of Adventurers
of England Trading in Hudson’s Bay.” These merchant adventurers became
virtual rulers over “Rupert’s Land,” approximately 1,400,000 square
miles of territory, and so their successors of the Hudson’s Bay Company
were to be for over 200 years.

After the English became entrenched on Hudson’s Bay, furs were diverted
to them that otherwise would have been collected by the French. In time
French traders became aggravated enough to make repeated attacks on
the rival posts. Attempts to dislodge the English from the bay proved
futile however. Although the “Honorable Company,” as the Hudson’s Bay
Company was to become known, moved ponderously at times due to its
conservative absentee directorship in England, it managed to endure and
to expand at the expense of the French. In fact, it was destined to
become the world’s largest fur trading organization. It would shift the
course of trade to London, to make it the center of the western world’s
fur market.

Meanwhile, the adventurous French were spurred on by the discovery of
the upper Mississippi. Radisson called the Mississippi, in conjunction
with the Missouri, the Forked River “because it has two branches, the
one towards the west, the other towards the south, which we believe
runs toward Mexico.” Jesuit priests, probing the hinterland, wrote that
the savages assured them the Mississippi was “so noble a river that, at
more than three hundred leagues’ distance from its mouth, it is larger
than the one flowing before Quebec; for they declare it is more than a
league wide.... Some warriors of this country, who tell us that they
have made their way thither, declare that they saw there men resembling
the French, who were splitting trees with long knives, and that some
of them had houses on the water--for they thus expressed themselves in
speaking of sawed boards and Ships”--and Spaniards!

Already, young Louis XIV had considered occupying the mouths of
continental rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico to threaten the
Spanish possessions there. If Radisson’s Forked River was really one of
these waterways, the strategic value of such a move would be immensely
enhanced. It would provide a backside approach from New France, an
interior line of communications safe from Spanish attack. It was an
intriguing prospect, to say the least.

Then, in 1673, a fur trader and mine prospector named Louis Joliet
together with a Jesuit priest, Father Jacques Marquette, descended the
Mississippi far enough to learn that it assuredly did flow into the
Gulf of Mexico. Whereupon the French not only tasted the stimulating
prospect of threatening Spanish possessions there, they excitedly
envisioned an inland empire of trading citadels stretching from the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and the Mississippi
Valley, to the Gulf of Mexico. The continent would be theirs, with
great ports of entry at the distantly separated mouths of the St.
Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers. The English colonies would be
completely encircled--to be pinned down on the coast, or eliminated!

Chief among those who developed this grand commercial strategy for
dominion over the heart of America was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la
Salle, who as Commandant of Fort Frontenac at the western outlet of
Lake Ontario had built up a thriving trade with the northwestern
savages. Much to the annoyance of the Iroquois he furnished these
Algonquin tribes with guns, powder and lead, as well as less deadly
goods, in return for their furs. La Salle’s profits from this commerce
were huge. But he was an eager young man. The prospect of an enormous
trade for buffalo hides, deerskins, beaver, bear, otter and raccoon
in the Mississippi valley beckoned him to conquest. In 1678, on his
promise to King Louis that he would Christianize the natives, establish
a line of forts from the lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi and open
a direct route to France through the Gulf of Mexico, he was granted a
monopolistic trade patent to all the lands drained by the mighty river.

It was to be four years however before La Salle reached the mouth of
the Mississippi, even on an initial exploratory expedition, for he was
to make one false start after another.

If the Iroquois had been unhappy before, they were more so when La
Salle, entering into his new domain, palisaded a trading post called
Fort Crevecouer--the present site of Peoria, Illinois. They almost
annihilated the Illinois with whom the Frenchmen were trading there,
this being one of the tribes over which the Five Nations maintained
their tyrannous lordship. Henri de Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant in
command of the fort at the time these human tigers descended on their
vassals, was given the choice of being burned along with some Illinois
captives or departing forthwith. He chose to depart. Curiously enough,
however, not without a superb stock of furs for his inconvenience, all
provided for him with typical savage capriciousness.

There were other opponents with whom La Salle had to contend during
this period of trial. Jesuit priests, who drove a profitable trade
for beaver among the savages while saving souls, objected not only
to the monopoly granted La Salle but to the Franciscan priests who
accompanied him and who competed in both commercial and spiritual
fields. And there were still others who made mischief. _Coureurs des
bois_, those renegade Frenchmen trading in the wilderness without
license and illegally selling their furs to the English at Albany, were
not averse to conspiring against the new monopoly that threatened their
independence. There were hundreds of these savage-like white men, some
originally of the French petty nobility, living among the Indians. Many
of them had squaw wives, no consciences and little compunction about
stirring up a war against their own countrymen if it fattened their
pocketbooks.

In the end, however, La Salle established trading relations with the
western tribes and organized them as allies. To keep the Iroquois off
his back he furnished his red friends with more guns and taught them
how to palisade their villages against the attacks of their fierce
overlords. This done, in 1682 he was able to launch the fleet of canoes
that carried a motley company of some fifty white men and Indians,
including squaws and papooses, to the desolate delta country at the
mouth of the Mississippi River. There, he erected a cross, sang the
_Te Deum_ and gave the name of “Louisiana” to the vast domain he now
claimed in the name of France. Then he re-embarked with his company for
the Illinois country.

It was a tortuous voyage back up the river. La Salle sickened and
nearly died. Recovering at last, he went on to France where he
organized and embarked on the expedition that was to end his short but
historic career.

After setting out for the Gulf of Mexico with a well-equipped fleet of
ships and a full complement of traders and their families, La Salle was
first attacked by the Spaniards; then he failed to locate the mouth
of the Mississippi. In final desperation he built a palisaded fort
hundreds of miles west of his goal on what is now called Matagorda
Bay. In that strange country the young French leader was killed
by discontents among his own men following an argument over the
apportionment of some buffalo meat.

But La Salle’s grand scheme did not die with him. While the Spaniards,
who carried on a flourishing business in hides in New Mexico, were
not long in searching out all that remained of the French colony and
taking over the neighboring country called “Texas,” they didn’t occupy
the strategic region about the mouth of the Mississippi River. By 1699
Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a Canadian, had planted a colony
on Biloxi Bay in what is now Mississippi, and in another three years
a strongly palisaded fort was built close by at Mobile, to become the
capital of Louisiana.

French trading citadels soon dotted the Mississippi valley--New Orleans
in the delta, Forts Rosalie, Chartres and St. Antoine to comprehend
the length of the great river itself, Fort d’Huiller on the Minnesota,
Pimitoui on the Illinois, and Fort Orleans on the Missouri. Half-breed
camps, conglomerate communities sprang up--Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Natchez,
Natchitoches, and others. The natives, and even the outlawed _coureurs
des bois_, found ready, local markets for their peltries in exchange
for trade goods and supplies. And, while deep-laden canoes and company
boats plied the alluvial waters of the Mississippi River to and from
its mouth, ships from France set a course direct to the Gulf of
Mexico--to the new French fur emporium in America.

In the meantime, the main path of the fur traders, the line of
communication between Canada and Louisiana, was shortened by a
far-sighted Gascon merchant named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
When he palisaded his trading citadel at Detroit in 1699, on the
strait connecting Lake Erie and Lake Huron, he brought about such a
concentration of Indian commerce and military power in those parts that
within a few years portages between streams feeding western Lake Erie
and the Ohio River could be effected with relative safety from Iroquois
attack. And, when French fur traders began dipping their paddles in
the Ohio River, thousands of square miles of territory were added to
France’s mid-continent conquest.

Not only had the French completely encircled the English colonies
strung out along the Atlantic seaboard, they had now begun to spread
their occupation eastward toward the Appalachian Mountains, behind
which they hoped to contain the English permanently.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, trail-blazing traders from Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania
and New York had come upon the Appalachians and were searching out that
mountainous barrier to further westward expansion.

Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, had an especial interest
in the mountains and the country beyond. As agent in America for the
Hudson’s Bay Company he hoped to help break the French monopoly on the
hinterland trade by exploiting the western territory from Virginia.
As early as 1669 he sent out John Lederer, a German, who ranged the
eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, north and south, for many miles.
Even before that, Abraham Wood and other traders with commissions from
the governor had bartered far to the southwest among the headwaters of
Carolina coastal rivers.

