Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  For the past twenty years, these western havens had made tentative efforts to explore and settle the coast of New England, but as a sideline, not as a preoccupation. Now they suddenly entered the field with determination, in partnership with financiers in London and the Mayflower Pilgrims. This occurred as a direct result of the war between Louis XIII and the Huguenots.

  Equally important, but less visibly so, was something that occurred on the Lombard plain in Italy in December. The Duke of Mantua died without leaving an undisputed heir, and a succession crisis followed. Because Mantua controlled the valley of the Po, both France and Spain felt obliged to intervene on behalf of rival candidates. The Mantuan succession crisis opened a new phase in European history. Spain and France embarked on destructive conflict first in Italy and then more widely, when France entered the Thirty Years’ War in 1635.9

  War between Spain and France gave England a decade of security, while its former enemies attacked each other elsewhere. Peace released English ships from warfare and privateering to take part in transatlantic trade and to carry emigrants. Like the recoil of a spring, England’s merchant navy leaped forward into a postwar boom that brought with it a surge of activity in North America. As we shall see, one of the first and most tangible and direct effects of the boom was the sailing of the Winthrop fleet to Massachusetts Bay.

  All this happened at a moment when, for political reasons, the words of John Preston and his friends found an eager audience. Thanks to the catastrophe on the Île de Ré, King Charles in his quest for money had to summon a new Parliament in 1628. The parliamentary session ended the following year with an outcome so frustrating to Puritan opinion that at last exile to America became an inescapable option for settlers in far larger numbers.

  Neither Preston nor Buckingham lived to see them go. On August 23, 1628, as he prepared at Portsmouth for another futile attempt at the relief of La Rochelle, the duke fell victim to an assassin’s knife. The murderer was an officer wounded during the previous year’s defeat, but still unpaid. Buckingham’s death fulfilled the prophecy of Micaiah, but Micaiah had also passed away. Four weeks before the death of Buckingham, John Preston succumbed to disease, his lungs choked with thick phlegm. He died “in a cold and clammy sweat” at five in the morning of July 20.10

  As Buckingham breathed his last, a tiny ship called the Pleasure was preparing to leave America for the voyage back to the old country. She carried a cargo of beaver skins from the Pilgrims. From the moment she docked at her home port, on October 17, it was only a matter of time before a second wave of settlers left England to form new Puritan colonies in the west.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE FIRST BOSTONIANS

  I wish I could write … good news touching the present state of affairs in this kingdom; but in truth … we have more reason to fear an utter downfall, than to hope for a rising.

  —THE REVEREND GEORGE HAKEWILL, RECTOR OF HEANTON PUNCHARDON, DEVON, JULY 16, 16281

  Slung out in the sea like a discus or a jackknife, twelve miles from the coast of North Devon, the island of Lundy guards the approaches to a wide gulf, the great bay of Barnstaple. From the west, the tides fetch in across the full width of the Atlantic. When they reach the granite hulk of Lundy, they split and divide around the shoals that scatter from its corners. Even in sunshine and on a calm day, pale spots of foam mark the location of the rocks, first the Hen and Chickens and then the White Horses, more names awarded by seafarers dead many centuries ago.

  To the east, the coast of the mainland sweeps off to form the crescent of the bay. Twenty miles across, it ends at the north in an escarpment of cliffs. The highest in England, they rise to nine hundred feet, divided by plunging chasms, curving and folding away from the eye like the ridge backs of a distant herd of speckled swine. Beneath them, plowed by offshore winds, in the age of sail the waters of the gulf were some of the most hazardous in the British Isles, even more vicious than those off Plymouth Sound, on the opposite side of the same county.

  If you stand on the top of Lundy in the winter and look inshore, when the drizzle clears, you will see along the coast a line of surf. For a while, at the innermost middle of the bay, the cliffs dip and vanish, making way for a wide brown expanse of marshes, sand dunes, and mud. In front of them, the line of surf indicates the presence of a bar of silt, with above it shallow water, at the entrance to the estuary of the rivers Torridge and Taw. Crossed at the wrong time, Bideford Bar is fatal, yet another place where wind and tide conspire.

