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!