In 1629 Sir George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, visited Jamestown seeking a new refuge for a Catholic colony. A former Secretary of State under James I, Calvert resigned office following his conversion to Catholicism. During the early 1620s he established a small outpost on Newfoundland, where he settled with his wife and family in 1628. Defeated by the ‘sadd face of wynter’, he sought an alternative location in Chesapeake Bay. Robert Beverley subsequently noted that the settlers ‘looked upon him with an evil Eye, on account of his Religion’. Despite the hostile reception, on his return to England he secured royal approval for the creation of another colony in the Bay, named Maryland, in honour of Charles I's French wife, Henrietta Maria. Although Calvert died in April 1632, shortly before the charter for the settlement passed under the royal seal, his son Cecil, second Lord Baltimore, proceeded with the venture. By this ‘unhappy Accident’, bemoaned Beverley, a ‘Country which Nature had so well contriv’d for one, became Two separate Governments’. The establishment of Maryland transformed an emerging colonial world. It divided the Bay into rival colonies and competing interethnic trading associations and networks. At the same time the new colony threatened the prospect of colonial expansion in Virginia. Consequently, during the 1630s the Bay became a bitterly contested arena, where religious animosity inflamed the competition over trade and territory. The focal point for much of this rivalry was Kent Island, settled as a satellite of Virginia, but which after 1634 lay within the bounds of Maryland. Claiborne's ambitions to combine trade and plantation in the upper Bay were mirrored by those of the Maryland adventurers along the Potomac. Innovative schemes to develop the transatlantic trade in beaver skins thus occurred under challenging and competitive conditions. Colonial and native rivalries, which spilled over into Delaware Bay, fuelled commercial expansion, but from the outset there was a danger that these duelling ventures would frustrate the aims and ambitions of the other.

The Kent Island joint stock from 1631 to 1634

Although studied from various perspectives, the Kent Island partnership has yet to be recognized as one of the most ambitious and novel fur trading ventures established by the English prior to the formation of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670.

Richard Hakluyt the younger was one of the first English commentators to draw attention to the value of the fur trade in North America for commercial and colonial expansion. A clergyman, Hakluyt devoted his career to collecting and publishing accounts of English voyages in an attempt to promote colonization with the support of the monarchy. In 1583 he was sent to Paris by Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary, to acquire information on French activity in the New World while serving as chaplain in the residency of the ambassador. During a mission of nine months Hakluyt met merchants and seafarers, providing Walsingham with up-to-date reports on French enterprise. Shortly after his return to London he completed ‘The Discourse of Western Planting’, a confidential document for the queen and a small group of prominent supporters of American colonization, in which he noted the great quantity of furs available in the gulf of the St Lawrence River. Embroidering eye-witness reportage, Hakluyt portrayed North America as a vast cornucopia, rich with precious metals and stones, spices and drugs, dyes, all kinds of fruits, timber and fish, as well as a multitude of animals that could provide tallow and hides. Here was a land that could compensate England for declining trades in Europe, so long as adventurers were prepared to face hostility from the French and others.

Despite Hakluyt's clarion call for action, English ambitions and enterprise faltered, while French adventurers, responding to the demand for fur in Paris, established an extensive trading network along the St Lawrence. Nonetheless, during a pioneering phase of episodic English overseas expansion, fishermen, traders and settlers developed widespread interests in the trade in beaver skins. At various locations along the eastern seaboard of North America they established small, impermanent and shifting commercial sites, in competition with French and Dutch adventurers. It was an intermittent enterprise, conducted in fleeting, sometimes suspicious, cross-cultural exchanges, which drew various Indian groups, eager to acquire trade goods, into contact with Europeans in search of furs. Although the commercial zones that emerged during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were little more than pinpricks in a vast and unknown continent, they created beachheads for the growth of trade and, in some cases, settlement.

