So Argall was dispatched north again, this time to rout the French from the Bay of Fundy. On the way, he destroyed all vestiges of French occupation at Mt. Desert Island and at St. Croix; then he surprised Port Royal with the help of Father Biard who appears to have acted as his guide ashore. Coming upon the fort-like settlement at a time when most of the inhabitants were busy in the fields, Argall burned their houses and plundered their stores, leaving the Frenchmen almost destitute on the eve of winter.
The destruction was so complete that Sieur de Poutrincourt, who arrived from France in the spring, decided to collect what furs he could and transport his people back to France.
Madame deGuercheville gave up too. She attempted no new colony, contenting herself with protestations to the English king. But James let it be known that the Virginia Company was well within its rights, and there the matter ended.
Although Saint Just did return to Port Royal later to act as factor for some independent La Rochelle fur merchants and although young Dupont-Grave wintered at St. Croix on occasion to maintain desultory barter with the savages there, the French fur trade was now restricted in the main to the St. Lawrence Valley and the hinterland. Argall had effectually checked the advance south on the coast into the territory claimed by the English—for the time being.
Traffic on the “Northern Virginia” coast, below the Bay of Fundy, now fell almost exclusively into the hands of the English—except, of course, for that which the Dutchmen were pursuing in the vicinity of the Hudson River.
There is the relation in an uncorroborated promotional tract of the time that Captain Argall, in the late fall of 1613 on his return from Port Royal, stopped off at Manhattan where he is said to have caused the few Dutch traders he found there to submit to the English king and the government at Jamestown. If so, he no doubt took whatever furs they had as tribute and probably made other arrangements calculated to benefit his private purse. Samuel Argall, later knighted, was to become notorious for such devices.
But if the Dutch traders, reflectively smoking their pipes, acceded to his demands while the guns of the Treasurer pointed at their huts, they lost little time in expanding their beaver trade along the eastern and northern coasts once the hot-headed Englishman left. The very next spring they began the prosecution of a highly profitable business in and about Long Island Sound, up the valley of the Connecticut, and in the Narragansett country. The Indians as far east as Buzzard’s Bay acquired special longings for Dutch sugar, liquor, ornaments, cloth and firearms, and the Hollanders were able to maintain a virtual monopoly on this trade for some years.
Captain John Smith didn’t see anything of these Dutch competitors when he visited northern Virginia in 1614. But then he traded along the coasts no farther south than Cape Cod. The only foreigners he encountered were a couple of poaching French ships bartering with the Indians for pelts some forty leagues below the mouth of the Kennebec River.
Being recovered from his wound and being much interested in planting an English colony in the north, Captain Smith had helped promote enough capital to supply two ships for this voyage. Of course the venture’s immediate object was not colonization. No money could have been raised for that. Rather it was to “Take whales and make tryalls of a Myne of Gold and Copper,” Smith said. “If those failed, Fish and Furres was then our refuge.”
The venturers discovered no mines. And, although there were plenty of whales in sight, they weren’t able to catch any. The English hadn’t yet learned to whale. So, while the sailors turned to fishing, John Smith set out with eight or nine men in a shallop to investigate the country, to map the bays and rivers, and to trade with the natives—in preparation for the colonization he secretly planned.