DONALD F. CHARD

The Price and Profits of Accommodation: Massachusetts—Louisbourg Trade, 1713–1744

WAR ravaged much of New England in the last decade of the seventeenth and the first decade of the eighteenth centuries. Northern areas were particularly hard hit: Maine was so badly ravaged that its population in 1717 was still less than it had been in 1660. In the 1690s, residents of some frontier towns were forbidden to flee their homes because of the need for a buffer against French and Indian attackers and because Bostonians resented the presence of penniless refugees on their doorsteps. When a second conflict broke out with the French in 1702, many of the same problems recurred. By 1706, some Bostonians felt very threatened. Samuel Sewall, prominent Boston merchant, experienced nightmares about the situation:

Last night I dreamed I saw a vast number of French coming towards us, for multitude and Huddle like a great Flock of Sheep. It put me into a great consternation, and made me think of hiding in some Thicket. The impression remain’d upon me after my Waking. GOD Defend.1

Sewall had good reasons to fear the French. In 1707 Boston’s trade declined drastically because of the activities of French privateers. One observer reported that “Boston hath been a place of great trade, but the warr have extremely impoverished them, so that the trade is not now one-third of what it was.”2 Port Royal, then capital of Acadia and refuge for a number of the privateers harassing New England, fell to the English in October 1710, but not before a fierce assault on New England shipping by French marauders. In the last year in which the French controlled Port Royal, privateers from there seized some thirty-five English vessels, including nine within five days no more than fifteen leagues from Boston.

It is little wonder, then, that when the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713 there was fear in North America that New England would enjoy little relief from French rivalry. Samuel Vetch, first English governor of Nova Scotia, and a leading advocate of English expansion in North America, warned the Board of Trade that France might apply to Cape Breton Island all the money formerly devoted to Acadia and Newfoundland, and that Louisbourg would become a major privateering center. Vetch’s fears appeared to have been realized when Nova Scotia Indians, allied to the French authorities on Cape Breton Island, prevented Massachusetts fishermen from establishing themselves anywhere in Nova Scotia except at Canso, across the strait from Cape Breton Island. The situation worsened until 1715, when Indians forced Cyprian Southack of Boston to abandon his fishing establishment on Nova Scotia’s south shore. Indians seized some twenty-seven New England fishing vessels in the course of the year, and Massachusetts had to send two commissioners to Nova Scotia to negotiate a release of the vessels.

French occupation of Cape Breton Island, and influence in Nova Scotia worried some New Englanders, but to others it spelled opportunity. Massachusetts’ merchants quickly grasped the potential of trade with lie Royale, as the French named their colony, and they pursued that trade avidly until the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1744.

In accommodating themselves to the French, Massachusetts merchants had to cope with a series of obstacles. This was the main price of accommodation. There were three main threats to accommodation between 1713 and 1744, the first of which came in 1718 when fishing interests precipitated a confrontation with the French over control of Canso. French mercantilist policy posed the second major threat to accommodation and trade and was most serious in the late 1720s when metropolitan French officials attempted to reduce drastically, if not eliminate, trade between English colonies and He Royale. The third challenge came from British mercantilist policies and was of greatest concern to New Englanders in the early 1730s.

Although the price of accommodation, in terms of wrangling with opponents of trade, was considerable, it was clearly outweighed by the profits. For over thirty years, New England merchants traded with their counterparts at Louisbourg. Some of the Massachusetts merchant kings of the period were involved in the trade: men such as the Pepperrells (father and son), and Peter Faneuil. By the last decade before war disrupted trade, forty to fifty New England vessels visited He Royale each year. The English sold a wide assortment of goods to the French, but foodstuffs, building materials, and ships dominated the list. At Louisbourg, New Englanders obtained large quantities of molasses to fuel Boston’s rum distilleries. They also secured rum itself, indigo, coal, and French manufactured goods.

Trade with He Royale began within a year of the founding of Louisbourg in 1713 and was based on the inability of the French empire to supply the colony of He Royale as capably as could New England merchants. French settlers began to arrive at Louisbourg in the summer of 1713. That winter they suffered greatly from inadequate provisioning. They began slaughtering their cattle in December, and by spring only two of the original twenty-one cattle were still alive. Some settlers developed scurvy that winter. Relief from France was slow in reaching the island in 1714. Drift ice remained off the coast until the end of May, making it impossible for French supply vessels to get to Louisbourg until then. The first French vessel to arrive in 1714 was in the ice fields for twenty days. Another vessel, carrying provisions to the outlying settlements of Mire (Mira), was wrecked in passage. Unexplained delays in the departure of vessels from France further exacerbated the situation.

Whether or not they recognized that a French colony dependent on them for supplies was less of a long-term threat than a colony which could be sustained by the French empire, Massachusetts’ merchants moved quickly to secure a portion of the Louisbourg market. Acadians who visited He Royale in 1714 reported seeing New England vessels at Louisbourg and elsewhere. One of the vessels was from Boston; another was from Casco Bay. Both ships carried boards, salt, cattle and other goods. Among the customers for the cargoes was Joseph Monbeton de Brouillon (called Saint-Ovide), then king’s lieutenant and from 1717 to 1739 Governor of the colony. Saint-Ovide purchased for himself the entire contents of four Boston merchantmen in 1714.3

As soon as the trade began, some British officials in North America sought to halt it. Samuel Vetch’s successor as Governor of Nova Scotia, Francis Nicholson, mentioned the trade to Governor Joseph Dudley of Massachusetts several times in 1714 and expressed apprehension that New Englanders would send more vessels in the spring of 1715. Nicholson also expressed a belief that the French would have to draw on New England for supplies if they were to develop a sizeable establishment on Cape Breton Island. To forestall this eventuality, Nicholson advised New England governors and customs agents to use “all lawfull ways and means” to prevent French development of Cape Breton. Anticipating the methods by which some of the trade would be conducted, Nicholson said that he supposed that vessels bound for the island would enter for “Newfoundland or some place here abouts.…”4

Nicholson’s complaints met with a prompt response in Massachusetts. The Council read his letter two days after it was written and then launched an investigation into the matter. It ordered the examination of three French officers then in Boston to determine the nature of their business in the city. The French apparently satisfied the Council that their presence did not constitute a threat to the interests of Massachusetts or the British empire generally. Nevertheless, on 3 January 1715 the Massachusetts Council drew up a proclamation forbidding any correspondence, trade, commerce, or any other dealings with the French of Canada, Cape Breton or any other French colony. The proclamation specifically prohibited the shipping of provisions, lumber or any other supplies to the French. This action would at first seem to indicate a determination of the Massachusetts government to give Nicholson its wholehearted support. But, on closer scrutiny, it appears that the Council had reservations about placing overly strict or lengthy restrictions on trade with the French. The proclamation was to be in effect only “until His Majesty’s Pleasure be known therein.” In March 1715, the Council advised customs collectors in Massachusetts to use all possible methods to discover any vessels whatsoever trading to Cape Breton, Canada, or any other place inhabited by subjects of the French king, but to judge from the rarity of seizures, the customs officials could not have had the means to carry out their instructions.

At Louisbourg, trade was accepted and encouraged. Major Jacques L’Hermitte, engineer at Louisbourg in 1714 and 1715, reported at the end of 1714 that trade with Boston had been open all summer and that Governor Costebelle had accepted it. French records for this period, although fragmentary in dealing with Louisbourg shipping, suggest that Massachusetts regulations had no effect on trade between the two colonies. L’Hermitte suggested that New Englanders sold goods at Louisbourg at lower prices than could French merchants, which gave Louisbourg merchants a considerable incentive to trade with the New Englanders.

Although they wanted trade with Massachusetts and the other New England colonies, the French authorities at Louisbourg wanted the trade confined within certain limits. By 1716, Louisbourg authorities had imposed controls on New England vessels calling at that port. When four or five New England vessels put in to Louisbourg because of bad weather and a need for food and water, a sergeant and two soldiers boarded each ship, and obliged each vessel to leave within twenty-four hours.

Contacts and trade elsewhere were more difficult to police. One French official complained of a “liaison trop grande” between fishermen of the two nations. The situation was particularly troublesome at Port Toulouse, because of the lack of conscientious enforcement of trade regulations there and because of the settlement’s proximity to Canso.

Louisbourg officials could not find an easy solution to the problems of the Port Toulouse-Canso area. A report of early 1717 indicated that both French and English lived at Canso, and there were suggestions that Governor Costebelle tolerated the situation. To these allegations Costebelle replied that toleration of the situation was necessary to keep the strait between Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia open to the French. As for trade in the area, he suggested that it was necessary because of problems in receiving supplies from merchants in French ports such as Bayonne, Nantes, and St. Jean de Luz. The Council of Marine in France was apparently unsatisfied with such explanations. The Council, noting in a memoir of September 1717 that trade was easily and commonly conducted at Port Toulouse, proceeded to forbid all commerce with the English by inhabitants of the village. Issuing decrees was easier than enforcing them. The Louisbourg authorities probably could not rely on the garrison at Port Toulouse to regulate trade. The soldiers there were reportedly so undisciplined that they passed much of their time in taverns and worked only when it pleased them to do so. It was said to be impossible to get them to perform even the most pressing tasks. Only the suppression of the taverns, one report advised, would bring about a restoration of order.5

While Louisbourg officials brooded about English-French contacts, Massachusetts officials and entrepreneurs took steps to protect their interests. Their actions threatened the Anglo-French entente which had developed after the Treaty of Utrecht, but New Englanders were prepared to take the risk despite the implications for trade. In 1718 some Massachusetts residents with fishing interests at Canso began to agitate for the eviction of the French from the area and for a forceful assertion of Britain’s claim to jurisdiction over Canso as a territory dependent on Nova Scotia.

Cyprian Southack, former commander of Province Galley of Massachusetts, operator of a fishing station at Canso, and the sponsor of the abortive enterprise at Port Roseway, played a key role in the affair. In registering the first known complaint about French activity in the Canso area, Southack declared that “a great many French commanders of ships with their men,” had come from Cape Breton to fish at Canso and to the west. Southack also charged that one particular Frenchman from Cape Breton had built a house and stages at Canso, and “makes all the mischief he can…against the English interest.”6 Other complaints followed. In June 1718, Governor Shute of Massachusetts received a memorial declaring that about 300 Frenchmen had taken possession of the area and erected houses in it. “There is a ship from France in the harbour and more dayly expected, they have seized the best places for making fish, and threaten the English with a removal, pretending that they act by the advice and direction of the Governor of Cape Breton.”7 A memorandum by Cyprian Southack supported the complaint.

Prompted by the spate of complaints about French encroachments, and French-encouraged Indian hostility, Governor Shute dispatched H.M.S. Squirrel to Canso and Louisbourg in August 1718 to investigate the matter. Captain Thomas Smart commanded the vessel, accompanied by Cyprian Southack. The investigation resulted in the seizure of French property at Canso and the eviction of French residents, after a protest was lodged with Louisbourg authorities.

Protests by individual French merchants and the French government, discussion of the affair by an Anglo-French boundary commission, and reprisals by Indians and French inhabitants of He Royale all ensued from Massachusetts’ action in 1718. But the Massachusetts government had made its point. In light of the Anglo-French entente it dared not attempt the destruction of He Royale, but it was determined to establish firm control over Canso. The price Massachusetts paid, in terms of raids on the establishment at Canso, did not shake English control of the area, and by 1720 the Louisbourg trade was once more of sufficient volume to worry Massachusetts’ Governor Shute.