  On January 23, 1628, if you had perched like a puffin on Lundy, you would have seen a sailing ship make her way westward from the bar. At two hundred tons, the White Angel was a little larger than the Mayflower, with a reputation as a craft fit for an attempt to find the Northwest Passage. On this occasion, the White Angel was outward bound to the Plymouth Colony, with supplies for the Pilgrims, shipped westward by Isaac Allerton.

  Earlier that day, as she dropped down the river with the tide, her crew passed the timbers of a wrecked Dutch ship, the St. Peter of Amsterdam. The customs records describe her fate, driven aground that month by a storm, with on board her a cargo of steel, tar, and English woolen cloth. Looking south, the men on board the White Angel saw the church at Northam, a fishing village, and in front of the church a plot of high ground called Bone Hill, used as a sandy graveyard for dead sailors. Only twelve months previously, the villagers had buried six fishermen, drowned as they tried to cross the bar in bad weather.2

  On the low hills above the estuary, a series of church towers offered landmarks to mariners. Signifiers of home and salvation, they guided men back to their wives and safe harbor, at a place where the Taw and the Torridge came together to form a sheltered anchorage. Around it were a series of small townships, not only Northam, but also Appledore, Bideford, Instow, and Heanton Punchardon. They looked for leadership seven miles upstream to Barnstaple, the chief town of the area, the port from which the White Angel sailed, and the place that gave its name to the Massachusetts county that now encompasses Cape Cod.

  The English Barnstaple stood at the head of the tidal stretch of the Taw, at the place where the first bridge spanned the river. Confident and cosmopolitan, the town was a small Devon replica of La Rochelle. Fiercely independent, this too was a maritime republic, led by an elite of Calvinist merchants. Because of the damage done to trade by the war with France, and because of the new opportunities found by the Pilgrims, in the late 1620s the Barnstaple men in question stepped forward and became the leaders of English commerce in the North Atlantic.

  They did so at a moment when at last, like the waters of two estuaries, an array of circumstances converged to permit and to compel a movement out across the ocean much larger than the journey of the Pilgrims in 1620. Suddenly men who had only dabbled or experimented in America found a multitude of new and urgent motives for wanting to make a permanent commitment. Some were shipowners and traders from Barnstaple, or its sister port at Bristol. Some were Puritans from London like John Pocock, and some were Lincolnshire dissidents such as Theophilus Clinton. At the end of 1628 and in early 1629, as it became clear that New England could at last be made to pay its way, thanks to the skin of the beaver, they found a common cause, and the movement began.

  At Barnstaple, Isaac Allerton did most of his business with a merchant of fifty-three called William Palmer. In his career, and the town’s, we can see how and why events took the course they did.

  NEW SHOES FOR NEW ENGLAND

  It seems that William Palmer was sound, because a business partner called him “a just and upright dealer,” and he had a loyal following among his fellow citizens. Three times mayor of Barnstaple, Palmer kept the town’s archives and its store of gunpowder, and later, during the English Civil War, he led its armed resistance to the Crown. By virtue of his past, and the plight of his town in 1628, he had every reason to offer Allerton the help he needed.3

  In his late twenties, Palmer lived in the Basque port of San Sebastián in Spain, working as
an agent for an older Barnstaple merchant and making regular trips to the French town of Bayonne. Less openly, he spied for the English intelligence service, sending home reports of Spanish shipping movements for the eyes of Sir Robert Cecil. In the Basque Country, Palmer acquired a hatred of Spain that seethes from his letters, but he also found himself among men with the best knowledge available of the North American coast.

  For nearly a century the Basque ports had been whaling, fishing, and fur trading as far as Labrador. North American maize grew in the fields around Bayonne, and Native Americans walked the town’s streets: a Micmac warrior lodged in the house of Bayonne’s mayor, a man Palmer mentioned in his dispatches to Cecil. What’s more, William Palmer’s employer was a man with American interests by the name of John Delbridge. Another mayor of Barnstaple and several times its member of Parliament, Delbridge dealt in tobacco with Bermuda and with Jamestown. As it happens, Delbridge was a Puritan—an opponent in a lawsuit called him “a man inclyned to Sect and Schisme, and in most things opposite to the government of the Church of England”—and this also had its bearing on the course of events in 1628.4

