Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  The Russians drove hard bargains, and especially in the fur business. It evolved side by side with the commerce in naval stores, and with the small but luxurious trade in caviar from the Volga basin, but the tsars kept it strictly under their control. This was so from the moment in the early 1580s when Russian fur trappers began to look for pelts in Siberia. By that date, trappers and hunters had hunted to extinction fur-bearing animals on the western side of the Urals. So, looking mainly for sable, they crossed the mountains, led first by the Stroganov family, merchants from Moscow, who created a private commercial empire in the east. Unleashed by the Stroganovs, in 1581 the Cossack general Ermak conquered the Tartar stronghold of Sibir.

  From New Voyages to North America (1703), by Baron de Lahontan, perhaps the most realistic early European representation of beaver hunting, showing beavers being speared through holes in the ice, shot, trapped, and pursued by dogs. A French soldier, Lahontan went to Canada in 1683 and traveled as far west as Minnesota. (London Library)

  Three hundred miles beyond the Urals, Sibir was the gathering point for vast quantities of fur. Ermak sent back to Moscow a rich tribute of sable, black fox skins, and two thousand beaver pelts, and the tsar responded by making the conquest of Siberia a goal of Russian policy. Cossacks, traders, and trappers built a network of forts and blockhouses to draw these immense spaces within the pale of Muscovite dominion.18 Once that was achieved, the tsar made money in three ways. He imposed a fur levy on the native people, he took a tithe from private traders, and he purchased skins for the imperial account or for resale at a big markup to foreign merchants. To prevent foreigners from trying to sneak into Siberia by the back door, in 1619 the tsar banned voyages to the east of Archangel, along the northern coast.

  Also from Lahontan’s book of 1703, a North American beaver (Special Collections, the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex, England)

  By 1620, the Cossacks had reached the rivers that feed Lake Baikal, close to the longitude of Beijing, and the speed of their advance must have caused problems of its own. As they went, they ravaged the wildlife they found. It was said that by the mid-1620s they had wiped out the beaver as far east as the Yenisey and Tunguska valleys, and a glance at the map shows that this region lies two thousand miles from Moscow. Given that beavers are easily trapped and killed, this was entirely possible.

  Their dams make obvious targets, and they have the effect of changing the current of water downstream, alerting a trapper to their presence. Another fatal weakness of the beaver was its preference for certain trees and shrubs. Why does the beaver choose to munch the quaking aspen and the willow? Because their wood is digestible and packed with nourishment, and the willow contains salicylic acid. The active ingredient of aspirin, it is eaten by beavers to give their bodies a natural medicine. All a trapper had to do was to break a hole in the ice near the beaver lodge and poke a willow or an aspen branch into the water. Lured to the edge of the pond, the hungry beaver made an easy target for the spear.

  If this holocaust of mammals had reached the Yenisey by the 1620s, then as furs became more distant, the price must have risen: the data lie hidden, perhaps, in the Russian imperial archives. Even if it did not, English haberdashers had another motive to consider America as an alternative. At Archangel, the Russians would accept nothing but hard currency. So the ships that sailed from London had to take bags of Spanish coins: the Sea Venture, for example, left for Russia in 1617 with nearly four thousand pounds in pieces of eight.19 Carrying bullion required a warrant from the Privy Council, because of the national shortage of precious metals, and because the East India Company had first call on silver: their suppliers of spices and silk in the Indies insisted on it. When English stocks of bullion collapsed in 1620, the situation must have become almost impossible.

  By the time the Mayflower sailed, the English merchants who traded with Russia had mostly been forced out of business. Again the Dutch played their unhelpful part. The Muscovy Company did not deal exclusively in furs or naval stores: starting in about 1610, it also sent whaling expeditions to Spitsbergen, between Norway and Greenland, for the sake of whale and walrus oil. But soon the Dutch arrived, and the two countries found themselves fighting an undeclared war in the Arctic. Claiming priority in the same waters, Dutch whalers attacked the Muscovy Company’s ships, wrecking its trade, and set fire to its post at Archangel.

