Pelts and palisades: The story of fur and the rivalry for pelts in early America

by Nathaniel C. Hale

The Englishmen living already in America, in southern Virginia, were more concerned about the Catholic Spaniards to the south of them than about a few Dutch traders on an unknown river to the north. Jamestown had been planted by the London Company with very much the same objects that Raleigh had in mind when he planted Roanoke—a threat to New Spain among other things. While the colony was young and relatively weak, therefore, the Virginians lived in constant dread of themselves being surprised and destroyed by the Spaniards.

Their neighbors in the south had a reputation for making short shrift of heretics or any foreign colonies that might endanger Florida or Spanish silver fleets. Some years earlier several hundred Huguenots from France who planted a colony on the southern coast had been butchered to the last man in a surprise attack.

Indeed, the Virginians’ fears were well founded. The Spanish admiralty more than once nursed just such an action against the “English pirates’ nest” on the James River. That they didn’t attack was probably due to their own increasing vulnerability, for the Spanish star had been in decline since the destruction of the Armada.

To the north, the Virginians had mainly been concerned about the French. The northern boundary of English “Virginia,” the 45th parallel, cut through the Bay of Fundy, but the Frenchmen failed to observe this delineation of the border. Whereas Dutch interlopers might be passed off as no more than individual traders who could be ousted at will, the government-backed traders of New France, firmly entrenched as they were in the far north, needed special watching.

There was no English colony in those parts to forestall serious French encroachment. The Plymouth Company had failed in its mission to settle a plantation in northern Virginia.

It had been with the hope of finding gold or a trade route to the Indian sea, or in lieu of that at least an outlet for English woolens, that King James granted charters in 1606 to the London Company and the Plymouth Company. The merchants of these two joint-stock trading companies were to settle southern and northern Virginia respectively, thus driving an English wedge of actual occupation between the vast territorial claims of New Spain and New France. Under the direction of Sir Thomas Smith of the London Company the southern colony, Jamestown, was successfully planted. But in the north, on the border of French Canada, the colonists sent over by the Plymouth Company failed. They were too much in love with “El Dorado.”

There had been an unusually good prospect of trade in furs to tide over the Plymouth Company’s plantation until it could become permanently rooted by agriculture. Gosnold, Pring, Weymouth—all had predicted the success of such a venture. But colonization failed. There was no John Smith at Sagadahoc.

The settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec in Maine was made in 1607, only a few months after the colonists of the London Company planted themselves at Jamestown. The Sagadahoc venturers came in two ships, mainly supplied by Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the Plymouth Company and backed by the special patronage of another great merchant adventurer, Chief Justice Sir John Popham. They built a palisaded fort which they called Saint George, a storehouse and a church, and fifteen dwellings. And their carpenters under the supervision of a shipwright named Digby constructed a thirty-ton pinnace, the Virginia, which crossed the ocean to England and came back later to Jamestown in the service of the Virginia Company.

Except for these few noteworthy accomplishments, however, everything went wrong at Sagadahoc. Fire destroyed most of the buildings and few survived the bitter cold of the first winter. George Popham, the president of the colony and a nephew of the chief patron, died. Trouble with French traders on the coast operating out of the Bay of Fundy was a source of much uneasiness, especially after a prominent French captain wintering at St. Croix was waylaid by the Englishmen and released only on his promise never again to trade for pelts in those parts. The weakened defenders of Fort St. George lived in fear of a surprise French attack—of bloody retaliation.