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For more than a decade Bostonians have watched the progress of the Big Dig, described on the project’s official Website as a public works challenge on the scale of the Panama Canal, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the English Channel Tunnel (Chunnel). Thanks to an infusion of federal highway dollars, an unsightly elevated highway that has long separated the city’s North End from its commercial and civic core is about to be replaced with an eight-to-ten-lane underground highway. To create the massive tunnel, contractors removed sixteen million cubic yards of soil and underground debris.

Fewer people know about the little digs that preceded Boston’s Big Dig. Following federal guidelines, the Central Artery project allotted roughly four million dollars in the early 1990s for archaeological explorations in areas thought to be rich in early history and likely to be destroyed by construction. Ultimately four sites were chosen. One of the four, a patch of asphalt shaded by the old elevated highway, became known as the Cross Street back lot. Here archaeologists uncovered a seventeenth-century privy and in the privy an astonishing treasure–an artifact identified in Massachusetts’ new Commonwealth Museum as “North America’s Oldest Bowling Ball.”

Unlike the sleek balls used in modern candlepin bowling, seventeenth-century “lawn bowles” were flattened on two sides creating a profile more like a squished bun than a ball. The lathe-turned bowle found in the privy has a perforation on one side where a leaden weight was inserted to give it more play when rolled. When new, the hole would have been covered with a now-lost disc made from mother-of-pearl or ivory. Archaeologists found the bowle just below the collapsed floor of the privy in a layer of artifacts dating from the last decades of the seventeenth century. There is no way of knowing the exact date when the privy was built, though its size and construction generally conform to Boston regulations of 1652 requiring that any “house of office” (a euphemism for what contemporaries called a “shit house”) be no less than twelve feet from a neighboring house or street, be vaulted, and be at least six feet deep.

The careful construction of the privy shows town government at work in a period of urban expansion. Fifty years after the great Puritan migration of the 1630s, Boston had grown from a frontier settlement to a maritime and commercial center of forty-five hundred inhabitants. Although still a village by modern standards, it was the center of an expanding economy that linked the agriculture of its hinterland and the fishing and lumbering outposts of Maine and New Hampshire to a larger Atlantic economy. In the Cross Street privy, archaeologists found Caribbean shells, shards of Venetian glass, fragments of Iberian storage jars, broken bits of German, Dutch, and Italian tableware, and one oak lawn bowle.

Did the bowling ball accidentally fall in during the period when the “house of office” was in active use? Or was it part of the fill added about 1700 when the privy was altered? Either way, its presence suggests an underground Boston lurking beneath a presumably Puritan past.

Massachusetts’ earliest laws were hostile to bowling. A 1646 statute forbidding “the use of the Games of Shuffle-board and Bowling, in and about Houses of Common-entertainment,” was still in effect in the 1670s. (The same statute forbade dancing and the observance of Christmas and other English feast days.) Puritan lawmakers disliked bowling not only because it squandered “precious time” but because, in the language of the statute, it caused “much waste of Wine and Beer.” A certain amount of alcohol seemed essential to life, but when people began to hang around taverns playing at sports, they drank more than they needed. Bowling, then, went hand-in-ball with a series of what Englishmen and women would have known as urban vices: drunkenness, idleness, gambling.

By the early eighteenth century, however, the concept of recreation had replaced earlier anxieties about time wasting. In 1714, an enterprising Boston businessman advertised the opening of a bowling green “at the British Coffee House in Queen Street . . . where all gentlemen, merchants and others that have a mind to recreate themselves can be accomodated.” Boston’s bowle can be fitted, then, into a familiar story about secularization and the decline of Puritan piety.

But that interpretation is too simple. Puritan fathers would have had no need to pass laws against bowling unless some inhabitants of the town, even in the 1670s, found the pastime appealing. North America’s Oldest Bowling Ball doesn’t represent the transformation of a Puritan village into a provincial English town so much as it reveals contradictions present in Boston from its beginnings. In the 1630s as well as the 1670s, Boston was inhabited by libertines as well as orthodox Puritans, but in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, town leaders feared that they were losing control.

The city struggled for the survival of its body as well as its soul. On its streets and in its houses, luxury goods coexisted with infested food and infectious organisms. The city had long since lost any possibility of sustaining itself. Dependent on both international commerce and internal trade, it was an entrepôt for meandering males and desperate women as well as goods. People as well as things moved back and forth from Boston to the rude fishing and lumbering settlements in what are now Maine and New Hampshire, places that offered anonymity and the possibility of escape. Facing war with the Dutch and quarreling congregations at home, Boston’s sober merchants struggled with problems as remote as Algerine pirates and as immediate as unexplained fires in their own lofts and warehouses. As if droughts, torrential storms, and failed harvests weren’t punishment enough, the sins of avarice and lust were rampant. Ships from Barbados carried vice as well as sugar.

On January 30, 1671, Boston silversmith and mint master John Hull summarized the worst of the news emanating from the latest quarterly court: “This County Court three or four young men were convicted of several burglaries in breaking open warehouse, ketches, and cellars; Marry Moor and several, of fornication; some suspect for re-iterated whoredom; and also one Alice Thomas, of great suspicion to keep a brothel-house.” He closed the entry with what was for him an unusual outburst of emotion, praying that “[t]he good Lord give check to such wickedness, and grant it be not a punishment judicial!” The scriptural reference that follows the entry, Hos. 4:13-14, explains Hull’s fear. For the Old Testament prophet as well as the Puritan merchant, the real fear was that God would punish the entire community for spiritual as much as for literal whoredom. Alice Thomas’s brothel and Mary Moor’s fornication were merely signs of a larger infidelity.

From a modern perspective it is hard to imagine how a sport like lawn bowling could threaten social order. In the seventeenth century, it was a case of guilt by association. The sort of men enraptured by bowling might also linger in taverns, patronize lewd women, or speak profanely. In one of his emblem books, the English poet Francis Quarles imagined a game of bowles between Mammon and Cupid on a lawn controlled by the Devil. Quarles was obviously fascinated by the rules of the game and the posture and habits of the players. He imagined the two bowlers standing at one end of the lawn, bluffing and bragging:

One raps an oath, another deals a curse; He never better bowl’d; this never worse: One rubs his itchless elbow, shrugs and laughs, The other bends his beetle brows, and chafes.