By a peculiar combination of opportunistic probing and visionary imagining, Chesapeake Bay became the location for the first successful English colony in North America. Following a period of successive failures, which included Sir Walter Raleigh's attempted settlement of Roanoke during the 1580s, the tiny outpost of Jamestown, established in 1607, paved the way for the emergence of colonial Virginia. It experienced a harrowing beginning. Lacking a successful model for colonization and left in the hands of private enterprise – the Virginia Company of London – Jamestown nearly succumbed to a deadly combination of disease and demoralization. Indian hostility, which culminated in a devastating attack on the small colony in 1622, also took a toll. It is, in the words of one recent study, ‘the creation story from hell’. Yet the settlement survived, outliving the collapse of its parent company in 1624. Indeed, its persistence and emerging profitability created an encouraging environment for the establishment of another colony, a decade later. But the new settlement of Maryland, under the authority of a Catholic lord proprietor, was an unwelcome intrusion, threatening the projection of a ‘greater Virginia’. Relations between these neighbouring, but rival, colonies dramatically re-shaped the Chesapeake, injecting intense competition for trade and territory into an emergent colonial world.

Economically, both colonies became wedded to the cultivation of tobacco. Its rapid spread during the 1620s and beyond secured the future of the newcomers, providing a profitable cash crop dependent on expanding consumption across the Atlantic. Over the course of the seventeenth century, exports from the Bay increased at a staggering rate, to the financial benefit of colonial planters, London merchants and the monarchy. Despite some diversification, it was the mainstay of economic development. The emergence and elaboration of a distinctive tobacco culture left an indelible imprint on the evolution of the Chesapeake colonies. Within a few decades the demands of a labour-intensive and exploitative agricultural system focused the attention of settlers on land, encouraging early expansion along the rivers. According to Robert Beverley, author of the earliest colonial history of Virginia, published in London in 1705, it provided an incentive for the newcomers with alarming consequences for the natives.

In November 1700 the Board of Trade in London received an alarming report that the fur trade of New York and Boston had ‘sunk to little or nothing, and the market is so low for beaver in England that ‘tis scarce worth the transporting’. The author, Richard Coote, first earl of Bellomont, governor of the province of New York, was concerned at the wider consequences of the fall in the price of beaver skins, from fourteen to five shillings per pound, in the London market. While the declining value of beaver discouraged the Iroquois, the main suppliers of fur to the colony, it also reduced the incentive for distant native groups to trade with the English. Playing on the threat from the French in Canada, Bellomont argued that New York was a frontier province where relations with the Indians had to be managed in the interests of the monarchy. Ignoring the situation at Boston, he requested the removal of customs duties on fur in New York and England. Early the following year, he urged the board to secure parliamentary support to encourage the fur trade. Drawing on the example of France, he appealed for legislation requiring all hatters to use a certain amount of beaver wool in the manufacture of headwear. Such intervention would ‘help the consumption of Beaver which at present is grown almost out of use in England, since Carolina hats have been so much and Beaver hats so little in fashion’. Although demand for the latter revived, Bellomont's concerns illuminate the state of the transatlantic fur trade at the close of the seventeenth century. Colonial networks on which commerce depended seemed to be under threat, not least as a result of changes in the supply of raw material. This included the opening up of a vast commercial zone awarded to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. As studies of the company demonstrate, the rapid growth of the northern fur trade, based on seemingly limitless supplies of thicker and more valuable pelts, created problems in the metropolitan market, which was one of the sources of the governor's alarm.

The collapse of the Kent Island partnership left the rival venture in Maryland well-placed to secure control of the fur trade in the upper Bay after 1640. But the prospect of commercial expansion was dashed by the onset of a protracted crisis that threatened the survival of the colony. Civil war in England plunged the Chesapeake into a ‘time of troubles’, marked by disunity, division and conflict. Surprisingly, the interconnections between English events and the development of the North American colonies during the 1640s and 1650s have rarely been examined in detail, though a recent study argues that they contributed to the establishment and greater definition of an English Atlantic, facilitated by more extensive intercolonial communication. But political turbulence across the colonies, manifest in rebellion or insurrection, was intensified within the Bay by the divisive legacy of the 1630s. Thus, the rapid collapse of royal authority revived the opponents of Baltimore. Seeking to exploit these unsettled and potentially favourable conditions, Claiborne made repeated attempts to recover trade and territory which merged with wider ambitions for the reformation of the region. Colonial rivalry was accompanied by widespread native unrest and dislocation, intensified by the impact of hostilities in the north between Huron and Iroquoian groups. Conflict with the Powhatans in Virginia was paralleled by the outbreak of war with the Susquehannocks in Maryland. During a period of barren confusion much of the fur trade in the upper Bay was diverted to Swedish and Dutch outposts in the Delaware. Colonial traders remained active, despite the rivalry and conflict, but these years represented a turning point in interethnic commerce and exchange. Though masked by the turmoil of war and rebellion on both sides of the Atlantic, the collapse of metropolitan interest in fur trading enterprise, combined with a narrowing of colonial opportunities within an embryonic and expanding plantation culture, cast a shadow over the function of native trades. In these circumstances the commercial interruption of the civil war enabled the Dutch to increase their trade in the Chesapeake. The response of the new republican regime in England was to impose regulation over colonial trade and shipping, which pointed towards an exclusionary, imperial direction.