  Typically, King James added to the confusion by granting a new whaling charter to a Scottish consortium, led by a favored courtier, to compete with the Muscovy Company. The wars between the Russians, Swedes, and Poles also took their toll on the company, damaging Russia’s trade. What remained went mostly to Amsterdam. By 1618, three-quarters of the ships that made the summer run to Archangel came from the Netherlands. In the spring of that year, unable to fund their share of the loan to the tsar, the Muscovy merchants had to seek a rescue by way of a merger with the East India Company. The latter agreed, reluctantly, because it needed to protect its supplies of Archangel rope.

  As things turned out, the merger failed to serve its purpose. By the end of 1619, the Muscovy Company had collapsed, suffering from heavy losses, and the East India men decided to exit the business. They sold the whaling stations to the investor group led by Ralph Freeman, and with them the right to trade back and forth to Archangel. Recorded in the board minutes of the East India Company, the deal was done in February 1620. With this transaction, Freeman cornered what was left of England’s commerce with Russia, in fur, rope, and caviar. He controlled it throughout the 1620s, sending out six or seven ships each season.20

  On June 22, as Jones made the Mayflower ready for sail, the Virginia Company put out a promotional pamphlet. It contained the following sentence: “The rich Furres, Caviary and Cordage, which we draw from Russia with so great difficulty, are to be had in Virginia, and the parts adioyning, with ease and plenty.”21 The words speak for themselves. Because of beaver hats and rope, because of Freeman, because of the tsars, and because of the shortage of bullion, the easier voyage to America became a compelling, attractive proposition, for merchants and mariners alike.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IN THE ARTILLERY GARDEN

  O master, if you did but hear the pedlar at the door … He hath ribbons of all the colours i’ th’ rainbow; points more than all the lawyers in Bohemia can learnedly handle, though they come to him by th’ gross; inkles, caddisses, cambrics, lawns: why, he sings ’em over as they were gods or goddesses; you would think a smock were a she-angel.

  —SHAKESPEARE, THE WINTER’S TALE (1611)

  We have Prince Maurice to thank for the Plymouth Colony. If the Pilgrims had sailed as Dutchmen, they might have created a settlement in Brooklyn, or camped out upriver trading furs, but this would not have been New England. Eccentrics already, in the eyes of their countrymen, the Brownists of Leiden would have become traitors too. These were years when Dutch and English seamen were fighting each other not only for whaling but also for the spice trade in the Moluccas. The general in The Hague saved them from becoming soldiers in a trade war, but in doing so he left them with only one option. It turned out to contain perils of its own.

  He drove the Pilgrims into the unreliable arms of a trader from the City of London. This was Thomas Weston, aged thirty-five, and he led a company of investors, numbering about seventy. The figure comes from Captain John Smith, who says that they were a mixed party of gentlemen, merchants, and tradesmen. They financed the Pilgrims with what the contract called an “adventure.” French in origin, the term referred not to the voyage but to the risk taken by the investors, who ventured their capital to support the colony. At La Rochelle, Frenchmen who invested in Canada looked for a return on their capital of about 30 percent. Weston must have hoped for something similar. A decade later investors in New England still wished to make profits on that scale, because risks were high and they needed a reward to match.1

  Until 1628, the colony at New Plymouth ran up heavy losses, and by the time it broke even,
most of the investors had long since died, withdrawn, or sold out. By 1626, the seventy had already dwindled down to six, who stuck with the project until it began to prosper. Two of them bought country property at Clapham, on the south side of the Thames, and made themselves landed gentlemen with the help of the profits they eventually made. To begin with, however, Thomas Weston was one of the first of many Britons who promised far more in America than they could deliver.*

  From the outset, the colony was a commercial project, as well as a mission inspired by religious ideals. Weston wished to make money, as the contract put it, from “trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing” on the American coast. Far from being a commune, the Mayflower was a common stock: the very words employed in the contract. All the land in the Plymouth Colony, its houses, its tools, and its trading profits (if they appeared) were to belong to a joint-stock company owned by the shareholders as a whole.

