But unfortunately, as they later learned, the Fortune was intercepted by a French privateer before she reached England and all her cargo confiscated!
Long before this first supply ship came to Plymouth the Pilgrims had been in want of food. Their meal was gone, and other rations were rapidly dwindling under their communalistic system. But when the ship arrived it brought only letters of gratuitous counsel from their merchant backers in England and more “hungrie bellies” to be fed. There was practically nothing aboard in the way of food and clothing or truck for barter with the savages.
Already half-starved, the colonists were in really dire straits as winter approached. Many of them sickened and death stalked the huts and cottages at Plymouth. With Indian alarms and unaccountable fires creating a general state of anxiety, fear and suspicion lay heavy on those who lived. Probably the only thing that prevented a complete collapse was the diversion brought about by enforced labor on strengthening the fortifications of the plantation.
Before the first snow, the Narragansett tribe which had not suffered from the plague boldly sent in a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin. It was an open challenge to war. The Pilgrims were plucky enough to replace the arrows with bullets and send the snakeskin back to the Narragansett, but they were nevertheless thoroughly frightened and hastened to palisade their fort and buildings with a strong wall of high pales.
Relations with the natives was under constant strain. Most of the early commerce with them for pelts and food was a bloody business. But, as explosive and unprincipled as was the red-headed little military captain, Miles Standish, it was Squanto who caused much of the trouble.
It seems that the Indian interpreter was overly ambitious to become a great sachem and seized on any opportunity to eliminate a red rival to his pretensions by provoking hostilities. Captain Standish never did like Squanto, and Bradford himself later stated that the interpreter “sought his own ends and played his own game, by putting the Indians in fear and drawing gifts from them to enrich himself, making them believe he could stir up war against whom he would, and make peace with whom he would.”
Although some temporary relief in the matter of food could be obtained from trading and fishing boats off the Maine coast and by other local expedients, it was plain for all to see that the economy, indeed the very existence of Plymouth, depended on fur. Fishing had failed completely as a source of income. Only as a fur-trading post could the plantation be maintained, for only by the export of pelts could sufficient supplies and trading goods be obtained and the debt to the merchant adventurers paid off. So, in the spring of 1622, an expedition went out once more to the Massachusetts and commerce of a sort was resumed—along with hostilities. Some few pelts were thus obtained by the Pilgrims in spite of their almost total lack of trading goods.
But then came a “providence of God.” A trading ship, coasting the shores from Virginia to New England, came into the harbor with a large store of English beads and knives aboard.
The captain, however, drove a hard bargain with the desperate colonists. Shrewdly sensing the situation, he hiked the prices of his trading goods; in fact, he “would sell none but at dear rates and also a good quantity together.” The Pilgrims were forced to buy, paying away their store of coat-beaver at three shillings per pound which, as it happened, “in a few years after yielded twenty shillings.” Still, by this means, they were fitted again to barter for beans and corn—and more beaver.