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.