They transported their wares on pack horses, 150 to 200 pounds on
each animal, making twenty miles or more a day on their journeys when
forage was plentiful. With guns, powder and shot as prime trade goods
they visited tribes who had previously bartered with the Spaniards of
Florida. They took hatchets, kettles, iron tools, colorful blankets and
a variety of trinkets to villages never before visited by white men.
On these occasions the appearance of that strange animal, the horse,
strung with tinkling bells and packing unbelievable wealth on his back,
created more awe among the savages than the bearded white man himself.

In 1671 the Virginians crossed the southerly ridges into the New River
valley, and in another two years young Gabriel Arthur opened commerce
with the Cherokees in the terminal hills of the Appalachians. He
and his partner, James Needham, had some extraordinary experiences.
Needham, a much older man of some experience in the Indian trade, was
murdered by the savages on this venture. Arthur himself escaped burning
only through the intervention of a Cherokee chief who, during the midst
of the torture, adopted him into the tribe.

The Cherokee chief dressed and armed Arthur as a brave and sent him out
with raiding war parties. In the first such instance, the Virginian
seems to have joined willingly enough in a murderous surprise attack
on a Spanish mission settlement in West Florida. In another, he helped
slaughter some sleeping native villagers one night in the vicinity of
Port Royal, South Carolina, on the promise of the Cherokees that no
Englishmen in those parts would be harmed during the raid. Arthur later
said he could tell that one English family was celebrating Christmas
when his war party crept by their hut.

In still another instance, Arthur went all the way to the banks of the
Ohio with his Cherokee chief to attack a Shawnee village. There he was
badly wounded and captured, but released with some reverence when he
scrubbed himself and exhibited his white skin to the amazed savages.
After making his way back to the country of his Cherokee friends, the
young Virginian finally returned to his own kind on the James River,
richly laden with furs and trade treaties.

Henry Woodward, Carolina’s resourceful pioneer, found evidence of the
Virginians’ trade on the backside of Lord Ashley’s proprietary in
1674. Woodward, who saved the fledgling colony at Charles Towne from
bankruptcy by developing a trade in pelts and skins with the hinterland
savages, visited the palisaded village of the Westoes that year. There,
high up the Savannah River, he found the natives already “well provided
with arms, ammunition, tradeing cloath & other trade from ye northward
for which at set times of ye year they truck drest deare skins furrs &
young Indian slaves.”

Governor Berkeley’s traders were indeed carrying on a highly profitable
commerce. So much so, that in the interests of those profits, it was
claimed, the governor permitted favored hinterland tribes to pillage
Virginia tobacco planters with impunity. In any case Berkeley, who
operated gainfully in his capacity as a British fur factor, did not
respond with enough enthusiasm to the planters’ demands for protection,
and a civil war resulted in 1676 that set back the colony’s economy by
years. The rebellion was led by a fiery, twenty-nine-year-old patriot
named Nathaniel Bacon. Before he died suddenly of a camp malady, Bacon
chased the governor across the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore and
burned Jamestown, the capital of Virginia, to the ground. With Bacon’s
death the revolt collapsed and twenty-three prominent insurgent leaders
were hanged by the governor in an orgy of personal revenge.

But, if Governor Berkeley had won the war over the fur trade, it was a
merchant at the Falls of the James River who prospered most. There, at
his store, William Byrd maintained a fine stock of calico, red coats,
beads, knives, guns and Barbadian brandy for the pack-traders who
sought out beaver pelts among remote Indian villages in the interior.
So successful was Byrd that by the early 1680’s he dominated the
hinterland trading paths of Virginia and Carolina. From this commerce
he created the fortune that bought enough slaves and tobacco lands to
promote his family to a position among the wealthiest in the colony,
while the great hogsheads of pelts that he shipped yearly down the
James River to England contributed in no small way to the support of
Britain’s growing empire.

Henry Woodward and his Carolinians driving straight west avoided the
trading paths of the Virginians, as well as the Appalachian Mountains,
to invade the preserves of Spanish Florida. This took them to the
headwaters of rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, to the villages
of the Creeks, where the Spaniards had previously monopolized the
trade in deerskins and Indian slaves. The Carolinians diverted much
of this profitable commerce to newly located Charleston. Thousands
upon thousands of deerskins were shipped yearly to England, to be
manufactured into a variety of articles. Hundreds of Indian slaves were
supplied to New England and Virginia, and to Barbados where the rate of
mortality on the hot sugar plantations insured a steady demand.

Spanish resistance in the south, the extinction of deer and the
elimination of whole tribes of Indians who succumbed to slavery, kept
the Charleston traders pushing ever toward the unknown west, across the
headwaters of the Chattahoochee and the Alabama and into the valley of
the Tennessee River. Before the turn of the century they had reached
the lands of the Chickasaw Indians bordering on the Mississippi River,
where their bright trade goods soon brought in all the available deer
in those parts. There, they were busily helping the Chickasaws make
war on their neighbors, the Choctaws, to procure slaves in lieu of the
skins, when the French arrived.

French forts and a French alliance with the Choctaws halted this
English advance into the lower valley of the Mississippi. Even so,
the Carolina traders had pushed the English frontier farther west, by
hundreds of miles, than any other colonials would do during the next
half century.

North of Virginia in the latter part of the seventeenth century the
two major areas of the fur trade among the English colonies were New
England and New York.

The New England trade, exhausting itself, was on the decline. It had
been blocked from expansion by national and political barriers in
the west and by the hostility of the French in the north. Raids and
counter raids, with the Indians used as allies on both sides, kept the
borders between the French and the New Englanders alive with savage
horrors. And, because of the prolonged hostilities in Europe these
conditions would continue into the next century, until 1763, long after
competition for pelts was no longer a controlling motive in that area.

The main fur trade of the colonies in the north after the fall of New
Netherland was New York’s hinterland traffic, that which had been
inherited from the Dutch. All wilderness paths led to Albany, even
those made by the _coureurs des bois_ and their copper-hued families
packing their illegal furs to the Hudson when they could not do
business with their own countrymen at Montreal. In 1679, it was said,
there were over 500 of these French renegades living among the Indians.
And to Albany, of course, came not only the beaver of the Five Nations
but the peltries of vassal tribes deep in the hinterland for whom the
Iroquois acted as middlemen.

The Five Nations were jealous enough of their trade and sovereignty
to visit swift vengeance on any vassals who tried to deal direct
with the white men, as happened to the Illinois in 1680 when those
distant natives sold their pelts to La Salle. For the same reason
they also tried to keep white pack traders from pushing farther into
the west, where they might exchange their wares direct with the less
sophisticated natives. It was a losing battle however.

       *       *       *       *       *

By the turn of the century, traders from New York, Pennsylvania and
Virginia were working the Appalachian passes for beaver and otter. In
another twenty years many were squeezing through the more northerly
gaps into the valley of the Ohio River. By then, the pressure of
immigrant families upon the land east of the mountains had commenced in
earnest. Palatine farmers were flowing up the valley of the Mohawk in
great numbers, and land-hungry Ulster Scots were scrambling through the
Susquehanna valley and southward up the Shenandoah.

The fur trader as usual had searched out the country. Then, while he
was still exploiting it for his own purposes, he had to make way for
the farmer. The two could never blend, not after the frontier began
to roll westward. Farmers spoiled the trade. The pioneer traders could
only move on to more fertile trading grounds, to open new territory
which itself would later be taken up by farmers.

Of course, Indian titles had to be extinguished before settlers could
legally move into the lands opened up by the fur traders. Some tribes
were a bit troublesome about this detail. The Delaware kicked up an
especially bloody fuss on the Pennsylvania frontier. They had more than
a suspicion that they had been swindled by the “Walking Purchase.”

When William Penn, the founding proprietor of the Quaker colony, bought
land from the Delaware tribe, the extent of the purchase was limited to
the distance a man could go in 1¹⁄₂ days. But, when the time came in
1737 for Penn’s son to measure this off, he did not have it walked off
as the Indians had presumed it would be done. To cover the distance,
the Quaker employed trained white athletes, runners! It was even
suspected that the white runners may have used horses concealed along
the route, that is, after they were out of sight of the Indians who
panted along behind them full of Penn’s rum, according to some accounts.

Things settled down rather quickly however when James Logan, that
astute Pennsylvanian who guided the Indian policy of the colony,
treated generously with the Iroquois to keep the Delaware in line. The
Delaware, in fear of their fierce overlords in the north, vacated most
of their lands east of the mountains and joined the equally unhappy
Shawnee in the upper Ohio valley. There they listened malevolently to
French traders and soldiers who promised a red-handed revenge.

