FURS

IN 1634, William Bradford reported “the saddest thing that befell them since they came,” a double murder involving a Plymouth man. John Hocking, sent by two English noblemen (Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke) to trade in the Kennebec region, intruded on a Plymouth claim. He traveled upriver beyond Plymouth’s trading station, intent on intercepting any Native hunters who were then heading downriver with furs. The men stationed at the Kennebec outpost followed him to put a stop to his scheme. An altercation ensued. John Howland, the leader of the Plymouth station, ordered three men to take a canoe alongside Hocking’s ship, to cut his anchor cables so that his vessel would drift downstream. To stop them from completing their task, Hocking shot and killed Moses Talbot, one of the three. A friend of Talbot’s “(which loved him well)” then killed Hocking. Bradford expressed great dismay that Plymouth was implicated in these deaths, all the more so because the fighting occurred between English men rather than with the French, who also menaced the trade. That Hocking was employed by noble lords complicated matters, creating the potential for a political crisis. The men who had sent Hocking to New England declared “that howsoever they might have sent a man of war [meaning a private ship fitted out to wage war], to beat down the house at Kennebec for the death of Hocking,” they would agree to a mediated settlement instead.¹ Massachusetts Bay oversaw the negotiations, which concluded that Hocking had caused his own death by firing the first shot.²

That men killed over rights to the fur trade demonstrated the high value Europeans placed on the acquisition of pelts. As the Plymouth men reasoned, “now was the season for trade to come down”—meaning that hunters would be bringing furs downriver—and if they allowed a rival trader access to an upriver location, he would intercept the supplies of beaver and “take it from them,” so that they would lose their investment.³ Plymouth Plantation desperately wanted access to furs, even if its leaders concluded that killing to maintain it went too far.

Furs—or skins as they were often called—appeared to be one locally available item that could be readily turned into money. Even before settlement had begun, John Smith identified furs and fish as the best prospects for New England’s economic future.⁴ Although he was particularly enamored of fish, he also noted his hopes for furs. He advised that the English drive the French out of the region in order to crush the competition, since their rivals often “afford them better” trading terms.⁵ When the Plymouth men finally met some Native inhabitants—after months of wary glimpses and near encounters—they carefully noted what furs the Natives wore.⁶ With alacrity, they distributed a few gifts and asked to establish a trade in pelts. After that, everywhere the Plymouth men traveled around the region, they greeted all new peoples with questions about furs.

Animal pelts became the symbol of Plymouth’s desire. When meeting an elderly woman whose three sons had been among those kidnapped (along with Tisquantum) by the notorious Thomas Hunt, the settlers took pains to dissociate themselves from Hunt’s activities. They used their hankering for furs as a measure of their disdain for Hunt’s actions toward the Natives he encountered: “we would not offer them any such injury, though it would gain us all the skins in the Country.”⁷ On a journey through the countryside, they met numerous “Sachems, or petty Governors” and joined in gambling games. Tellingly, what the Native gamers sought were metal knives to replace the bone cutting tools they made; what the English winners desired were furs.⁸ Getting animal pelts, which they had little facility for acquiring on their own, required relations with skilled and wide-ranging Native hunters.

Plymouth shared with every new settlement the need to generate income. Across the Atlantic basin, choices were basically two: extract or grow something that could find a market. The Spanish, the first Europeans in the Americas, took mountains of mineral wealth. The English never found mines of any note—although they kept searching. The first success the English gained came instead via a plant: tobacco. Planters in Virginia learned to cultivate this Native crop, tapped a growing market, and grabbed more land in order to increase their acreage. Although New England also supported tobacco cultivation and Natives grew it for their own use, the Plymouth settlers quickly rejected that option: the lesser quality of the local variety made it an infeasible export. They relied instead on other local resources: fish—which had for over a century been pulled from North Atlantic waters for consumption in Europe; the much sought-after furs of both beaver and otter; and timber, along with other forest products. In early Plymouth, planters focused especially on fish and furs. The first they could theoretically take on their own, although they needed boats, tools, packing barrels, and salt (not to mention some skill). Acquiring the second, pelts, required trading partners.

Relying on this trade, Plymouth might have pursued an economic model that was used in many locations: the trading post. Europeans in Africa and Asia set up outposts—often called factories—that provided shelter to traders, a meeting place for transactions, and storage for trade goods awaiting ships to carry them off. Such outposts did not necessitate actual colonization in that the European traders tended to be temporary residents; in addition, they were present only with the permission of the local ruler and were often constrained in their movements. Dutch trade on the Hudson began along these lines, with traders traveling upriver to meet Mohawk hunters to bargain for pelts. Only gradually did New Amsterdam develop economic functions beyond supplying traders and storing pelts. Even though the Plymouth fur trade resembled such factory outposts in its aims, the settlers clearly meant to remain in New England. For them, furs offered a hoped-for income to buy what they needed from England and, especially, to pay off the debt incurred in establishing the settlement.

Such a trade proved difficult to organize, as the Plymouth leaders quickly learned. As soon as Massasoit and Plymouth established an alliance, the plantation received a continual flow of visitors who came to check out the new settlement, share a meal, and trade a pelt or two. This stream of prospective traders proved disruptive and expensive, and the planters asked Massasoit to put an end to it. Instead of receiving one or two furs at a time, Plymouth wanted them to arrive in bulk. They wanted to negotiate a single price for a lot.⁹ This plan assumed a level of organization within Native communities around servicing the trade that did not yet exist. Hunting was an individual activity, and the mechanisms for collecting numerous pelts and trading for a bulk shipment did not fit well within Native practices. Getting hunters to join together to trade represented just one hurdle.