  Given his background, in time William Palmer was bound to turn his eyes westward, and so he did. In the early 1620s, when shipowners from Devon began to send fishing expeditions to Maine, Palmer was among the first. As early as 1622, the Council for New England heard complaints of Barnstaple ships fishing without licenses in its territory. The following year, four Barnstaple vessels made the trip on behalf of “Mr. Palmer and others,” merchants of the town, fishing and trading for furs, this time with the council’s grudging approval. They even applied for their own patent “for the Settling of a Plantacion in New England.” No record exists that it was granted, but by 1626 a local man, Abraham Shurt of Bideford, was living at Pemaquid on the coast of Maine. He managed a fishing station, traded, and made sporadic contact with the Pilgrims.5

  Even so, for the time being these Barnstaple adventures in New England remained modest and marginal. Very few beaver pelts reached the town; they may have come by way of French middlemen, and the ships that went to Maine were small, of eighty tons or less. Until the late 1620s, merchants such as William Palmer had quite enough to keep them occupied much nearer home. During the previous fifty years, they had created a flourishing system of trade across the sea, from Spain to Poland, with Ireland now essential too. As long as it prospered, there was no reason for them to go elsewhere in strength.

  Barnstaple had no option but to be pragmatic. To the east lay the barren immensities of Exmoor, which reached the sea to form the cliffs of the bay, while to the south and west the country was too rugged to be worked by the plow for wheat or barley. Tall trees were few and far between. Barnstaple had a population of about three thousand, large enough to make it rank as a populous borough, and so, to feed its people, it had to find grain from elsewhere. To keep its fleet at sea, it needed timber from abroad. In 1615, we find Barnstaple importing rye, flax, iron, and masts for ships on Dutch vessels coming from Norway or the Baltic, while coastal craft ferried in oats, peas, and butter from English regions where the soil was more friendly.

  One foreign seaport mattered far more to Barnstaple than any other, and that was La Rochelle. For centuries, ships had left the harbors of North Devon to sail there or to Bordeaux, the wine haven of the old Plantagenet domain of Aquitaine. But by the 1620s, these connections had deepened and intensified, thanks again to the sheep on England’s western hills and the weavers who lived in villages inland. Each year, ships leaving Barnstaple made about sixty sea voyages, carrying a new brand of woolen cloth known as “Barnstaple Bayes,” to be swapped in foreign ports for wine, salt, iron, figs, prunes, and all the other items the town required. Barnstaple ships sailed also to Cádiz, Lisbon, and the Canaries, but next to La Rochelle they went most often to Ireland. And this, as it turned out, came to be critical too, for the future of New England.6

  Waterford and County Cork lay only four days’ sail away, and behind them were the grasslands of the Irish southeast, the best cattle country in Europe. After about 1610, as English landlords tightened their grip on Ireland, they began to breed livestock. By 1615 shiploads of twenty cows at a time were arriving at Barnstaple from Irish harbors. Soon horses came too, from as far away as Ulster, like the “xvii Yrishe horsses” that arrived from Derry that August.7

  Thanks to its network of trade, the town of Barnstaple prospered, and its wealth took the tangible form of stone and candles. A preacher called the town “neat Barnstaple,” and visitors found the streets lit by lanterns until nine each evening. Travelers remarked on its broad, well-paved streets, its fine houses of stone and brick, and the “sweet and wholesome Air” of this little seaside city-state.8 When Palmer’s business partner died in 1624, he left a rich bequest to found an almshouse for the elderly. The arcaded building still stands, serving the same purpose, just like the Browne almshouses at Stamford.

  And then, as a direct consequence of the king’s two wars, first with Spain and then with France, the storm clouds began to blow in from Lundy. When Parliament met in 1626, John Delbridge swiftly rose to his feet to list the many grievances afflicting Barnstaple. He spoke out against high taxes on imported wine, and of course he denounced the French for their confiscation of English ships. He raged about the losses suffered at the hands of Turkish pirates and Spanish raiders, and he blamed the Duke of Buckingham. Early the following year, Delbridge delivered the town’s petition to the Crown, protesting against the cost of billeted troops. Similar complaints came from many other towns, but most loudly from seaports. For Barnstaple, they reached their worst extent in 1628, after the massacre on the Île de Ré.

