For the next three or four years the Plymouth plantation was engaged in hand-to-mouth expedients to squeeze enough revenue from the fur trade to meet the demands of its economy.
All of this was made the more trying because of the evils of the communalistic system under which the colony was operated. A first step toward the private ownership of land was taken in 1623, when each man was permitted to set a little corn “for his owne perticuler,” but it was some years before this reform was fully realized. However, of more concern to the Pilgrims was the increasing pressure from a variety of English competitors for the fur trade along the coast.
Always a bit disturbing had been the freebooting interlopers who operated along the coasts, particularly in Maine. These Englishmen, bartering generously with trinkets, colored cloth and ironware, were also not averse to trading guns and powder with the Indians, a practice frowned upon by the king.
Partly because of the trade in firearms, but mainly because the freebooters were cutting into the monopoly of the august Council for New England, that body obtained a royal proclamation forbidding trade in furs and fish without a license. As it turned out however the merchants were unsuccessful in enforcing the edict. Captain Francis West, the Admiral of New England, who was sent out to stop the trespassing returned only to report that he found the traders to be “stuborne fellows.”
In the meantime a number of patents and licenses were being granted through the Council for New England along the northern coast.
Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, as adventurers, were granted the “Province of Maine,” all the land lying between the Merrimac and the Kennebec Rivers. As early as 1623 David Thompson, “a Scottish gentleman,” went out with a few servants and established a fur-trading post at the mouth of the Piscataqua, near the present site of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Said to have been accompanied by his wife and children, he “built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarily with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians....” Thompson nevertheless carried on a flourishing business with the natives for otter and beaver, as did Christopher Levett who built a fort-like emporium for the same kind of military commerce in Casco Bay the following year.
More obvious competitors to the Pilgrims had been getting footholds in the country of the Massachusetts Indians. Samuel Maverick had a palisaded trading post on Noddle’s Island (East Boston) wherein he mounted “four murtherers to protect him from the Indians.” Under the muzzles of these wicked little cannon he drove a most profitable private trade. And David Thompson himself moved to Boston Bay in 1626, building a truck house on the island which ever since has been known by his name.
Although these more or less distant and individual competitors cut into the Plymouth Colony’s business to some degree, they were not exactly strangling the economy and they were not neighbors in the bothersome sense. However, the Pilgrims viewed with real alarm all attempts of English traders to establish themselves in the near-by lower end of Boston Bay. That, they judged, belonged to them and was necessary to their survival as well as their cherished privacy.
Their one-time friend, Thomas Weston, had been the first to try to plant a trading post there, at Wessagusset, in 1622. Weston, who had sold out his interest in the Plymouth Plantation, first sent over some men to trade for his “perticuler,” that is, not for the plantation’s account. Shortly afterward he obtained a patent to plant a colony of his own at the lower end of Boston Bay.
The colony his men established at Wessagusset, now Weymouth, was entirely too close to the Pilgrims for their comfort, not only because it forthwith severed a major artery of their fur trade but because it put the pinch on Plymouth for food. Weston’s “rude fellers” were more interested in consorting with Indian squaws, according to the Pilgrims, than in grubbing for their own food. Also, disturbingly enough in itself, these newcomers setting themselves down as near neighbors were Anglicans.