Although the play is intense, in this contest there is no winner: “the bowls / Are sinful thoughts; the prize, a crown for fools.”

Lawn bowling required four bowles for each player and a jack for a goal. The bowle in the privy must once have belonged to such a set. One can only imagine when and where it was used. But the history of the family who owned the privy provides plenty of evidence for an emblematic interpretation of the bowle. In the 1670s, Mammon and Cupid were running riot in Boston’s North End.

The lot where the privy stood originally fronted on Ann Street, an extension of the colonial “Fish Street” that meandered along the eastern shore of the peninsula toward Boston neck. All of the seventeenth-century owners of the lot were merchants and mariners. The man who built the privy was probably Robert Nanny, a London goldsmith and Barbadian planter who dabbled in the Maine fur trade. His wife Katherine was the daughter of John Wheelwright, the dissenting minister who was banned from Boston in the 1630s with his sister-in-law Anne Hutchinson. After Nanny’s death in 1663, his wife married Edward Naylor, another far-ranging merchant.

The food waste, textile fragments, and micro-organisms excavated from the privy document the wealth of the Nanny-Naylor family. Archaeologists found abundant evidence of imported as well as local foods: olive pits alongside the stones of plums, cherries, and peaches; and seeds from imported raisins, coriander, and peppers as well as from local plants like blueberry, huckleberry, strawberry, and elderberry. There were remnants of English walnuts as well as hickory, and abundant evidence that the family purchased flour rather than whole grain. That flour, though, was infested with weevils, some of it so severely that it was simply dumped in the privy.

Katherine Naylor, like other Bostonians in the last decades of the seventeenth century, was still making pies from the passenger pigeons that had so impressed early explorers. But deer were gone, and the codfish that sustained the local economy was mostly salted for export. Most of the animal bones thrown into the privy came from cows and sheep, though there is also evidence of pork consumption. Pigs still scavenged in Boston’s streets, and though they consumed waste, they also carried disease. Parasitological analysis shows that members of the Nanny-Naylor family suffered from whipworms and roundworms. A suckling pig whose skeleton was found in the privy suffered from a bone infection.

Although illness and death haunted the household (only two of the eight children survived childhood), the family was well dressed. Fragments of textiles that fell or were tossed into the privy suggest the full range of elite apparel, from gowns of silk lustring to sleeves and garters trimmed with multicolored ribbons. There is evidence of the sheer silk called “tiffany” often used for women’s hoods, and of bone or bobbin lace, forbidden to common people in sumptuary laws, but displayed lavishly on the waistcoats and petticoats of merchant families. The textiles in the privy, unraveled and degraded, offer a mute Jeremiad against the ostentation displayed in portraits of Katherine Naylor’s neighbors, the Freake family with their little baby, Mary, and the lushly dressed Elisabeth Paddy Wensley.

One can imagine Katherine Naylor dressed much like the woman in the painting. Despite her luxurious clothing, however, she lived a life of agony after her marriage to Naylor. The whispered stories about her husband’s misbehavior emerged into the public record bit by bit, after a house maid named Mary Read became pregnant. Although Edward Naylor helped his maidservant flee to Hampton, New Hampshire, hoping she would give birth in secret, Read succumbed to the entreaties of her midwife and, in the “Extremity of paine,” blurted out the truth, begging her attendants to “keep itt privatt unless it were forsed from them by Authorety.”

“Authorety” did intervene. In January 1671/2, a jury found Naylor guilty of fornication with Mary Read, “uncivil Cariage with mary Morse” (the woman whom the county court suspected of “reiterated whoredom”), and “inhumane Carieje [Carriage] & severe Cruelty in Abuseing his wife and Children.” A few months later, the court forwarded to the court of assistants Katherine Naylor’s petition for divorce. Colonial Massachusetts was one jurisdiction where such a legal remedy was possible, and in this case it seems to have worked.

The depositions in the divorce case show both the power and the limitations of neighborly surveillance in a densely settled but stratified town. Much of the information came from household servants, young women who knew a lot about the inner workings of households but could not risk their own livelihoods by becoming common gossips. Once summoned, however, they showed little restraint in documenting their own suspicions. A woman who lived in the same house as Mary Moor said that she saw Naylor go into Moor’s chamber. Following him up the stairs, she peered “through a crevis betwixt the dore & the post,” through which she saw “him slip downe his britches & goe to bed.” Other witnesses were washerwomen, tavern keepers, or dockworkers. A housewife who washed a lodger’s linen with her own, found “such tokkens” on the man’s shirt that she feared he “had had to do” with Mary Moor. She heard him say that “he would lye with any woman that would let him.”

These depositions suggest that ordinary women, as well as the magistrates, participated in the enforcement of social norms in early Boston. Surprisingly, however, there are no depositions in the surviving court records from Katherine Naylor’s extended family or from women who were her peers economically or socially. Out of shame or fear, she seems to have kept her husband’s secrets. Little wonder that in the divorce petition, she described her life with Naylor as “an intolerable bondage.”

Stories told in court reveal the spatial and social arrangements of seventeenth-century Boston houses, and suggest uses of the kinds of artifacts found in inventories and, in their shattered form, in archaeological digs. A maid who had lived with the family for a year testified that Naylor would come in after midnight and expect his wife to serve him. One night, “she haveing drest him some meate and kept it hot for him over a chafing dish of coles,” he threw it down on the floor demanding butter. When the ever dutiful wife fetched the butter “in an other erthen plater . . . he threw down it also & broke the plater.” Perhaps the fragments wound up in the privy.

Naylor delighted in dragging people from their sleep. One maid testified that he came home drunk and called her out of her bed, asking her to “Kisse him quickly.” Another servant said that when she was slow to respond to his nocturnal summons, he “fired 2 or 3 pistols in the garet” so that she “was almost choked with the smoke of the powder.” Worse, he pulled his five-year-old daughter out of bed in the depths of winter and forced her to “stand naked al but her shift about an hower.” When the child cried, he “whipt her 2 or 3 times, & then set her downe in ye flore.” In the light of these stories, a fashionable child’s shoe lifted out of the muck in the privy acquires new meaning. Naylor terrorized those he should have protected, kicking one child down the garret stairs and forcing his wife to get up out of childbed on a rainy day to walk with him to a neighbor’s. He bragged that though he hadn’t killed her yet, he soon would.