So successful was the Indian policy in general, however, that on the
outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 between England and France, the
Iroquois were cajoled into granting the English practically all the
Ohio valley and sealing the bargain with an alliance to help protect
the property against the French who were already there. In fact,
commissioners from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, meeting with an
Iroquois delegation around the council fire at Lancaster, obtained “a
Deed recognizing the King’s right to all the Lands that are, or shall
be, by his Majesty’s appointment, in the Colony of Virginia.”

As far as the Virginians were concerned those lands by ancient charter
stretched all the way to the South Sea, wherever that was, although
they were willing to settle for the Ohio valley for the time being. Nor
did the Quaker colony seriously dispute Virginia’s claim at the time,
even though nearly all of the fur traders beyond the mountains, who
were now aggressively competing with the French, were Pennsylvanians.

Chief among these was George Croghan. He had not arrived in
Pennsylvania from Dublin until 1741, but he was established in trade
on the Ohio River well before King George’s War. By 1746 he had a
number of storehouses on Lake Erie itself. From the bustling base of
his operations in the 1740’s near Harris Ferry (Harrisburg) on the
Susquehanna, and later from Aughwick farther west, he and his various
partners directed effective attacks on French trade in the Ohio valley.

Together with his brother-in-law William Trent, and Andrew Montour,
Barney Curran and John Fraser, Croghan controlled fort-like storehouses
about the forks of the Ohio, up the Allegheny and the Youghiogheny,
on the south shore of Lake Erie, at the forks of the Muskingum, and
even on the Scioto and Miami Rivers. From these trading posts, all of
which developed into rude settlements of sorts, the Pennsylvanians
distributed rum, gunpowder, lead and flints, as well as calicoes,
ribbons, colored stockings, kettles, axes, bells, whistles and
looking-glasses. In return, they collected a fine variety of pelts and
skins--beaver, raccoon, otter, muskrat, mink, fisher, fox, deer, elk,
and bear.

Croghan’s pack traders, at times possibly numbering twenty-five men
and driving a hundred or more mules altogether, followed the Ohio down
to the falls and worked the streams that fed it. They were trading and
fighting in what is now West Virginia and eastern Kentucky almost a
quarter of a century before Daniel Boone. They bartered under the very
guns of French forts, engaging in bloody skirmishes with the French and
Indians and on occasion being taken as captives to Montreal and even to
France.

Croghan had his English competitors too. There were, for instance, the
five Lowrey brothers, as aggressive and as rugged a lot of rivals as
might have been found on any fur frontier. But all the Pennsylvanians
were as one in their persistent encroachment on the French. Backed by
factors in Philadelphia and Lancaster, including Shippen and Lawrence
and the firm of Levy, Franks and Simon, both of which specialized in
the Indian trade and in turn received credit from wealthy merchants of
London and Bristol, these intrepid frontiersmen stubbornly picked away
at the French trade.

In one respect the Englishmen were fortunate. During King George’s War
the French had trouble getting sufficient trade goods, and many Indians
with whom they had been trading became contemptuous of them. It is said
that, on one occasion, when a Frenchman only offered a single charge
of powder for a beaver skin, the Indian with whom he was bartering
“took up his Hatchet, and knock’d him on the head, and killed him upon
the Spot.” Croghan and his Pennsylvanians took full advantage of the
temporary French embarrassment, building up their annual business in
pelts to a value of some 40,000 pounds sterling.

It was the prospect of a share in this lucrative trade that motivated
some wealthy Virginians, among them Thomas Lee and the Washingtons, who
conceived the Ohio Company after the Treaty of Lancaster. While acting
as a vehicle to establish England’s claim west of the mountains, the
company as it was finally organized promised future dividends from land
development in those parts. But there was the immediate prospect of
rich gains from the fur trade, and little time was lost in lining up
experienced Indian traders for the project.

Thomas Cresap, a clever Yorkshireman, who operated a trading post in
the mountains near the junction of the North and South Branches of
the Potomac River, became an organizing member of the Ohio Company.
So lavishly hospitable was Cresap to the Indians and others with whom
he did business that he was known to them as “Big Spoon,” but to his
Pennsylvania trading competitors he was an undercutting Marylander
not above committing murder for a beaver skin. Certain it is that
he had once been carted off in irons, after some “rascality” on the
Maryland-Pennsylvania border, to spend a year in prison at Philadelphia.

In any case the aristocratic tidewater Virginians counted “Colonel
Cressup” a key member of their Ohio Company. The Marylander’s trading
paths already led to the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, and the
Ohio. So, the fort-like establishment he maintained on Virginia’s
northwestern frontier served as a convenient base from which the
company commenced its well-financed operations in the Ohio valley.

Employed by the company were some former associates of George Croghan.
Among them were Andrew Montour, a colorful half-breed of _coureur des
bois_ stock, and Croghan’s brother-in-law William Trent. With the aid
of experienced men like these, Thomas Cresap was soon proving his worth
to his tidewater partners and to the British Empire.

The threat was too obvious to be ignored by the French. They laid plans
to push the English back over the mountains. Already, a French army
detachment, using a traders’ portage between the eastern end of Lake
Erie and Lake Chautauqua, had gone down to the Ohio via the Allegheny
River, planting lead plates along both streams as a warning to
trespassers. Already, French-led and French-inspired Indian raids had
taken the lives of English traders, as well as those of their native
hosts. In one case a prominent Indian chief allied with the English had
been boiled and eaten by some Ottawas led by a French half-breed, all
without discouraging the Englishmen it seemed. Now, in 1753, a French
army of 1,000 men headed down the Allegheny from Canada, to begin
building a line of forts along the line of the previously planted lead
plates.

Forts were built first at present-day Erie on the lake and at the head
of French Creek to secure a portage. Then, John Frazer’s trading post
at Venango on the Allegheny was taken and converted to a fortification.
There the French troops, bogged down with sickness, dug in for the
winter.

That is where Major George Washington found them when he carried a note
from the Governor of Virginia to their commanding officer suggesting
that they all retire promptly to Canada. This, the Frenchmen said, they
had no intention of doing. In the spring they would push on, down the
Allegheny, to the strategic Forks of the Ohio.

Even as the French army was building canoes that winter for its advance
on the Ohio, Thomas Cresap and William Trent were supervising the
construction of an English fort at the forks of the river. They now
represented the Governor of Virginia and the King of England, as well
as the Ohio Company, all of whom were one and the same as far as the
Ohio valley was concerned. In fact Trent, the fur trader in the employ
of the Ohio Company, had been commissioned a captain by Governor
Dinwiddie of Virginia to command the new fort and oppose the French.

But when spring and the French came to the Forks of the Ohio, Captain
Trent was absent. He said he was looking for recruits; some suspected
he was ferrying his beaver to a safer spot. The ensign in command
yielded the English fort in the face of overwhelming odds, and the
French built an impressive citadel in its place, which they named Fort
DuQuesne to honor the Canadian governor of that name.

Washington, now Colonel Washington, who was advancing from Virginia
with his militia to Trent’s support, was much too late. He was forced
to content himself with palisading a defensive position along the road
at Great Meadows. There at Fort Necessity, as he called it, he warded
off as best he could the large number of French troops who came out to
engage him.

That summer of 1754 Washington surrendered. When he led his militiamen
back over the Alleghenies, the Frenchmen had succeeded in their
purpose. The English were out of the Ohio valley.

However, the American phase of the Seven Years’ War had commenced--two
years before it was officially declared in Europe. The critical contest
known on this continent as the French and Indian War was under way, and
the very next year General Edward Braddock arrived with his British
regulars to direct the campaign.

The strategic plan decided upon encompassed a four-fold attack upon the
French at DuQuesne, Crown Point, Niagara, and in Nova Scotia. General
Braddock himself assumed the DuQuesne assignment, the most important
immediate objective. But he failed on this mission, his abortive
attempt to reach the Forks of the Ohio ending in the disastrous rout of
his troops and his own death.

It was not until 1758 that General John Forbes forced the evacuation
of the fort at the Forks of the Ohio. The French then abandoned the
entire valley. Fort DuQuesne became Fort Pitt and the English were in
control of the Ohio River.

