Pring was more interested in sassafras trees, but he later wrote that the furs of certain wild beasts in those parts “being hereafter purchased by exchange may yield no smal gaine to us. Since as we are certainly informed, the Frenchmen brought from Canada the value of thirtie thousand Crownes in the yeare 1604. Almost in Bevers and Otters skinnes only.”
A great deal of sassafras was cut and stowed aboard their ships by these two captains. Sassafras brought fancy prices at the time as a cure for the French pox as well as a specific for certain other diseases. But such windfall importations glutted the London and Bristol markets, seriously depressing the price.
Both Gosnold and Pring brought back the usual tales about a passage to the South Sea and the fertility of the land. So Captain George Weymouth went over in 1605, visiting the Maine coast where he explored for colonization sites. He also drove a good though hazardous trade for pelts. In one instance, “for knives, glasses, combes and other trifles to the valew of foure or five shillings, we had 40 good Beavers skins, Otters skins, Sables, and other small skins which we knewe not how to call.”
These were the interlopers who had alarmed the French traders then settled in the Bay of Fundy. Before Weymouth left Maine, Champlain was making his own exploration southward along the coast as far as Cape Cod. He learned enough to decide that all the English ventures had been failures. They had discovered no mines, no passage, and, although they had made a temporary camp or two, no colony was yet planted. Obviously, the Frenchman surmised, the English had found nothing of great value to the south or they would be trying to occupy that coast. Champlain turned back, convinced that the best prospects lay in the valley of the St. Lawrence.
But then, late in 1606, three small ships put down the Thames, bound for America. Aboard, in addition to the crews, were a hundred or more men committed to colonizing an English plantation in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay. One of these was Captain John Smith, soldier and adventurer extraordinary—and, fortunately, a forthright man who spoke his mind.
VI
Captain John Smith Takes to Trade
When Captain John Smith arrived in America early in 1607 he was but freshly turned twenty-seven years of age. And he was in serious trouble—a prospect for the gibbet, in fact, because of alleged treason. On the voyage over he had plotted to supplant those in charge, or so it was charged by his enemies in the expedition.
But, when the sealed instructions from the London Company were opened that spring in Virginia, it was learned that John Smith himself was to be a member of the council in the government of the colony. In the end he had to be given his rightful position of authority at Jamestown where the colony was planted.
It had always been thus with young Smith. By just such amazing experiences he had succeeded in raising himself from the status of a poor tenant farmer’s son in Lincolnshire to that of soldier and “gentleman.”