  In the final weeks of 1627, French engineers at La Rochelle hurried to finish the great barrage that sealed off the port’s access to the ocean. The last supplies entered the city in early January, and by the end of that month English agents in France were reporting that the blockade was complete. For the merchants of Barnstaple, the siege removed their most valued trading partner. It dealt the town by far the most serious of the long series of blows it had sustained.9

  Foreign trade dwindled almost to zero in 1628. That year not a single ship sailed from the Taw estuary to France or Spain, only scraps of woolen cloth left Barnstaple for foreign ports, and until midsummer there were no arrivals from any European port. Two Dutchmen evaded French warships and crept in with salt from Brittany, but the vast bulk of the salt and wine trade from abroad simply vanished. For salt, vital for its fishermen, Barnstaple had to rely on coasters making the long, dangerous voyage from Scotland, under threat from Spanish privateers ranging up and down the North Sea from Dunkirk.10 The Irish connection remained, but even so the town’s seaborne commerce fell to less than half the level seen before the war. “All things are dead with us,” said John Delbridge in the Parliament that met in March.11

  At this very moment, William Palmer found his alternative in the west, in partnership with the Pilgrims. News of the barrage at La Rochelle would have reached North Devon no later than Christmas week. We know from the fate of the St. Peter that in Britain’s western approaches the weather was bad in January. When it cleared, off from Barnstaple to America went a small fleet of four ships, led by the White Angel. She was actually a Bristol ship, but the ports of Barnstaple and Bristol worked in tandem, with small vessels plying back and forth between the two. Both towns sent to sea as many privateers as they could—Palmer and his colleagues had fourteen letters of marque, allowing them to do so—and they used the prize money from taking French and Spanish ships to feed a joint pool of capital. When the time came, it was available to finance the Atlantic trade.12

  As the Latin of the customs books put it, the White Angel was heading “versus Novam Angliam”—toward New England—and she carried a cargo of Irish and Barnstaple-made woolen cloth, haberdashery, and iron. Isaac Allerton was the exporter. The following day a second ship left, the Eagle, of fifty tons. For Allerton, she carried two fishing nets and a
nother three hundred pairs of “novorum calceorum,” new shoes for the feet of the Pilgrims. Also on board were more haberdashery and groceries, shipped by Palmer.13

  Two weeks later, on February 7, out sailed the Content, a fishing boat of only thirty tons, again bound for New England. Her master was John Witheridge of Instow, aged fifty-five, from a family with long ties to the Palmers. He was perhaps the town’s most experienced transatlantic seaman. A Newfoundland veteran, he had fished and traded for fur on the coast of Maine in 1623, where he met Samoset, the Abenaki chieftain who greeted the settlers at New Plymouth.14

  Last of all, on March 2, the thirty-five-ton Pleasure left for America, under the command of a veteran Barnstaple seaman, William Peeters. He took with him a hogshead of brandy, enough for eight thousand shots of liquor. Gunpowder and lead shot made the crossing too, and a mass of tools and trading goods: hatchets, hoes, axes, scythes, scissors, knives, and iron pots. We know this because in his letter book Bradford copied out a set of accounts for the Plymouth Colony drawn up by James Sherley. They match the data from the port of Barnstaple.15

  Each of the four ships made the journey safely, both ways. When they crossed Bideford Bar on their return, they brought with them a haul of beaver skins of a size hitherto unseen in their home ports. First to reach Devon on July 28 was the Eagle. After unloading her supplies for the Pilgrims, she had fished, collected train oil, and then sailed on to Virginia before coming home. She carried no fewer than 274 beaver skins, divided into three consignments for Barnstaple merchants. Of these, 230 went to a consortium led by William Palmer.

  Into the Taw on October 2 came the Content, and on board John Witheridge brought back another 228 beaver pelts, sixty-five otter skins, and eight tons of wax from Jamestown. All the fur was for Palmer’s account. The Pleasure was the last to reach harbor, on October 17. Her cargo came directly from the Mayflower Pilgrims. Sherley mentioned the Pleasure, and Peeters, and two hundred pounds of beaver fur sent back from New Plymouth. Altogether, the Pleasure carried four tons of train oil and 726 beaver pelts for five Bristol and Barnstaple merchants. One of them, named John Brand, acted for Sherley. He packed Sherley’s pelts off to London to be sold on the colony’s behalf.