by Nick Bunker
Nearly thirteen hundred skins from North American beavers arrived in the river Taw that season, more than a third of them imported by Palmer’s syndicate. These were remarkable totals. When London ships sailed home from Archangel in the early 1620s, they carried Siberian skins in far greater quantities, but Barnstaple was a small port, with a merchant fleet less than a tenth the size of the capital’s, and records list only some of the fur that came home in 1628. The White Angel left Lundy on her starboard bow and sailed on to Bristol. The customs books from that town have not survived, but the White Angel carried at least three hundred pelts from the Pilgrims alone. She may have picked up still more from other English traders who were making inroads along the coast of Maine. By weight, the skins brought home by the four ships probably amounted to at least three thousand pounds, the pelts of about eighteen hundred of the beavers of Mawooshen.
At this moment, the pattern of events in North America changed fundamentally. For the Mayflower Pilgrims, the trading season of 1628 supplied the reward for eight years of effort, often apparently wasted but ultimately worthwhile. That same year, in June, they sent Standish up the coast to eject Thomas Morton by force from his base at Mount Wollaston, on the grounds that he was selling liquor and guns to the Indians: he was packed off to England to be dealt with by the Council for New England, but the affair also stopped Morton competing with the Pilgrims for the Kennebec fur trade.
Meanwhile, back home in London, when the furs were sold, it became clear that the Pilgrims had made their first outright profit, and so they met their first deadline for paying off their debts. At the same time, they found new partners in Bristol and Barnstaple. Another man whose business had suffered because of the French war was a Bristol wine merchant named Giles Elbridge, and now he joined Beauchamp, Pocock, and Sherley in extending additional credit to the Plymouth Colony. Since Elbridge was also a successful privateer, he had the cash to do so, and soon afterward he founded his own colony in Maine. In this way, the momentum created by the Pilgrims began to roll out new settlements all along the New England coast.16
Until now, the French had dominated the fur trade of the north, sending back pelts in their thousands from the posts created by Champlain on the St. Lawrence. Suddenly the English stood on the brink of a period in which, for nearly four years, they had the region to themselves. Via their trading post at Cushnoc, and the canoe routes that converged upon it, the Pilgrims had found an avenue that led in and out of the territory, dense with beaver, between the Kennebec, Chaudière, and Penobscot rivers. As we shall see, the English were about to go further, and temporarily elbow the French out of Canada entirely. By doing so, they secured not only the fur supplies of the watershed but also those of the whole St. Lawrence valley. For a while they made the Gulf of Maine an English lake.
All this made possible the Great Migration of Puritans to New Boston. But, before it could occur, a new political crisis had to intervene in England, a crisis that added extra encouragement for those who wavered on the verge of exile. As the Barnstaple ships and their seamen tied up at the quayside in the town in the autumn of 1628, they found the symptoms of the crisis all too visible around them.
Soon after Witheridge dropped anchor in the Taw, a small boat arrived carrying fifteen starving soldiers, English troops who had been trapped in La Rochelle throughout the siege. They were evacuated after the city fell to Louis XIII in October. Similar boatloads of dying men reached many other western ports, and the stories they brought with them intensified a pervasive animosity toward the Crown. On the other side of the county in Plymouth, shipowners, merchants, and mariners began to display open civil disobedience. They refused to commit their men and their hulls to any more futile efforts against the enemy across the channel.
By mishandling the war as they did, the Duke of Buckingham and King Charles laid a trail of gunpowder that led toward New England. All it needed was a lit flame, and the man who struck the match went by the name of Matthew Cradock. Mentioned only briefly by most historians, because he never visited Massachusetts and never saw his land along the Mystic, Cradock founded the new company that settled Massachusetts Bay.
Under his leadership, in the spring and summer of 1629, the company took a series of decisions that led to the voyage of John Winthrop the following year. They were based on the experience of the Plymouth Colony, because Cradock knew the Pilgrims well.