Another challenge involved settling on an item that could be given in exchange for the furs that Plymouth so eagerly sought. At first hunters accepted novelty items of European manufacture, valuable because rare: beads or similar “trifles.” As the trade grew, however, and hunters became accustomed to having access to European goods, they demanded more: metal tools, European cloth, or even guns. As a result of this trade, wampum (clam shells formed into small beads) circulated more vigorously, and Plymouth then sought access to those from the Narragansett Bay where they were harvested and manufactured. Competitors for the trade began arriving soon after the Mayflower, so that Plymouth found itself vying not only with the French to the north and the Dutch to the west but also with other English men in their immediate area. More traders gave local hunters the power to pick their partners, which in turn placed demands on Plymouth to supply appealing trade items. For all their confidence that they dealt with a primitive people, Plymouth traders quickly found local people engaging with increasing sophistication in this burgeoning market economy. In such ways, Atlantic networks reached into Native America.

In organizing trade, location mattered. Bulky items (as well as people) moved with the greatest ease via waterways, and so trading stations set on a river—like the Plymouth trading house in Kennebec—were most likely to succeed. Plymouth, however, did not boast a sizeable river system, and the plantation’s leaders soon looked farther afield, both to the west and the north, in search of workable locations. Plymouth tried to parlay the fact that it had arrived first in the area into claims that reached beyond the limited land grant they eventually held from the Council for New England. They moved into the Connecticut and Kennebec river regions, in the former case at least claiming a right to the trade as a result of having “discovered” (by which they meant “explored”) the river. In the Kennebec case, they went back to the council to get the rights to the trade there. By the middle of its second decade, Plymouth had two remote trading stations, one of which was threatened when Hocking moved in on its claim.

Despite Plymouth’s diligent and sometimes fatal efforts to command the fur trade, its ability to do so proved limited as well as short-lived. With the goal of retiring the colony’s debt through the trade, Plymouth prohibited any resident from trading independently. A 1637 notation in the court record book continued the same few men in the management of all the trade (listing beaver as well as beads and corn as the items being exchanged).¹⁰ Just as they wanted their Native trading partners to organize the trade on their end, sending furs in bulk and deputizing one trader to deal with them, so too they wanted to organize their end of the trade. Bradford praised the Dutch for blocking interlopers and funneling all pelts through its company, clearly desiring that Plymouth would similarly control all English trade. In 1626, eight men known as the “Undertakers” accepted personal responsibility for Plymouth’s debt and took control of the trade. One of them, John Howland, commanded the Kennebec station at the time of the confrontation that killed Hocking and Talbot.

Plymouth, although the first European settlement in the region, was soon joined by the Dutch to the west and a smattering of small and often temporary English outposts in their general vicinity. To further their trade with Native hunters, residents established outposts around New England, fending off both English and French competitors. In 1629, Massachusetts Bay was founded, with its initial settlement at Salem.

In addition to rivals for the trade, Plymouth planters faced all the usual tribulations of transatlantic trade in the early modern era. One ship sunk with their goods on board while another was taken by a “Turkish man-of-war,” a ship fitted out for warfare.¹¹ Another shipment arrived in London during an epidemic, when trade was at a standstill and the price offered for the pelts was far below expectations.¹² Even had Plymouth commanded the trade as Bradford and others wished, unforeseeable setbacks were a routine part of doing business. Furs held out the prospect for financial solvency, but they also brought frustration and disappointment—as well as murder.

They never succeeded, save for largely within Plymouth itself, in limiting the trade. Bradford complained of men who came to fish but turned to trading for furs as only one of many threats to their business.¹³ Thomas Weston, a former Plymouth investor, established a rival outpost in 1622. It soon collapsed, but before doing so it prompted many complaints for its “injurious walking” toward the neighboring Native communities. Winslow blamed Weston’s men for damaging the trade in both furs and corn; in their hunger—the result in his view of laziness—they gave “as much for a quart of corn, as we used to do for a Beavers skin.”¹⁴ When that outpost broke up, some of Weston’s company joined another enterprise under the direction of Thomas Morton. He angered Winslow and his companions even more by trading guns for furs. This scheme was not original with Morton, as Bradford blamed English fisherman, as well as the Dutch and the French, for initiating it; still, Morton—nearby and irritating for a whole host of reasons—earned their special ire.¹⁵ They eventually arrested him and returned him to England, but competition for the fur trade continued.

Matters only worsened in the 1630s, as thousands of other English people arrived in New England, threatening Plymouth’s access to both Connecticut and Kennebec. By 1642, Bradford was grumbling that the trade had decayed.¹⁶ The demand for pelts led to overhunting, and the beaver and otter populations declined dramatically. The elimination of beaver in particular drastically altered the landscape, bringing changes to the land when spring dams no longer held water back, as the environmental historian William Cronon has noted.¹⁷ The decline of the beaver also dashed Plymouth’s hopes for profit. It had taken the Plymouth Undertakers more than two decades from the time of their arrival and a decade and a half from the date they initially expected to have repaid their investors for them to retire the debt. They had been hampered by the vagaries of the trade in general but more so by the rising competition to exploit what proved to be—under the pressures of English, French, and Dutch demand—a finite resource.

The fur trade in southeast New England was minor and soon exhausted. For that reason, Plymouth leaders quickly saw the need to establish outposts elsewhere, but even those trading stations had limited prospects given the rapid increase in competition. Plymouth, in participating in and for a time heavily depending on the trade, partook in a larger process in which Native hunters were drawn into transatlantic trade networks, and local resources were exploited at an unprecedented rate. The fur trade would continue long after it dried up in Plymouth, especially trade managed by the French to the north and west, but everywhere it would prompt competition, conflict, and poor resource management. Extracting American resources became a way to gain a profit, and men exploited it aggressively.