The next day Taylor was in the Potomac River for a try at recapturing the Long Tayle. He carried what might be described as a letter of marque and reprisal given him by William Claiborne. The Marylanders, however, turned the tables on him. They captured Taylor along with his pinnace.
But in the meantime Governor Harvey had been placed under arrest by the Virginia Council and put on a ship for England. When Claiborne arrived from Kent Island late in May of 1635 with news of the bloody encounters on the bay, the acting governor, John West, at once sent a mission to St. Mary’s to apprize Calvert of Harvey’s arrest and to demand that the Marylanders “desist their violent proceedings.”
Leonard Calvert took pause at this unexpected development. His younger brother, George, as well as his councillor, Jerome Hawley, had been contending all along that Claiborne had some right on his side. Violence was certainly not accomplishing anything. Maybe, Calvert may have conjectured, his brother in England could do better through the courts.
So it came about that the mission was successful in imposing a truce on Maryland that lasted for two years. Prisoners and confiscated boats were exchanged. Claiborne, now married and settled with his family, was left unmolested in the possession of his island home and undisturbed in his trading activities. Another windmill was built, and another church, better to serve the two growing communities on Kent Island. Besides an enormous number of pelts traded locally for private accounts and for the maintenance of the plantation, furs to the value of 4,000 pounds sterling were shipped to England for the company partners there.
But then, Captain Claiborne found it necessary to go to England, for Lord Baltimore had powerful friends. It looked as if he might get a legal decision against the Virginians through the Lords Commissioners of Plantations. Claiborne turned over all his operations to a partner who had recently arrived from England representing the joint-stock company, and went to London to fight for his rights. No sooner had he left however than this partner, one George Evelin, managed to betray Kent Island into the hands of his enemies.
Although the main fort was traitorously delivered up, the island was not yielded quietly or easily. Repeated military expeditions to subdue the inhabitants were made by Leonard Calvert before Captain Thomas Smith and others were finally captured in 1638 and hanged as pirates and rebels. Claiborne himself, in absentia, was attainted by the Maryland Assembly of the “grievous crimes of pyracie and murther,” and “all his lands and tenements, goods and chattels” were forfeited to the Lord Proprietary. Evelin took his share of the loot, even digging up some of Claiborne’s fruit trees and transplanting them to the manor that Lord Baltimore granted him near St. Mary’s in payment for his services.
In another few years, due to continued disturbances, Kent Island was to be laid waste without hope of recovery, the mill and the forts destroyed, its former population scattered abroad.
Soldiers armed with ordnance taken from Kent were also sent in 1638 to Palmer’s Island in the Susquehanna River where they “utterly ruined” the plantation and reduced the palisaded fort which had been built there the previous year. They seized all of Claiborne’s goods and chattels. Leonard Calvert himself, following the expedition, triumphantly supervised the conversion of this trade outpost to “Fort Conquest” of Maryland. The spoils were divided. Claiborne’s bonded servants, cattle and other goods at Palmer’s Island went to John Lewger, Secretary of Maryland. His books were sequestered by a petty officer, as was a wooden chest belonging to the unfortunate Captain Tom Smith.
Gone was the “Plantation in the Sasquesahonoughs Country” at the mouth of the river, for which Captain Claiborne had been willing to pay the king a rental of fifty pounds sterling a year including rights “to the head of the said River, and to the Grand Lake of Canada to be held in fee from the Crown of England.” In fact, forever gone was the “greate trade of beaver and other furrs which Claiborne might have had with the mountayn Indians which live upon the lakes of the river of Canada.”
The Marylanders carried on a profitable local fur trade, in spite of Indian disturbances, for some years. But they were no threat to the French or the Dutch as they were never successful in tapping the northern lake-country trade on the backside of Virginia through either the valley of the Susquehanna or the Potomac. Their relations with the Indians were not up to it, and they were more inclined to agricultural pursuits anyway.