  When the final value of the assets was determined, after seven years, the investors and the colonists would divide them up: that was the plan. All of the participants, those who stayed in England and those who had come to America, would receive a dividend in proportion to the number of shares they owned. Those who had no capital, but simply came on the boat, were deemed to have a single share. If any investor injected more cash, he or she would receive extra shares accordingly. It was not the same thing as a modern corporation, but a likeness existed, and not least in the dubious character of the man who acted as chairman of the board.

  By birth, Weston ranked as a gentleman, but his wealth was scanty. His behavior was even worse. Somebody he crossed said that Weston was “soe subtile & unconscionable soe that he might accomplish his owne ends he cared not what bonds he or anie for him entered into for he would keepe none.”2 Bradford rather more gently labels Weston a man “embittered in spirit,” but either way history’s verdict has been hostile. Because he first sabotaged and then abandoned the Pilgrims after they reached the New World, Weston ranks next to King James as the villain of the piece.

  Even if he was, Thomas Weston had some extenuating circumstances. Only in the 1970s did a British genealogist find Weston’s date and place of birth, in 1584 at Rugeley in Staffordshire.* Without that information, his background and his career could not be reconstructed. For this reason, pretty much everything written about the early days of the Plymouth Colony is incomplete, and much of it is misleading or inaccurate. Weston definitely failed in commerce in the early 1620s, he was certainly a smuggler, and he may have been a felon, a gunrunner. Nobody would freely choose him as a business partner. But if we put Weston and his colleagues back in their correct setting, they lead us to the heart of Jacobean England as it was.3

  What sort of place was it? To find an artistic mirror, again we might turn to Shakespeare, and The Winter’s Tale. The play has many meanings of a subtle kind, but it also contains documentary elements, assembled from the mundane realities of the day. Among its characters we find the peddler Autolycus, described in the lines quoted at the head of this chapter. In Autolycus, Shakespeare gives us the beginnings of a consumer culture, by way of a growing market for cheap household items—pins, needles, thimbles, ribbons, and the like—carried up and down the land on the backs of men such as him. The investors who financed the Mayflower included merchants who fed the likes of Autolycus with the wares they carried.

  They also bought and sold woolen cloth. That too we find in The Winter’s Tale, where the drama unfolds amid the bleating of sheep. Jacobean England had ten million of the animals, numbering twice as many as its human population. “Divide our native commodities into ten parts,” said the greatest lawyer of the age, Sir Edward Coke, in Parliament in 1621, “and nine arise from the sheep’s back.” Coke did not exaggerate by much. Three-quarters of English exports did indeed consist of woven cloth, and Thomas Weston depended on it, as did most of the men who financed the voyage of the Mayflower. When their world seemed to be collapsing, they turned to America. Since some of them, but not Weston, were Puritans with their own evangelical ties, their commercial motives went hand in hand with piety of a very distinctive Jacobean kind, both militant and patriotic.

  DICK WHITTINGTON AND THE MAYFLOWER

  Let us imagine that one summer evening Shakespeare left his home in Stratford and walked down to the Avon. Fourteen stone arches carried a highway across the river, and on the bridge he would see a chain of horses, steaming with sweat. Traveling twenty miles each day, the horses came from the Shropshire market town of Shrewsbury, near the Welsh border. On their backs they carried bundles of fabric known as Welsh cotton, though in fact it was made of coarse wool, with a fluffed surface.

  Hill farmers raised the sheep whose fleeces made the stuff. In their shacks in winter they spun and wove the wool before selling it to the drapers of Shrewsbury who finished it and dressed it and packed it. Early every Wednesday morning, from August to October, off went the horses on the eight-day trek to the capital. On Thursdays and Fridays, merchants in London bought Welsh cottons at Blackwell Hall, the City’s bourse for cloth, and they shipped a third of it to France: mainly to Rouen.