In early 1720, Shute asked his legislature to ban trade with He Royale. In a message to the Council, Shute claimed that Massachusetts and New Hampshire “constantly supplied the French of Cape Breton with provisions and other stores,” and suggested that a French and Indian raid on Canso in August might not have been possible if goods had not reached He Royale from New England. Some three weeks after Shute’s statement, three members of the Council formed a committee with members of the House of Representatives to consider the Governor’s request. They subsequently drew up a bill to effect a ban, but the House of Representatives refused its assent. In March 1721 Shute renewed his appeal for a ban: “I must again recommend it, hoping it will have a better fare this session, lest otherwise it should be thought by the Government at Home that we have more regard for some private man’s interest than to his Majesties Treaties or the Public Good.”8 Once more Shute’s arguments fell on deaf ears. The Council passed legislation “to prevent Carrying on an illegal Trade to Cape Breton alias Louisbourg,” and when the bill was sent to the House a message was attached to impress that body with the need for passage of the bill. The message noted that Governor Phillips of Nova Scotia had complained to Governor Shute about supplies going to Cape Breton from New England. Phillips warned that he would be obliged to represent the state of affairs to the authorities in Britain. Moreover, the message to the House alleged that an unidentified French officer from Cape Breton had admitted that except for supplies received from New England, the French would have had to abandon the colony. Such information failed to sway the House, which rejected the bill, declaring “We then did not, neither do we now know, or are informed of any within this Government, that do Trade there.…”9

Although the volume and the value of New England’s trade with Louisbourg in the early 1720s is difficult to determine with precision, it was of sufficient importance to attract several prominent Massachusetts merchants. This fact may explain, at least in part, the reluctance of the Massachusetts House of Representatives to ban the trade. For instance, one of the Bowdoins, possibly James Bowdoin, was involved in trade with He Royale in 1720. That year, Bowdoin consigned a cargo of pork to William Pickering of Salem. Pickering, one of the first New Englanders to do business at Canso after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, conveyed the pork to Cape Breton.1 Pickering later disappeared with his vessel, and it is not known if anyone else maintained the trade for Bowdoin. The fact of Bowdoin’s involvement in the Cape Breton trade is significant. Not only does it prove an interest in the Cape Breton trade by prominent Massachusetts merchants, but it also anticipated the entrance of Peter Faneuil in the trade later in the 1720s, in which trade Faneuil became extensively involved.

Massachusetts’ trade with He Royale was also extensive enough that it involved merchants of the other New England colonies, as the case of Joshua Peirce illustrates. Peirce, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had five or six schooners fishing at Canso by 1723. By 1726, he was selling livestock and lumber at Louisbourg, and by 1728 he was engaged in cooperative ventures to the West Indies with a Louisbourg merchant named Dolebra. In the autumn of 1728, Peirce arranged to send his partner a brigantine loaded with items such as boards, bricks, sheep, and cattle. Peirce instructed Dolebra to sell the cargo at Louisbourg and then to send the vessel to Martinique under a French master. From there, the vessel was to return to Boston, where the English captain would assume command again.2 The arrangements were sophisticated and somewhat clandestine, prompted no doubt by French edicts of 1717 and 1728 which excluded all foreign commerce from French islands in the West Indies in order to make both imports and exports of the islands the monopoly of the French empire. It is clear from Peirce’s activities that Boston merchants sometimes used merchants of other colonies to facilitate their trade with He Royale, and through He Royale with the French West Indies.

On occasion, Peirce used Canso to mask the nature of his activities. In 1733 one of Peirce’s vessels, carrying goods from Louisbourg to Boston, entered Canso to disguise the origin of its cargo of molasses and other French goods. Peirce explained to his Boston buyer that there would now be no danger of the goods being seized at either Portsmouth or Boston.3 Such precautions may not really have been necessary, as Boston merchants enjoyed a special relationship with the customs collector there. On the death of John Jekyll the elder, who held the customs collector’s post from 1717 to 1733, the Boston Weekly Newsletter reported that by his “courteous Behaviour to the Merchant, he became the Darling of all fair Traders…with much humanity [he] took pleasure in directing Masters of Vessels how they ought to avoid the Breach of the Acts of Trade.”4

On the whole, French imperial trade regulations posed a greater nuisance to Massachusetts merchants than did British regulations. In 1722 the King of France decreed that trade with the English for “Livestock and lumber” was permissible when there was need for these items at Louisbourg, but at the same time he declared that trade in other items was forbidden except under “the most pressing and indispensable need.”5 Regulations such as those of 1722 (and the earlier edicts of 1717), appear to have been more honored in the breach than in the observance, to judge from the complaints of inhabitants and officials alike at He Royale, and from the occasional reiteration of trade regulations by authorities in France. In 1724, for instance, a number of inhabitants of He Royale complained to the Minister of the Marine that a great number of English (New England) ships came to He Royale and, under the pretext of bringing permitted goods, brought prohibited materials such as tar, pitch, salt, lard, tobacco, and even cloth. In 1726, authorities in France repeated their orders to Louisbourg officials on trade with foreign vessels. The entry of any merchandise from foreign colonies was forbidden except for livestock, provisions, building materials, and, in case of need, flour. Guards were to be placed on all foreign ships to ensure that they complied with these regulations.

Despite these oft-repeated instructions, St. Malo merchants complained in 1727 that Governor Saint-Ovide allowed foreigners to trade in prohibited goods. They also claimed that New Englanders received gold and silver when there was any at Louisbourg, and fish when there was not. One St. Malo merchant charged that Saint-Ovide maltreated and imprisoned him and the crew of his ship Prudent for having brought about the arrest of a New England ship trading at Louisbourg. In his defense, Saint-Ovide claimed that the merchant had boarded the ship in question with fifteen to twenty armed men and had maltreated the captain.6

According to Louisbourg Admiralty officials, Saint-Ovide also interfered with their activities. In April 1727, Admiralty officials seized the brigantine Travellor, whose captain admitted making a false declaration of goods landed, having neglected to declare £243 worth of tobacco and other unspecified items. Saint-Ovide had intervened and returned the confiscated goods. Not long after this, the Minister of the Marine warned Saint-Ovide that “It is to your interest that there should be no more complaints on this score.”7 Saint-Ovide defended his actions by asserting that everything he had done had been for the good of the community and had not benefited any individual.

In 1727 new regulations, precipitated in part perhaps by the difficulties early in the year, heralded a stiff challenge by authorities in France to Massachusetts-lie Royale trade. Maurepas, Minister of the Marine from 1724 to 1749, and a mercantilist of considerable conviction, decided to ban all trade between the French and English colonies in North America. His edict of November 1727 was, however, not registered at Louisbourg until October 1730, until which time trade continued. Within a few months of imposition of the ban some merchants were complaining about it. St. Jean de Luz merchants declared in December 1730 that they needed English ships to carry on the fishery and that the ban deprived them of the vessels.8

Louisbourg officials soon began using loopholes in French trade regulations in order to guarantee access to the colony’s New England suppliers. In 1731, Governor Saint-Ovide allowed four New England ships to trade at He Royale on the grounds that the contractor working on the fortifications was in great need of bricks and planks. The Governor also acknowledged having permitted New Englanders to sell cattle, sheep, poultry, Indian wheat, apples, and onions, because the colony allegedly suffered shortages of food. Louisbourg authorities also permitted New Englanders to sell five ships there in 1731, and thirteen in 1732.9

In 1733, Louisbourg officials continued to sanction trade with New England on the grounds that there were shortages in the colony. In the first eight months of 1733 some thirty-two English ships, mostly from Massachusetts, arrived at Louisbourg. Trade continued at this level for the next ten years. From 1733 to 1743, an average of fifty ships a year reached Louisbourg from Acadia and New England. The average tonnage of the New England vessels at Louisbourg in 1742, one of the few years for which figures are available, was 40.5 tons.

Throughout the period, Massachusetts merchants traded at Louisbourg confidently. The merchant community did not reflect the concern Boston newspapers expressed at the continued erection of fortifications on Cape Breton Island. In September 1733, the Boston Gazette published a report that the French were still adding to Louisbourg’s defenses although they allegedly already had nearly 200 guns mounted on the batteries there. The French were also said to have started fortifications at Port Toulouse. The newspaper expressed concern about the works in case of war between France and Britain. It noted that “poor Canso…lies neglected, without so much as one gun for its defence, and in the neighbourhood of so powerful a rival in the fishery.”1

Boston merchants doing business at Canso took a rather different view of the military establishment at Canso, as is apparent from a 1732 memorial of Massachusetts and New Hampshire merchants to the Governor of Nova Scotia. The merchants complained that the Canso garrison committed depredations on the fishing establishment and on warehouses there. Among the signers of the petition were such prominent merchants as Peter and Andrew Faneuil, Stephen Botineau, Charles Apthorp, Jacob Wendall, and Joshua and Nathaniel Peirce. Governor Phillips responded to their complaints by establishing a court of sessions at Canso, composed of justices of the peace authorized to meet weekly. Several of those who had complained of the disorderly garrison, such as Joshua Peirce and Thomas Kilby, received appointments as justices.

Just as New England merchants were sensitive to anything at Canso or Cape Breton which might have interrupted or otherwise impeded trade with the French, their representatives in the Massachusetts government demonstrated a like determination to silence or counteract publicity about illegal trade. Thus, they showed great concern at statements Jeremiah Dunbar made before a committee of the House of Commons in 1730, to the effect that New England timber reserved for the Crown was being cut by private individuals who then exported it from Boston to the French colonies. Dunbar reportedly charged that “most of the principal people in that country were involved,” and that “some of the richest men in Boston got their estates by exporting timber and importing French sugar, rum, and silks.” Cape Breton was not mentioned in the report, but Dunbar had reportedly said that there were merchants in Boston who were factors for the French and, in that capacity, had ships built and registered in their own names. Afterwards they transferred the ships to masters sent to Boston by the French to bring the vessels to the French colonies.2 This was basically the same technique Joshua Peirce used in his dealings with his partner at Louisbourg.

An anxious Massachusetts House of Representatives set up a committee to investigate the report, because they felt that it contained “sundry injurious restrictions and false insinuations of the people of this Province their trade and Business.…” Dunbar, then residing in Boston, was summoned before the committee, where he declared that parts of the statements attributed to him were false, that he had said nothing about illegal imports of French silks. The committee then called on Samuel Waldo and Joshua Winslow, who had been present at the Commons hearings at which Dunbar had testified. They stated that the report in the possession of the Representatives contained the substance of what Dunbar had said, including the comment about silks. Dunbar again denied the charge, but the committee concluded that he had misrepresented “His Majesty’s good subjects of New-England to the Honourable the Commons of Great Britain.”

No doubt Dunbar’s charges had embarrassed the Massachusetts government, despite their denials of his charges. Governor Belcher subsequently took a strong stand against illegal trade. In 1731, Belcher reiterated the provisions of the Treaty of Neutrality of 1686, which authorized the confiscation of any French or English vessel caught fishing or trading in the territorial waters of the other sovereign’s colonies. His action suggests that some Massachusetts authorities wanted to give the appearance of opposition to illicit trade, but the proclamations were at the same time an admission that such trade took place. Belcher noted that “divers French Vessels have entered the Ports of this Province under Pretence of being disabled and hindered from proceeding on their voyages.”3 The real purpose of the calls, Belcher suggested, was to carry on illegal trade. Belcher also reminded the colony of an act passed in 1701 entitled “an act for the preventing of Danger by the French residing within this Province.” According to the terms of this act, French residents of Massachusetts were not permitted to live in seaports or on the frontier without a license from the governor and council.4 Belcher’s move can only have been directed against the Huguenot community in Massachusetts, members of which had traded with the French in Acadia during the War of the League of Augsburg in the 1690s, and traded with the French at Louisbourg in Belcher’s own day.