The war was savagely fought out on all fronts in America. Other French
citadels fell--Louisburg, Frontenac, Niagara, Ticonderoga, and Crown
Point. Eventually, Quebec and Montreal, those ancient fortresses on
the St. Lawrence River, capitulated to the British. Then, in 1763, by
the Treaty of Paris, France ceded Canada and all her territory east
of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, except for one small plot
encompassing New Orleans. Spain likewise ceded Florida.

The English flanks no longer needed protection. The way west was open
and the frontier was boundless!

Settlers spilled through the gaps of the Appalachians, into Ohio,
Kentucky, Illinois. And the fur traders, making way for them as they
pressed upon their trading grounds, pushed on, ever westward, across
the plains after the turn of the century to the Rocky Mountains and the
coastal rivers of the Pacific.

But the era of the early fur trader, typified by the white trader and
the Indian hunter, had come to an end. As the frontier began rolling
across the great plains of America, the white man became trapper as
well as trader. When he took over the function of the Indian, who had
formerly caught the beaver, a whole new conception of the fur trade in
America was born. A new era commenced--that of the fur trapper.

The fur trader of early America had played out his historically
important role.




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INDEX


  _A_

  Abnaki Indians, 103

  Acadia, 107, 110, 112

  Acadian Peninsula, 39

  Accomac, 115, 126

  Accomac Indians, 120

  Africa, 4, 14, 26, 135

  _Africa_ (ship), 126

  Agawam, 169

  Alabama River, 196

  Albany, 70, 73, 137, 141, 177, 191, 197

  Albemarle Sound, 52

  Alexander, Pope, 14

  Alexander, Sir William, 108, 109, 110, 126

  Algonkin Indians, 33, 34, 40, 42

  Algonquin Indians, 34, 59, 60, 73, 74, 117, 119, 129, 138, 170, 175,
   176, 190

  Allegheny River, 199, 201

  Alleghenies, 202

  Allerton, Isaac, 103, 104, 105, 111, 157

  American Revolution, 185

  Amerigo’s Land, 25

  Amsterdam, 72, 73, 78, 80, 116, 135, 136, 141, 142, 175, 176

  Anacostan Indians, 118, 129

  Anglican, 99, 115

  Anglo-Saxon, 9

  Ango, Jean, 32

  Annapolis, 126

  Appalachian, 20, 193, 194, 196, 197, 203

  Arabs, 6, 17

  Arabian, 4, 9

  Arctic, 28, 67

  Argall, Capt. Samuel, 78, 79, 85, 86, 87, 107, 115

  Argo, 3

  Argonauts, 2, 3, 4

  Armada, 80, 82

  Armenia, 5

  Arthur, Gabriel, 194

  Ashley, Edward, 103

  Ashley, Lord, 195

  Asia, 4, 6, 17, 23, 24, 26, 49

  Atlantic (Ocean), vii, 14, 16, 17, 24, 25, 34, 108, 193

  Aughwick, 199

  Augusta (Maine), 103

  Aunay, Charles d’, 111, 112

  Avalon (Newfoundland), 114

  Ayllon, Lucas Vasquez de, 28, 29

  Aztec Empire, 27, 28


  _B_

  Babylon, 2

  Bacon, Nathaniel, 195

  Bagnall, Walter, 104, 105

  Baltic Sea, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 45

  Baltimore, Lord, (first) _see_ George Calvert;
    (second) _see_ Cecilius Calvert

  Barbadian brandy, 195

  Barbados, 196

  Barbary pirates, 57

  Barrington, Rhode Island, 171

  Basque, 25, 37, 39

  Battery, 140

  Bay of Biscay, 38

  Bay Colony, 166, 183

  Bay of Fundy, 37, 39, 55, 62, 82, 83, 84, 86, 107, 108, 109, 111

  Bay of the Narragansetts, 172

  Bay of Santa Maria, 28

  Beaver Road Fort, 160

  Bergen, 22

  Berkeley, Sir William (Governor of Virginia), 193, 195

  Beverwyck, 177, 179

  Biard, Father Pierre, 85, 86

  Biloxi Bay (Mississippi), 192

  Black Sea, 4, 9, 14

  Block, Capt. Adrien, 78, 166

  Block Island, 171

  Blommaert, Samuel, 141, 147, 148

  Blue Ridge Mountains, 74, 194

  Boone, Daniel, 199

  Borgia, Lucretia, 14

  Bosphorus, 4

  Boston (Massachusetts), 78, 98, 156, 168, 171, 173, 176, 180, 183, 189

  Boston Bay, 98, 99, 101

  Boston Harbor, 95

  Braddock, General Edward, 202

  Bradford, Governor William, 91, 93, 96, 102, 105, 106

  Brazil, 25

  Bremen
    Canon Adam of, 10, 22
    Councillors of, 10

  Bretons, 25, 37

  Bristol, 24, 25, 184, 200

  Britain, 33, 196

  British Empire, 59, 201

  Brouage, Bay of Biscay, 38

  Browne, Richard, 33

  Bruges (Flanders), 12, 14

  Brule, Etienne, 76, 77

  Bry, Theodore de, 53

  Burgesses, House of, 118, 125, 127

  Butler, John, 130

  Buzzard’s Bay, 55, 87

  Byrd, William, 195

  Byzantium, 4, 9


  _C_

  Cabot, John, 24, 25, 27, 37

  Cadillac, Antoine de la Mothe, 193

  Cahokia, 193

  Calvert, Cecilius (second Lord Baltimore), 127, 128, 132, 133, 134,
   183

  Calvert, George (first Lord Baltimore), 108, 114, 115, 119, 123, 124,
   125, 127, 129

  Calvert, Leonard, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133

  Canada, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 42, 43, 61, 73, 75, 76, 77, 83, 104, 114,
   126, 128, 129, 133, 188, 193, 201, 203

  Cape Breton, 24, 32, 33, 39

  Cape Cod, 17, 18, 28, 39, 55, 69, 78, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 111, 175,
   181

  Cape Elizabeth, 104

  Cape Fear, 24, 37, 186

  Cape of Good Hope, 14

  Cape Hatteras, 34, 52

  Cape Henlopen, 141, 142, 152

  Cape May, 89, 142, 153

  Cape Sable, 108, 109, 111

  Carantouan, 76, 77

  Cardinal de Richelieu, 109

  Caribbean Sea, 29, 33, 38, 52

  Carolina, 74, 186, 193, 194, 195, 196

  Carr, Sir Robert, 185

  Cartier, Jacques, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 39

  Casco Bay, 98

  Caspian Sea, 4, 9

  Castine, Maine, 103

  Catawba Indians, 74

  Cathay, 4, 6, 15, 24, 28, 29, 30, 38, 44, 48, 49, 54, 58, 63

  Catholic, 47, 82, 85, 114, 115, 124, 148, 159, 187

  Cavelier, Robert (Sieur de la Salle), 190, 191, 192, 197

  Cayuga Indians, 74

  Champlain, Samuel de. _See_ Chapter IV, pp. 37-43, 55, 56, 74, 75, 77,
   107, 108, 109, 110, 187

  Channing, Edward, 91

  Charles I, 110, 114, 124, 125, 126, 180

  Charles II, 124, 184

  Charles of Spain, 27

  Charleston, 196

  Charles Towne, 195

  Chattahoochee River, 196

  Chaucer, 13

  Cherokee Indians, 194, 195

  Chesapeake Area, 29, 54, 62, 65, 120

  Chesapeake Bay, 20, 27, 28, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 61, 65, 69, 74, 76,
   77, 89

  Chew, John, 120

  Chickasaw Indians, 196

  China, 16, 27, 28, 39, 43, 67, 68, 72, 186

  Choctaw Indians, 196

  Chouart, Medard, Sieur des Grosseilliers, 188

  Christiansen, Hendrick, 73

  Christina River, 79

  Church, The, 5, 11, 16

  Claiborne, William, 119-123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131,
   132, 133

  Cloberry, William, 119, 125, 126, 165

  _Cockatrice_ (wherry), 131

  Codfish Land, 25, 26, 29

  Colchis, 3

  Columbus, Christopher, 17, 23, 24

  Commissioners of the United Colonies, 170, 181

  Company of Cathay, 49

  Company of London, 165

  Company of New France, 109, 110

  Connecticut, 170, 171, 172

  Connecticut Path, 167, 169

  Connecticut River, 40, 66, 74, 78, 87, 113, 137, 165, 166, 167, 168,
   169, 172, 180, 182, 184

