the Indians, and when a trial shipment was sent to England the success of the venture was great. Thereupon the colonists became so eager to produce it that the authorities felt obliged to prohibit the crop unless at least two acres of grain were grown at the same time by each planter.
The demand for Virginia tobacco increased until the merchants sent their agents to the colony to buy and pay for the crop long before it was harvested; they even sent ships to lie there for months before the harvest in order to have first chance to secure it. Why should the Virginians build or buy ships under such circumstances?
Now consider some of the conditions surrounding the first New England settlers. Many fishermen had visited the New England coast before a settlement was made there. These adventurers found full fares and they looked upon the coast at a season when it was not "stern."
It was to this coast that the Pilgrims came.
Of the well-known story of the Pilgrims it seems necessary to recall here, first of all, the fact that they were Englishmen who had lived for several years among the Dutch, a people who described themselves upon their coinage as a nation whose "way is on the sea." More than a thousand ships were built every year in Holland where the Pilgrims were sojourning, and everybody lived in a seafaring atmosphere. Though a distinct people, the Pilgrims necessarily absorbed, as one may say, something of the Dutch aptitude for trade and sea life. Thus, when ready to migrate to America, they were able to secure the capital they needed for the venture from merchants who were acquainted with the success that had attended the fishing voyages to the coast.
It is worth noting, too, that Captain Thomas Jones, of the Mayflower, had fished in Greenland waters, and that Mate Robert Coppin was carried as the pilot of the ship because he had been on the parts of the coast to which the expedition was bound. The Pilgrims intended to settle somewhere near the Hudson River, but on November 11, 1620, the Mayflower was found at anchor under Cape Cod. While lying there a number of the company came to think that a settlement there would serve their purpose well, and the reasons given in support of this proposition are of interest because they show what business ideas animated these Pilgrims. The location, they said, "afforded a good harbor for boats." It was "a place of profitable fishing." "The master and his mate and others experienced in fishing" preferred it to the Greenland fishery where whaling made large profits. Moreover, the situation was "healthy, secure and defensible." While the desire for "freedom to worship God" was perhaps uppermost in their talk, as it was in their writings, the Pilgrims were "intensely practical in applying their theories of Providence and Divine control to the immediate business in hand," as Weeden says, in his Economic History of New England.
After settling at Plymouth, as the reader remembers, life was hard during the first years. But the poetic rhapsodies about the "stern and rock-bound coast" do not convey an accurate idea of the agricultural possibilities of the region. Some of the farm lands of eastern Massachusetts are among the most prolific and profitable in the nation. The average yield of Indian corn per acre in Massachusetts in 1907 (see Year Book, Department of Agriculture) was exceeded only by that of Maine (another part of the "stern and rock-bound coast") and that of the irrigated lands of Arizona. Arizona averaged 37.5 bushels per acre, Maine 37, and Massachusetts 36. Consider, too, that it was in April, "while the birds sang in the woods most pleasantly," that Squanto and Hobomoc, red neighbors, taught these Englishmen how to fertilize the fields with fish, and to plant corn in fields that the Indians had cleared. And corn, produced on these fields, formed the first cargo of the first American sea-trader of which we have a definite record.
Through various causes not necessary to enumerate the Pilgrims got on so poorly that it was not until 1624 that they began ship-building. The prosperity that came to them in that year was due to success in fishing. They took enough cod to freight a ship for England. The profit on the cod was so much beyond the immediate need of the people that they launched "two very good and strong shallops (which after did them greate service)."
As it happened, in the year following the building of these shallops the Pilgrims produced such an abundant crop of corn that they had some to sell. Accordingly they loaded a shallop with it, and sent it, under Winslow, to the Kennebec, where he traded it for 700 pounds of beaver skins.
A year later a more important, or at any rate a more profitable, voyage was made. Some English merchants who had maintained a trading-post on Monhegan Island sent word down the beach that they were going to abandon it and would sell the remainder of their goods at a bargain. Although in the years that had passed the Pilgrims had, at times, come so near to starvation that men had been seen to stagger in the street because they were faint with hunger, they had persisted. They had caught and sold fish. They had produced forest products and corn for sale. They had traded with the Indians for furs. They had traded with the fishermen who came over from England, and they had made a profit on every deal—they had not lived in Holland for nothing. When a bargain in trade goods on Monhegan Island was offered, they had capital to make a purchase, and going there with a shallop they secured stuff worth £400. Then, on finding at the mouth of the Kennebec some other goods that had been taken from a French ship wrecked on that coast, they bought an additional £100 worth, which was all their boat would hold, as one may suppose. For as soon as they reached Plymouth Bay they cut their shallop in two and lengthened her, so that when another opportunity was offered to buy goods at a bargain she would have a larger capacity.
Recall, now, a number of events occurring in America before, and at about the time of, the first voyages of the Pilgrim shallops. Henry Hudson had sailed in the Half Moon up the river that bears his name (September, 1609), and the Dutch, after building a few fur-buying posts in that country, had begun a permanent settlement on the lower end of Manhattan Island (1623). Adrien Block, a Dutch explorer, had built a "yacht" on Manhattan Island (during the winter of 1614–1615), that was used later in the coasting trade. At New Amsterdam the Dutch built many small boats for gathering furs on the Hudson, and they repaired ships coming to the port when there was need. But as late as October 10, 1658, J. Aldrichs wrote a letter from that town saying, in connection with a "galliot" that was needed for local use (N. Y. C. docs. II, 51):—
"We are not yet in condition to build such a craft here."
At a still earlier date the French had made a permanent settlement in Canada. In the long story of the French in America it is of interest to note first that the Bretons and Basques had been among the pioneers on the Newfoundland fishing banks. It is not difficult to believe that the Basques were there before Cabot's time.
Of the French explorers we need to recall but one, Samuel de Champlain, "young, ardent, yet ripe in experience, a skilled seaman and a practiced soldier," who had been leading a strenuous life in the West Indies. In 1603 he made a voyage to the St. Lawrence River. In 1604 he helped to make a settlement on the St. Croix River, where he remained until the next year. When a badly needed relief ship came in 1605, he explored the New England coast down around Cape Cod.
In 1608 Champlain built a trading-post where Quebec now stands, and in 1616 there were two real home-builders there, a farmer named Louis Hebert and Champlain himself. In 1626 the population numbered 105, all told. It is not unlikely that the French ship, from which the Pilgrims obtained enough cheap goods to fill their shallop, in their second voyage to the Maine coast, had been wrecked while on a voyage to Quebec. The seafaring merchants of New England inevitably took much interest in the development of this colony from a rival nation.
Still more interesting, though in a different way, were the settlements of the West Indies. The Spaniards had introduced the sugar-cane and negro slavery, an economic combination of the greatest importance to the commerce of the world; for while the Spaniards maintained, as far as possible, a monopoly of their own trade, both slavery and sugar-planting spread all over the islands. Moreover, Spanish exclusiveness was to lead to adventures on the part of some New Englanders.
In 1605 the crew of an English ship took possession of Barbados. On February 17, 1625, an English ship "landed forty English and seven or eight negroes" on the island, and thus began building a colony that was of the utmost importance to New England traders in later years. In 1676 the export of sugar "was capable of employing 400 sail of vessels, averaging 150 tons."
In the meantime (1619), a Dutch privateer