However, the accusation against Claiborne was later proved false on the testimony of the Indian chiefs themselves. They said that it was actually Captain Fleet who had talked against the Marylanders—all of which might indicate that some original scheme concocted by Fleet to hang on to his Potomac trade had backfired. Father Andrew White, a restless Jesuit priest who was much involved in the fur trade with the natives as a means of supporting the Jesuits’ mission in Maryland, always insisted that Captain Fleet “had been a firebrand to inflame the Indians against us.”
The new Governor of Virginia, Sir John Harvey, also co-operated with the Marylanders. For reasons of his own he gave them cattle and supplies and assisted them against Claiborne whom he had relieved of his office as secretary. All of which was very much to the disgust of the Virginians who eventually “thrust” the governor out of office for treason to their interests and sent him packing back to England.
It was charged that Harvey had even encouraged Calvert’s men to fire on Kent Island shallops and confiscate their furs. In any case, this the Marylanders did almost from the time of their arrival in 1634, and during all the remainder of that year piracy and lawlessness ruled the Chesapeake.
Armed pinnaces out of St. Mary’s commandeered Claiborne’s smaller shallops and took his furs. His men were evicted from their traditional trading grounds with gun and sword. But the fort on Kent Island was not attacked, and the Virginians had time not only to make it more secure but to erect a second fort on another part of the island to prevent surprise. They also began building larger boats, including a pinnace called the Long Tayle, that could carry more fighting men and heavier weapons in addition to a cargo of pelts.
The Long Tayle was the first real ship built within the present boundaries of Maryland. She had a crew of twenty men. Her guns were chambers and falconets for ball shot, and murderers—the little cannon into the muzzles of which could be jammed scraps of iron, rocks, or almost anything lethal that might be handy for standing off boarding parties.
The Kent Islanders launched the hostilities in the spring of 1635 when John Butler, Claiborne’s brother-in-law, captured a Maryland boat loaded with pelts taken from Palmer’s Island. Soon after, Captain Thomas Smith went out in the Long Tayle to trade for beaver with an Indian village on the south side of the Patuxent River. Since this village was not more than half a dozen miles overland from the Maryland capital, it is not strange that Calvert learned of the Long Tayle’s presence. He promptly sent a sufficient force of soldiers to surprise the Kent Islanders and take them and their pinnace.
Captain Claiborne retaliated just as promptly. He dispatched Lieutenant Radcliffe Warren down the bay in a fast wherry, called the Cockatrice, with a vengeful crew of thirteen men. They tried to recapture the Long Tayle. However they couldn’t get at her under the guns of Calvert’s fort at St. Mary’s where she lay protected. But then, Warren heard that a Maryland pinnace, the St. Helen, was trading alone in the Pocomoke River on the Eastern Shore. So he set out after her.
Entering the Pocomoke, he sighted the Maryland pinnace and splashed a ball from his falconet beside her. She hove to quietly. He was closing in to board when, suddenly from a nearby cove, another pinnace bore down on him. Her decks were razed and her crew were presenting arms. It was the St. Margaret, Calvert’s largest boat, commanded by his chief trader and councillor, Captain Thomas Cornwallis.
Lieutenant Warren had little time to consider the probability that he was the victim of a well-laid trap. Falconets cracked out their sharp reports. Chambers barked. The surrounding marshes of the Pocomoke reverberated with the din of oaths, shots and belching murderers as the three boats became environed with fire and smoke. Warren himself was killed. Three others died in the fight, and many were wounded on both sides. Only the greater maneuverability and speed of the badly battered Cockatrice accounted for its escape back to Kent Island.
Claiborne and his men were bitter about the unexpected outcome of Warren’s expedition. They soon had an opportunity for revenge however. Just a few weeks later they learned that Cornwallis was again bartering in the Pocomoke, together with his aide, Cuthbert Fenwick, and some other well known Maryland traders. Two boats were sent this time to trap the Marylanders. Captain Thomas Smith, recently escaped from St. Mary’s and now master of the Cockatrice, went in escort with a newly enlisted Virginia pinnace under the command of Philip Taylor. They succeeded in capturing the big Maryland boat and its crew in a naval action that was later described as “felonie and piracie” by Lord Baltimore’s government.