  Constantinople, 14

  Cooper, Thomas, 170

  Cornwallis, Capt. Thomas, 131

  Corssen, Arendt, 144, 153, 160

  Council of Foreign Plantations, 184

  _Coureurs des bois_, 191, 193, 197, 201

  Cox, William, 157

  Cree Indians, 188

  Creek Indians, 196

  Cresap, Thomas, 200, 201

  “Croatan,” 54

  Croghan, George, 199, 200, 201

  Cromwell, Oliver, 180, 184
    Navigation Act of, 182

  Croshaw, Raleigh, 118, 120

  Crown Point, 202, 203

  Crusades, 5, 10

  Cugley, Daniel, 120

  Curler, Jacob van, 167

  Curran, Barney, 199

  Cushenoc, 103, 105


  _D_

  Dacotah Indians, 187

  Damariscotta River, 104

  Danes, 12

  Dare, Virginia, 54

  Dark Ages, 5, 13

  Darkness, Region of, 8, 9

  Dartmouth, England, 72

  D’Aunay, Charles, 111, 112

  Davis, Capt. John, 54

  Debedeavon, 120

  De Bry, Theodore, 53

  De Champlain. _See_ Champlain

  De Ferrara, Alfonso, 14

  DeGuercheville, Madame, 85, 86

  Delaware, 150

  Delaware Bay, 78, 89, 138, 141, 183

  Delaware Indians, 198

  Delaware River, 20, 66, 69, 74, 77, 79, 113, 116, 117, 127, 134, 137,
   138, 139, 140, 144, 145, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 157, 158, 165, 183,
   184, 185

  De Monts, 39, 41, 84

  Department of Commerce, viii

  De Razilly, 110, 111

  Dermer, Capt. Thomas, 88, 89, 95, 116

  De Roberval, 32

  Des Grosseilliers, 188

  De Tonti, Henri, 191

  Detroit, 193

  De Vries. _See_ Vries

  D’Iberville, Pierre le Moyne, 192

  Dieppe, 32

  Digby, 83

  Dinwiddie, Governor, 201, 202

  Dneiper, 9

  Donnacona, 30, 31, 52

  _Dove_ (pinnace), 128

  Drake, Francis, 48

  Dublin, 199

  Duck Creek, 149

  Dupont-Grave, 38, 39, 40, 86

  Dutch. _See_ Chapters VII, XIII, XV and pages 12, 13, 36, 41, 45, 66,
   82, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 102, 104, 116, 117, 119, 120, 134, 147, 148,
   149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162,
   163, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 197

  Dutch East India Company, 67, 72, 79, 80

  Dutchmen’s Island, 174

  Dutch West India Company, 80, 90, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 147, 149,
   150, 151, 152, 162, 165, 175, 176, 177

  DuQuesne, 202

  Dvina, 9


  _E_

  East India Company, 67, 72, 79, 80

  East Indies, 15, 80

  Eastern Shore, 115, 116, 120, 126, 131, 195

  Edward III, 46

  Eelkens, Jacob, 165, 166

  Egypt, 2, 60

  Elbe, 10

  “El Dorado,” 53, 63, 83

  Elizabeth I, 47, 48, 49

  Elizabeth City, 120

  Elizabethan occupation theory, 79, 145, 164

  Endicott, Capt. John, 101, 171

  England, 11, 12, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 37, Chapter V, 58, 62, 63,
   64, 72, 79, 83, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101, 103, 105, 106, 110,
   112, 114, 117, 125, 127, 130, 132, 133, 136, 140, 145, 161, 163, 165,
   169, 174, 180, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 196, 198, 200, 202

  English, 12, 24, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 59,
   62, 63, 65, 67, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90,
   91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111,
   112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 135, 136, 139, 143, 144,
   145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166,
   167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, Chapter XVI, 186, 187, 189,
   190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203

  Eratosthenes, 16

  Ericson, Leif, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22

  Eric the Red (Eric Thorvaldson), 17, 21

  Ericson, Thorvald, 18

  Erie, 201

  Eriwoneck, 145

  Eskimos, 22, 49

  Ethiopians, 2, 4

  Europe, vii, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 16, 23, 25, 51, 70, 72, 141, 149, 197,
   202

  Euxine Sea, 3

  Evelin, George, 133


  _F_

  Fairfield, 172

  Ferrara, Alfonso de, 14

  Fendall, Governor, 183

  Fenwick, Cuthbert, 131

  Ferryland, 108, 114

  Finland, 26

  Finns, 152

  Five Nations, 41, 42, 43, 61, 74, 75, 76, 77, 129, 191, 197

  Flanders, 5, 11, 12

  _Flatey Book_, 21

  Fleet, Henry, 118, 119, 128, 129, 130

  Florida, 27, 29, 33, 52, 82, 124, 194, 203

  Forbes, General John, 202

  Forked River, 189, 190

  Fort Albany, 186

  Fort Amstel, 163

  Fort Amsterdam, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 156, 157, 176, 184,
   185

  Fort Beversrede, 160

  Fort Casimir, 161, 162

  Fort Chartres, 192

  Fort Christina, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 160, 162, 163

  Fort Conquest, 133

  Fort Crevecouer, 191

  Fort DuQuesne, 202, 203

  Fort Elfsborg, 155, 156, 161

  Fort Frontenac, 190, 203

  Fort Good Hope, 137, 166, 167, 168, 181

  Fort d’Huiller, 193

  Fort Korsholm, 159, 161

  Fort Nassau, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 137, 138, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146,
   149, 152, 155, 156, 160, 161

  Fort Necessity, 202

  Fort New Gothenborg, 155

  Fort Onondaga, 76

  Fort Orange, 137, 163, 165, 166, 176, 177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 186

  Fort Orleans, 193

  Fort Pitt, 203

  Fort Rosalie, 192

  Fort St. Antoine, 192

  Fort St. George, 84

  Fort Saybrook, 168, 172, 173

  Fort Trinity, 163

  _Fortune_ (ship), 95

  France, 11, 13, 14, 23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 39, 40, 52, 79, 82, 84, 86,
   107, 108, 110, 111, 163, 191, 192, 193, 198, 199, 203

  Francis I, 27, 29, 31, 47, 48

  Fraser, John, 199, 201

  French Canada, 35, 61, 83, 175, 185, 186

  French Creek, 201

  French, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 54, 55, 62, 68,
   69, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95,
   101, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117, 119, 120, 126, 134,
   137, 145, 147, 173, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197,
   198, 199, 200, 201 _passim_, 202, 203

  French and Indian War, vii, viii, 187, 202

  Freydis, 17, 21

  Frobisher, Martin, 48, 49

  Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 170


  _G_

  Gaspe, 39

  Genoa, 6, 14

  German, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 193

  Gibbons, Ambrose, 104

  Gilbert, Bartholomew, 54

  Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 49, 50, 51, 54

  Gilbert, Sir John, 51

  Girling, Captain, 112

  Gloucester, New Jersey, 137

  Godfrey of Bouillon, 10

  Godyn, Samuel, 141

  Golden Fleece, 2, 3, 4, 188

  Gomez, Captain Estevan, 69

  Gondomar, Ambassador, 124

  Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 83, 84, 88, 93, 98, 99, 104

  Gorges, Capt. Robert, 99

  Gosnold, Bartholomew, 55, 69, 83

  Gothenburg, 148

  Gothland, 11

  Grave, Francois (Sieur duPont), 38, 39, 40

  Great Lakes, 68, 74, 190

  Great Meadows, 202

  Greece, 3, 4

  Greek, 2, 4, 13, 17, 188

  Green Bay, 187

  Greenland, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24

  Greenwich (Connecticut), 126, 173, 181, 182

  Grenville, Sir Richard, 53

  _Gripen_ (ship), 148, 150, 151

  Grosseilliers, Sieur des, 188

  Gudrid, 17, 19

  Guercheville, Madame de, 85, 86

  Guiana, 54, 92

  Gulf of Mexico, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196

  Gulf of St. Lawrence, 28, 29, 37, 50, 108, 109, 190

  Gustavus Adolphus, 146


  _H_

  Hakluyt, Richard, 33, 37

  _Half Moon_ (ship), 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72

  Hampton, Virginia, 120

  Hansa, 11, 12

  Hanseatic League, 11, 12, 22

  Hariot, Thomas, 53

  Harmar, Charles, 120, 128, 129

  Harrisburg, 199

  Harris Ferry, 199

  Hartford, 137, 166, 168, 170, 181, 182, 183

  Harvey, Sir John (Governor of Virginia), 130, 132, 144, 145

  Hatteras, 34, 52

  _Hauk’s Book_, 20

  Havre, 32

  Hawkins, John, 33, 48

  Hawley, Jerome, 132

  Hendricksen, Cornelis, 78, 79, 89

  Henry IV, 38

  Henry VIII, 46, 47

  Heyn, Admiral Peter, 135

  Hindustan, 5

  Hochelaga, 30

  Holland, 12, 13, 72, 73, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 92, 93, 135, 136, 138,
   140, 142, 143, 148, 151, 156, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 177, 178,
   179, 182