The bones, shells, and fruit pits found in the privy suggest a household well supplied with food and drink. The court records tell a darker story. When a neighbor asked Mary Read “the Reason why it was reported mr Nailer & his wife lay not to gether, & that the vittels and aney thing should be locked up from hr mistris . . . she said because her mistris was wastfull, & her master order they should be lockt up.” Mary Jackson said that more than once she loaned her mistress money “to buy Bred & butter & cheese or such like to keep us & ye children alive.”

Naylor humiliated his wife before her servants and neighbors by denying her the authority to manage her own affairs. During washing week, he dragged her sheets into the dirt. Finding her at prayer, he railed against her, saying “he would have no such thing done in his house.” Such “fitts” so distressed Jackson that she threatened to leave, explaining “that I was not able to live this life.” Mistress Naylor responded, “If you can not indure it a moment how shal i indure it al my life.”

Witnesses to the goings on in the Naylor household describe a world of opposites, of grandiose sinners and submissive saints. In their accounts, Mistress Naylor is a long-suffering and dutiful wife, bearing blows to body and spirit without slacking her own responsibilities. In contrast, the women involved with Naylor are as contemptuous of authority as he. Mary Moor borrowed a pair of pattens to walk to the waterside, pretending to visit her grandmother. Instead she kept a rendezvous in Salem with Naylor, sitting on his lap in taverns and at every stop implying that she was his wife. Mary Read, some believed, not only slept with her master but tried to poison her mistress by adding henbane to her beer.

Naylor was perhaps more surprised than anyone when his wife finally decided to speak out. Perhaps he had grown accustomed to her steady piety, believing that she would never violate her own vows even if he repeatedly abandoned his. A few months after the divorce case went to the court of assistants, he wrote her from Pemaquid in Maine, proposing reconciliation. Adopting penitential language, he admitted that his “wicked hart” had deprived him of the company of his wife, and he prayed that “Through our Lord Jesus Christ” they might once again “love in union one with Another: as wee ought to.” In a second letter, he begged her to send him clothing, “Espeshially Lenen & Shoues.” For once, she refused to comply.

With the support of the same magistrates who punished fornicators and disdained bowling, Katherine Naylor rid herself of an abusive husband. He eventually fled the colony. She remained in the house on Ann Street. About 1690, she began filling in the privy, depositing heaps of household trash and an old bowling ball that three hundred years later would emerge from beneath a strip of asphalt under an elevated expressway to reveal a lost history of seventeenth-century Boston.

Digging Further:

To see the location of the site in relation to present-day Boston, go to the “Beyond the Big Dig” Website. Click on “History” at the top of the map, then use the “thermometer” time-line at the right to see the evolution of the Boston peninsula in relation to the project. The so-called Cross Street back lot is under the pink ribbon in the once narrow neck of land connecting the North End from the present downtown area. For an online exhibit of Big Dig archaeology, see the Commonwealth Museum Website.

For a sprightly summary of the archaeology, see Norma Jane Langford, “Colonial Boston Unearthed,” Archaeology, September 26, 1997.

This essay includes colored photos of redware and white salt-glazed stoneware from the Cross Street back lot privies and earthen and glassware from the Three Cranes Tavern site as well as a photo of a reinstallation in Charlestown Square of posts from John Winthrop’s great house and foundation stones from the Three Cranes Tavern.

For a more detailed and technical analysis, see a special issue of Historical Archaeology 32 (1998), which includes: Lauren J. Cook, “Katherine Nanny, alias Naylor”: A Life in Puritan Boston,” 15-19; Dana B. Heck and Joseph Balicki, “Katherine Naylor’s “House of Office’: A Seventeenth-Century Privy,” 24-37; Allison Bain, “A Seventeenth-Century Beetle Fauna from Colonial Boston,” 38-48; Gerald K. Kelso, “Pollen Analysis of the Feature 4 Privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site, Boston, Massachusetts,” 49-62; Martin G. Dudek, Lawrence Kaplan, and Marie Mansfield King, “Botanical Remains from a Seventeenth-Century Privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site,” 63-71; Gregory J. Brown and Joanne Bowen, “Animal Bones from the Cross Street Back Lot Privy,” 72-80; Margaret T. Ordonez and Linda Welters, “Textiles from the Seventeenth-Century Privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site,” 81-90; and Jeffrey A. Butterworth, “Forming the Past,” 91-98.

The primary sources on the Edward Naylor-Katharine Naylor divorce can be found in Suffolk County Files, #1148, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston. (I wish to thank Michelle Morris, who is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on family life in early Massachusetts, for sharing her transcriptions.)

For colored images of Catherine Naylor’s neighbors John and Elizabeth Freake, click here. To trace early inhabitants of Boston, see a new resource produced jointly by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society: Annie Haven Thwing, Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630-1800 and The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630-1822, CD-ROM, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001. For the rules of lawn bowling, click here.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Her latest book is The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

On October 1, 1768, the American Revolution began for Mercy Otis Warren. On that day, a “hostile parade” of British soldiers marched through the streets of Boston in a time of peace. The result of the city’s seventeen-month military occupation was a confrontation on King Street in 1770 that became known as the Boston Massacre. John Adams would later comment, “on that night the Foundation of American Independence was laid.” The connection made by both Warren and Adams between the presence of British soldiers and the course of American independence highlights the influence the occupation had on Bostonians’ perceptions of their British identity. It is a theme that Richard Archer elaborates in As If an Enemy’s Country, which argues that the period between the “parade” and the massacre fractured Bostonians’ British identity and laid the foundation for the emergence of a new, American identity.

Archer’s narration of events leading to the massacre is not new. His contribution resides in his interpretation of how these events shaped Bostonians’ concepts of their status within the British Empire. He argues that upon the regiments’ arrival, Boston became an “enemy’s country” in the citizens’ mind because the action challenged their status as equal British subjects. The occupation initiated a permanent shift in Bostonian identity. He prefaces this argument by affirming that neither the massacre nor the revolution was inevitable, but both resulted from a series of compounding choices made by colonists and the British government. Archer’s goal is to demonstrate that as the relationship between Bostonians and enforcers of parliamentary policy (soldiers and officials) broke down so did the colonists’ concept of their status within the empire.