Commerce, conflict and competition during the early 1640s

Commercial enterprise in the upper Bay operated under the constraints of weak economic and political structures characteristic of a small colonial outpost.

Appendix

In 1679 John Banister, minister and naturalist, informed one of his correspondents that the Indian trade in Virginia, ‘once great & good’, had ‘dwindled almost into Nothing’. Dismissing the opinion of many settlers who identified interethnic commerce as the source of recent troubles in the colony, he claimed it was ‘rightly considered our Vinculum Pacis’, or a bond of peace, with the Indians. Writing from the fort located at the falls on the James River, where William Byrd was developing commercial relations with inland groups, Banister envisioned a commercial pathway based on native demand for ‘many Things which they wanted … for their use & ornament’. Despite this appealing prospect, twenty years later a proposal to launch an ambitious fur-trading venture in Virginia failed to gather support on either side of the Atlantic. The response in London indicated that the primary propose of the colony was the cultivation of tobacco. Such a perspective reflected the consolidation of the Chesapeake colonies as agricultural economies sustained by an expanding transatlantic trade. Shipments of tobacco into London, which amounted to two million pounds in 1640, reached seven million in 1663, and climbed to 11 million by 1676. Commercial expansion, based on servant and slave labour, was accompanied by population growth. Sir William Berkeley claimed that the colonial population of Virginia was at least 40,000 by the mid-1670s, while that of its northern neighbour was about 20,000 by 1685. Socio-economic change increased the hunger for land, intensifying the pressure on native communities, leading to a sharp demographic decline in neighbouring groups. In combination with the ever-widening impact of interethnic trade, it encouraged Indian re-location and re-structuring, with the association of survivor or refugee groups, or their assimilation by others, reflected in re-naming and cultural adaptation.

The development of a colonial tobacco culture, alongside the cultivation of grain and the raising of stock, were accompanied by changes to the fur trade. As commerce within the confines of the Bay declined, trading ambitions were either re-directed to regions beyond or re-shaped by Indian hostility and conflict. At the same time, the gradual disengagement of former colonial rivals was both cause and consequence of the emergence of divergent patterns, demonstrated by exploration and expansion in Virginia and stagnation and conflict in Maryland.

In 1583 the puritan Philip Stubbes denounced extravagant dress in England. During the course of his vitriolic Anatomie of Abuses, he fulminated against ‘novell Inventions and new-fangled fashions’. One of his targets was the changing style of headwear. Responding to recent developments, he noted that fashion in hats was both rare and strange. They were worn in distinctive ways, dyed in various colours, and made of different materials. The fabric used in the manufacture of headwear included silk, velvet, wool, and fine hair or fur ‘far-fetched and dear bought’. Stubbes’ concern was provoked by the appearance of the beaver hat in England, which became an essential accessory during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for rich and fashion-conscious consumers. But the spread of the new fashion provoked moral reformers who insisted that clothing and accessories serve necessity not vanity. Their anger was fuelled by the use of jewellery and feathers, highlighting the distinctive qualities of the beaver, which Stubbes dismissed as unseemly emblems of pride in defiance of virtue. The exaggerated language of complaint reflected a broader battle in early modern England over the regulation and representation of the body. Unintentionally, its impact, as echoed in sermons and drama, may have strengthened the appeal of the new style in headwear across age and gender boundaries as a symbol of wealth, status and power. But the introduction of the beaver hat had unintended and far-reaching consequences. Growing demand revitalized the fur trade, at a time when European supplies were declining, encouraging traders to seek out new sources across the Atlantic. It led to the emergence of a new industry, which called for specialized skills and expertise related to wider changes in the structure and organization of feltmaking in London. Based on the domestic market, the growth of consumption and production, linked with marketing and distribution, created the socio-economic infrastructure that sustained the North American fur trade. During an early and experimental phase of seaborne expansion, it served as a driving force for wider commercial and colonial horizons. While acknowledging the deeper roots of change within an established culture of dress, this chapter examines the links between fur, fashion and consumption which established the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new transatlantic enterprise.