  Hollanders, 39, 77, 78, 87, 89, 136, 138, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152,
   158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 174, 175, 176, 181, 182

  Holmes, Capt. William, 168

  Holmes, George, 146

  Hoorn, 73, 77, 116

  Hopkins, Governor Edward, 170

  Horne (Hoorn), 116

  Hudde, Andries, 159

  Hudson Bay, 22, 188, 189

  Hudson’s Bay Company, 189, 193

  Hudson, Capt. Henry, 40, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 88,
   102, 164

  Hudson River, 20, 27, 28, 66, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 86, 93,
   102, 113, 116, 117, 137, 138, 165, 166, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180,
   181, 183, 184, 186, 197

  Huguenots, 82, 85

  Hunt, Captain, 95

  Huron Indians, 33, 41, 42, 74, 76, 77

  Huygen, Hendrick, 150, 152, 158


  _I_

  Iberville, Pierre le Moyne d’, 192

  Ibn-Batootah, 7, 8

  Iceland, 17, 24

  Illinois, 203

  Illinois Indians, 191, 192, 197

  Illinois River, 193

  India, 2, 7, 14, 16, 24, 63

  Indian, 110, 123, 124, 129, 134, 142, 150, 158, 168, 172, 174, 176,
   183, 196, 200, 201, 203
    corn, viii, 28, 35, 48, 69, 75, 94, 96
    league, 176
    policy, 198
    trade, 126, 128, 148, 153, 154, 156, 157, 169, 174, 177, 180, 184,
   193, 194, 200
    village, 131, 169, 174, 195

  Indian Ocean, 5, 27, 50, 52, 53

  Indians, vii, 25, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64,
   68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 94, 97, 100, 102,
   105, 109, 115, 117, 119, 128, 129, 130, 133, 136, 137, 139, 143, 148,
   149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171,
   172, 173, 175, 180, 181, 188, 191, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200
    customs of, 121-122

  Indian Sea, 83

  Indies, 16

  Ingram, David, 33

  Ireland, 17, 72

  Iroquois Confederacy, 73

  Iroquois Indians, 30, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 61, 73, 74, 75, 77, 80,
   107, 123, 128, 129, 137, 138, 139, 170, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181,
   182, 184, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197, 198
    customs of, 74

  Islam, 5

  Italy, 6, 14

  Italian merchants, 5, 6, 14

  Ivan the Terrible, 12, 44, 45


  _J_

  James I, 54, 58, 83, 86, 108, 164

  James Bay, 189

  James, Duke of York, 184, 186

  James River, 20, 28, 29, 59, 82, 83, 85, 87, 89, 115, 116, 118, 120,
   124, 125, 195, 196

  Jamestown, 57, 58, 60, 62, 69, 82, 89, 115, 116, 117, 118, 127, 143,
   144, 150, 195

  Jansen, Commissary Jan, 146, 149, 150, 154, 156, 159

  Japazaws, 118

  Jason, 2, 3, 4 _passim_, 188

  Jesuit priests, 29, 85, 190, 191

  Johnson, Dr. Amandus, 151, 157

  Joliet, Louis, 190

  Julin, 10

  Juno, 3


  _K_

  _Kalmar Nyckel_ (ship), 148, 150, 151

  Karlsefni, Thorfinn, 17, 19, 20, 21, 69

  Kaskaskia, 193

  Kecoughtan, 115, 120, 126, 146

  Kennebec River, 83, 87, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 145

  Kent Hundred, 127

  Kent Island, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134

  Kent Islanders, 128, 130, 131

  Kentucky, 199, 203

  Khan, Kublai, the Great, 6, 7, 13

  Kieft, Governor William, 150, 175

  King George’s War, 198, 199, 200

  Kirke brothers, 109, 126, 128

  “Kleynties,” 76

  Kling, Lieutenant Mans, 150, 156

  Knight, Capt. John, 54

  Kublai Khan, 6, 7, 13


  _L_

  Labrador, 25

  Laconia Company, 104, 156

  _La Dauphine_ (ship), 27, 28

  Lake Champlain, 41, 74, 104

  Lake Chautauqua, 201

  Lake Erie, 193, 199, 201

  Lake Huron, 193

  Lake Michigan, 187

  Lake Nipissing, 42

  Lake of the Iroquois, 41, 156

  Lake Onondaga, 75

  Lake Ontario, 42, 75, 190

  Lake Superior, 188

  Lake Winnipeg, 22

  Lake Winnepesaukee, 104, 181

  Lamberton, George, 153, 154

  Lancaster, 198, 200

  Lane, Governor Ralph, 53, 54

  La Rochelle, 32, 35, 86

  La Salle, Sieur de, 190, 191, 192, 197

  La Tour, Charles de, 108, 109, 110, 111

  Laud, William (Bishop of London), 124

  Lederer, John, 193

  Lee, Thomas, 200

  Leif, Ericson, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22

  Leigh, Capt. Charles, 37, 54

  Leipzig, 26

  Lenni Lenape Indians, 74, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 148, 149

  Levett, Christopher, 98

  Levy, Franks and Simon, 200

  Lewger, John (Secretary of Maryland), 133

  Leyden, 92

  Lincolnshire, 57

  Logan, James, 198

  Lok, Michael, 49

  London, 37, 45, 48, 55, 63, 64, 83, 95, 119, 132, 164, 165, 184, 189,
   200

  London Company, 57, 58, 69, 82, 83

  Long Island Sound, 18, 78, 87, 102, 153, 165, 171, 173, 183

  _Long Tayle_ (pinnace), 130, 131, 132

  Lords Commissioners of Plantations, 132

  Louis XIV, 190, 191

  Louisburg, 203

  Louisiana, viii, ix, 192, 193

  Lowrey brothers, 199


  _M_

  Machias (Maine), 111

  Machias River, 104

  Maine, 18, 55, 62, 68, 83, 84, 85, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104,
   105, 106, 107,110, 111, 112, 156

  Malaga, 95

  Malaya, 14, 16

  Malay Archipelago, 5

  Manhattan, 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 79, 86, 88, 89, 102, 136, 140, 144,
   145, 150, 154, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179,
   181, 185

  Marco Polo, 6, 7, 8, 9, 25

  “Markland,” 22

  Marquette, Father Jacques, 190

  Martha’s Vineyard, 78

  Martiau, Capt. Nicholas, 127

  Mary Tudor (Queen of England), 47

  Maryland, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 183, 198, 200

  Marylanders, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 152, 200

  Mason, Capt. John, 98, 104, 172

  Massachusetts, 103, 112, 156, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 180,
   182, 183

  Massachusetts Bay, 167

  Massachusetts Bay Colony, 111

  Massachusetts Bay Company, 101

  Massachusetts Indians, 95, 97, 98, 99

  Matagorda Bay, 192

  _Matthew_ (boat), 24

  Mathews, Samuel, 120

  Maverick, Samuel, 98

  May, Capt. Cornelis Jacobsen, 77, 78, 89, 135, 136, 137, 138

  May, Peter, 146, 149

  _Mayflower_ (ship), 92, 93, 94

  Mediterranean, 5, 6, 13, 14

  Merrimac River, 98, 181

  Merrymount, 100, 101, 104

  Mesopotamians, 4

  Mexico, 41, 190

  Minqua Indians, 77, 79, 140, 144, 149, 150, 152, 154

  Minquas Kill, 148, 149, 150

  Minnesota, 22

  Minnesota River, 193

  Minuit, Governor Peter, 136, 140, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151

  Mississippi, 192

  Mississippi River, 134, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 203
    discovery of, 189

