([Larger])

TIERA DE AYLLON
TIERA DE ESTEVA GOMEZ
TIERA NOVA: DE CORTEREAI

Map of the North American Coast, a portion of the World Map made by Diego Ribero in 1529, showing the results of the explorations of Estevan Gomez in 1525

Reproduced from the Map Collection, Yale University Library

Inevitably the tremendous growth of all this free-lance commercial shipping, in the fur trade and fisheries, must lead to attempts to organize it either into colonial administrations under government control, or business companies privately financed. Everyone could see that permanent bases were needed in the New World. International quarrels and actual piracy were already appearing in the Newfoundland fisheries. Sir Humphrey Gilbert determined to make Newfoundland an English colony. But in 1583 his well-organized expedition came to grief by shipwreck. His half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, renewed the attempt, this time at Roanoke in the Carolinas, but was unable to maintain the colony’s supply, once it was established. The project failed. But the idea was right, and men in England like Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt, the historian of English voyages, kept preaching the necessity of overseas colonies. Similar ideas were growing in the western ports of France.

The turn of the century marked the beginning of a concerted campaign on the part of both France and England to establish plantations in New England. The first move was made by a group of free-lance English merchants who in 1602 sent out Bartholomew Gosnold on a commercial voyage with thirty-two men in the bark Concord. Its objective was twofold, to get sassafras (a medication thought to be “of sovereigne vertue for the French poxe”) and to establish an outpost somewhere in the area described by Verrazano seventy-five years before. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s son Bartholomew was among the company. After brief landings on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, the expedition built a hut on the islet in the pond on Cuttyhunk Island in Buzzards Bay, there traded with the Indians, cut a cargo of sassafras root and cedarwood, and after a minor altercation with the natives pulled up stakes and sailed back to England with two enthusiastic narratives of the country and its commodities.

Less than nine months later, and obviously because of the success of the Gosnold voyage, a new expedition of two vessels, Speedwell and Discoverer, with forty-four men and boys, sailed to Massachusetts from Bristol under command of Martin Pring, a Devonshire skipper. This voyage was instigated by Richard Hakluyt, together with some merchants of Bristol. Robert Salterne, pilot of the Gosnold voyage, was assistant to Pring. Deliberately avoiding the long sail around Cape Cod, Pring entered Massachusetts Bay, coasted its North Shore looking for sassafras, and finding none, sailed across to “a certaine Bay, which we called Whitson Bay.” It had a “pleasant Hill thereunto adjoyning,” and a “Haven winding in compasse like the Shell of a Snaile,” with twenty fathoms at the entrance, and seven fathoms at the land-locked anchorage. Here was a “sufficient quantitie of Sassafras.” This was Plymouth Harbor in 1603.

Ashore, Pring’s men built a “small baricado” or watchtower and kept it manned with sentinels while the crew worked in the woods. They also took ashore with them two great mastiff dogs, of whom the Indians were mortally afraid. Indians appeared in considerable numbers, “at one time one hundred and twentie at once.” One of the crew delighted the natives by playing a guitar and they sang and “danced twentie in a ring” about him and gave him gifts of tobacco, tobacco pipes, snakeskin girdles and “Fawnes skinnes.” They had black and yellow bows, and prettily decorated quivers of rushes filled with long feathered arrows. They used birch-bark canoes “where of we brought one to Bristoll.” Their gardens were planted with tobacco, pumpkins, cucumbers and corn. The men wore breech clouts, and feathers in their knotted hair; the women “Aprons of Leather skins before them down to the knees, and a Bears skinne like an Irish Mantle over one shoulder.”

([Larger])