In The Planter's Speech of 1684 Thomas Tryon provided a voice for the complaints of mute animals against the oppression and violence they suffered at the hands of English colonists in North America. With the recentlyestablished Quaker settlement of Pennsylvania in his sights, he mocked the absurdity of ‘those who fly from Violence in one place’, to inflict it on the ‘Innocent in those places where they take shelter’. It seemed as if the settlers had declared war against the wildlife of their new habitations. With the advantage of muskets and snares, they were more efficient at killing animals than the natives, who hunted only for food and necessity. But even among the Indians, intensive hunting and destruction had become both ‘an Occupation and a Trade’. Through the acquisition of guns, they grew ‘more expert in all kind of Violence’, travelling ‘night & day with all Pains and Cunning imaginable, to hunt … Creatures, not so much now for Food, as for the Skins, Feathers or Carkasses to sell’. Contracting diseases ‘never before heard amongst them’, they ‘put themselves to a World of needless Slavery and Toil’. More than a century later Thomas Jefferson claimed, in his influential Notes on the State of Virginia, that the ‘general destruction’ of North American game by the Indians began with their trading relations with Europeans, ‘for the purpose of purchasing matchcoats, hatchets, and fire locks, with their skins’.

These insights have been echoed by modern scholarship on the fur trade. It is widely recognized that the beaver was the victim of an unparalleled and devastating hunt. The consequences were evident along some parts of the eastern seaboard by the mid-seventeenth century, in the depletion or disappearance of local populations of fur-bearing animals. During this early period of interethnic commercial activity, exports of beaver skins from Canada to France may have reached a high point of about 30,000, while later annual shipments from New Netherland were even greater. By comparison, the volume of trade from English colonies in the Chesapeake was much less, amounting to between 2,500 and 3,000 skins in some years, though exports were higher for New England.

English seaborne depredation acquired new energy and direction during the second half of the seventeenth century, paving the way for the alarming, but shortlived, globalization of organized piracy. Drawing on a long tradition of plunder at sea, English pirates and rovers ranged the Caribbean, spread outwards into the Pacific and Atlantic, and infiltrated the Indian Ocean, exposing the vulnerability of international trade and colonial settlements to attack. The development of long-distance piracy deliberately confused boundaries between legal and illegal activity. With official sanction or unofficial connivance, privateering and buccaneering skirted the bounds of legality. In these circumstances the expansion of English piracy, the product of an inherent centrifugal tendency, created fragmented and fractured forms of enterprise. By the early eighteenth century the activities of a group of pirate leaders were beginning to place an intolerable burden on key commercial and colonial networks of the British economy. When this was accompanied by signs of institutional form and organization, including the emergence of scattered pirate settlements, as well as a provocative and threatening outlaw culture, the resources of the state were deployed to destroy the menace of organized piracy. One of the underlying themes of this period, therefore, was a shifting perception of piracy, particularly in its wider relationship with state and community. It was an important development, which effectively forestalled the appearance, in shadow outline, of an anti-empire of sea rovers that preyed on the resources of ambitious, expanding and increasingly powerful metropolitan interests.

Context: sea war and plunder during the 1650s

Although organized English piracy appeared to be in retreat during the 1630s, the civil war led to the revival of widespread plunder at sea of varied and contested legality. Both royalists and parliamentarians resorted to the licensing of privateering. Royalist activity continued after the execution of Charles I in 1649, through the issue of commissions by his sons, Charles and James, to English captains based in French and Flemish ports. These adventurers were dismissed as pirates by the Commonwealth regime and its supporters; if caught, they faced the prospect of trial and execution by the High Court of Admiralty.