by Eric Rutkow
As for Hakluyt, he never made it to the New World. The man who devoted his life to studying sea voyages refused to be part of one. The reasons for this remain a mystery. He died in 1616, leaving behind a son and two shares in the London Company worth twenty-one pounds. His grave in Westminster Abbey is unmarked. A commemorative plaque in Bristol Cathedral reads: “The ardent Love of my Country devoured all Difficulties.”
Hakluyt had realized his patriotic vision of a colonial England, but in doing so he had also planted the seeds of a new nation. And the trees that he saw bringing so much prosperity to his homeland would soon shape the emigrants to this once-unknown land.
“Here Is Good Living for Those That Love Good Fires”
ON NOVEMBER 11, 1620, after a two-month journey, the Mayflower finally settled in to a harbor near Cape Cod Bay. As carpenters began repairing the ship, sixteen men set out to explore the territory, “necessitie calling them to looke out a place for habitation,” according to William Bradford, the future governor of the Pilgrims’ colony. The scouting party wandered toward the forests, when they spotted several natives, who fled into the woods like startled deer. The Pilgrims pursued them to ensure that more were not lying in ambush. However, according to Bradford, his companions “soone lost both [the natives] & them selves, falling into shuch thickets as were ready to tear their cloaths & armore in peeces, but were most distressed for wante of drinke.” Several days later, while Bradford was lost in the woods with another party, he leaned over to look at a curiously bent sapling, which “gave a sodaine jerk up, and he was immediately caught by the leg” and pulled off the ground by an Indian game trap.
Hakluyt may have been correct about the value of trees as a commodity, but he had not appreciated the challenges of living in the woods. In Bradford’s words, the “whole countrie, full of woods & thickets, represented a wild & savage heiw [hue].”
The forests were a frightening place for settlers transported from Europe. Savages lived there, alongside strange beasts, swarming insects, and, quite possibly, the devil himself. But these fears were, in some ways, no more troubling than the trees themselves. The Pilgrims could not begin planting crops nor building homes until they cut them down, one by one, a task near impossible for men who had never handled heavy axes. One potential settlement region the Pilgrims had “a very great liking to plant in” was rejected largely because of the trees. According to Bradford, it was “so incompassed with woods, that we should bee in much danger of the Salvages, and our number being so little, and so much ground to cleare, so as we thought good to quit and cleare [leave] that place.”
Eventually, the Pilgrims established their colony near Plymouth Harbor in an outcropping free of woods. The land’s natural forest had earlier been cleared by Patuxet Indians, who had been growing corn there until a 1617 plague decimated the population. Hakluyt’s travel narratives had described the continent as pristine territory, but in reality the native population had shaped the forests for thousands of years through burnings and tree fellings. Many of the earliest settlement points—Plymouth, Boston, Salem, Medford, Watertown—were actually abandoned Indian fields or natural clearings, ironic for a Yankee culture that would soon be defined by trees.
The forest, while not the Pilgrims’ literal home, quickly became their salvation. They had brought stores of food and clothes on the Mayflower, but few building materials and no fuel. In the first two years, Bradford and his men hauled great logs and thousands of small trees from the nearby woodlands to construct a fort as well as individual houses. And firewood was their only source of heat in a territory with unexpectedly cold winters—Hakluyt’s travel narratives were from summertime voyages, which described the climate accordingly.
Wood gathering “always cost a great deale of labour,” according to Bradford. One Pilgrim complained that the colony’s location forced him to walk “halfe a quarter of an English myle” to gather wood, not a great distance, but tiresome considering the backbreaking labor and the enormous quantities involved—each family burned through an acre of wood a year. Despite the heavy labor, access to unlimited timber and fuel mitigated the effects of the first brutal winter, which claimed the lives of half the original settlers. A report on the original New England colonies by a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, stated, “Here is good living for those that love good fires,” though the Pilgrims who had to carry the logs might have disagreed.
The New England trees were as diverse as they were plentiful. Though most woodlands had several dominant species—such as the oak-chestnut forests of southern New England or the spruce-hardwood forests of Vermont—there was a cornucopia of species variation within any given region. William Wood, the first Englishman to produce a detailed account of New England ecology, in 1634, summed up the situation with a poem:
Trees both in hills and plaines, in plenty be,
The long liv’d Oake and mournefull Cypris tree,
Skie towring pines, and Chesnuts coated rough,
The lasting Cedar, with the Walnut tough:
The rozin dropping Firre for masts in use,
The boatmen seeke for Oares light, neate growne Sprewse [spruce],
The brittle Ash, the ever trembling Aspes,
The broad-spread Elme, whose concave harbours waspes . . .
The Diars [dyer’s] Shumach [sumac], with more trees there be,
That are both good to use, and rare to see.
Collectively, these trees formed the landscape of early New England, one of vibrant springtime blossoms, dense summer foliage, and brilliant autumnal leaves.
Timber was the most conspicuous resource, practically the only resource, the Pilgrims had at first. When they yielded to pressures from their financial backers in 1621 and sent a load of commodities back to England aboard the fifty-five-ton vessel Fortune, it contained only “2 hoggsheads of beaver and otter skins” but was “laden with good clapboard as full as she could stowe,” according to Bradford.