Curbs on Huguenot contacts with the French would not, however, have stopped trade with He Royale, because there were also prominent non-Huguenot merchants such as the Messrs. William Pepperrell trading there along with a host of less well known individuals. The Pepperrells traded with He Royale for more than a decade, despite some losses, such as the wrecking at Port Toulouse of a vessel in which they had an interest, in 1721. The master of the vessel, a sloop called Prosperous, saved only the clothes on his back.5

This voyage to Cape Breton by Pepperrell interests was not an isolated venture. The same year in which Prosperous was lost, Pepperrell sent John and Mary to the same area. He instructed the captain, John More, to dispose of his cargo to either the French or the English. The cargo was typical of those destined for the Canso-Port Toulouse area. It consisted of 2,500 feet of boards and planks, 5,500 staves, four calves, some cows, twenty-four sheep, one hogshead of rum, and two hogsheads of tobacco. Pepperrell specifically directed More to call at Port Toulouse and “See and bring home what our Vessels have got to send home.” Moreover, Pepperrell instructed More to sell the vessel if he could get £200 sterling or goods of that value for it.6

In 1723, the Pepperrell operations in the Canso-Port Toulouse area suffered another loss with the death of Captain John Watkins, son-in-law to the senior Pepperrell. Watkins was killed at Canso by either French or Indians. When he learned of the event, Pepperrell wrote to Major William Cosby, commander of the Canso garrison, to ask his assistance in settling Watkins’ affairs and securing his effects, described as very considerable. In 1726, the Pepperrells still conducted business at Port Toulouse, as is made clear by their correspondence dealing with the disposal of a vessel left at Port Toulouse upon the death of Captain John Dearing, with whom the Pepperrells were joint owners.7

In the 1730s, undaunted by their earlier reverses in dealings in the area, the Pepperrells made use of Louisbourg to facilitate trade with the French West Indies, particularly with Martinique. Details of this trade are sketchy, but the Pepperrells had sent ships to the West Indies via Louisbourg by at least 1729, when Hughes Grangent, a Martinique merchant, wrote Pepperrell that a small boat belonging to the latter had arrived at Martinique from Louisbourg. Grangent, who owed Pepperrell and a third party, Benjamin Clark, over £5,000 Massachusetts currency, indicated that he would remit rum and molasses to Boston in payment. In Grangent’s account of the transaction there are references to four different New England ships taking part in his trade with Pepperrell.8

Doing business with Grangent was sometimes difficult. In January 1731, Grangent complained to Pepperrell of the latter having held up two brigantines, thus making their entry at Louisbourg difficult for some unspecified reason. As an alternative to sending the vessels to Louisbourg, Grangent suggested sending them to St. Lucia. In reply, Pepperrell stated that there had been a delay in fitting out the vessels because of an outbreak of smallpox at Boston. There were other obstacles in the way of the transaction as well. Grangent still owed Pepperrell over £500 “New England money,” and Pepperrell insisted on payment of the debt before he would send the ships: “I shall write to Mr. Daccaratt Junior at Lewisbourg on Cape Brittain and if he will send us effects [I] will dispatch the two brigs. But I shall not advance any more money.” To make sure that the point was clearly understood, Pepperrell remarked that he did not “care to Venture to Send them to St. Lucia or Louisbourg untill the money is Secured in some English place, it is too Great a risque.…”9

Other New England merchants, such as Peter Faneuil of Boston, managed to conduct trade with the French with less apparent difficulty. For Faneuil, the Cape Breton trade may have been only a small part of his overall operations, but he nevertheless pursued it avidly. Faneuil’s first known venture to Louisbourg occurred in 1728 when he received sixty-one barrels of sugar, and over thirty-two tierces of molasses from Louisbourg. In 1729 Faneuil received shipments of rum, sugar, molasses, sweetmeats, cotton wool, cocoa, wine, brandy, and silks from Louisbourg. The goods were sent there by merchants in Guadeloupe and La Rochelle.1

From at least 1729 to 1733, Peter Faneuil did business at Louisbourg with Abraham Tabois. Tabois, otherwise unidentified, was a middleman for Faneuil, forwarding goods to Faneuil on the account of merchants in La Rochelle and possibly for West Indian merchants also. By 1733, Faneuil had developed an arrangement with Joshua Peirce whereby he acted as an intermediary and a shipper of goods from Louisbourg to Boston. Joshua’s brother Nathaniel carried molasses and other goods from Louisbourg to Boston for the Faneuil interests in November 1733.2

Whether or not the Peirces still handled business at Louisbourg for Faneuil in the late 1730s is unclear. The Peirces made voyages to Canso as late as 1737, but by that time Peter Faneuil had appointed Thomas Kilby as his agent at Canso and conducted much of his Louisbourg trade through him. In selecting Kilby as his agent, Faneuil obtained the services of an individual with an intimate knowledge of the Canso area, an individual who, if not then well acquainted with Louisbourg would soon become very familiar with it. After completing his studies at Harvard in 1726, Kilby became a merchant, with interests at Canso, where he was granted land sometime prior to 1729, and named a justice of the peace in 1730.3

Kilby looked after both trade at Louisbourg and fishing matters at Canso. In a letter of June 1737, Peter Faneuil instructed Kilby to supervise the loading with fish of a ship bound for Bilboa, and to secure cargoes for three other ships. In the same letter, Faneuil also instructed Kilby to go to Louisbourg and dispose of a sloop and its cargo there or to send the sloop back to Boston. Faneuil advised Kilby that he would give him credit for a sum of money at Louisbourg, implying that he had maintained contacts there since the earlier ventures under the auspices of Joshua Peirce. In addition to selling the sloop and her cargo, Kilby was instructed to see if any indigo, rum or molasses was available, “or anything ye will turn to account here.…” At the same time, Faneuil requested Kilby to find out what was in demand at Louisbourg, and advise him, so that the appropriate goods might be sent there. Shortly afterwards, Faneuil sent Kilby a cargo of lumber, salt, and other goods, and instructed him to dispose of them and to buy indigo.4

Prices at Louisbourg were not always favorable, but must generally have been good. In July 1737, Faneuil wrote Kilby that “the French were starving for want of provisions they may thank themselves for it for when we used to carry it to ’em they would give nothing for it.…” Although Faneuil grumbled about the prices he received for his goods at Louisbourg previously, that did not stop him from doing business there, nor did it keep other New Englanders away in any great numbers. In 1736, there were thirty-five vessels from New England and Acadia at Louisbourg (most of them New England vessels), and the year before that there were fifty-two English colonial vessels there.5

In the summer of 1737, demand at Louisbourg was good, and prompted the involvement in a trading venture of Peter Warren, who would in 1745 lead the naval squadron which assisted William Pepperrell in seizing the town. A shortage of provisions at Louisbourg in 1737 prompted Governor Saint-Ovide to write to Faneuil and promise that any Englishmen who came with provisions would have his protection.6 Upon receipt of this news, Faneuil and Captain Peter Warren decided to send Kilby a sloop with a cargo of biscuit to sell to the French. In exchange for the food Faneuil wanted rum, molasses, and cash. Faneuil gave Kilby explicit directions to purchase Cape Francois rum, which was available from “Mr. Morpain…and no one else.” Faneuil estimated that he and Warren would clear between £400 and £500 on the voyage, and clearly outweighed any qualms they may have had at dealing with a noted former privateersman.

Faneuil’s correspondence with Kilby reveals several facets of his involvement with Louisbourg. Faneuil’s interests were extensive enough to require his agent’s presence at Louisbourg frequently and facilitated Faneuil’s trade with France. Not content merely with purchasing whatever French goods were available at Louisbourg, Faneuil went beyond that and corresponded with two Bordeaux merchants, Etienne Sigal and P. Griffon. This suggests that although Louisbourg merchants handled some aspects of transactions between New England merchants and their counterparts in France and the French West Indies, there were occasions on which the principals would discuss their transactions directly and eliminate the middleman at Louisbourg or relegate him to a minor role.

Although there is little correspondence by New England merchants trading with Louisbourg in the 1740s, there is evidence that the trade continued to grow then, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, He St. Jean (present-day Prince Edward Island), failed to become a reliable source of foodstuffs for He Royale. In 1741 the continued failure of the French empire to meet all the needs of He Royale is apparent in the fact that fifty New England vessels called at Louisbourg and in 1742 approximately the same number arrived. Severe shortages kept demand for English colonial produce high. In June 1742, Francois Bigot, then a highly placed official at Louisbourg, wrote that misery had grown in the colony and that there was little or no bread and no vegetables whatsoever available. Officials in France made it clear to Bigot that he should send to France for supplies when Canada could not provide them. Bigot agreed to follow the order, but observed that it would be expensive for the colony because goods which came from France were always more expensive than those from New England.7

Again in 1743, shortages at Louisbourg led officials there to seek large amounts of foodstuffs from the English colonies. Not only could the colony of Canada not export food to Louisbourg, but its officials requested Louisbourg officials to obtain supplies from New England for Canada. Gilles Hocquart, intendant of Canada, requested 4,000 or more quarts of flour, because caterpillars threatened the wheat crop in Canada. In August, word reached Louisbourg that the threat was not as severe as at first anticipated. By that time Louisbourg officials had sent to Canso for the flour, 800 to 900 quintals of biscuit, a cargo of corn, vegetables, and 4,000 quintals of cod.8

That the French would turn so quickly to Canso for supplies reveals much about the evolution of trade between He Royale and New England between 1713 and the 1740s. At first, contacts had been somewhat haphazard. There is no evidence of the involvement of Massachusetts merchants of any consequence prior to Bowdoin’s involvement in 1720. By the late 1720s merchants such as the Peirces, Pepperrells, and Peter Faneuil had developed contacts at Louisbourg which enabled them to obtain goods there from France and the French West Indies. Faneuil maintained an agent at Canso to look after his affairs there and at Louisbourg. Both Faneuil and the Pepperrells also corresponded with merchants in the West Indies, and Peter Faneuil corresponded with merchants in France, indicating that while Louisbourg was a useful place through which to obtain the products of other parts of the French empire, by the late 1730s Louisbourg merchants may have played a secondary part in the trade.

French officials at Louisbourg accepted the trade from the very beginning as a necessary means of providing the inhabitants of the colony with provisions and building materials, and in order to guarantee a market for goods coming to Louisbourg from other parts of the French empire. Authorities in France came to accept this state of affairs even though it contradicted the mercantilist precepts on which French imperial trade policy was based.

As for the New Englanders, led by Massachusetts merchants and mariners, they pursued the Louisbourg trade relentlessly until the eve of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1744. They also managed to obtain a near monopoly on the shipping of English colonial goods to Louisbourg. Only two of the English colonial vessels whose visits to Louisbourg were recorded by the French for 1742 and 1743 came from outside New England, and the bulk of the New England vessels came from Massachusetts. At first, New Englanders conducted trade with He Royale openly. Early attempts by governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to stop the trade failed, as did efforts to control the trade in the 1730s by such means as the Molasses Act of 1733.

