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.