But this practice of timber export did not last long. The Pilgrims found their wood supply too important, and on March 29, 1626, the colony’s leaders restricted overseas sale with the following:
That for the preventing of such inconveniences as do and may befall the plantation by the want of timber, That no man of what condition soever sell or transport any manner of workes . . . [that] may tend to the destruction of timber . . . without the consent approbation and liking of the Governour and councile.
Hakluyt’s vision of North American colonies immediately supplying the home country with timber butted up against the reality that survival concerned Bradford’s group more than providing commodities. Trees made the task of carving a life out of a new, savage land easier, but only by so much.
By the mid-1630s, following a decade of increased immigration (partly related to the ongoing timber famine in England), the original treeless outcroppings started to become overpopulated. Recent settlers, of necessity, entered the woods to make their property claims. This presented a new series of challenges, aside from the Indian attacks or a visit from Satan. The earliest forest dwellers often did not have the time or resources to construct a proper home. As one colonist explained, for many, forming a shelter meant
[they would] dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, 6 or 7 feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all around the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up and cover the spars with bark or green sods.
Once a shelter was established, at least a year was needed to burn, chop, log, plow, and sow several acres. And that was if the settler was handy with an ax, which practically none were. For the heaviest tasks, like moving logs and building a more permanent shelter, he needed the aid of several neighbors and, ideally, oxen, which had to be imported from Europe.
The more New England colonists lived with trees, however, the
more they learned to exploit them for goods beyond timber and fuel. The woodlands offered the raw material for daily life, replacements for comforts and necessities that had been left behind in England. Early settlers crafted tools and bowls from the hardest woods, like ash, hickory, and hornbeam, which, according to William Wood, required “so much paines in riving [splitting] as is almost incredible.” Distinctive woods, like the sweet-smelling, red-hued cedar or the dark, richly textured black walnut, were often selected for fancier products, ranging from decorative boxes and carved furniture to ceremonial gunstocks. The trees also provided New Englanders with fruits and nuts, including wild plums, cherries, acorns, chestnuts, and walnuts, which could be “as bigge as a small peare,” according to Wood. From the amber sap of maple trees, colonists derived sugar, their main source of sweetness besides honey. And they fermented birch, black walnut, sassafras, and spruce to produce beer. The forest even served as something of a pharmacy: purgatives from nut oils; suppuratives from the bark of alder, birch, oak, and willow; cough medicine from the dark, potato-chip-like bark of black cherry trees; and astringents from white pine or hemlock sap. Additionally, colonists extracted colorful dyes from numerous species, including ash, birch, dogwood, hemlock, hickory, sassafras, and sumac.
These first colonists—Pilgrims, Puritans, and independent settlers—thus started to find refuge among the New England forests, but they were failing to live up to their commercial obligations. Their sponsors, joint-stock companies such as Hakluyt’s London Company, were for-profit ventures that expected the colonies to deliver commodities and justify the investment. Pilgrims and Puritans may have arrived in America to discover an uncorrupted life, but that didn’t mean their backers shared this enthusiasm. In 1629, the New England Company, a reorganized version of the original Plymouth Company, sent six or seven shipwrights to Salem, Massachusetts, jump-starting a domestic shipbuilding trade. The directors of the Massachusetts Bay Company then sent over their own trained shipwrights, coopers, and woodsmen to begin exploiting the woods for profit. Suddenly, the New England coasts were buzzing with the sounds of hammers, axes, and adzes.
The region seemed to have been designed for the building of ships. White oaks, similar to English oaks, furnished excellent ship timber and planking. Cedars, chestnuts, and black oaks were decay-resistant and provided resilient boards for outdoor and underwater sections of ships. Colonists extracted the ever-important naval stores from pitch pines, a fire-resistant conifer, which populated areas that Indians had burned. But perhaps the greatest asset was the white pine, which grew to prodigious heights in the unspoiled forests of New England and produced larger masts than any of the Riga firs in Europe.
Collectively, these assets bolstered the shipbuilding trade. In turn, this brought about the fishing, shipping, and whaling trades, three staples of New England life. Maritime work would become the second-largest colonial occupation, exceeded only by agriculture and trailed closely by logging.
The natural endowments of New England were so great that colonial shipbuilders gained a competitive advantage over their English counterparts, who had an eighty-year head start and the active support of the Crown. Colonists never needed to import timbers or naval stores. Their shipwrights easily obtained even the naturally curved timbers that were preferred for bows, ribs, stems, and sterns. Ultimately, the abundance of good timber allowed New Englanders to produce ships at least 30 percent cheaper than the English, and it became commonplace to sell New England ships to ship merchants in the mother country. These ships would become New England’s most profitable manufactured export in the colonial period.