  Missouri River, 188, 189, 193

  Mobile, 192

  Mohammed, 5

  Mohawk Indians, 73, 74, 75, 170, 175, 176

  Mohawk Valley, 76, 187, 197

  Mohegan Indians, 73, 75, 137, 167, 172, 173

  Moluccas, 24

  Mongolia, 4, 7

  Monhegan Island, 101

  Monongahela River, 201

  Montagnais Indians, 33, 40

  Montour, Andrew, 199, 201

  Montreal, 30, 197, 199, 203

  Monts, Sieur de, 39, 41, 84

  Morton, Thomas, 100, 101, 104

  Moscow, 11, 44, 45

  Moslem, 5, 6

  Mount Desert Island, 18, 19, 62, 85, 86

  Moxon, Rev. George, 170

  Moyne, Pierre le (Sieur d’Iberville), 192

  Muscongus River, 104

  Muscovy, 50, 72

  Muscovy Company, 44, 67

  Muskingum River, 199

  Mystic River, 172


  _N_

  Nantasket, 99

  Narragansett Bay, 101, 102, 174

  Narragansett Indians, 87, 96, 101, 102, 171, 172, 173, 174

  Narrows, 70, 166

  Natchez, 193

  Natchitoches, 193

  Naugatuck River, 180

  Navigation Acts, 182, 184, 186

  Neale, Capt. Walter, 104, 156

  Needham, James, 194

  Nelson River, 22

  Netherlands. _See_ Holland

  New Amsterdam, 158, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 175, 182, 183, 184

  New Brunswick, 108

  New Castle, 161

  New England, 40, 64, 81, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 108, 119, 135, 151,
   153, 158, 163, 165, 166, 167, 171, 180, 181, 183, 196
    Confederation of, 112
    Council for, 93, 97, 98, 99

  New Englanders, 107, 137, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 167, 168, 171, 172,
   173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 197

  Newfoundland, 17, 25, 37, 50, 51, 63, 68, 70, 108, 114

  New France, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 74, 79, 80, 82,
   83, 107, 108, 109, 110, 158, 190

  New Haven, 153, 155, 173, 175, 180, 182

  New Jersey, 153

  New Mexico, 192

  New Netherland, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 90, 92, 108, 113, Chapter XII,
   147, 149, 151, 155, 161, 162, Chapter XV, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184,
   185, 186, 197
    Council of, 154
    Governor of, 148, 158, 179

  New Netherlanders, 102, 146, 175, 176, 183

  _New Netherland_ (ship), 136

  New Orleans, 192, 203

  New Plymouth, 166, 167, 168, 171

  Newport, Capt. Christopher, 58, 116

  New River Valley, 194

  New Scotland, 108, 109

  New Spain, 52, 70, 82, 83, 108

  New Sweden, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 183

  New York (city), ix, 76, 136, 137, 164, 184, 196

  New York (state), 185, 193, 197

  New Yorkers, 40

  _New York Times_, ix

  New World, 3, 80, 92

  Niagara, 42, 202, 203

  Nicollet, Jean, 187, 188

  Nicolls, Colonel Richard, 184, 185

  Nile, 4, 60

  Noddle’s Island, 98

  Normans, 13, 25, 27, 46

  Norman’s Kill, 137

  Norsemen, 9, 10 _passim_, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 69

  North America, 24, 54, 135, 136

  North River, 137, 141, 151, 165

  North Sea, 9, 11, 12

  Norwalk, 173

  Norway, 22

  Norwegians, 22

  Nova Scotia, 17, 22, 54, 68, 107, 108, 109, 110, 126, 189, 202

  Novgorod, 10, 11, 12, 45

  Nuremberg, 17


  _O_

  Oder River, 10

  Ohio, 203

  Ohio Company, 200, 202

  Ohio River, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203

  Oldham, John, 104, 167, 171

  Oneida Indians, 74

  Onondaga Indians, 74

  _Onrust_ (ship), 78, 79

  Ontario, 188

  Opechancanough, 118

  Orient, 6, 135

  Oriental pelts, 9, 187

  Ottawa Indians, 201

  Ottawa River, 41, 42

  Oyster Bay, 173


  _P_

  Pacific Ocean, 203

  Palmer’s Island, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134

  Pamlico Sound, 52

  Pamunkey Indians, 124

  Panama Canal, 38

  Paris, 33, 39

  Passyunk, 137, 138, 160

  Patowomecks, 115, 118

  Patuxent River, 116, 131

  Peirsey, Abraham, 120

  Pelias, King, 3

  Pemaquid, 104, 111

  Penn, William, 137, 198

  Penn’s son, 198

  Pennsauken Creek, 145

  Pennsylvania, 76, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200

  Penobscot Bay, 68, 88

  Penobscot River, 103, 104, 110, 111, 187

  Pentagoet, 103, 110, 112

  Pentagoet Bay, 112

  Peoria, Illinois, 191

  Pequot Indians, 102, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176
    annihilation of, 172
    War, 171

  Persians, 4, 44, 45

  Philadelphia, ix, x, 39, 78, 123, 127, 137, 144, 145, 153, 155, 160,
   200

  Philip II (King of Spain), 48

  Phoenicians, 17

  Piedmont plateau, 74

  Pilgrims, 90, Chapter IX, 110, 111, 112, 156, 167, 168

  Pimitoui, 193

  Piscataqua, 98, 104

  Piscataqua River, 104

  Piscattaway Indians, 129

  Placentia Bay, 108

  Pleskow, 11

  Plymouth, Chapter IX, 111, 112, 157, 164

  Plymouth Company, 83, 84, 88, 93

  Pocahontas, 58, 61, 117

  Pocomoke River, 131

  Point Comfort, 124

  Polo, Marco, 6, 7, 8, 9, 25

  Poole, Robert, 117

  Popham, Sir Francis, 88

  Popham, George, 83

  Popham, Sir John (Chief Justice), 83

  Port Royal (Bay of Fundy), 39, 62, 84, 85, 86, 108, 109, 110, 111, 126

  Port Royal, South Carolina, 194

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 98

  Portugal, 11, 13, 23, 25, 26

  Portuguese, 14, 15, 16, 25

  Potomac River, 29, 65, 115, 116, 118, 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132,
   134, 200

  Poutrincourt, Sieur de, 84, 86, 108

  Powhatan, 58, 59, 60, 117

  Powhatan Confederacy, 59, 116, 124

  Pring, Martin, 55, 83

  Printz, Johan (Governor of New Sweden), 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158,
   159, 160, 161, 162, 163

  Province Island, 153, 155, 159

  Puritan, 101, 111, 112, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172

  Pynchon, William, 169-170, 171, 181


  _Q_

  Quaker, 198, 199

  Quebec, 30, 32, 40, 41, 42, 108, 109, 110, 145, 188, 190, 203

  Quebec Province, 108

  Quincy, 99


  _R_

  Radisson, Pierre Esprit, 188, 189, 190

  Raleigh, Sir Walter, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 82

  Rappahannock River, 115

  Rasieres, Isaak de, 102

  Razilly, Chevalier Isaac de, 110, 111

  Red River, 22

  Renaissance, 12, 14, 46

  Rensselaer, Kiliaen van, 141, 176, 177, 178

  Rensselaerwyck, 141, 176, 177, 178, 179

  Restoration, 183

  Rhode Island, 173, 174, 175

  Richelieu, Cardinal de, 109

  Richelieu River, 41

  Richmond’s Island, 104, 105

  Rising, Johan, 162, 163

  Roanoke, 37, 52, 54, 55, 82

  Roberval, Sieur de, 32

  Rocky Mountains, viii, 203

  Rolfe, John, 118

  Romans, 4, 5, 60

  Rome, 4, 124

  Rotterdam, 151

  Rouen, 32, 39

  “Rupert’s Land,” 189

  Rupert, Prince, 189

  Rurik, 9

  Russia, 9, 10, 12, 26, 44, 45, 51, 63

  Russian, 45, 46


  _S_

  Saco River, 104

  Sagahadoc, 83, 84, 88, 101

  St. Augustine, 186

  St. Christopher’s Island, 151

  St. Croix, 39, 62, 84, 86

  St. Croix River, 186, 187

  Saint George, 83

  _St. Helen_ (pinnace), 131

  Saint Just, 84, 85, 86, 108

  St. Lawrence River, 20, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 56,
   62, 85, 86, 107, 108, 110, 112, 145, 188, 190, 203