FUR, POLITICS, AND FAITH
Up to a point, Matthew Cradock resembled Thomas Weston, but the likeness was very superficial. Like the Westons, the Cradocks came from Staffordshire, where they dealt in wool and woolen cloth, and like Weston the young Matthew Cradock started his career exporting cheap textiles to France. Their names appear beside each other in the customs book for 1617. There the similarity ends, because Cradock rose to become an affluent luminary of the London scene, importing raisins and currants from the Near East. He invested in the East India Company, and he knew the fur trade, since he sat with the beaver king Ralph Freeman on the board of the Muscovy Company. In the spring of 1628, Cradock saw an opportunity to relaunch England’s fumbling ventures in America by taking over a failing enterprise that had tried to emulate the Mayflower Pilgrims.17
The enterprise in question came into existence in 1623. In that year, a group of investors from Dorset, on the south coast of England, decided to found their own Massachusetts fishing colony at Cape Ann. They too were Puritans, haberdashers, and cloth merchants, with a Calvinist preacher called John White at their head. They had a godly aim to bring the Gospel to the people whom they called Indians, but they had a political edge as well. Their number included members of Parliament, patriotic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Spanish, but their business acumen fell far short of their zeal and their national pride.
They sent too few men, in ships that were too small, and only a handful of cattle. They squabbled with the Pilgrims—Miles Standish tried to push them off their jetty in 1624—and in any event they had chosen the wrong place. It was too rocky and too windswept for an enduring post. In 1626, the leader on the spot at Cape Ann, Roger Conant, took them off twenty or thirty strong to a better site at Naumkeag, where Salem stands today. Meanwhile, the investors in England had lost heart, and so John White’s project faltered and ground to a halt.18
Not for long, however. By the time the Barnstaple men sailed off to New England, in the opening months of 1628, the business community in London had begun to see that the same place might offer solutions for their own dilemmas. They too were losing business, because of the war. So, in March, a group of London merchants including Cradock made what amounted to a takeover bid for White’s limping venture. They rebuilt it as the New England Company, with new investors and new capital from the City, and they prepared to send reinforcements to Naumkeag. In June, the Abigail left Weymouth in Dorset, a ship of 120 tons, with on board her John Endecott, whose task was to relieve and replace Conant as leader of the colony.
At last, enthusiasm about America north of the Delaware began to take hold in London. In February, even King Charles joined in, with a royal proclamation that called on parish churches to pass round the hat on Sunday to collect donations for a new colony in Casco Bay in Maine, “for the propagacon of the true religion … by converting those Ignorant people to Christianity.”19 This was also a matter of military strategy: the king had listened to men who argued that naval bases along the Gulf of Maine were essential, to protect the cod fishing grounds and resources of timber from the French and the Spanish.
Then, during the spring, as Cradock began to revive the White project, some of his near neighbors in London launched the first of two remarkable expeditions to Canada. Like John Pocock, the men concerned came from Bread Street Ward. Their leader, Gervase Kirke, lived in the parish of All Hallows. Another merchant who exported woolens to France, using the same ships as Thomas Weston, Kirke married a Frenchwoman from Dieppe. They had three sons, all of whom trained as navigators in the town. As the war shut down his relationship with France, Ki
rke became a privateer. In 1628 he saw a superb opportunity to outflank the French, by making a surprise attack on Champlain at Quebec.
Kirke and his partners fitted out three ships, led by his son Captain David Kirke, a young man of only thirty-one. He reached Canada that summer and seized the French trading post at Tadoussac. Then at the mouth of the St. Lawrence he turned to face a French squadron sent out by Richelieu.
