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 £5 each, and horses at £10 each. The goods rate increased after a time.
That the oversea rates were remunerative is manifest from the increase in the number of ships finding employment in the trade. In 1635 the Secretary to the Admiralty learned that forty ships were regularly employed in the trade, of which "six sail of ships, at least" belonged to the Americans.
The profits in the trade on owners' account were also recorded. In 1636 Thomas Mayhew and John Winthrop, Jr., as partners, sent a vessel to the Bermudas, then called the Summer Islands, where she sold corn and pork and bought oranges, lemons, and potatoes. Perhaps that was the first importation of Bermuda potatoes. The profit on the venture was "twenty od pounds."
The Richmond, a 30-ton vessel, built by Winter at Richmond Island, Maine, carried 6000 pipe-staves from the island to England, where they were sold at a profit of a little over £25 per thousand.
An idea of the profits on some of the voyages "eastward" to trade with the Indians can be had from the records of the Pilgrims, who, with their shallops, became experts in that line. Between 1631 and 1636, inclusive, the Pilgrims bought and shipped 12,150 pounds of beaver skins and 1156 of otter. "Ye parcells of beaver came to little less than 10,000 li. [pounds]. And ye otter skins would pay all ye charges," as Governor Bradford wrote. As otter skins sold for from 14 to 15s. a pound, "ye charges" in a business that gave a profit of "little less than £10,000" did not exceed £867. And this profit was made, although the Pilgrims had to buy some of their trade goods on credit and pay 40 per cent interest per annum on the sum thus borrowed.
It was at this period of the history of the American merchant marine that Captain Thomas Wiggin, an observing shipmaster from Bristol, England, wrote a letter about the New Englanders, in which he said:—
"The English, numbering about two thousand, and generally most industrious, have done more in three years than others in seven times that space, and at a tenth of the expense."