He begins by laying out colonial resistance to Parliamentary taxation, particularly the Stamp Act. By tracing the reactions of royal officials, Whig leaders, and the actions of Boston’s mob, Archer argues that by the spring of 1766, Bostonians had shown their willingness to resort to “extralegal measures” in the name of preserving their rights as British citizens (39). He contends Parliament encouraged this behavior by ignoring “the plight of the colonists” and refusing to read the petitions sent in protest (45). This “marked the beginning of an opposition movement” (39) which encompassed a wide cross-section of the population. No single group—not merchants, town officials, consumers, ministers, or the mob—could resist Parliamentary taxation on their own. He argues an unintended consequence of the Stamp Act was that the collective resistance to the legislation brought Bostonians together by “giving them a common cause and an emerging identity” (47).

Archer identifies the interim period between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the arrival of troops as a series of blunders and poor decisions on the part of royal officials, both in Boston and London. The intent was to affirm Britain’s authority over the colonies, but the resistance to the Townshend program left Great Britain with only two options. They could repeal the taxes, as they had with the Stamp Act, or send the military to enforce the legislation. The improper seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty was a further extension of the governing officials desire to enforce British regulations. Archer contrasts Britain’s increasing authoritative actions and the final decision to send troops with Bostonians’ increased efforts to remain loyal subjects. On the eve of the arrival of the two regiments, the Massachusetts Convention proved this by not reaffirming the need to resist government policy by any means, but instead confirming, “almost all citizens were genuinely loyal to Great Britain” (103).

The period between the arrival of troops in the fall 1768 and the massacre in March 1770 convinced Bostonians of the government’s intent to deny them their rights as British citizens. Archer argues that the presence and actions of the troops increased the citizens’ consciousness of their subjugation. He cites the soldiers’ encouragement of slave uprisings, assaults on women, disruptions of the Sabbath, and theft, among other social transgressions, as constant reminders of the city’s occupation. As a result, Bostonians of all political and economic factions came to identify themselves in opposition to the soldiers. The troops, however, limited their options for resistance. Archer argues Bostonians understood that violent mob action would validate Britain’s decision to occupy the city and therefore, they searched for an alternative form of recourse. Non-importation remained the strongest form of resistance and proved to unite merchants across political lines.

A stream of conflicts, including the disapproval and scaring-off of John Mein and the death of Christopher Seider, heightened the agitation of the colonists at their continued occupation. The massacre on March 5 was the culmination of the colonists’ frustration over their occupation and, as Archer points out, their victory. In the aftermath, the removal of troops from Boston and the repealing of most of the Townshend duties (except for the one on tea), gave citizens a sense that the course of resistance they pursued was the appropriate one. Following these perceived victories, particularly the removal of the troops, the non-importation movement began to fracture. According to Archer, the consensus among the citizens was a desired return to “normalcy”—a city unoccupied by soldiers and no longer burdened with taxation. Despite a partial regaining of the “quasi-autonomy that had existed prior to the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War,” the sense of alienation within the empire was permanent (226). Bostonians’ opinions radicalized during the occupation and confirmed that the colonists were “not a subordinate but a separate people” (228).

By focusing attention on the shift in Bostonians’ identity, Archer’s work is an overdue advancement on the dominant interpretation espoused in Hiller Zobel’s The Boston Massacre (1970). His detailed account examines the events as an erosion of authority led by manipulative Whig leaders and dealt with by frustrated officials. Archer elaborates on Zobel’s assertion that the massacre resulted from a breakdown in law and order, but argues that Bostonians’ collective trust of British authority dissolved as their perception of oppression increased. By expanding on the legal ramifications of the events surrounding the massacre, Archer focuses needed attention on the how the economic and social strains created by occupation had permanent consequences for colonial identity.

Though Archer is able to show the formation of a separate identity in Boston, he mirrors Zobel’s narrative of the events and does not engage the implications of the massacre’s commemoration. Archer does not, as Zobel does, write off the anniversary orations of the massacre as “naive rhetoric,” but claims that the commemorations between 1771-1783 signified “a political and psychological need for the citizens to remember” (229).

This “need” is vital, but remains unexplored in Archer’s historical narrative. It’s obvious that the annual celebration of March 5 promoted cultural cohesion in Boston by harnessing the massacre’s memory to remind citizens of the shared struggle to preserve liberty and prevent tyranny represented by a standing army. Unfortunately, despite his assertion that the orations were an annual reminder of “the existence of Bostonians and other colonists as a people apart, a population with unraveling ties to the British Empire,” Archer does not take the next step to connect the massacre to its memory (229). By limiting himself to the standard narrative of events, Archer misses an opportunity to examine the subsequent legacy of March 5 and the evolution of a non-British identity after 1770. Archer succeeds in arguing that Boston’s occupation in the years prior to the massacre fractured their British identity; but what is missing is a full examination of how citizens maintained that identity in the following years leading to independence. Only by examining the meaning of the massacre, and its origins in conjunction with its commemoration, can historians develop an understanding of its significance to Bostonians in terms of collective memory, identity formation, and its broader relationship to the revolution.

Archer’s As If an Enemy’s Country contributes to the ongoing debate over the formation of American identity. His persuasive argument focuses on when and how Bostonians started to question their understanding of themselves as British and leads to his conclusion that, “the first American revolution was in Bostonians’ sense of their identity” (228).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Nichole George is a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame and is currently researching Boston’s Pope Day gangs, the spread of colonial unity through processional rituals, and the transformation from English to an American identity.

Whale consumption in the lives of Plymouth colonists

Whales have always been big in New England. They were big and plentiful off of Cape Cod when the Mayflower arrived; they were big money in the nineteenth century when New Bedford lit the world with whale oil; and they are big tourist attractions today, drawing thousands of whale watchers out to Stellwagen Bank every summer, where the world’s largest mammals can be seen grazing on tiny sea foods, throwing their flukes skyward, and breaching into the sunset. Though now fully committed to whale saving, New Englanders are eerily proud of their whaling past. From Nantucket to Provincetown, sperm-whale weathervanes and sea captains’ houses turned bed-and-breakfasts crowd the landscape, and the tools used in the chase and the slaughter stand boldly on display at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, the Nantucket Historical Association’s newly renovated whaling museum, and countless other small, local historical societies, public libraries, and historic houses. Local newspapers do their part to keep this history alive by periodically publishing articles, such as “A Century Ago, Cape Codders Hunted Whales,” that marvel at the region’s transformation from a land of prosperous whale killers to a land of prosperous whale watchers.