Mercantilist-inspired Navigation Acts, and similarly inspired French trade regulations bowed to colonial realities which dictated that colonists would trade wherever they could do so with profit. Merchants of both Massachusetts and Ile Royale would undoubtedly have subscribed to the words of Joseph Robineau de Villebon, the French governor of Acadia, who immediately on his arrival in the colony in 1691 had to make considerable adjustment to colonial realities. He explained to his superiors that “Without these compromises it would be impossible to exist in this country.…”

1 A board, about six feet long and twenty-four inches wide, bearing a scribed plan of a small vessel, perhaps a coasting sloop, was found in Warren, Rhode Island, in the spring of 1977. From details of the design practices depicted the writer would date the plan at least pre-1750.

2 Since the writing of this paper in 1975 further study of the plaster ceiling decorations in Hook House, mentioned earlier, has tended to discount their value as representations of the Ark and Dove.

1 Charles Browne, “Memorandum concerning Abraham Browne, of Boston,” New England Historical & Genealogical Register, ii. (1848), 45–46.

2 James A. Spaulding’s query in New England Historical & Genealogical Register, xlv. (1891), 166.

3 David Hannay, “Barbary Pirates,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (London, 1910), in. 383–384

4 Abraham Browne, “Journal,” 1–3.

5 Browne, “Journal,” 5–7.

6 A small, light coasting or fishing vessel.

7 Browne, “Journal,” 19.

8 Browne, “Journal,” 20–24.

9 Browne, “Journal,” 27–28. Richmond’s Island lies off the southern shore of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, about half a mile distant from the mainland. It was at the time a commercial center and fishing station.

1 Browne, “Journal,” 29.

2 The following account of this voyage and Browne’s captivity is in his “Journal,” 38–58.

3 Corunna, Spain.

4 Sale, a seaport town of Morocco opposite Rabat.

5 Algiers. Spanish, “Argel.”

6 An ensign or flag.

7 Portuguese.

8 Browne, “Journal,” 89–90.

1 “The accounts of this interview given, on the one hand, by Smart and Southack and, on the other, by St. Ovide are irreconcilable,” writes John Stewart McLennan in Louisbourg from Its Foundation to Its Fall (1918).

1 For maps of Boston and Boston Harbor, see:

Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, [Report to the Society on Boston maps before the Revolution, with a letter from G. G. Smith], Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vu. (Boston, The Society, 1863), 35–40; and Shurtleff’s A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 3rd ed. (Boston, Common Council, 1891).
John Appleton, “Early Charts of the Harbor of Boston,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vm. (1864), 475–477.
Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (Boston, J. R. Osgood, 1881), ii. 491–533 (Provincial); in. i–vii (Revolutionary).
Engineering Department, Boston. “List of Maps of Boston published between 1614 and 1822, copies of which are to be found in the possession of the City of Boston.” Annual Report of the City Engineer, Appendix II, 1 February 1903 (Boston, 1903), 248 pp.
P. L. Phillips, “A Descriptive List of Maps and Views of Boston in the Library of Congress,” [Washington, D. C], 1922, 275 pp. (a typed list, found in several libraries).
John R. Reps, “Boston by Bostonians: The Printed Plans and Views of the Colonial City by its Artists, Cartographers, Engravers, and Publishers,” Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670–1775 (Boston, The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 3–56.

2 A facsimile of the Cellere manuscript (Morgan Library MS., MA766) with an accompanying transcription and translation, is in Lawrence C. Wroth, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano 1524–1528 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970), 97–143. This is the best biography of Verrazzano, with full documentation and reproduction of pertinent maps.

3 This reproduction is from a full-scale photograph of the original in E. L. Stevenson, Maps Illustrating Early Discovery and Exploration in America 1502–1530 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1903), No. 12. Another smaller unsigned world chart in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, has been identified as by Gerolamo, with the suggested date of 1528, with additions of about 1540: Marcel Destombes, “Nautical Charts attributed to Verrazzano (1525–1528),” Imago Mundi, XX. (1954), 57–66. Maggiolo’s world chart of 1527, formerly in the Ambrosiana Library, Milan, with information not on the Gerolamo charts, was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War (reprod. in Stevenson, op. cit., No. 10). A fourth manuscript map, presumably lost, was still extant as late as 1582, according to Hakluyt in his Divers Voyages, ii. 2, 287: “Master John Verazzanus, which hath been thrise on that coast, in an olde excellent mappe which he gave to King Henrie the eight, and is yet in the custodie of master Locke.”

An early and very popular printed map that showed Verrazzano’s discoveries was a quaint woodcut of the western hemisphere by Sebastian Münster, “Insulae Novae,” that first appeared in Münster’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Basle, 1540) and later in Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), published in some twenty-eight Latin, German, French, and Italian editions throughout the rest of the century. This woodcut in effect shows three connected continents: “Francisca” above Verrazzano’s false gulf, connected by a narrow peninsula with “Terra florida” and several Central American countries; below these is South America, “Insula Atlantica quam uocant Brasilii & Americam,” separated by “Fretum Magnaliani” from yet another antarctic land mass.

4 The best attempts to identify some of the Verrazzano names are in W. F. Ganong, Crucial Maps in the Early Cartography and Place-Nomenclature of the Atlantic Coast of Canada, ed. T. E. Layng (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1964), 104–194; L. C. Wroth, Verrazzano, 88–90; and Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of North America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970), 308–311.

5 Wroth, Verrazzano, 141.

6 These and other maps showing Verrazzano’s Sea are examined in Wroth, Verrazzano, 178–212.

7 The pertinent documents by these three are printed in Henry Harrisse, The Discovery of North America: A Critical, Documentary, and Historical Investigation (London and Paris, 1892), 229–243.

8 L. A. Vigneras, “The Voyage of Esteban Gómez from Florida to the Baccalaos,” Terrae Incognitae, ii. (1970), 28.

9 Woodbury Lowery, The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States, 1513–1561 (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 161.

1 This large vellum planisphere (82 × 102 cm.) was given to Count Baldassare Castiglioni, papal legate to Spain and personal friend of Charles V, and is still in the possession of the Castiglioni family in Mantua. It was examined by the present writer in 1958. Although unsigned, it is clearly the work of Diego Ribero; the date is given twice: “1525” in the astrolabe in the lower right-hand corner (as in the signed Ribero charts, Vatican 1529 and Weimar 1529), and in the legend near New England, “Land, discovered by Estebam Gómez in this year of 1525 by order of his majesty.”

2 L. A. Vigneras, “The Cartographer Diogo Ribeiro,” Imago Mundi, xvi. (1962), 76–83.

3 On some of the later maps Cabo de Arenas was transferred to apply to the northern tip of Cape Cod, although the early charts give Cabo de Santiago as the northern point. Around the middle of the sixteenth century some charts show Cape Cod not as a thin straight finger pointing northeast but as a simple straight-line jutting to the east with no Cape Cod Bay and with the coast continuing directly southward from its point, somewhat like a “7.” Examples are Pierre Desceliers 1550 (reprod., W. P. Cumming, R. A. Skelton, and D. B. Quinn, The Discovery of North America (London, Elek, 1971); John Dee (from The Simon Fernandez map) 1580 (reprod., Cumming, ibid., 195); Levasseur 1601 (Service Hydrog., Paris, Arch. 5).

4 Alonso de Chaves, Quatripartitu[m]en cosmographia pratica, with tables made for the year 1539; the original manuscript is in the Real Academia, Madrid. See Appendix B. Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps (New York, Bonanza Books, 1949), 141–144, has a good summary of the origin, functioning, and laws governing the Casa de Contratación, the pilot majors, and the official charts (padron real and padron general).

5 Reprod. (detail) from Alonso de Chaves, Islario General, ed. by Franz R. V. Wieser (Innsbruck, Wagner, 1908), pl. 4.

6 Reprod. (detail) from Cartas de Indias (Madrid, Ministerio de Fomento, 1877), Facsimile R. The original is in the Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid. Commentary on the map is in W. P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1962), 114; photographic reproduction of the entire map from the original from South America to Nova Scotia is in Cumming, Discovery, pl. 193, p. 172. The Cartas de Indias facsimile has small errors of transcription that are corrected in the list in Appendix B.

7 Examples are Rotz 1542 (reprod., Cumming, Discovery of North America, pi. 116); anonymous maps in Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, circa 1540 (reprod., ibid., pis. 54, 152); Pierre Desceliers 1550 (reprod., Cumming, ibid., pi. 139); Guillaume Le Testu 1550 (reprod., Cumming, ibid., pis. 99, 141, 147, 163); Diogo Homem 1558 (Cumming, ibid., pi. 140). Wilma George, Animals and Maps (London, Seeker & Warburg, 1969), examines with many reproductions the portrayal by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartographers of animals as typical of different regions.

8 Ganong, Crucial Maps, 180–187; Bernard G. Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1961). Reprod. of Lopo Homem 1554, I. P. N. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York, R. H. Dodd, 1915–1928), ii. pl. 11; Diogo Homem 1558, Cumming, Discovery, pl. 140, 126–127.

9 Reproduced from Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois (Paris, 1613), Harvard College Library copy. The maps and drawings of Champlain, including the Library of Congress map of 1607, the original drawings in the John Carter Brown Library, and those in published works, with useful notes, are in The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. by H. P. Biggar and others (Toronto, Champlain Society, 1922–1936), in eight volumes including an accompanying portfolio. W. F. Ganong edited, with translations, the first book of Les Voyages (1613) and the first two books of Les Voyages (1632), in this series (Vols. II and III), with useful notes.

1 Samuel Eliot Morison, Samuel de Champlain, Father of New France (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 36.

2 The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. H. P. Biggar (Toronto, 1922–1936), (Les Voyages, ed. W. F. Ganong, Book I), ii. 346.

3 Reproduced from Champlain, “Description de costs…de la nouvelle france,” 1607, from manuscript original in the Library of Congress.

4 Numerous editions are reproduced in Tony Campbell, Netv Light on the Jansson-Visscher Maps of New England (London, Map Collectors’ Circle No. 24, 1965).

5 Reprod., I. P. N. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan-Island, 6 vols. (New York, 1915–1928), 11. pl. 21A and 49; Gabriel Archer’s account of Gosnold’s 1602 voyage in Samuel Purchas, Hakluyt Posthumous or Purchas his Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1906), xviii. 304–305; for Pring 1603, ibid., xviii. 324. For identifications of the harbor, Henry S. Burrage, ed., Early English and French Voyages, chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534–1608 (New York, 1906), 346–347; D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York, 1974), 426–427, argues convincingly for Provincetown.

6 Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), 455–460. Reprod. of Velasco map: Cumming, Discovery, 266–267; also Stokes, op. cit., ii, frontispiece and 51, 135.

7 Burrage, ed., Early English and French Voyages, 335 (Gosnold); 358 (Waymouth).

Mr. Philip L. Barbour, who is preparing a new edition of the Arber-Bradley Works and Travels of Captain John Smith, has found a German map derived from Waymouth’s chart.

8 Henry O. Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony. Gorges Society, iv. (Portland, Me., 1892), with the text of the manuscript in the Lambeth Palace Library, giving the relation of the voyage under George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert and a reproduction of the Simancas plan. Cf. also reprod. in Cumming, Discovery, pl. 313, and p. 257.

9 John Smith, Travels and Works, ed. by Edward Arber, revised by A. G. Bradley (New York, B. Franklin, 1910), i. 188, 190.

1 Ibid., ii. 704; I. 190.

2 Ibid., i. 170. Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston, i. 52, gives a list of changes that distinguish ten issues of the plate, usually with only minor changes and additions. See also Joseph Sabin and others, Bibliotheca Americana, 29 vols. (New York, Bibliographical Society of America, 1868–1936), xx. 230–231, where nine issues are distinguished; the first issue of 1616 has forty-eight names along the coast to which forty-two names are added by the ninth issue of 1635. For comments on the map, see Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964), 308–310, 326–327.

