Mayflower

achieve any sort of long-term financial success. By 1626, the Merchant Adventurers in London had disbanded, and Bradford and seven others, including Winslow, Brewster, Standish, Alden, Howland, Allerton, and Thomas Prence, who had come over in the Fortune in 1621, agreed to assume the colony’s debt with the understanding that they be given a monopoly in the fur trade. The following year, the Dutch trading agent Isaack de Rasiere introduced the Pilgrims to wampum, the white and purple shell beads that quickly became the medium of exchange in New England and revolutionized the trade with the Indians. By the early 1630s, Plymouth had established a series of trading posts that extended all the way from the Connecticut River to Castine, Maine.

    After it was started under the direction of the veteran frontiersman Edward Ashley, the trading post in Castine was run by the young Thomas Willett, who arrived in Plymouth in 1629 as a twenty-two-year-old émigré from Leiden. John Howland and John Alden established a second Pilgrim trading post in Maine on the Kennebec River at modern Augusta. By this time, Howland had married Mayflower passenger Elizabeth Tilley, while Alden had married Priscilla Mullins. In 1634 the Plymouth men at Kennebec got into a fatal argument with some rival English fur traders that resulted in Alden’s being briefly detained in a Boston jail. The following year, the French forced Willett and his men to abandon their post in Castine. For Howland, Alden, and especially Willett—who eventually became one of the wealthiest men in the colony—Maine provided a valuable education in the rough-and-tumble world of international trade in the New World.
    Despite some remarkable early returns in the fur trade, Bradford and his fellow investors struggled to pay off the colony’s debt. Bradford blamed most of their difficulties on his former assistant governor, Isaac Allerton. Allerton, who had mercantile ambitions of his own, was entrusted with overseeing Plymouth’s relations with the merchants in England, and it eventually became apparent that Allerton was mixing his personal business with the colony’s. As a result of his mismanagement, if not outright fraud, Plymouth’s debts only increased even though the Pilgrims had sent significant quantities of furs back to England.
    In truth, it was not all Isaac Allerton’s fault. Bradford, who’d suffered reversals of his own back in Leiden, never had a talent for financial matters, and the colony continued to have trouble with the merchants in London long after Allerton ceased representing them in 1630. According to Bradford’s calculations, between 1631 and 1636, they shipped £10,000 in beaver and otter pelts (worth almost 2 million in today’s dollars) yet saw no significant reduction in their debt of approximately £6,000.
    Not only were the Pilgrims poor judges of character, they were forced to struggle with the logistical difficulties of sending goods back and forth across three thousand miles of ocean. Plymouth was an inadequate port to begin with, and financial stability only came to the colony when their principal market shifted from London to Boston, which later emerged as New England’s primary port. Not until 1648, after they had been forced to sell off some of their own land, did Bradford and the other Plymouth investors finally settle their accounts with the merchants in England. It would be left to others to hit upon a way to wealth in the New World.
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    As Pastor Robinson had suggested, the Pilgrims had lost more than a little of their collective soul at Wessagussett. But so had the Pokanokets. Massasoit had entered into a devil’s bargain with the English. By selling out his Native neighbors in Massachusetts and Cape Cod, he had cast his lot with a culture and technology on which his own people increasingly came to depend. Whether it was iron hoes and kettles, blankets, liquor, or guns, the English had what the Pokanokets wanted. There would be some good years ahead as the Pilgrims eagerly traded with them for furs. But as the beavers and other fur-bearing animals grew scarce, the only thing the Indians had to sell to the English was their land.
    It had begun innocently enough in 1621, when Massasoit had given Patuxet to the Pilgrims as a gift. Back then it had been difficult to imagine a time when land would be anything but a boundless resource. The Pilgrims believed that since no