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.”