3 Smith, Travels and Works, ed. Arber and Bradley, i. 123; II. 699–700.

4 Reproduction of the De Laet and Dudley are in Stokes op. cit., ii. pis. 31, 35, 37, with bibliographical references; for Sanson reprod. see Blathviayt Atlas, ed. J. D. Black (Providence, R. i., 1970), i. map 6.

5 Reproduced in Cumming, Discovery of North America, 291, and elsewhere. Justin Winsor suggests that Wood’s map is based on the same survey as that in the Henry Fitzgilbert Waters-Governor John Winthrop manuscript map (British Museum, Add. MS. 5415. G. 3) of about the same time and which Winsor reproduces with explanatory notes (America, iii. 380–383). The Waters-Winthrop map includes the coast only from Boston Bay to Merrimac River but is more detailed for the land area around the bay than Woods.

6 Original in the State Archives, The Hague. It is an anonymous undated manuscript map, extending from just below the entrance to Chesapeake Bay north to Penobscot River on the coast and to the Saguenay River in Canada. It was presented to the States-General of the Dutch Republic 11 October 1614 by Gerrit Witsen and his associates in the New Netherlands colonizing venture to show the discoveries made by their three ships between 40° and 45° N.L. It was most probably copied from an original by Block, who sailed in 1614 through Hellegat (East River and Long Island Sound) along the south coast in his ship Onrust, the first ship built on Manhattan Island: cf. Stokes, ii. 67, 136–137, pl. 23. The most accurate and best reproduction of this so-called “Figurative Map of Adriaen Block” is a full-sized chomolithograph executed at the Hague about 1854 by E. Spanier, lithographer to the King.

An unsigned, undated seventeenth-century coastal outline of New England in The Hague Algemeen Rijksarchief, Versameling Kaarten No. 517 (photocopy in the Library of Congress) is interesting because it is a draughtsman’s sketch on a cross-lined sheet that shows the shore line in considerable detail, with offshore islands but with no names. It is unlike the published Dutch Jansson-Visscher charts in the smallness of Buzzards Bay and the shape of Cape Cod as well as in the intricacy of coastal delineation.

7 Stokes, ii. 137–138, pls. 25, 27; the excellent commentaries on early cartography are by F. C. Wieder, author of Monumenta Cartographica.

8 Stokes, ii. 80–82, 138; no example is known of the 1621 chart, but a later state with the imprint of Jac. Robin, otherwise apparently unchanged, is reproduced as plate 28.

9 Stokes, ii. 86, 143, pl. 31, from de Laet’s Beschryvlnghe van West-Indien (Leyden, Elzevir, 1630).

1 Stokes, ii. 88, 144–145, pl. 31; first found in the English edition of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas (Amsterdam, [1636]).

2 Stokes, ii. 88, 143–144, pl. 32.

3 Stokes, i. pls. 7, 7a, 7b, 7A. The best cartobibliographical study is Tony Campbell, New Light on the Jansson-Visscher Maps of New England (London, Map Collectors Circle No. 24, 1965), with twenty-four plates illustrating various editions. Additional information on the Jansson-Visscher series is scattered through the volumes of Cornelis Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici: Bibliography of Terrestrial, Maritime and Celestial Atlases and Pilot Books, Published in the Netherlands Up to 1880. 5 vols. (Amsterdam, 1967–1971).

4 “A New Mapp of the north part of America from Hudson Straights.…Including Newfoundland…New England…& Carolena…by John Thornton.” (1673) Reprod. and notes in Jeannette D. Black, The Blathwayt Atlas (Providence, R. I., Brown University Press, 1970), No. 5, and the Blathwayt Atlas: Volume II: Commentary (Providence, 1975), 48–55.

“A New Map of the English Plantations in America…By Robert Morden…and William Berry” (1673). Reprod. and notes, Blathwayt Atlas, No. 3, ii. 43–45.

“A Mapp of Virginia…& New England by John Thornton…and by Robert Greene” [1678–1679]. Reprod. and notes, Black, Blathwayt Atlas, No. 10, II: ii. 75–81.

“A Map of y^e English Empire…by R. Daniel…R. Morden…W. Berry” (1679). Reprod., Stokes, Iconography, ii. 158, pl. 51. Comment, Cumming Southeast, 157; for 1685 edition with changed imprint, ibid., 163.

“A Chart of the Sea coasts of New England…and Carolina. From C. Cod to C. Hatteras” and “A Chart of the West Indies from Cape Cod to the River Oronoque, By John Seller. Hydrographer to the King,” in Seller’s Atlas Maritimus (London, 1675): see Cumming, Southeast, pl. 38, 153–154.

5 David Woodward, “The Foster Woodcut Controversy: A Further Examination of the Evidence,” Imago Mundi, xxi. (1967), 52–61.

6 Seller’s “A Mapp of New England” was advertised for sale in the London Gazette, no. 1085 (10–13 April 1676); see Black, Commentary, 80, n. 14. See Stokes, Iconography, ii. pi. 52, p. 157: “A Mapp of New England by John Seller,” with the dedication to Robert Thomson, in his Atlas Maritimus.

Since Seller’s map is earlier than Foster’s woodcut, since it has many differences from it in detail and coastal configuration, and since it has settlements apparently relating to King Philip’s War not on the Stoughton-Bulkeley map (deriving from the Reed map of 1665), Seller must have had other sources not yet identified in addition to some version or copy of the Reed map. He was gathering information for his English Pilot and other publications, presumably including New England correspondents. In this connection it is interesting that the second edition of his “Mapp” is dedicated to Robert Thomson, a London merchant involved in the New England Company: see Black, Commentary, 84–85.

7 Cf. Cumming, British Maps, fig. 18, p. 31.

8 Black, Commentary, Map 8, pp. 63–72.

9 Black, Commentary, 67, 69–71.

1 Mr. Boulind generously allowed the writer to read the typescript of his “William Hack and The Description of New England,” to be published by The Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He makes a detailed study of many names found on the Hack map and analyzes the differences in four charts that include New England in Hack’s atlas, A Description of the Coasts, Islands & C^a. in the North Sea of America, in the British Museum (K. Mar. VII. 3). None of these is as detailed as the Hack map in the Plymouth Society; No. 3 is the closest to it.

2 John Seller, Praxis Nautica (London, 1669), Postscript, quoted in full in Coolie Verner, A Carto-bibliographical Study of The English Pilot, The Fourth Book (Charlottesville, Va., University Press of Virginia, 1960), 5–6.

3 Samuel Pepys, The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys, ed. Edwin Chappell, Publications of the Navy Record Society, Vol. 73 (Greenwich, England, 1935), 107.

4 The English Pilot: The Fourth Book; London, 1680, ed. Coolie Verner (Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis, 1967), xix–xx.

The following is a list of charts of the New England coast with the dates of their first and last inclusions in various editions of The English Pilot:

1. A New Chart of the Sea Coast of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England, New Jersey, Virginia…(1689–1706).
2. Part of New England, New York, East New Jersey, and Long Island…(1689–1706).
3. Part of New England…(1689–1706).
4. Boston Harbour in New England (1689–1698).
5. A Large Draught of New England New York and Long Island…Inset: Boston Harbour (1706–1737).
6. Chart of the Sea Coast of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland (1713–1794).
7. New Survey of the Harbour of Boston in New England…(1721–1732).
8. Harbour of Casco Bay…Captain Cyprian Southicke…1720…Em. Bowen (1721–1774).
9. Correct Map of the Coast of New England…1731 (1737–1760).
10. New and Correct Chart of the Sea Coast of New England from Cape Cod to Casco Bay…Henry Barnsley (1767–1773).
11. A Map of the Coast of New England from Staten Island to the Island of Breton as it was actually surveyed by Capt. Cyprian Southack…Insets: Town of Boston in New England [top left];[Atlantic Ocean, north of equator] [top right] (1775–1794).

5 “Part of New England” extends from Penobscot to eastern Long Island. The Fourth Book of 1689 has two other charts showing the sea coast from Newfoundland to Virginia and from southern New England to the Bahama Islands; on a smaller scale, they give less detail.

British Museum Add. MS. 5414.22 is a rough line drawing of the coast from Plymouth and Cape Cod to include southern Maine, with settlements on the rivers (circa 1680). Two manuscript maps of the New England coast in the Public Record Office have some similarity in coastal delineation to the 1689 chart: P.R.O., CO. 700. New England. 2, showing rivers and numbered references to a list with 130 references; and P.R.O., CO. 700. New England. 1, similar to the preceding with some details to the interior. In the British Museum are a number of undated maps of the New England coast that have not been identified as influencing printed charts: K. Top. 120.23 (Kennebec River; for Gov. Winslow by Indicott); Add. MS. 5414.21 (circa 1670); Add. MS. 5415, g. 2 (by Hack: circa 1680); Add. MS. 13970a (circa 1680); K. Mar. vii.9 (circa 1700). The dates, given in the B. M. Catalogue, iii. (1843), 536–540, are unreliable.

6 “Harbour of Casco Bay…by Capt. Cyprian Southicke…1720…Em. Bowen” was retained for over seventy years, until 1794.

7 P.R.O., CO. 700. Maine 3.

8 Clara E. LeGear, “The New England Coasting Pilot of Cyprian Southack,” Imago Mundi, XI. (1954), 137–144, with a list of Southack’s charts.

9 Bellamy’s wreck and Southack’s expedition have been recounted from original records in J. Franklin Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (New York, Macmillan, 1923), 290–311.

1 Pp. 43–65

2 [Braddock Mead] Explanation for the Neiv Map of Nova Scotia and Cape Britain (London, T. Jefferys, 1755), 5; William Douglass, Summary…of the British Settlements in North America, 2 vols. (Boston, Rogers and Fowler, 1749–1752), i. 362.

3 Cumming, British Maps, 40–45.

4 Public Record Office, CO. 700. Nova Scotia, 4.

5 Cumming, British Maps, pp. 10, 86, pl. 7; Arthur H. Robinson, “Nathaniel Blackmore’s Plaine Chart of Nova Scotia: Isobaths in the Open Sea?” Imago Mundi, xxviii. (1976), 137–141. Professor Robinson saw a photocopy of Blackmore’s chart in 1970, when the present writer was discussing Moll’s use of another map by Blackmore of Nova Scotia in his “Dominions” and later maps. Professor Robinson first noted the significance of Blackmore’s contour lines and has made a careful and judicious analysis of the problems involved. For the controversy between Mitchell and John Green [Mead] over Blackmore and his maps, including Mitchell’s attack on Blackmore in the second edition (ca. 1757) of his map of North America, see E. and D. S. Berkeley, Dr. John Mitchell, Chapel Hill, 1974, pp. 208–209, which gives an account of the controversy and its background.

6 Arthur H. Robinson, “The Genealogy of the Isopleth,” Surveying and Mapping, xxxii. (1972), 332, 337.

7 “A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on y^e Continent of North America,” in H. Moll, The World Described (London, 1709–1720), No. 8. See Cumming, Southeast, 43–44, 181–183.

8 A Map of the British Empire in A merica with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent Thereto, by Henry Popple, with introductory notes by William P. Cumming and Helen Wallis (Lympne Castle, Kent, Harry Margary, 1972).

