The local competition for beaver now being almost overwhelming, the Pilgrims found it necessary to go more and more afield to meet their required quota of pelts. Excursions north to the Kennebec in Maine were the most fruitful, not only because there was much fine fur to be had from the natives there but because trading goods on occasion could be obtained from fishing and trading ships off that coast. Once, too, in exchange for corn the Pilgrims picked up four hundred pounds worth of trucking stuff from some Englishmen who were abandoning their plantation on Monhegan Island. And they acquired an additional stock of truck from a French ship which had been wrecked at Sagadahoc.
To the south along the coast they never met with much success. When they had first gone out to Narragansett Bay on a trading voyage in 1623, for instance, the Indians there disdained their meagre offerings. The Narragansett were much too happy with the goods being furnished by the Dutch traders from Manhattan. Both the Narragansett and their neighbors, the Pequot, held on to their furs for the Hollanders, and they were powerful enough to get away with it. They had Dutch guns and powder, as well as the Hollanders themselves if need be, to back them up. In fact, by 1625 the Dutch had a fortified trading post on an island in Narragansett Bay and two similar forts near-by on the mainland.
Governor Bradford, in exasperation, gave out a warning that all the region along the coast to the southeast of Plymouth was English territory. He as much as demanded that the New Netherlanders stop trading there. But it was useless. The Dutchmen simply ignored the warnings. However they did offer to enter into direct trading relations themselves with Plymouth and sent a mission there in 1627, with sugar, linen and other goods, to talk it over.
This mission was headed up by Isaack de Rasieres, the chief trader as well as the Secretary of New Netherland. Rasieres appears to have had an ulterior motive in making the visit. He brought along a stock of wampum, the strings of highly polished shell-beads that the Dutchmen had been accustomed to getting from the Narragansett and the Pequot. With wampum, Rasieres pointed out to the Pilgrims, he had been doing a great business among Indians who didn’t have the means of manufacturing it, especially along the Hudson River where Henry Hudson himself had first discovered strings of shell-beads circulating as a kind of money.
The Hollander cannily suggested that wampum might be used to just as great advantage on the Kennebec by the Pilgrims. No doubt, by this means, he hoped to direct their attention more to Maine and away from the Dutch trading preserves in Long Island Sound and the Narragansett country. Offering to sell wampum to the Englishmen at a fair price, probably he hoped also to keep them from dealing direct for it with the Narragansett and the Pequot.
Although the Pilgrim fathers were a bit suspicious of Rasieres’ motives, nevertheless they did find the shell-money to be most “vendable” on the Kennebec. So much so, in fact, that in a very short time with the aid of this medium of exchange they were enabled to cut off the fur trade of that region from the fishermen and other independent traders who had been accustomed to barter there. In the meantime they also developed their own sources of wampum among some of the Massachusetts coastal tribes who, as it turned out, also possessed the means of manufacturing it.
The Pilgrims secured their rights up the Kennebec River by obtaining a patent to a strip of land fifteen miles wide on both sides of that river. They built a trucking house at Cushenoc (Augusta) which they kept stocked with coats, shirts, rugs, blankets, corn, biscuit, peas, prunes, and other supplies. With the help of wampum for exchange they drove a brisk trade among the Abnaki Indians in those parts. In 1630 they extended their operations even farther north, setting up a trading post on the Penobscot River at Pentagoet, now Castine, Maine.
The Penobscot trading post originated as a private venture for which the Pilgrim, Isaac Allerton, along with some partners in England promoted a patent. Allerton, once a London tailor, had risen in prominence at Plymouth in New England to stand second only to the governor. It would appear that he and his overseas partners shared the rights to trade in the territory north of the Kennebec with other leading Pilgrims in return for the loan of wampum, shallops, supplies and servants.
But the partnership accounts became jumbled, because of Allerton’s financial deceits according to the Pilgrims. And Edward Ashley, the “profane young man” sent out from England as factor, didn’t help things by his personal conduct.