The tedium of our daily lives makes it easy for us to watch whales for pleasure. Standing in the oil aisle of the grocery store trying to decide between extra-virgin olive oil, pure golden olive oil, corn oil, peanut oil, or canola oil; carting home jugs of laundry detergent; turning bright electric lights on with a twitch of a finger; squeezing into and out of spandex in fitting rooms and then paying for our purchases with a small slice of plastic—we forget that there is more one could do with a whale besides capturing it with our cameras.

No one in seventeenth-century New England watched whales for pleasure. Even in 1620, two centuries before New Bedford began sending out fifty whaleships a year, the religious Separatists who founded Plymouth Colony knew that whales meant big money. As the first permanent English settlement in New England, the Plymouth colonists garnered a privileged place in American history as the “Pilgrims.” To historians of the American whaling industry, they appear as founding fathers of a very different sort, important for being the first among the English to advertise the bounty of whales off the coast of southern New England. In the anonymous memoir of their first year in New England, known as Mourt’s Relation (1622), they reported that while lying at anchor in what is now Provincetown Harbor, they saw large whales, “the best kind for oil and bone,” swim about the Mayflower every day and that the Mayflower‘s “master and his mate, and others experienced in fishing, professed we might have made three or four thousands pounds’ worth of oil. They preferred it before Greenland whale-fishing, and purpose the next winter to fish for whale here.” But without the “instruments and means to take them,” the Separatists had to forsake a “very rich return.”

The Separatists later saw more whales while searching Cape Cod for the perfect settlement site, and with Mourt’s Relation they became the first to describe in print what a typical New England whale stranding looked like. A small scouting party sent to investigate Cape Cod Bay came across “a great fish, called a grampus, dead on the sands” and then two more lying dead in the shallows. They next saw from a distance a group of Indians on the beach “very busy about a black thing.” The Indians ran off when they saw the Separatists but took something away with them. When the English arrived at that spot, they discovered that the black thing was also “a grampus,” or what would be called a blackfish in subsequent centuries and a long-finned pilot whale in today’s nomenclature. Small whales, technically large dolphins, measuring only fifteen to twenty feet, pilot whales are notorious mass stranders, rushing crazily toward land in certain predictable hotspots around the world, from New Zealand to the inside elbow of Cape Cod. The dead grampuses saddened the Separatists, not for sentimental reasons, not from wonder at this brutal surprise wrought by God or Nature, but because this was another lost profit opportunity. The grampuses were “some five or six paces long, and about two inches thick of fat, and fleshed like a swine” and “would have yielded a great deal of oil if there had been time and means to have taken it.”

The Indians no doubt regretted the Separatists’ inopportune appearance for much the same reason. They would have been accustomed to the sea sporadically throwing up whales onto the beach—not just pilot whales but also behemoth right whales, fin whales, humpbacks, and maybe even an occasional sperm whale—and they would have learned to watch the shore in anticipation whenever the seasons changed or right after a nor’easter storm.

The Separatists described how the Indians had butchered the “black thing” into long strips, which is what the Separatists had seen the Indians carrying away as they fled. These strips were no doubt the blubber, the several-inch-thick layer of fat that helps marine mammals withstand cold ocean temperatures and which could be rendered into oil over a hot fire. Back then and still today, oil is a miracle elixir. Indians probably used whale oil like any other animal fat. They could cook with it, rub it into the body to keep the bugs from biting, or tan deer hides with it. If the pilot whale was still fresh, the Indians would likely have consumed its flesh. Once they had stripped the carcass of meat and blubber, the Indians then would have made fish hooks, scrapers, and other tools from the bones.

The Separatists wanted those grampuses for themselves but for a different purpose. They wanted to sell them in the global marketplace. Each of their whale sightings prompted visions of the entire industrial whaling process, from the gathering of the raw material, to the manufacturing of it into “oil and bone” (bone referred not to the skeleton but to “whalebone,” now called baleen), and finally to the sale of these commodities at market for great profit. The Separatists’ readiness to see living, swimming whales as cash, as four thousand pounds worth of oil and baleen, tells us that they were already familiar with the existing whaling industry in Europe and that they knew exactly which parts of whales European consumers desired and were most likely to purchase.

The Separatists dropped clues as to where their knowledge about whales came from. The captain, mate, and others of the crew “experienced in fishing” said they “preferred it before Greenland whale-fishing.” In 1620, the English whaling industry at Spitsbergen, or “Greenland,” was only nine years old. The Muscovy Company sent the first English whaleship, the Mary-Margaret, to Spitsbergen in 1611, fully stocked with harpoons, shallops, winches, cutting knives, large copper kettles for boiling blubber into oil, and most importantly half-a-dozen Basque whalemen from the town of St. Jean de Luz, France. Up until that point, French and Spanish Basques had dominated Europe’s whaling industry. Basques had hunted right whales in the Bay of Biscay for several centuries and then sometime in the mid-sixteenth century expanded their whaling operations across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Before the English took up whaling for themselves, they envied and poached on Basque whaling. Whenever English ships explored the northeastern coast of North America or fished for cod around Newfoundland, they kept a lookout for wounded whales along the beaches, pillaged Basque shore-whaling stations, and occasionally sacked Basque whaling vessels, taking the whale oil and baleen as booty.

The odds are against any of the Mayflower‘s crew having served on the Mary-Margaret, but very likely one or more of them had been to Spitsbergen. In the nine years between the start of the English whaling industry and the Mayflower‘s sailing for New England, the Muscovy Company sent ever-larger whaling expeditions to Spitsbergen every summer. Other English whalers, mainly from Hull, left for Spitsbergen, too, despite James I’s royal patent of 1613, which awarded the Muscovy Company exclusive rights to Spitsbergen’s whales. There is even some speculation that the Mayflower itself went whaling in Spitsbergen sometime between 1616 and 1619, when its whereabouts are unknown. Previous to 1616, the Mayflower had carried wine, prunes, herring, tar, and other trade between Britain and continental Europe. Since master and part-owner of the Mayflower Christopher Jones had among his Harwich and London connections some family and acquaintances known to have invested in whaling, he may have been tempted to try his hand at it himself. If the Mayflower had been whaling in Spitsbergen in the years immediately before its transatlantic crossing, its violation of the Muscovy Company’s monopoly helps explain why it briefly disappears from the documentary record.

