It may be asked why the “Undertakers” were willing to saddle themselves with such a responsibility. The answer is their sense of obligation to their old friends in Leyden, as well as their fidelity to the London merchants. Most of the former adventurers had so opposed sending over any more people from Leyden that the beloved Pastor Robinson prophetically, before his death, looked for no further help until means came from Plymouth itself. The first example of such aid would cost the partnership £500, the amount paid for the emigration in 1629 of what was a welcome but “weak” addition to the colony.
Three London merchants agree to continue as Plymouth’s partners
It was extremely important to tap resources of English credit to secure new working capital for the trade. It might have to be borrowed at rates as high as 30–50%, instead of the 6–8% Sherley reported as current for English business loans in 1628. This explains why Allerton was sent to London to persuade the former treasurer of the company, Sherley, and others in England to join the “Undertakers” as partners. Together with Sherley, John Beauchamp and Richard Andrews consented to the proposal. One immediate result was that Sherley forebore collection of £50 he had lent at 30% two years earlier, and induced John Beauchamp and Richard Andrews to do the same for goods they had provided while the negotiations were in progress. At Bradford’s request, Sherley and Beauchamp were designated as factors to receive the furs shipped to London, while Allerton, long since Bradford’s right hand as chief of the assistants in the colony, continued to act as business agent of the “Undertakers.”[36]
The Pilgrims encounter difficulties in the fur trade
Under skillful and energetic management the Plymouth traders soon succeeded in expanding their collection of pelts from the Indians. The trade in furs had begun in 1621, when Squanto guided the Pilgrims’ shallop to the Massachusetts Indians. Unluckily, the first return to England of two hogsheads, estimated to be worth about £400, was captured in the Fortune. In fact, a considerable quantity of what was collected in the first years never reached England at all and thus produced no credit for the colony. Instead, Weston’s malice was all they got for 170 pounds of beaver lent him on his arrival in 1623. Another part of their precious hoard of skins paid some fishermen for raising the Little James, while Turkish pirates seized an additional 800 pounds on its way to England in 1625. Finally, the colony purchased with beaver about £500 worth of trading goods, including Biscay rugs, from a wrecked ship they learned was for sale at Monhegan.
After the joint stock company had broken up, Standish took £277 worth of beaver with him to pay Sherley. A large haul of 700 pounds was the result of a single autumn voyage to the Kennebec, purchased, remarkably enough, with home-grown corn. No lack of energy on the part of the Plymouth traders had prevented returns, but scarcity of the kind of English trading goods, such as hatchets, knives, and trading cloth, which the Indians wanted. In the early stages such goods had to be bought from passing vessels. On at least one occasion valuable coat beaver, which Bradford expected to bring about 20s. per pound in England, was sold to these at 3s. a pound, in exchange for beads and knives.
As the “Undertakers” took over management, it was evident that numerous competing trading posts, settled up and down the New England coast, were beginning to cut into Plymouth’s sources of fur and to raise the price the Indians demanded for it. The scapegrace, Thomas Morton of Merrymount, in particular, aroused their ire by selling the natives the forbidden articles, liquor, guns, and powder. On top of this, his introduction of such pastimes as setting up a May Pole and “drinking and ... dancing and frisking together” with Indian maidens so seriously offended their religious sensibilities that they sent Captain Standish to evict Morton in 1628.
In the early stages of the fur trade, transportation presented considerable difficulty. Shallops or open boats were used at first, but a small vessel was needed to coast in and out of the little harbors for several weeks at a time, carrying a few traders and their supplies. To provide for this, an ingenious house carpenter lengthened one of the shallops and built a deck, affording a hold for long voyages in the winter.[37]
The “Undertakers” now decided to build a pinnace on the Manomet River, twenty miles south of Plymouth, and to erect there a permanent trading house of hewn oak planks, furnished with trading goods and in the care of two men the year round. Aptucxet was the name of their first post; it was located so strategically in relation to Buzzard’s Bay that its site is at the edge of the modern passage, the Cape Cod Canal. In the seventeenth century a short overland portage, probably accomplished in about six hours, took one across the neck of the Cape from a few miles up the Scusset River, entered from Cape Cod Bay, and thus avoided the hazards of sea passage around the Cape.
Just at this time the Pilgrims took advantage of a new contact. Responding to earlier Dutch offers to trade for beaver, Governor Bradford invited Isaack de Rasieres, the chief merchant in New Amsterdam, to pay a visit. The portly burgher arrived at the Aptucxet post in October 1627 and came ashore “accompanied with a noise of trumpeters.” Finding the journey overland to Plymouth too far to walk, he requested that a small boat be sent for him, visited the little town, and in due course wrote a description of it. The intercourse thus opened with the Dutch plantation at the mouth of the Hudson lasted several years. It not only offered the Pilgrims desirable goods, such as sugar, linen cloth, and other stuffs, but in the long run greatly enhanced the colony’s opportunities for Indian trade by selling them a quantity of wampum. This valuable native shell money, made by the Narragansetts, now promoted gainful dealings with the Abnakis of the Kennebec country and other tribes. De Rasieres felt it necessary to justify his selling the Pilgrims the first fifty fathom of sewan (wampum) by saying that he hoped to keep them from seeking it themselves at its source of manufacture and so discovering the profitable fur trade inland. He must have meant by this the trade with the Iroquois the Dutch had tapped through their control of the Hudson River, or that of the upper Connecticut Valley.[38]