9 Cumming, British Maps, 34, 90–91. Copies of the rare Douglass map are in the Library of Congress, British Museum, and Harvard College Library. The Douglass map was not engraved until after his death by order of his executors (circa 1753). Many copies of Douglass’s Summary have a copy inserted of Huske’s “A New and Accurate Map of North America…1755” in the 1760 edition of the work.

1 “A Map of the most Inhabited part of New England…by Thos. Jefferys, 1755,” North America at the Time of the Revolution: A Collection of Eighteenth Century Maps, Part II, with introductory notes by Louis De Vorsey, Jr. (Lympne Castle, Kent, Harry Margary, 1974), ii, sheets J1 to J4; Cumming, British Maps, 34, 91; Erik Akorn, “Geographical and Place names, Taken from A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, lxxxix. (1953), 275–287. The differences in the numerous states of the Jefferys map are noted in Stevens and Tree, “Comparative Cartography,” Map Collectors Circle, xxxix. (1967), 326–327.

Mead (alias John Green) does not acknowledge Douglass in the list of authorities used for the map, but the “List of Maps” prefixed to Thomas Jefferys’s A General Topography of North America…(London, 1768), states that the Douglass map is the basis for the “Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England.”

2 Charles Morris’s “Draught of the Northern English Colonies…” dedicated to William Shirley (British Museum, K. Top. 118. 52) is a careful, finely executed manuscript map on vellum dated Boston, 16 August 1749. Morris, born in Boston in 1711, had already been surveying the coast for several years; he was appointed surveyor general of Nova Scotia 25 September 1749: see Don W. Thompson, Men and Meridians (Ottawa, Queen’s Printer, 1966), i. 117–118.

3 Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Dr. John Mitchell: The Man Who Made the Maf (Chapel Hill, U.N.C. Press, 1974), 175–213, has the best analysis of the sources and influence of Mitchell’s map. A full-scale facsimile, with notes, is Louis De Vorsey, North America at the Time of the Revolution Part II (Lympne Castle, Kent, Harry Margary, 1974), pis. M1–8. The different editions of the map are given by Richard W. Stephenson in W. W. Ristow, A la Carte: Selected Papers on Maps and Atlases (Washington, Library of Congress, 1972), 109–113.

Neither the Berkeleys nor Mitchell himself in his notes engraved on the map give specific information about the sources used for New England, although Mitchell (Sheet 7, col. 3) makes detailed criticism of the latitudes on the maps of Moll, Blackmore, and others and cites the observations of those whom he follows.

4 An annotated list of the American maps in the Bernard Collection is given in Cumming, British Maps, Appendix A, 28–30, 75–78. In 1959 the writer looked over these maps; ten years later, 1969, Dr. Helen Wallis of the British Museum and the writer visited Nether Winchendon, examined the collection, and took photographs.

Other manuscript maps and charts of Maine made for Sir Francis are in the Public Record Office: Maps and Plans, Vol. II (America), ed. P. A. Penfold (London, 1974), CO. 700. Maine no. 18 (“Rout from Fort Pownall…to Quebec 1764”), and probably CO. 700. Maine no. 16 (“Six Townships on the East side of the River Penobscot…1763”); C.O. 700. Maine no. 18 (“seven Townships…on the East side of Mount Desert River…1764”); C.O. 700. Maine no. 19 (“Bay and River of Penobscot” [1764]).

5 Cumming, British Maps, 30.

6 “A Map of the Middle British Colonies in North America…by M^r Lewis Evans …with the Addition of New England…By T. Pownall…London…1776”; off the Maine coast is the legend “**The coast included within these marks is copied from Governor Bernards Surveys, including M^ọ Desart I^ḍ &c.” See reproduction and notes in ed. Lois Mulkearn A Topographical Description…By T. Pownall (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949).

7 A major legal factor in the rival claims of the Kennebeck Company proprietors and their opponents was whether the Kennebec River extended to the sea or whether it ended at Merrymeeting Bay and from there was the Sagadahoc River and therefore not included in the original Plymouth Council patent. At least part of the lower river below Merrymeeting Bay and the coastal bay into which it flowed was known to the English as the Sagadahoc from the time of Popham’s short-lived Sagadahoc Colony settlement in 1607. Sagadahoc is derived from the Indian sanktai -i -wi, to finish, and -onk, a locative, meaning a finishing place: where a river ceases to be a river, the mouth of a river: cf. Edward Ballard, Geographical Names on the Coast of Maine (Washington, Coast Survey Report, 1868). Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (Orono, Maine, Maine University Press, 1941), 129, 172, lists ten different spellings of Sagadahoc, with early references to its Indian meaning.

The French used the name “Quinibequy” for the entire river from the time of Champlain (1604) and his maps (Cumming, Discovery, 273, 274). J. N. Bellin’s map in P. F. X. de Charlevoix, Histoire et Description Generate de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1744), ii. facing 237, gives the entrance as “Baye de Kinibequi.” Both John Green, Explanation for the New Map of Nova Scotia and Cape Britain (London, 1753), 6, and Thomas Johnston in his “Plan of Kennebeck and Sagadahock Rivers…1754” refer to Bellin’s map. Johnston, attempting to limit the name to the Androscoggin River, that branch which also flows into Merrymeeting Bay as well as the Kennebec, notes along the river “Sagadahock or Amorescoggin River, so called by Mr. Pople [Popple’s “A Map of the British Empire in America…1733”], Sagadahock R. so Called by Monsr. Bellin and also by most or all the Ancient Plans.” In 1757, however, Bellin, probably confused by Green’s maps which he used, has both “Sagadahoc” and “Kinibeke” flow into the “Baye de Sagadahock” in his “Carte de la Nouvelle Angleterre…1757” that appeared in his Histoire Générale Des Voiages (Paris, 1746–1761), xiv. (1757).

The ruling of the Privy Council did not come until 1771 and then was inconclusive (Kershaw, Kennebeck Proprietors, 190); they ordered the case returned for a new trial to the Massachusetts Superior Court. It was not until after the Revolution that the Proprietors equivocally won their case; they were granted other land to compensate for that which they claimed.

Gordon E. Kershaw, The Kennebeck Proprietors 1740–1775 (Portland, Me., Maine Historical Society, 1975), 175–200.

Gordon E. Kershaw, “Settling the District Called Frankfort,” Maine Historical Society Newsletter, x (February 1971), 73–83, with a reproduction of Johnston’s “Plan of Kennebeck & Sagadahock…1755.”

8 L. C. Wroth, “The Thomas Johnston Maps of the Kennebec Purchase,” In Tribute to Fred Anthoensen, Master Printer (Portland, Me., 1952), 161, 163, with reproductions of Johnston maps.

James C. Wheat and Christian F. Brun, Maps and Charts Published in America Before 1800 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969), 34.

Sinclair Hitchings, “Thomas Johnston,” Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–1775 (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1973), 83–132, with reproductions of Johnston’s “A True Coppy…1753” and “Kennebeck and Sagadahock…1754.”

9 Willis Chipman, The Life and Times of Major Samuel Holland, Surveyor General, 1764–1801 in Papers and Records, Ontario Historical Society, xxi. (1924), 21.

1 Louis De Vorsey, ed., De Brahm’s Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 33; De Vorsey’s Introduction is the best life of De Brahm.

2 Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians (Ottawa, Queen’s Printer, 1966), 100.

3 Chipman, Holland, 11–15; Thomson, Men and Meridians, 108.

4 P.R.O., C.O. 700. Maine 20.

5 Louis De Vorsey, “Hydrography: A Note on the Equipage of Eighteenth-Century Survey Vessels,” The Mariner’s Mirror, lviii. (1972), 173–177.

6 G. N. D. Evans, “Hydrography: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Methods,” The Mariner’s Mirror, lii. (1960), 247–250. G. N. D. Evans, Uncommon Obdurate: The Several Public Careers of J. F. W. DesBarres (Salem, Peabody Museum, 1969), 13–14.

7 Evans, Uncommon Obdurate, and Thomson, Men and Meridians, 93ff., are somewhat complementary in their biographies.

8 There is no complete list of the works that DesBarres supervised and published, but several libraries have published their holdings in map catalogues. Some of the productions of DesBarres’ workshop, chiefly profiles that may have been discarded, are known only by a unique copy in some collection. The most extensive list so far is the typewritten list by Henry Stevens, “Catalogue of the Henry Stevens Collection of The Atlantic Neptune, with revisions to 1937 (London),” a careful carto-bibliography of the charts, profiles, and views that he owned and of other states that he had observed. His collection has been acquired by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Other large collections are in the British Museum; the Hydrographic Department of the Navy at Taunton, Somerset; the New York Public Library; and the Library of Congress. The collection of sets and separate sheets in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress (totaling some 2,300 items) is at present being collated by Dr. John R. Sellars and Miss Patricia Molen van Ee in a Library of Congress Bicentennial project. At the time of writing, the finest private collection is owned by Mr. Augustus P. Loring of Prides Crossing, Massachusetts; from it were chosen the full-scale reproductions in the four-portfolio reproductions of The Atlantic Neptune published by the Barre Publishing Company, Barre, Mass., 1966–1969.

The library at Taunton holds a number of the original drafts of the New England coast sent by Holland and his assistants to London; these deserve special study not yet made, to examine their relation to the finished plates produced in London by DesBarres. See A Summary of Selected Manuscript Documents of Historical Importance Preserved in the Archives of the Department of Hydrography: Department Professional Paper No. 13. London: Admiralty, 1950, pp. 5, 19 ff. In 1820 the Admiralty purchased the original copper plates used for The Atlantic Neptune from DesBarres, later selling 84 of the 241 purchased. In 1946–1947 the Admiralty presented to the Canadian government 30 of the original plates and to the United States of America 34 plates; these have later been distributed to appropriate local archives and libraries. At Taunton are also four sets of The Atlantic Neptune, one from George III with his coat of arms.

9 The profiles in The Atlantic Neptune are usually depicted as they are seen about thirty feet above water from an off-shore vessel. Some plates have been erased and new profiles from a different angle engraved, indicating the continuous sketching done as the surveying vessel was making soundings.

The writer is indebted to Mr. Loring for his analysis of changes in profiles and views on different states of the same chart, illustrated by examples from his collection and photographs of the same views, taken two hundred years later, from the same locations.

1 The writer is indebted to Mrs. William P. Cumming who has done the research with him and read the MS. at all stages, and to Miss Jeannette Black for suggestions and corrections that have added to the usefulness of this essay.

1 “Diary of Samuel Sewall,” 4 April 1706, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 5th Series, vi. 157.

2 Colonel Robert Quary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 10 January 1708, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, xxiii. No. 1273.

3 Declaration of Denis & Bernard Godet of Annapolis Royal, 1 September 1714, Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG7, 52, 53; B. Pothier, “Joseph de Monbeton de Brouillon, dit Saint-Ovide,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, III, (Toronto, 1974), 454

4 Governor Francis Nicholson of Nova Scotia to Governor Joseph Dudley of Massachusetts, Boston, 25 December 1714, Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG7, 49.

5 De la Forest (? to the Minister of Marine), 12 September 1717, Archives des Colonies (France), Series CiiB, ii. f.274.

6 Cyprian Southack to Lieutenant Governor John Doucett of Nova Scotia, Boston, 9 January 1718, Public Record Office (London), Colonial Office 217/2, ff.188, 189.

7 Memorial to Governor Shute, the Council and General Court of Massachusetts by Oliver Noyes et. al., Boston, June 1718, P.R.O. C.O. 217/2, f.283.

