Virginia, where "twenty Africans were disembarked," and sold to planters who were to use negro slaves, for many years thereafter, with profit, in the production of tobacco. And slaves, sugar, and tobacco were among the first articles of merchandise to bring profit to the New England ship-owners.
Most interesting of all, however, were the centres of population established upon the New England coast. The English fishermen who came to the coast after the arrival of the Pilgrims, occasionally landed men to remain through the winter in order to trade for furs and procure a supply of provisions—venison, wild fowl, etc.—for the use of the crews of the ships that were to return in the spring.
Of this character was a settlement made at Cape Ann in 1623. The Rev. John White, of Dorchester, England, having become interested in the fishermen, persuaded some merchants to send out people to form a colony. The whole business was badly managed; in 1626 the merchants abandoned the colony, and most of the people returned to England. But one Roger Conant and "a few of the most honest and industrious resolved to stay." They removed, however, to a point on the coast known as Naumkeag, where they made a settlement which they named Salem.
In the meantime White had been working faithfully in England to promote the interests of these men, and in 1628 sixty or seventy emigrants were sent over to join them. In 1629 White and other English Puritans procured a charter for "a colony under the title of The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay." The settlers who came to America and lived under this charter were the "Puritans" of American history, a fact that seems worth especial mention because a modern mark of intelligence in New England is found in the ability to distinguish between the "Pilgrims" who formed the colony on Plymouth Bay, or the "Old Colony," and the "Puritans" who made the settlements at the head of Massachusetts Bay.
The colonists who came over in 1628 explored the head of the bay, and some of them located where Charlestown now stands. With its dancing waters, its green islands, and its views of the distant blue hills from which the Indians had already called it Massachusetts, the region was enchanting, and the Puritan explorers described it in such glowing colors that 200 more settlers were brought over the next year. The Puritans were the original "boomers" of America.
Among the 200 who arrived in 1629 there were wheelwrights, carpenters, and ship-builders. The ship-builders went up the Mystic River to the place where Medford now stands, and established a shipyard. A considerable number of the emigrants of 1630 joined them. This was the first American shipyard, properly so called.
It is also to be noted that some of these emigrants, under the lead of John Winthrop, located on the peninsula opposite Charlestown, which was distinguished by a three-pointed hill and a "Backbay," where they built a town named Boston.
The French, having a water-road to the far-away regions of the Great Lakes, became wholly absorbed in the fur trade. The Dutch on the Hudson, though less favorably situated, had a western outlet through the Iroquois Indian country, and did a large business in furs. The English on Barbados, having a favorable climate, a fertile soil, and slaves, were preparing to supply all Englishmen with sugar, while the English on the Chesapeake, having facilities similar to those at Barbados, were already astonishing the commercial world with their product of tobacco.
The New Englanders had no considerable back country from which they could draw furs; they had no water route to the interior, and at that time they were unable to produce any crop from the soil for which a good market could be found in Europe. But what they lacked in these respects they made up by hard work in the development of such resources as their country afforded. The histories of New England are full of tales of privation and suffering endured during the first years of their existence, and the stories are all true. But as soon as those settlers had learned how to supplement their prayers for daily bread by well-directed efforts to secure it, hunger fled. They then saw that the waters laving their feet were inviting them to go afloat to seek fortune in the uttermost parts of the earth, and they accepted the invitation.
On July 4, 1631 (the fact that it was on July 4 has attracted the attention of more than one New Englander as a "beautiful coincidence"), the ship-builders on the Mystic launched their first sea-going vessel. "The bark, being of thirty tons," was named the Blessing of the Bay. Her owner, Governor John Winthrop, recorded his reason for building her:—
"The general fear of want of foreign commodities, now that our money was gone, set us on work to provide shipping of our own."
That statement was characteristic of the people as well as of Winthrop. A "want"—any want—"set them on work" to provide for themselves.
The Blessing of the Bay was not a "bark" according to modern nomenclature. She was a vessel of one mast, and much like the vessel built by the less persistent people in the earlier settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec. On August 31 she "went on a voyage to eastward," to trade with the Indians, beyond a doubt, and to pick up such business as might be offered by the few settlers and the fishermen to be found along shore. The fishing and trading station which "fishmongers in London" had built on the Piscataqua, at which no planting was done, was probably the most important point visited.
Another incident of this year, 1631, is of almost as much interest as the launch of the Blessing of the Bay. One John Winter established a shipyard on Richmond Island, off Cape Elizabeth (near the site of the modern Portland), Maine. Some time in December Winter began to build there a ship for merchants in Plymouth, England. As already noted, other ships had been built in America by Europeans for European use, but Winter's work may be called the beginning of the American business of building ships for export.
Three facts about Winter's shipyard may be correlated. In 1638 sixty men were at work in it. During the year a 300-ton ship brought a cargo of wines and liquors to the island. "It was a sporadic" settlement, and it "dwindled away."
Winthrop's Blessing of the Bay appears to have been the first New England vessel to open trade with the Dutch on Manhattan Island. She went there in 1633, perhaps sooner. In 1627 the Dutch had invited "friendly commercial relations" with the Pilgrims by sending the governor of the colony "a rundlet of sugar and two Holland Cheeses," with a letter in which they offered to "accommodate"—to give credit. But the Pilgrims were shy because the Dutch had been trading with the Connecticut Indians, a region claimed by the English; the Dutch had come even to the head of Buzzard's Bay, where the Pilgrims were maintaining a post for the fur trade. However, in September, 1627, the Dutch sent Isaac de Rasieres with a small trial cargo in the "barque Nassau" to see what he could do, and he proved a worthy forerunner of the great race of American commercial travellers. For he carried soldiers and trumpeters along, not to fight, but to do honor to the occasion by means of salutes and blaring music; and he chose these men from among the residents of New Amsterdam who had known some of the Pilgrims in Holland. Indeed, some of them were related to the Pilgrims. Naturally, after "the joyful meeting of kindred as well as friends," and after much fine talk and the display of goods—especially of "wampum,"—De Rasieres made what he called "the beginning of a profitable trade."
Wampum (bits of sea-shell) was the coin of the red men. The chief mint of the continent was on Long Island. All red men, at that time, were much more anxious to get wampum than the silver coin of the white man. The Pilgrims were glad to buy the wampum because the Indians of New England had but little, and were eager to get it.
It was no doubt to secure a supply of wampum and such West India products as sugar and salt, in which the Dutch traded, that Winthrop sent his Blessing of the Bay to Manhattan Island.
Certain details of the earlier voyages should now prove interesting. For instance, Winthrop's vessel was at first engaged in trading on her owner's account. She was not a freighter, looking for cargo to carry at a price per ton, but a floating store, so to say, carrying merchandise for sale or exchange. The distinction between the freighter and the ship trading on owners' account is to be kept in mind.
After the New Englanders had spread to Connecticut there is a record of the employment of the Blessing of the Bay as a freighter. She carried goods from Massachusetts Bay to Connecticut at 30s. per ton.
In 1629 the freight rate between England and Massachusetts Bay was £3 per ton. Passengers were carried at