A voyage or two to Spitsbergen did not automatically transform English sailors and fishermen into whalemen, however. During the nine years after the opening up of the Spitsbergen whaling grounds, the English whale fishery remained wholly dependent on Basque expertise. Whoever it was among the Mayflower‘s crew who turned to the Separatists and said of the right whales off of Cape Cod, these are “the best kind for oil and bone,” owed that piece of wisdom to the Basques at Spitsbergen who less than a decade before had pointed to the right whales’ near relative, the bowhead, and said to their English employers, these are “the best kind of Whales.”

If there were veterans of Spitsbergen aboard the Mayflower, we can reconstruct some of what they saw and experienced from the detailed reports produced by the Muscovy Company. Determined to acquire Basque expertise as quickly as possible, one of the company’s officers, Robert Fotherby, made a particularly close study of Basque practices in 1613. With twenty-four Basques along, this expedition gave Fotherby plenty of opportunities to see them in action. In “The Manner of Killing the Whale, and of the whole Proceedings for performeing of the Voyage,” he put together an instruction manual of sorts, which illustrated in words and watercolors each step of the whaling process, from the initial chase to the final stowing of bundled whalebone and casks of oil for transport back to England. His manual depicts three Basque shallops each holding five men, four at oars and one man standing at the bow with harpoon in hand, bearing down on a ferocious looking whale. The “whale-striker” throws his harpoon, to which “is made fast a rope.” Pinioned like a fish on a fishhook, the whale swims off “wth an uncontrowled force and swiftnes; hurrying the shallop after him.” After a mile or more, when the whale comes spouting up to the surface to breathe, the men row their shallop in close to “strike him wth long launces, wch are made purposelie for that vse,” aiming deeply into the whale near its “swimming finne” to tear at its vital organs. Upon the whale’s death, the three shallops tow it to the ship, where workmen begin cutting off large chunks of blubber. Sent to shore to be chopped into smaller pieces, the blubber then goes to the coppers to be boiled into oil and eventually casked. Meanwhile, the head of the whale is towed to shore, where a group of workmen take hatchets to it, cutting out strips of baleen from the whale’s mouth. Laying each strip of baleen on a board at waist level, one man scrapes away its hairy, fibrous fringe. They then rub each piece of baleen with sand to rid it of any lingering oil, sort the strips into five different grades, and bundle them together, writing on each bundle a number and the company’s mark. Fully processed, the whale has now been turned into products ready for sale to consumers.

Given the ruthless competition between the English and Dutch for Spitsbergen’s whales, those Separatists who emigrated directly from England and those who had just left Leyden, Holland, would have been equals in their ability to recognize that whaling could be an immensely profitable business. Surprisingly, however, they seemed oblivious to whaling’s risks. The Mayflower crew fed the Separatists’ fantasy of easy money. They did not mention all they knew of Spitsbergen whaling, neither the fierce international competition nor the vagaries of the market. Even with its monopoly privileges, the Muscovy Company’s whaling experiences made for a sorry history. In its first year of operation, 1611, the company sent two ships, both of which wrecked at Spitsbergen. Both ships’ crews had to beg for passage home on a vessel from Hull. In 1612, they met “with much difficultie; as not being experimented in the businesse.” Company employees then spent the entire summer of 1613 wrangling with the Spanish, French, and Dutch, resulting in a colossal three- to four-thousand-pound loss. In 1614 and 1615 they had to return “halfe laden” with oil before the ice set in for the winter. Finally, in 1616 and 1617, the company had two profitable years, and its ships returned home fully loaded with whale oil, baleen, and walrus teeth, only to face their two worst years yet, 1618 and 1619. Outgunned by the Dutch and Danes, the company’s whaling convoy suffered an “exceeding great losse” in both years, made worse by the success of the Dutch who flooded the market with their whale oil. Burdened by such weighty losses, the Muscovy Company got out of the whaling business in 1619.

That the Separatists thought they might be able to do what the Muscovy Company could not was optimism born of desperation. Successful whaling required special tools and expertise, which the Mayflower on its 1620 voyage lacked. The ship had aboard only a big and clumsy shallop, no harpoons, no lances, and no Basques. There is no evidence that the Mayflower, Master Christopher Jones, or any of the rest of the crew returned to Cape Cod Bay in later years to catch the whales they had remarked upon in 1620. Nor did the Separatists themselves turn to whaling immediately. They tried their hand at fishing only to encounter setbacks. So, they then directed their energies to the one activity primed to turn an immediate profit, the Indian fur trade.

Although the Mayflower crew and the Separatists fell short as producers of manufactured whale products, they would have been savvy whale consumers, probably having grown up around whale oil and baleen purchased from Basque manufacturers. As the first Europeans to develop large-scale industrial whaling, the Basques were also the first to market their whale products throughout Western Europe. By the time the Basque whale fishery in North America reached its peak, in the mid- to late sixteenth century, whale oil and baleen had become the most valued by-products of whales among European consumers. The Basques sold oil and baleen in Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Basque whale oil lit churches and municipal buildings and was, along with vegetable and fish oils, used in soapmaking, candle making, leather tanning, and the production of woolen textiles. As simply another kind of oil, whale oil’s utility was immediately obvious in contrast to baleen, a distinctive material for which new applications had to be invented. A cartilage-like substance often compared to human fingernails or modern-day plastic, baleen’s firmness made it a good substitute for animal horn or wood, but it was also more pliable. When heated, baleen could be molded into various shapes, and in the seventeenth century it was increasingly to be found in a multitude of handy objects from riding whips to fishing rods.