Outnumbered by eighteen ships to three, Captain Kirke engaged the enemy closely, sank ten of the French vessels, seized the flagship and captured more than one hundred cannon. In Paris, they burned Captain Kirke in effigy, as a traitor to his mother’s homeland. But in London his victory at sea was swiftly recognized for what it was: the most successful English foray to North America since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Kirkes swiftly made plans for another, even larger effort the following year, in the spring of 1629.20
Meanwhile, as the Barnstaple ships collected their skins from the Pilgrims, and as Cradock sent the Abigail to Salem, in June 1628 the political climate became still more unsettled. When Parliament assembled, the House of Commons voted new taxes for the war, but on too small a scale. They would scarcely cover the naval budget if the ships remained in port, let alone pay for a campaign sufficient to relieve La Rochelle. While Buckingham remained at the right hand of the king, the Commons would do no more. The duke became the bottleneck for complaints of all kinds, dating back to the forced loan and before, about imprisonment without trial, about billeting, about the Turkish pirates, about the slump in trade, and about religion.
Members of Parliament began to insist, like John Preston, that if England suffered defeats, it was because the kingdom was ungodly. As the session neared an angry close, a cohort of truculent MPs accused Buckingham of a plot to subvert the Protestant faith and to carry the nation back toward the Church of Rome. The king saw no point in prolonging such nonsense as this. On June 26 he prorogued the session, with the intention of recalling Parliament later that year. To show his critics what was what, he appointed a new bishop of London, William Laud, a latter-day Richard Bancroft. A man close to the duke, Laud was likely to enforce the law strictly against any signs of Puritan dissent. The following month, Buckingham was assassinated. This brought the crisis to a head.
While Buckingham lived, he acted as a lightning conductor for Charles I. His opponents in Parliament could hurl at the duke the blame for every woe from which the kingdom suffered. Among their number were the men most likely to support a new Protestant colony in the west. A list can be made of MPs who called for Buckingham’s impeachment in 1626, and on it appear the names of six men who helped finance the early settlement of New England. But with Buckingham dead, they lost their scapegoat, and so if the same woes continued, they would find themselves driven to a much more uncomfortable conclusion: that church and state suffered from a malaise that was chronic, cancerous, and incurable. Worst of all was “the Dilligence of the Papists,” as they gnawed away at the base of a Protestant nation.
If, as seemed likely, Laud rose even further, to become archbishop of Canterbury, would he put an end to Calvinism and delete predestination from the doctrine of the Church of England? Would he, like Bancroft, begin a purge of suspect clergymen? Would he punish or dismiss the likes of John Preston, for all their learning and distinction? That too seemed likely. Men such as Pocock would lose the preachers to whom they looked for guidance, the men who maintained godly good order in the parish. Even leaving aside religion—as if anybody could—did England have a future? With its economy in ruins, “impoverished by decay of Trade,” how could its people afford Christian charity? In America, they had a charitable mission ready-made, in the duty to bring the Gospel to the Indians, just as Pocock had taken it to Merseyside, by way of Harrison’s grammar school.21
These were the views of a small Puritan minority, of course. Compared with those who stayed at home, the English who went to America were very few. And, as many historians have argued, as emigration gathered pace in the 1630s, many of those who made the crossing were not really Puritans at all, but entirely economic refugees. But in 1629 that was not the case: again, as with the Mayflower, in the beginning numbers mattered less than morale and leadership. In the spring of 1629, the motivation was a compound. Religion stood at the top of the list, but it was inseparable from politics, while business was essential to supply the wherewithal for accomplishing the task.
Parliament met on January 20 and sat for seven weeks. The king wanted money with which to fight the war, while the House of Commons wanted reform. Its members could not quite agree what they meant by the word, but the religious demand was relatively simple: they wanted legislation to defend and to safeguard the Protestant religion as it had been before Laud, Buckingham, and the king’s marriage to a French Catholic. The king would not agree, Parliament refused to grant taxes, and so the session ended. Seeing no purpose in further debate, King Charles dissolved Parliament on March 10. In doing so, he gave the last impetus required for Cradock and his colleagues to do the unavoidable and to launch a second, much larger model of the Plymouth Colony. Eleven years passed until Charles ordered a new Parliament to convene.