8 Massachusetts Council Minutes, 15 March 1721, P.R.O., C.O. 5/794, 123.

9 Massachusetts House of Representatives to Governor Shute, November 1720, P.R.O., C.O. 6/794, f.85.

1 Giles Hall to Mrs. Hannah Pickering, Boston, 11 September 1723, Pickering & Derby Papers, 10, Essex Institute (Salem, Mass.).

2 Peirce to Dolebra, Portsmouth, 10 September 1728, Peirce Letter Book, Baker Library (Harvard University).

3 Peirce to Peter Faneuil, Portsmouth, 9, 30 November 1733, Peirce Letter Book.

4 T. Barrow, Trade & Empire, The British Customs Service in Colonial America 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 169.

5 Memorial of the King to Saint-Ovide and Mezy, Paris, 12 May 1722, Archives des Colonies, Series CiiB, xiv. f.235.

6 Complaint enclosed in a letter from the ministry of the Marine to Saint-Ovide, 17 May 1728, ibid., x. ff.24, 25, 29.

7 Maurepas to Saint-Ovide and Mezy, 18 June 1728, Archives Nationales (France), Series B, lii. f.582v.

8 Officers of the Admiralty, Louisbourg, 5 December 1730, Archives des Colonies, Series CiiB, xi. ff.111–113.

9 Mezy to the Minister of the Marine, Louisbourg, 3 February 1732, list of New England ships sold at Louisbourg in 1732, ibid., XIII. ff.7, 100.

1 Boston Gazette, 17 September 1733.

2 New England Weekly Journal, 8 January 1733.

3 Boston Gazette, 16 August 1731.

4 Ibid.

5 E. Pearse to William Pepperrell, London, 6 December 1721, Pepperrell MS., Book 2, New England Historical and Genealogical Society (Boston).

6 Orders and Bills of Lading, July 1721, Pepperrell Papers, Box 212, 1718–1721, Maine Historical Society (Portland); William Pepperrell to Captain John More, Piscataqua, 25 July 1721, Pepperrell Papers, Collection 35, No. 12, p. 5, Maine Historical Society.

7 William Pepperrell, Sr. to Captain Thomas Richards, 8 August 1726, ibid.

8 “Acct. of Mes. H. Grangent with Wm. Pepperrell & B. Clark,” 13 November 1729, ibid.

9 H. Grangent to William Pepperrell, Martinique, 11 January 1731, ibid.

1 Invoices nos. 119, 120, 121, 1, 10 September and 17 November 1729, P. Faneuil Ledger, 1730–1732, 3, Baker Library.

2 J. Peirce to P. Faneuil, Portsmouth, 9, 30 November 1733, Peirce Letter Book.

3 Governor Richard Philipps to John Henshaw et al., Public Record Office, C.O. 217/6, f.150.

4 Faneuil to Thomas Kilby, Boston, 20 June 1737, Faneuil Letter Book, Baker Library.

5 Account of Trade for 1736, Archives Nationales, Series CiiB, xviii. f.170.

6 Faneuil to Kilby, Boston, 19 April 1737, Faneuil Letter Book.

7 Bigot to the Minister, Louisbourg, 18 June 1742, Archives des Colonies, Series CiiB, xxiv. ff.87–89.

8 Archives Departementales, Charente-Maritime (La Rochelle), Series B, Cours et Jurisdictions (Amirauté de Louisbourg à La Rochelle), registre B272, ff.510–515, 555–560.

1 The introductory essay in Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Washington, 1878) remains the most useful account of the colonial fishery.

2 James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, England, 1972), Appendix IV, Table 2, pp. 211–216.

3 Three quarters of a century earlier, French whalemen at Spitzbergen attempted unsuccessfully to operate tryworks at sea. See Friedrich Martens, “Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland” (1671), in A Collection of Documents on Spitzbergen and Greenland, ed. Adam White (London, 1855), p. 130. The American practice may have begun in the 1740s, but logbook or other contemporary references to tryworks on board have not been found before the 1750s.

4 But see a puzzling advertisement in the Boston Nevus-Letter, 30 March 1748, offering “Sperma Ceti Candles, exceeding all others for Beauty, Sweetness of Scent when extinguished…[and] emitting a soft, easy expanding light.” As no evidence for the manufacture of spermaceti candles in the American colonies before 1750 has been found, the vendor, James Clement, possibly imported his wares. Yet no foreign source nor sperm whale fishery outside the colonies is known.

5 Although documentary material on outfitting costs and crew sizes for colonial whaling vessels is fragmentary, three useful sources are (1) Aaron Lopez Ships’ Book: 1767–1772, vol. 559, Lopez Papers, Newport Historical Society, (2) Ledger B (1769) of William Rotch, Sr., and (3) Journal B (1771), also of Rotch, in the Old Dartmouth Historical Society.

6 Except for a well-known one-paragraph description of whale hunting by Penobscot Indians in A True Relation of the Most Prosperous Voyage made this Present Yeare 1605, by Captain George Waymouth, there is no other documentary or archaeological evidence to sustain the assertion of an independent whaling tradition by native Americans. Without such confirmation, the Waymouth account should be treated with care.

7 For variations in available whaleboats of the period, see the letter from Jacob Rodriguez Rivera to Henry White, 19 June 1767: “I have agreeable to your request been with a Whaleboat Builder to git one built as you direct, but your directions not being explicit enough he is fearful to begin it till I hears from you.…The Common Whaleboats here row with 5 oars, they are 20 foot keel & 27 foot from stem to stern & about 5 foot 4 in. broad. If you incline to have it either longer or broader it shall be done. He wants to know if she is to be (as she is to steer with a Rudder) Square Stern or in the form of a Common Whaleboat.” Aaron Lopez Letter Book, 1767, vol. 81, Lopez Papers, Newport Historical Society.

8 For a detailed description of colonial whaling practices, see Adams’ notes and minutes for the case, in The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, II (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 68–97. Useful information may also be found in Douglass C. Fonda, Jr., Eighteenth Century Nantucket Whaling, As compiled from the Original Logs and Journals of the Nantucket Alheneum and the Nantucket Whaling Museum (Nantucket, 1969).

9 Among the earliest accounts of fastening to a whale with a whaleboat in colonial America is Felix Christian Sporri’s description of a capture off Narragansett Bay in 1662. Originally published in his Americanische Reiss-beschreiburg Nach den Caribes Insseln, Und Neu-Engelland (Zurich, 1677), a translation is available in Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience: Society in Rhode Island, 1636–1600 (Providence, 1974), Appendix V, pp. 144–145.

1 See Logbook of the Sloop Dighton, 1769, in Old Dartmouth Historical Society, and Fonda, Eighteenth Century Nantucket Whaling, p. 10.

2 For brief summaries of the conditions of the Massachusetts fishery before the Revolution, see the “Replies to Queries: Massachusetts,” submitted to Thomas Jefferson in 1784, and Jefferson’s “Memoranda Concerning the American, British and French Fisheries” (1788), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., vii. (Princeton, 1953), 339–343, xiv. (Princeton, 1958), 226–234.

3 Henry Cruger, Jr., to Aaron Lopez, Bristol, 28 July 1766, in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 1726–1774, ed. Worthington C. Ford, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 7th series, ix. (Boston, 1914), 165. See also Cruger’s letters to Lopez, 9 April 1766, and 6 April 1768, Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 152–153, 236, and the blunter remarks of William Stead, London, to Lopez, 10 February 1764, Aaron Lopez Papers, Box 651, Newport Historical Society: “As to the 44 casks of white oyl my cooper tells me they most of them stunk.”

4 Henry Lloyd to Aaron Lopez, Boston, 10 May 1756, in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 68.

5 Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, iii. (Boston, 1878), 546–547. See also Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1750–1751, ed. Stewart Mitchell (Boston, 1952), pp. 115, 135, 165, and Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery, pp. 149–150. The date of the petition is misstated by Starbuck and others as 1750. The confusion is probably due to the fact that the period from 1 January to 24 March 1751, was considered part of 1750 under the Julian Calendar still in effect in Great Britain and the colonies.

6 Invoice, Benjamin Crabb to Obadiah Brown, Providence, 21 August 1751, and “Schem for a Contract with Obadiah Brown” in Miscellaneous Papers, Obadiah Brown, 1742–1757, Box B-814, Rhode Island Historical Society.

7 The assertion that Brown was disappointed with Crabb’s ability was made by Obed Macy in his History of Nantucket, published in 1835, p. 69. See also James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years (Providence, 1968), pp. 9, 89

8 Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1752–1753, ed. Stewart Mitchell (Boston, 1954), p. 78.

9 Journals of the House of Representatives, 1752–1753, pp. 132, 147, 153.

1 Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, ii. (Cambridge, 1962), p. 46. See also George Francis Dow, Whale Ships and Whaling (Salem, 1925), pp. 36–38.

2 A Pennsylvania candleworks is known to have been in operation in the 1750s, perhaps as early as November 1751, when Benjamin Franklin referred in a letter to “a new kind of Candles very convenient to read by,” which were made at Marcus Hook in Chester County. From the description, they seem almost certain to have been spermaceti rather than tallow candles: “You will find that they afford a clear white Light; may be held in the Hand, even in hot Weather, without softning; that their Drops do not make Grease Spots like those from common Candles; that they last much longer, and need little or no Snuffing.” Letter, Franklin to Susanna Wright, Philadelphia, 21 November 1751 in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, iv. (New Haven, 1961), 211.

3 The largest single collection of Lopez papers is in the Newport Historical Society. For biographical details, see Stanley F. Chyet, Lopez of Newport: Colonial American Merchant Prince (Detroit, 1970). On the Jewish merchants of Newport, see Jacob Rader Marcus, Early A merican Jewry: The Jews of New York, New England and Canada, i. (Philadelphia, 1951) and S. Broches, Jews in New England, Six Monographs: Jewish Merchants in Colonial Rhode Island (New York, 1942).

4 For specifications and equipment of various candleworks, see (1) “Account of Cost Spermaceti Works,” in Obadiah Brown, Misc. Papers, 1742–1757, Box B-814, Rhode Island Historical Society, (2) Letter, J. Palmer & Co. to Nicholas Brown & Co., 26 August 1763, in Brown Papers, P-U5, John Carter Brown Library, (3) “Spermaceti Agreement” in Commerce of Rhode Island, t. 137–139, and (4) William Rotch, Jr., Account Book, “Spermaceti Candle Mfg. Accounts, 1772–1776,” in New Bedford Free Public Library.

5 The most complete description of the process of refining head matter and spermaceti is in Charles H. Stevenson, “Aquatic Products in Arts and Industries: Fish Oils, Fats, and Waxes,” U. S. Fish Commission Report for 1902 (Washington, 1903), pp. 200–201, 244–247.

6 An impression of Hurd’s label for Rome is in the collection of the John Carter Brown Library. The label for Palmer & Co. is reproduced in Dow, Whale Ships and. Whaling, p. 37.

7 Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade and the Economic Development of Colonial North America, Appendix 6, pp. 211–126.

8 The story of Hancock’s participation in the whale-oil trade is told in detail by W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge, 1945). See also N. S. B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson, Casebook in American Business History (New York, 1939), pp. 66–69.

9 Baxter, The House of Hancock, pp. 168–174.

1 Letter, Henry Cruger to Aaron Lopez, Bristol, England, 6 December 1769 in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 300.

2 The problems of smuggling head matter under the guise of common oil are vividly described in two “remarkably saucy” letters from Joseph Rotch & Sons to (1) Rivera & Co., Napth. & Isaac Hart, Thos. Robinson and Aaron Lopez, 31 July 1764, and (2) Robert Jenkins, 16 August 1764, both in Brown Papers, John Carter Brown Library.