In its most common use, baleen gave structure to women’s underclothes. The Basques were probably the first to insert baleen into clothes. Words for some of these undergarments, “busk” and “basque,” hint at Basque origins. The “busk” was a thin, decorative plate made of baleen, horn, wood, or metal, which women wore at the front of the chest to keep their torsos straight and rigid. The “basque,” or “farthingale” in England, anticipated the hoop skirt and pushed skirts out at the hips. Legend has it that Catherine of Aragon imported the fashionable cone-shaped torso and big hips look to England in the mid-sixteenth century when she married King Henry VIII. If so, then we know where her underclothes came from. They began with a Newfoundland whale, which Spanish Basques had captured, butchered, reduced to whale oil and baleen, and stored in the hold of a ship as it crossed the Atlantic to a Basque port. There the baleen would have been sold to a whalebone merchant, sold again to a dressmaker or tailor, eventually ending up in the Queen of England’s undergarments.

By 1620, what had once been elite, foreign fashions had trickled down to become standard women’s wear among Europe’s middling classes, including English Puritans, whose bodice—or as the Separatist women would have said, “pair of bodies”—consisted of two pieces of linen laced together and, if they could afford it, stiffened with whalebone stays stitched into the garment. Some of the Mayflower women may have been wearing a pair of bodies with whalebone stays as the ship crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps Dorothy Bradford, wife of Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford, did not commit suicide by jumping off the Mayflower when anchored in Provincetown Harbor as some have speculated but, made dizzy and breathless by whalebone bodies bound too tight, lost her balance to fall among the whales swimming in the water below.

It was not just the Mayflower women who had an intimate connection to whales. The Separatists’ boots, shoes, gloves, and other leather apparel might well have been tanned in whale oil. The woolen cloth of their pantaloons, skirts, coats, and blankets may have been dressed with whale oil when on the loom or washed in soap made from whale oil. And the many weavers, cloth makers, tailors, leather tanners, and glove makers among the Separatist men residing in Leyden, Holland, probably used whale oil in the course of their work. Like other ordinary English or Dutch people in the early seventeenth century, the Separatists knew that whales meant money because the tedium of their daily lives tied them to the consumption of whale products in the same humdrum sorts of ways that we are connected to the animal, vegetable, and petroleum oils that, in some manufactured form, we use to enrich our food, keep ourselves clean, and decorate our bodies.

In the first few decades after their 1620 arrival, the Plymouth colonists probably suffered from a shortage of whale products. Initially ill-equipped to catch New England’s whales, they had to depend on the occasional whale stranding. In the 1650s, Southampton and East Hampton, English towns on the eastern end of Long Island, initiated the first successful shore-whaling operations in the northeast. Cape Cod followed a decade or two later and then the island of Nantucket shortly after that. In the nineteenth century, New Englanders dominated the global whaling industry and could be found trolling for whales in all the world’s oceans from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific to the Arctic. Americans would continue to consume whale products well into the twentieth century, right up until 1972, when the Marine Mammal Protection Act outlawed whaling and the importation of whale products to the United States.

Further Reading:

For whaling history, see Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York, 2007) and Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York, 1991). For the history of Plymouth Colony, I recommend the Separatists’ own story as told in Dwight B. Heath, ed., Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (1622; Bedford, Mass., 1963) along with James F. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1977) and James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Nancy Shoemaker teaches history at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (2004) and other books in American Indian history. Her current research is on New England Indians and the American whaling industry.

Signed with a flourish across the top by Captain Joseph (José) Vidal (1797-1869), this little-known printed notice was distributed by the Natchez office of the Mississippi Herald in late October 1802 (fig. 1). While measuring only 6.8 x 11.2 in. (17.5 x 28.5 cm.), “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” is in keeping, in terms of its size, with many eighteenth and early nineteenth-century broadsides. Broadsides are defined as separately published and unfolded pages, created and sold for public display.

The sole extant print of multiple originals, today “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” remains in the collection of the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain. The ephemerality of the original series, whose existence was nearly forgotten forever save this single example, contrasts with the indelible event it announced: Spain’s final closure of the port of New Orleans to Americans, which revoked their “right of deposit,” re-activated by Intendant Juan Ventura Morales (1756-1819) in April 1798. The following paragraphs explore this rare document, its origin, and the meaning of Vidal’s signature.

Nueva Orleans and “Right of Deposit”

Established in 1718, New Orleans was the capital of France’s vast Louisiana Territory. Yet, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762) following the French and Indian War, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, for whom the territory functioned as a bulwark against British incursions into New Spain. Later, Spain, under constant threat of Anglo-American invasion, endeavored to strengthen political ties with United States via the Treaty of San Lorenzo (July 1795). Amidst the resolution of various border disputes for this agreement, Thomas Pinckney, the United States’ minister in Great Britain, also successfully negotiated with Spain for free navigation of the Mississippi River and tax-free export via Nueva Orleans. By “right of deposit,” established by Article 22 of the San Lorenzo treaty (or Pinckney’s Treaty), American agents were permitted to store and export their goods through Spanish New Orleans duty free.

However, by order of this printed decree, originally published by Juan Morales on October 16, 1802, the Intendant rescinded the right of deposit: “I order that from this date shall cease the privilege which the Americans had of bringing and depositing their goods in this capitol. And that the foregoing may be publicly known, and that no body may plead ignorance, I order it to be published in the accustomed places, copies to be posted up in public . . .” Morales’ controversial order is generally thought to have originated with Miguel Cayetano Soyer, Spain’s minister of the Treasury, though historian Arthur Whitaker cites pressure from France to thwart American commerce, and the topic remains debated. It is noteworthy that Louisiana, via the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), was, in fact a possession of France in 1802. As Whitaker notes, Pierre-Clement de Laussat, sent by Napoleon to serve as colonial prefect at New Orleans observed the following: “The Anglo-American flag eclipses by its number here those of France and Spain. . . . They (Americans) are poisoning these countries with English goods, with which French goods cannot compete.” Whatever its precise cause, Morales’ order provoked immediate outrage among merchants, who challenged its authenticity and legality.

Numerous American newspaper editorials decried the embargo and demanded Louisiana’s cessation or purchase, though the matter had been under consideration for some time. In 1798, a petition by the people of Kentucky to Congress demanded navigation rights.