  It was shoddy material, often attracting complaints, but the customers were poor. Rouen served Normandy and the Île-de-France, and like the rural workers in England the forgotten peasants of this region were losing ground as each year went by, their grim standard of living growing ever more intolerable. Welsh cotton sold well to the laboring masses because it was cheap and it was warm. Since France had four times as many inhabitants as England, and Welsh cotton also sold through Amsterdam, the trade was substantial. Hundreds of thousands of yards of cloth left English harbors each year. This was how Thomas Weston made his living, as an exporter of the same rough textiles, sourced from Shrewsbury.4

  Only forty miles separated the town from Weston’s birthplace at Rugeley, and the two places had close ties. One of Weston’s brothers served his time as an apprentice in Shrewsbury, qualifying there as Simon Weston, draper, in 1617. Perhaps the saddest of all the stories from the terrible early months in America had its origins in this same connection. On board the Mayflower traveled four infants, Ellen, Jasper, Richard, and Mary More, the unwanted offspring of a failed marriage in a Shropshire village, sixteen miles from the town where Simon Weston lived.

  Among the boys and girls, the oldest was eight and the youngest was four. Their great-grandfather was another draper in Shrewsbury. In the summer of 1620, their parents were divorced, on grounds of adultery, and the children were declared bastards. A family retainer took them to London and handed them over to Philemon Powell, Weston’s servant and factotum. Weston received a hundred pounds to cover their passage and to finance the purchase of shares in the colony. The first child to die was Jasper More, in Provincetown Harbor, and only one of the children survived the first American winter.5

  Thomas Weston also dealt with a Shrewsbury cloth merchant named John Vaughan. Thanks to Weston, in 1622 Vaughan incurred heavy losses. Litigation followed, and the affair and its consequences left behind a mass of legal documents, filled with evidence of the loosest of commercial morals. They show that Weston ran a precarious business, dealing in Welsh cottons bought on credit and then shipped to Europe, along with assorted haberdashery. Sometimes he handled exotic cargoes, whale fins, or tropical wood used to make dyes, but he had a handicap, and one that was common. He had far too little capital. This was his undoing, and very nearly that of the Plymouth Colony. Thomas Weston started off as yet another younger son from a marginal family with few connections.6

  By the time of King James, the Westons had lived at Rugeley for at least two hundred years, as the lords of Hagley Manor. Behind a motel, at the drab edge of modern Rugeley, a little park encloses a pond, with an island in the middle: all that remains of the Weston residence, and its medieval moat. But from the surviving features of the landscape, and because a stream still feeds the pond, we can imagine the life the Westons led on the edge of the dense woodlands of Cannock Chase. Beside the brook, and abo
ve the house, stood the manor’s water mill, while the town’s livestock market lay a few yards away, across a street still called Sheep Fair today. Thomas grew up surrounded by cattle, sheep, and horses.7

  But mention Rugeley to a Jacobean, and if a word came to mind, it would not be “sheep” but “papist.” Staffordshire was, and has remained, an area with more than the average English complement of Catholicism, partly thanks to local noblemen who clung to the old religion. It would be ironic, to say the least, if we found that the man who backed the Mayflower’s voyage was raised in that same faith. So he probably was. While his private beliefs may forever remain unknown, the following facts can be established.

  In 1648, officials seized the estates belonging to his eldest brother, Sir Richard Weston, after naming him as a Catholic. Thomas Weston’s mother came from a part of Lancashire that also held out as a Roman Catholic enclave, while his aunt married into the Wolseleys, who were Catholic gentry. The two families remained close, doing land deals together. Rugeley had a hard core of awkward Romanists, and in 1616 the authorities prosecuted six Catholics in the town for refusing to go to church, and another twenty at Cannock. None of this proves that Thomas Weston remained a Roman Catholic, since he also had early Puritan ties: as a youth, he worked for a leading Puritan iron merchant in the capital. But, at the very least, he came from a suspicious background.8