Six days before the dissolution, the king granted a charter to a new company to found a plantation around Massachusetts Bay. Formed by Matthew Cradock, it absorbed the settlement at Salem, and in March it began to make detailed plans for the future. On the eighteenth of the month, the Massachusetts Bay Company named Cradock as its first governor. With him in the chair, the company took its essential decisions, against a background of rising excitement about the opportunities identified by David Kirke.
On February 4, the Crown issued a patent to the Kirkes that marked another new high point in the scale of British ambition in North America. The king gave them a brief “to displant the French,” and if they could do so, then they could keep Canada as a whole. For the Kirkes, possession of the territory offered something of the highest value: “the sole trade of Beaver wools, Beaver skins, Furs, Hides & Skins of wild beasts” from Labrador inland to Lake Ontario and south to Nova Scotia. On August 20, Captain Kirke and his fleet duly captured Quebec, and with it Champlain, his Jesuit companions, his arms and ammunition, and several thousand pelts.
Until the middle of 1632, the English flag flew at Quebec, with the Kirkes standing ready to sink any French ship that approached. Eventually, they had to give back the settlement, under the terms of the treaty that ended the war, but during their period of occupation the English were free to do as they pleased on the far side of the Atlantic. The fur trade of Canada and New England belonged entirely to them. During that space of time the Great Migration began.22
Violent though they were, the Kirke expeditions demonstrated that success in North America depended on far bolder ventures than those undertaken hitherto. In reaching the same conclusion, Cradock could also draw upon the lessons taught by the arduous first decade of the Plymouth Colony. Cradock knew and trusted Isaac Allerton, who carried his letters to Endecott at Salem, by way of Barnstaple. He also knew John Pocock. In due course Pocock and three other New Plymouth investors went on to join the board of Cradock’s company.23
More clearly than anyone else, Cradock recognized that the ships sent to New England needed to be much larger, carrying settlers in parties numbering at least twice as many as the passengers on the Mayflower. Cattle had to make the journey too, numbering at least one hundred head. They had to travel with the first colonists, in order to achieve a rapid reproduction of an English diet on the other side of the Atlantic. Speed was essential, and Cradock saw fishing as a distraction: it simply did not make the required financial return.
Rather than wander the coast in search of cod, ships needed to head back to England as swiftly as possible to keep the wage bill to a minimum. On board, they had to carry the items that gave the fastest payback. They should carry fish only if the colonists had it ready and packed on the quayside. “Endevour to gett convenient howsinge, fitt to lodge as manye as you
cann,” Cradock wrote to Endecott. “And with all what bever, or other comodities, or ffishe, if the meanes to preserve it, can be gotten readie, to returne in the foresaid shippes; and likewise wood … there hath not been a better tyme for sale of tymber theise twoe seaven yeres.”24
During the summer and autumn of 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company took three essential decisions. First, on July 28, they approved the purchase of a ship called the Eagle of nearly four hundred tons, much larger than any used previously by the English in the Gulf of Maine. She was not yet available, because she was privateering in the Mediterranean, looking for Spaniards to sink, but, renamed the Arbella, she duly led the Winthrop fleet to America the following year. Still more capacity was needed, but it came within their grasp. With no new taxes from Parliament, Charles had to end the war with France one month later, in April. Soon ships committed to the war effort became free to cross the Atlantic with settlers. Then, as England became a neutral country, seaborne commerce began to thrive, as it carried cargoes for customers from every nation. In the next six years, English shipyards added ten thousand tons of new shipping, and this enabled the Great Migration to accelerate.
The second decision was made on August 29. Cradock and the assistants voted to transfer the company’s legal residence and government entirely to America. Why? One motive may have been to lessen the danger of interference by William Laud and the Crown, but another seems equally likely. They simply imitated the Plymouth Colony. It still owed money in London, but in 1626 it shook off the last ties of corporate control from the old country. It entirely ran its own affairs, and since Lyford’s departure it had done so with a tranquillity rare among the English overseas. Dual control could never work, causing only friction and disagreement between investors and settlers divided by sea crossings taking many weeks.