  St. Malo, 32, 33

  _St. Margaret_ (boat), 131

  St. Mary’s, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133

  Salem Creek, 153

  Salem, 101

  San Miguel, 28

  Santo Domingo, 28, 29

  Sanuto, 14

  Saquenay, 30, 31, 32

  Savage, Thomas, 115, 116, 117, 120

  Savannah River, 195

  Saxons, 10

  Scandinavia, 5, 11

  Schuylkill River, 137, 138, 144, 149, 153, 155, 159, 160

  Scioto River, 199

  Scotland, 110, 126

  Scots, 109, 111

  Scottish Company, 110

  Scottish and English Company, 109

  Semiramis, 2

  Seneca Indians, 74

  Seven Years’ War, 202

  Shawnee Indians, 194, 198

  Shenandoah Valley, 197

  Shippen and Lawrence, 200

  Siberia, 6, 7, 11, 24, 26, 45

  Sioux Indians, 188

  Skraelings, Chapter II, 94

  Skute, Capt. Sven, 162, 163

  Slavic lands, 4, 9, 10

  Slavs, 10

  Slechtenhorst, Brandt van, 178, 179

  Smith, Capt. Dirck, 163

  Smith, Henry, 169

  Smith, Capt. John, 48, 56, Chapter VI, 68, 69, 77, 83, 87, 88, 89, 94,
   95, 115, 116, 117, 118, 123

  Smith, Richard, 173, 174

  Smith, Capt. Thomas, 130, 133

  Smith, Sir Thomas, 58, 83

  Snorri, 19

  Somes Sound, 18

  Southampton, 50, 92

  South America, 24, 29, 54

  South River, 71, 78, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150,
   151, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163

  South Sea, 54, 55, 145, 186, 199

  Sowamset, 171

  Spain, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 48, 50, 52, 53, 69, 80, 125, 135, 140,
   148, 186, 203

  Spaniards, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 52, 80, 82, 115, 124, 140, 186, 192,
   194, 196

  Spanish, 27, 48, 52, 70, 76, 95, 124, 135, 136, 148, 149, 150, 190,
   194, 196

  Spanish Florida, 54, 77, 185, 186, 196

  Spanish Hill, 76

  Spanish West Indies, 157

  Spelman, Henry, 117, 118, 119

  Springfield, 169, 170

  Squanto, 94, 95, 96

  Stamford, 173, 176

  Standish, Capt. Miles, 94, 96, 101, 105, 112

  “staple right,” 177

  States General of the Netherlands, 79, 80, 90, 92, 135, 168, 177, 179,
   182

  Stoughton, Captain, 172

  Strabo, 16

  Stratford, 173

  Stuyvesant, Governor Peter, 159, 160, 162, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182,
   183, 184, 185

  Susquehanna River, 61, 65, 68, 74, 76, 77, 113, 123, 127, 133, 134,
   138, 152, 197, 199

  Susquehannocks, 61, 76, 77, 123, 129, 138, 139, 153

  Swanendael, 141, 142, 144, 147

  Sweden, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156, 157, 162

  Swedes, 22, 36, Chapter XIV

  Swedish, 146, Chapter XIV


  _T_

  Tadoussac, 40

  Tartars, 6, 7, 8, 13, 44, 45, 57

  Tartar Empire, 7

  Tartary, 29, 30, 40

  Tawasentha, 137

  Taylor, Philip, 132

  Taz River, 11

  Tennessee River, 196

  Texas, 192

  Thames River, 11, 56, 182

  The Hague, 73, 89, 90

  Thirty Years’ War, 107, 165

  Thompson, David, 98

  Thompson, Maurice, 125

  Thorowgood, Cyprian, 128

  Thorn, Poland, 10

  Thorvald Ericson, 18

  Thorvaldson, Eric (Eric the Red), 17, 21

  Three Rivers, 39, 77, 188

  Ticonderoga, 203

  Tierra D’Ayllon, 28, 29

  Tierra Florida, 28

  Timber Creek, 137

  Tinicum Island, 155, 161, 163

  Tobolsk, 11

  Tonti, Henri de, 191

  Transylvania, 57

  _Treasurer_ (ship), 85, 87

  Treaty of Hartford, 182

  Treaty of Lancaster, 200

  Treaty of Paris, 203

  Trent, Capt. William, 199, 201, 202

  Trenton, 138

  Trinity Bay, 108

  Trinity Harbor, 50

  Turkey, 45

  Turks, 14, 57

  Turner, Capt. Nathaniel, 153, 157

  Twide, Richard, 33

  Tyrker, 18


  _U_

  Ulster Scots, 197

  Underhill, Capt. John, 172, 176

  United Colonies, Commissioners of the, 183

  United Colonies of New England, 180

  United Netherlands, 80

  United New Netherland Company, 73

  United States, viii, ix

  Urals, 11, 45

  Usselinx, William, 80


  _V_

  Valley of Virginia, 74

  Van Curler, Jacob, 167

  Van Rensselaer, Kiliaen, 141, 176, 177, 178

  Van Slechtenhorst, Brandt, 178, 179

  Van Twiller, Governor Wouter, 165, 166

  Varangians, 9

  Varkens Kill, 153, 155

  Venango, 201

  Venice, 6, 11, 14

  Verhulst, William, 138

  Verhulsten Island, 138

  Verrazano, Giovanni da, 27, 28, 52, 69

  Vervins, Peace of, 38

  Vespucci, Amerigo, 25

  Vikings, 9, Chapter II, 24, 94

  Vines, Richard, 104

  Vinland, Chapter II

  Virginia, Capes of, 69

  Virginia Company, 83, 86, 92

  Virginia Company Council, 116

  Virginia Council, 86, 115, 132

  Virginia, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 78, 79, 80,
   83, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97, 99, 100, 113, Chapters XI, XII, 135, 144,
   145, 146, 148, 151, 164, 184, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202

  _Virginia_ (pinnace), 83

  Virginians, 70, 80, 82, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 128,
   129, 130, 134, 144, 146, 157, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200

  Volga, 9

  Vries, Capt. David Pieters de, 141, 143, 144


  _W_

  Wahunsonacock, 116

  Waldseemuller, 25

  “Walking Purchase,” 198

  Walloons, 136, 137, 141

  “Wall” Street, 182

  Warren, Lieutenant Radcliffe, 131

  Washington, D. C., 118

  Washington, George, 201, 202

  Washington family, 200

  Watertown, Massachusetts, 167

  Wessagusset, 99, 101

  Wessel, 147

  West, Capt. Francis, 98

  West, John, 132

  Westchester County, 173, 182

  Westfield, 170

  West India Company. _See_ Dutch West India Company

  West Indies, 29, 38, 53, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151

  Westoes, 195

  Weston Thomas, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99

  West Virginia, 199

  Wethersfield, 168

  Weymouth, 83, 99

  Weymouth, Capt. George, 54, 55, 95

  White, Father Andrew, 130

  White, John, 53, 54

  White Sea, 11, 44

  Whiting, William, 157, 170

  Whorekill, 142, 143, 147

  Wickford, Rhode Island, 174

  Wilcox, John, 157, 173

  Willard, Simon, 181

  _William_ (ship), 165, 166

  Williams, Roger, 172, 173

  Wilmington (Delaware), 79, 149

  Windsor, 168

  Winetha, 10

  Winslow, Edward, 105, 166, 167

  Winter, John, 105

  Winthrop, Governor John, 101, 156, 166

  Wisby, 11

  Wisconsin, 187

  Wollaston, 99, 100

  Wood, Abraham, 194

  Woodward, Henry, 195, 196

  Woronoco, 170

  Wyatt, Sir Francis (Governor of Virginia), 150


  _Y_

  York, Duke of, 184, 186

  York River, 29, 115

  Youghiogheny River, 199, 200, 201

  Young, Capt. Thomas, 145, 146

  Yowaccomoco Indians, 129


  _Z_

  Zipangu, 70




Transcriber’s Notes

A few minor errors in punctuation and spacing were corrected.

Page 10: “wore cloth hoods ostenstatiously” changed to “wore cloth
hoods ostentatiously”

Page 27: “Wholesale annihiliation” changed to “Wholesale annihilation”

Page 28: “instuments of torture” changed to “instruments of torture”

Page 34: “great linquistic family” changed to “great linguistic family”

Page 68: “parallelling the Susquehanna” changed to “paralleling the
Susquehanna”

Page 123: “the offer a squaw” changed to “the offer of a squaw”

Page 176: “sanquinary five-year war” changed to “sanguinary five-year
war”



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