While the home country showed interest in the colonial ships, it was less enthusiastic about timber itself. Hakluyt had been wrong about wood products’ becoming the commodity that would justify colonization for his country. The problem was that American timber was too costly. Part of the issue was that freehold laborers in the colonies earned six times more than their serf counterparts in European timber-producing nations. But a bigger concern was that transatlantic shipping made New England uncompetitive. The Baltic ports charged nine to twelve shillings per shipping ton, while the Boston ports charged forty to fifty shillings for the longer transatlantic journey.
New England’s inability to sell one of its most widely available products helped send the colonial economy into serious debt. By 1640, there was a glut of British manufactured goods in the colonies and not enough marketable commodities to sell back in exchange.
The need to develop timber markets and bolster the economy forced the colonists to look beyond England for trading partners, one of the first steps that helped separate New England from the mother country. Boston traders began to establish timber markets in Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira after the 1640 economic downturn. Shipping costs to these locations were relatively neutral between the colonies and the Baltic ports. Madeira, a Portuguese settlement and one of the wine islands, actually translates to “wooden land,” but deforestation had made this name ironic. The new Iberian and wine islands trades consisted primarily of oak staves for barrels, but also included building timber, white pine boards, and cedar shingles. Seven Boston vessels sailed to these ports in 1642, and this region became the dominant trading partner by the 1660s.
Timber was not among the “enumerated commodities” in England’s Navigation Acts, which restricted trade between the colonies and the rest of Europe. New Englanders, consequently, could continue their wine islands commerce in timber without upsetting the home country. Such was not the case with most of the valuable commodities that the southern colonies produced, such as indigo and tobacco, both regulated under the Navigation Acts.
The next major trade relationship that New England developed was with Barbados, a British colony in the West Indies. The small island was the colonial center for cane sugar, one of the most coveted marketable commodities. The Navigation Acts prohibited Barbados from trading its sugar with other European nations, but allowed unrestricted intracolonial commerce with New England. Sugar production had completely denuded a once-forested territory, and Barbadians became wholly dependent on New England. When Bridgetown, the island’s capital, burned to the ground in 1668, the city sent a flotilla to New England for timber to rebuild. By the 1670s British West Indian sugar islands depended entirely upon trade with New England, and timber was the most important commodity in terms of tons shipped. A group of Barbadian representatives in 1673 told the British Parliament of “the great necessity the Sugar Plantations had of a trade with [New England] for Boards timbers pipestaves horses & fish, & that they could not mainetaine theire buildings, nor send home theire Sugars, nor make above halfe that quantity without a Supply of those things from New England.”
With trading partners on both sides of the Atlantic, Boston ships began participating in various “triangular trades” to address commodity imbalances. In one route, timber and other goods were traded for wine in the wine islands. This was then sold to prosperous sugar planters in exchange for rum, which was then resold in New England. In another variation, New England supplies, mainly timber and low-grade fish for slave food, went to the British West Indies in exchange for rum, which was then used to purchase African slaves or sold to European slave traders. These slaves were then traded back to the British West Indies in exchange for sugar, which was distributed in the colonies or England. In the most historically famous triangle trade, New England ports, which handled almost all international trading from the American colonies, sold southern cash crops like tobacco, indigo, and rice to England; European manufactured goods were then bartered for African slaves, who were shipped back to the West Indies or southern colonies to fuel the various cash crop plantations.
In little more than fifty years, abundant timber resources had transformed New England from a harsh, uninviting land to a wealthy trading outpost. Some of the timber barons were as rich as any man in England, and the Puritans controlled one of the strongest shipping trades outside of the
Dutch empire. Hakluyt had been correct about the potential for North America’s forests, but he had not foreseen the manner in which it would develop.
Of course, there was one forest commodity, New England masts, about which Hakluyt had been uncannily prescient. Their importance to the Royal Navy was too great for England to ignore, regardless of shipping costs or political consequences.
The King’s Broad Arrow
IN EARLY OCTOBER, 1691, King William III issued a new royal charter governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its final section included a curious provision reserving to the King “all Trees of the Diameter of Twenty Four Inches and upwards” that were not on lands previously granted to private persons. Anyone who felled such trees would suffer the “penalty of Forfeiting One Hundred Pounds sterling.” The Crown had suddenly codified a prediction that Hakluyt had made more than one hundred years earlier: New England pines, according to the charter, were being regulated “for the better provideing and furnishing of Masts for [the] Royall Navy.”
During the second half of the seventeenth century Hakluyt’s fears about the Baltic mast trade had been realized. It began in the early 1650s when the ascendance of Dutch shipping, combined with that nation’s opposition to the English Navigation Acts, led to a series of Anglo-Dutch wars. The Dutch had earlier purchased the rights to the Baltic straits from the Danes for a sum of thirty-five thousand pounds annually and had used this leverage to threaten the supremacy of English shipping. The strait was shut down entirely for a brief period in 1654, and the situation remained tense throughout the late seventeenth century. When England’s new rulers, William and Mary, stepped up naval production once more in 1689 in preparation for a struggle with France, the heightened demand, along with the already strained Baltic conditions and growing hostility from Sweden, triggered a new timber crisis, and the Crown finally chose to exert its authority over the great mast resources in the forests three thousand miles away.