Cornelis Jacobsen May explored south again that very summer. He even entered the James River. Then he revisited the cape he had first sighted a few years earlier and which now bears his name. Entering Delaware Bay this time however, he charted its shores, and following in Hendricksen’s path he ascended the river to trade and more thoroughly investigate it also.
By the following year, 1621, the English ambassador at The Hague was before the States General calling attention to the trespassers on “English” territory in America. But his protests received scant hearing. The lowlanders’ grand design for the west was now in process of completion—the West India Company had been chartered—and a government for New Netherland was being organized. Already an official seal for the new province in America had been engraved, the figure of a beaver, fittingly enough, its central theme.
In the meantime however part of the Dutch claim had been occupied by some refugee Englishmen who were determined to stay in America. The Pilgrims had planted the first permanent settlement on the coast of New England.
IX
The Pilgrims Rely on God and Beaver
The first permanent settlement made by the English on the northern coasts of America owed its success to traffic in pelts.
Almost from the very beginning in the winter of 1620-21 the Plymouth plantation was a fur-trading post, depending on beaver and otter skins for the maintenance of its inhabitants. And, as Edward Channing has put it, “In the end what saved the Plymouth colony from extinction and gave the settlers a chance to repay the London merchants for their advances was a well managed fur trade.”
Governor William Bradford himself recognized that the fur trade was vital to the survival of his people in New England, saying “there was no other means to procure them food which they so much wanted and clothes also.”
This was only too true. Not only did a vicious system of communalistic enterprise retard the production of food at Plymouth but the merchant adventurers in England who backed the plantation insisted that time-consuming agricultural activities be curtailed to a minimum, promising to send over the needed food. In return for financing the venture they wanted quick returns that could be gotten only from fish and fur. Since the Plymouth colonists were never too successful at fishing, in fact ill equipped for that pursuit, they had to depend on the export of pelts to keep the merchants happy and to wangle supplies and trucking goods enough to keep themselves alive.
Even with the help of the fur trade, however, this brave little band of Brownist Separatists probably would not have survived the rigors of the climate and the harsh New England coast except for the impelling religious motive that brought them to America in the first place.