Cecil, Lord Baltimore, in fact laid much stress on the fur trade in his instructions to Leonard, consigning to his brother for his own account in trade with the natives a quantity of trucking stuff consisting of “coarse freeze, small groce glass beads, box, Ivorye, and horne Combes, brass kettles, axes, hoes, hawkes bells, and sheffeeld knives.” Before the palisaded fort at St. Mary’s was completed, the Maryland pinnace, Dove, was sent out to follow the “trade of beaver through all parts of the precincts of this province.”
Under Cyprian Thorowgood, Lord Baltimore’s traders paid a visit to the Virginians’ trading post on Palmer’s Island, which was manned by an interpreter named John Fullwood and a negro slave. However, the men from St. Mary’s “had a little falling out with the Indians” who never did take well to them. When Thorowgood threatened a small Kent Island shallop he found trading there, the Indians showed signs of siding with the Virginians and in the end the shallop was permitted to depart with its load of skins.
Although the Kent Islanders had taken in 3,000 skins during the first part of the 1634 season, the Marylanders, due to the lateness of their arrival that spring, took altogether “only 298, weighing 451 pounds, together with 53 muskrat and 17 other skins.”
Even so, Leonard Calvert was much encouraged, and he sent out shallops for more skins late in May. He also wrote home that he was certain that he could obtain a large part of the trade of the “Massawomecks” (Iroquois) who, he said, dwelt ten days journey to the north and had formerly traded with the Kirkes in Canada. He urged however that much more trucking stuff be sent over as “there is nothing does more endanger the loss of commerce with the Indians than want of truck to barter with them.”
The site of Calvert’s capital near the mouth of the Potomac River was an old trading ground of Virginia traders, including Claiborne, Fleet and Harmar. Once, Harmar had outwitted Fleet there to the tune of three hundredweight of beaver, when he persuaded the Yowaccomoco Indians to let him have the skins they were holding for his rival by telling them that Fleet was dead. The trick worked so well in fact that Harmar then went up the river spreading the report that Captain Fleet was dead, with the result that he made “an unexpected trade for the time, at a small charge, having gotten fifteen hundredweight of beaver, and cleared fourteen towns.”
Up the Potomac were the important towns of the Piscattaways. Beyond them lived the Anacostans who once held Henry Fleet captive and with whom he later traded. The Anacostans, like the Susquehannocks, were blood relatives of the Iroquois. But they too were now castoff and acted as buffers between the war-like Five Nations and the Algonquin tribes to the south. Through the Anacostans, Fleet hoped to make contacts with the Iroquois, tap the Canada trade, and drain it down the backside of Virginia through the Potomac River. He had run into trouble, however, due to the jealousies of the Piscattaways and others in the lower valley who didn’t want to be bypassed. They had no objection to acting as middlemen, but they objected to the white men taking their truck up the valley and dealing directly with their enemies.
Fleet’s problems were further complicated by the arrival of the Marylanders. It would appear that as a means of protecting his trade interests in the Potomac valley, he associated himself with them in the fur trade, agreeing to pay the ten percent tax demanded by the proprietary on all skins acquired from the Indians.
This, of course, William Claiborne and other Virginians would not agree to do.
When Captain Claiborne refused to submit to Lord Baltimore or to pay the tax on skins, he found himself accused of having incited the Indians against the Maryland settlement on the Potomac. Henry Fleet, it turned out, was the instrument of this accusation. Possibly he was hoping in this way to hasten the elimination of his major competitor for the backside trade.