3 On the Browns’ whaling ventures, see Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years, pp. 87–88. For Lopez, see his Ships’ Book, vol. 559, Lopez Papers, Newport Historical Society.

4 On the strategic position of the producers, see the series of letters from the Boston merchant, Henry Lloyd, to Aaron Lopez in 1755–1756, in Letters of Boston Merchants, 1. Baker Library, Harvard University. On the dominant position of the Rotch firm, see Lloyd’s letter to Lopez of 7 June 1756, in the Newport Historical Society, and the letter of another Boston merchant, John Rowe, to the London dealers, Booth and Lane, in Letter Book of John Rowe, 1759–1762, also in Baker Library. Pertinent material may also be found in Chapter iii of a doctoral dissertation, “The House of Rotch: Massachusetts Whaling Merchants, 1734–1828,” by Joseph L. McDevitt, Jr. (American University, 1978).

5 This and subsequent agreements of the “Spermaceti Trust” are best described in Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years, pp. 94–103.

6 The text of the agreement is printed in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 88–92.

7 Letter, Collins & Rivera, Naph. Hart & Co., Aaron Lopez to R. Cranch & Co., Newport, 29 July 1762; letter, R. Cranch & Co. to Nicholas Brown & Co., 16 and 23 August 1762; Brown Papers, John Carter Brown Library, L & A 59–92 Sp. C. The letter to Cranch is printed in Marcus, Early American Jewry., i. 132–133.

8 The agreement is printed in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 97–100.

9 Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 288–289.

1 Baxter, The House of Hancock, pp. 226–227.

2 Letter, Hancock to Barnard & Co., Boston, 17 August 1764, as quoted in Gras and Larson, Casebook in American Business History, p. 67.

3 Letters, Hancock to Barnard & Co., Boston, 5, 18 April 1765, in Gras and Larson, Casebook, pp. 67–68.

4 Letters, Hancock to Barnard & Co., Boston, 17 April, 8 November 1766, in Gras and Larson, Casebook, pp. 67–68.

5 Baxter, The House of Hancock, pp. 243–250.

6 Ellis, History of New Bedford and Vicinity, 1602–1892, pp. 58–59.

7 Tax Valuation List, Dartmouth, 1771, Old Dartmouth Historical Society. The property taxed to Joseph Rotch & Sons exceeded in value the combined total of the next six propertied residents of New Bedford. See also John M. Bullard, The Rotches (New Bedford, 1947), pp. 14–15.

8 Nicholas Brown & Co. to Jacob Rodriguez Rivera & rest of Spermaceti Manufacturers at Newport, Providence, 21 January 1768, Brown Papers, P-R5, John Carter Brown Library.

9 William Rotch Account Book, “Spermaceti Candle Mfg. Accounts, 1772–1776,” New Bedford Free Public Library.

1 Letter, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera to Nicholas Brown & Co., Newport, 7 February, 16, 26 September 1769, and letter, William Rotch to the Manufacturers of Head Matter at Newport and Providence, 24 January 1774, both in Brown Papers, P-U5, John Carter Brown Library.

1 The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1878), iii. 1062.

2 The first Province Galley, a snow, served from 1694 to 1704 when she was sold. The second, built in 1705, ended her days as a merchant vessel eleven years later. Prince of Orange was a snow-rigged galley, lost in 1745. The ship Massachusetts-Frigate, the largest of the Province vessels until construction of King George, served for about nine years before being sold out for a West Indiaman. The activities of these, and other, smaller Province vessels are described in Howard M. Chapin’s companion volumes Privateer Ships and Sailors, The First Century of American Colonial Privateering, 7625–7725 (Toulon, 1926) and Privateering in King George’s War, 1730–1748 (Providence, 1928).

3 The Acts and Resolves…of the Massachusetts Bay, iii. 1062.

4 Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts (Boston, 1960), xxxiii. pt. 2, 434.

5 Reproduced in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, lxiv. (1928), 199.

6 Journals of the House of Representatives…, xxxiii. pt. 2, 33.

7 The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, No. 108, 25 April 1757.

8 Reproduced in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, lxiv. (1928), 200.

9 The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, No. 127, 5 September 1757.

1 See Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, Caftain Samuel Tucker (1747–1833), Continental Navy (Salem, 1976).

2 See the “Journal of the Voyage of his Excell’y Thos. Pownall, Esq., Capn General and Governor in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts Bay, to Penobscot, and of his Proceedings in Establishing Possession of his Majesty’s Rights there in Behalf of the Said Province,” photostatic copy at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

3 Ibid.

4 The Boston Weekly News-Letter, No. 3017 (numbering out of sequence), 5 July 1759.

5 Ibid., No. 2940, 6 November 1760.

6 See The Boston News-Letter and New England Chronicle, No. 3043, 21 October 1762; No. 3083, 20 January 1763; and at the Public Record Office, London: Captain’s log of H.M.S. Northumberland, Adm. 51/3925; Captain’s log of H.M.S. Gosport, Adm. 51/406; Captain’s log of H.M.S. Syren, Adm. 51/966; and Admirals’ Correspondence (Colville), Adm. 1/482

1 Neil R. Stout, “Goals and Enforcement of British Colonial Policy, 1763–1775,” The American Neptune, xxvii. (1967), 211–220.

2 The memo of the Treasury was based on reports from the London Commissioners of Customs, 21 July and 16 September 1763, Treasury 1/426, Public Record Office; Order in Council, 4 October 1763, W. L. Grant and James Munro, eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series (6 vols., 1908–1912), iv. 569–572.

3 Instructions of Lord Colville, 15 October 1763, Admiralty 1/482, P.R.O. In direct quotations capitalizations and spellings have frequently been modernized.

4 3 Geo. iii c. 22, no. iv, Statutes at Large, xxv. 345–351.

5 Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, iv. 560–562. There is a printed copy in Adm. 1/3866, P.R.O.

6 This enumeration is taken from the 1771 Boston table of fees in T. 64/45, P.R.O. The other American ports are also listed there.

7 Captain John Brown to Customs Collector, 10 December 1763, Captain Brown to Admiral Colville, 12 December 1763, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 John Temple to Commander of H.M.S. Hawke, Boston, 19 December 1769, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

9 Commissioners of Customs to John Temple, Custom House, London, 19 January 1765, T. 1/441; also Adm. 1/4286, P.R.O.

1 Ibid.

2 The theoretical ramifications of the case especially for smugglers are in Herbert A. Johnson and David Syrett, “Some Nice Sharp Quillets of the Customs Law: The New York Affair, 1763–1767,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, xxv. (1968), 432–451. As the case was not decided until 1767 I am not sure what influence this decision had on the practice of smuggling.

3 E.g., Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 19 May 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

4 Cf., e.g., Colville to [Archibald] Cleveland, Halifax, 10 April 1761, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.; Gambier to Philip Stephens, Boston, 6 November 1770, Adm. 1/483, P.R.O.

5 A Table of Dimensions etc., Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

6 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 19 May 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

7 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 18 June 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 26 July 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

9 Thomas Hill to Colville, Newport, [30 June 1764], Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

1 New York Post Boy and Gazette, Supplement, 26 July 1764; see 2 August 1764.

2 Thomas Hill to Colville, Newport [circa 12 July 1764], Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.; Captain Smith [of Squirrel] to Colville, Rhode Island, 12 July 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

3 General Reports of Attorney and Solicitor General, 22 December 1765, Huntington MSS. HM 220, Huntington Library.

4 Thomas Lougharne to Colville, Halifax, 11 August 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

5 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 24 August 1764, 9 September 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

6 Colville to Philip Stephens, [Halifax], 24 August 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

7 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 9 September, 13 November 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 9 November 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

9 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 9 September, 13 November 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

1 An Account of the Disposition of H.M. Ships…14 December 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

2 An Account of the Disposition of H.M. Ships…10 July and 7 November 1765, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

3 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 7 June, 31 July 1766, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

4 Samuel Hood to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 28 July, 24 October 1767, 28 March, 23 October, 11 July 1768, Adm. 1/483, P.R.O.; Massachusetts Gazette, 10 November 1768.

5 L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adams (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965), ii. 173–210, especially, 180.

6 An Account of Warrants…of Incidental Expenses, 7 September 1767 to 10 November 1769, T. 1/461, P.R.O. These figures do not agree with those in the Legal Papers of John Adams (see footnote 5 above); nor with the accusation of John Temple that the cost was £1,500. John Temple to “My Lord Duke,” Boston, 25 October 1769, T. 1/469, P.R.O.

7 Reid had fought in the last war as a midshipman and mate. Colville had promised him a post in North America but was unable to obtain one. He had commanded the packet between Halifax and Boston. He was recommended to the command of Liberty by Colonel Dalrymple. Memo of William Reid, 29 January 1771, T. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 Deposition of William Reid, Newport, 21 July 1769, T. 1/471, P.R.O. See all the documents in this bundle connected with Liberty, especially Deposition of Joseph Adams, 21 July 1769; Deposition of Joseph Packwood, 21 July 1769; William Reid to Governor Joseph Wanton, Newport, Wednesday [19 July 1769], 11:00 P.M.; Charles Dudley and John Nicoll to Governor Wanton, Custom House, Rhode Island, 12 July 1769; Governor Wanton to Charles Dudley and John Nicoll, July 1769, etc.

The man who may have started the whole business, Barnabas Wilson, a tidesman in New London, was roughly handled by the mob on 25 July 1769. John Miller and Thomas Moffatt to Commissioners of Customs, New London, 27 July 1769, T. 1/471, P.R.O. The Commissioners gave Wilson £2.5 for his trouble. An Account of Warrants, T. 1/461, P.R.O.

9 See, e.g., Commissioners of Customs to the Treasury, 25 January 1771, T. 1/483; 11 February 1773, T. 1/501, P.R.O.

1 Memo of William Reid, 29 January 1771, T. 1/482, P.R.O.

2 Advices from Amsterdam, copies to Commissioners of Customs, the Lords of Admiralty, Collector at New York, 7, 15 October 1770, T. 1/480; Andrew Elliot and Lambert Moore to Treasury, 7, 16 January 1771, T. 1/482; Commissioners of Customs to Treasury, Boston, 25 January 1771, T. 1/483; James Gambier to Philip Stephens, Boston, 16 November 1770, 21 January 1771, Adm. 1/483; John Swift to Commissioner of Customs, Philadelphia, 5 February 1771 [Cf. Custom House Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, xi. 1346]; John Swift to Treasury, Philadelphia, 30 April 1771, T. 1/485; John Swift to Commissioners of Customs, Philadelphia, 5 February 1771, T. 1/482; Richard Reeve to John Robinson, Boston, 1 March 1771, T. 1/482; Case, ibid.; John Swift to Andrew Allen, n.d., T. 1/485, P.R.O.

3 Commissioners of Customs to Treasury, Custom House, London, 21 July 1763, T. 1/426; An Account of Receipts, Payments…from 8 September 1767 to 5 January 1777, T. 1/461, P.R.O. Another set of figures in this bundle of documents for 1769 gives gross revenue as £42,787, payments as £5,106, net £37, 681; another set in T. 1/486 and another in T. 1/504 gives £40,024; £18,242; £21,181. See also Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, iv. 569–572.

4 An Account of the Duties…from the 10th of October 1766 to the 10th of October 1767, T. 1/452; An Account of Receipts, Payments…from 8 September 1767 to 5 January 1777, T. 1/461, P.R.O.