The Mississippi is ours by the law of nature; it belongs to us by our numbers, and by the labour which we have bestowed on those spots which before our arrival, were desert and barren. Our innumerable rivers swell it, and flow with it into the Gulf of Mexico. Its mouth is the only issue which nature has given to our waters, and we wish to use it for our vessels. We do not prevent the Spanish and French from ascending the river to our towns and villages. We wish, in our turn to descend it without any interruption to its mouth, to ascend it again, and to exercise our privilege of trading on it and navigating it at our pleasure. If our most entire liberty in this matter is disputed, nothing will prevent our taking possession of the capital (of Louisiana), and when we are once masters of it, we will know how to maintain ourselves there. If Congress refuses us effectual protection, if it forsakes us, we will adopt the measures that our safety requires, even if they endanger the Peace of the Union and our connection with other States. No protection, no allegiance.

Morales’ 1802 embargo realized the American merchants’ simmering concerns.

The broadside resurfaces

We likely owe the rediscovery of this broadside at the Archivo General de Indias to Douglas Crawford McMurtrie (1888-1944), whose posthumous Bibliography of Mississippi Imprints, 1798-1830 includes a description and photostatic copy kept in the Library of Congress. It is not known precisely how “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” entered the Archivo General collection, though it was likely among the papers of Spanish Louisiana officials who returned to Spain via Havana during the late nineteenth century. Following the Louisiana Purchase, administrators such as Morales were dispatched to Pensacola and retained many records pertinent to their administration. Captain Vidal, then secretary to the Mississippi Territory’s Spanish Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, may have directed the notice to his associates in Spain in 1802.

For nearly two centuries, the notice remained bound together with a handwritten Spanish translation of its contents. Prolonged direct contact with that manuscript resulted in the imprint of that handwriting on its surface. According to Guillermo José Morán Dauchez of AGI, the ink used for the translation was a common one of that era called “metalogallic,” made of iron dust and gallic acid. Such ink acquires a characteristic sepia tone as it effectively rusts, causing the aforementioned imprint. Recently conservators isolated the sheet from other materials to prevent further acidification.

The printer

A notation at the bottom of the page reads, “Herald Office, Natchez, Thursday Night, October 28, 1802.” This line indicates that the broadside was printed at the offices of the Mississippi Herald, founded in June 1802 by New York-born Andrew Marschalk (1767-1838), though his name does not appear on the document. Marschalk learned the printing trade in London, where he acquired a mahogany printing press in 1790 and shipped it to America. While serving in the United States Army, Marschalk was commissioned to print the new laws of the Territory in Natchez, which he accomplished with a second press that he crafted himself to accommodate larger pages.

The Mississippi Herald ran under various names, including the Mississippi Herald, and Natchez Repository, until 1807. Its earliest surviving editions of August 10 and 17, 1802, remain in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, though no issues exist in any collection from the month of October 1802 (fig. 2). The dimensions of the earliest editions of 1802-3 (at the New-York Historical Society, Harvard, and the Library Company of Philadelphia) are consistent at 16.1 x 27.2 in. (41 x 69 cm.), indicating that “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” was a separate broadside commission independent from the regular newspaper. However, other newspapers such as Philadelphia’s Aurora general advertiser of Nov. 24, 1802, printed similar advice in their pages (fig. 3).

Documents such as “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” and the Aurora notice, “New Orleans Shut” remind us of the slower pace at which news travelled during the early nineteenth century. For example, an interval of nearly two weeks took place between Morales’s declaration and its translation and printing in Natchez for an American audience. (For travel upriver from New Orleans to Natchez, this amount of time for news to travel was then quite efficient.) Further, another month passed before this news hit the Philadelphia papers. Certainly, a well-developed American military presence poised at Fort McHenry near Natchez expedited the shift in power at New Orleans following the Louisiana Purchase (1803). However, letters in the collection of Tulane University from Miguel Cayetano Soyer to Juan Morales as late as May 1805 describe James Monroe’s recent appearance in Spain and resolutely dismiss Monroe and Thomas Pinckney’s entreaty that the United States be compensated for the enormous loss of goods as hundreds of ships languished at the New Orleans docks two years prior.

A “Letter from a gentleman”

Future examination of the Archivo General de Indias documents originally bound with Captain Vidal’s copy of “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” may reveal more evidence. However, the purpose of his signature is explained in F. Baily’s “Description of Louisiana,” published in Sir Richard Phillips’ Monthly Magazine, or, British Register (Vol. XV), for January-July 1803. Having visited Louisiana between 1796 and 1797, Baily explains:

The present dispute between America and Spain respecting the shutting of the port of New Orleans, having engrossed considerable attention in the political world, I have taken the liberty of sending you a description of that city . . . extracted principally from a journal which I kept during my travels.

Among his many observations, he took note of a local printer:

There is but one printing-press in this town, and that is for the use of the Government only. The Spaniards are too jealous to suffer the inhabitants to have the free exercise of it; and however strange it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that you cannot stick a paper against the wall (either to recover anything lost, or to advertise anything for sale) unless it has the signature of the Governor or his Secretary attached to it.

In the years following the death of Governor Gayoso in 1799 and prior to the Louisiana Purchase, José Vidal served as the Spanish Commandant of the Post of Concordia in Natchez. His imprimatur legitimized Marschalk’s broadsides displayed in the Mississippi Territory at Morales’ request and which showed “intelligence” provided by an anonymous (and potentially unreliable) source in the form of an “Extract of a Letter from a gentleman in New-Orleans to his friend in this place.”

Vidal’s signature, required to authorize this document’s display and contents, implies the complexity of power relations in the lower Mississippi River Valley as French, Spanish, and American officials operated neck-and-neck. While it made its way, probably among a Spanish official’s papers, into the Archivo General de Indias, it is an American broadside, printed in English, by an American press, and relaying a message for an American audience that was entrenched in the Mississippi Territory, militarily and otherwise. While it explicitly relays Morales’ message, “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” just as boldly implies the inevitability of Anglo-American hegemony in the Gulf South.

Further Reading

For further information about New Orleans under Spanish administration see: David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire, The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803; Cécile Vidal, Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2014), and Ralph Lee Woodward, “Spanish Commercial Policy in Louisiana, 1763-1803,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 44:2 (Spring 2003): 133-164.

For discussion about Spain and the American right of deposit see: C. Richard Arena, “Philadelphia-Mississippi Valley Trade and the Deposit Closure of 1802,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 30:1 (January 1963): 28-45 and Arthur P. Whitaker, “France and the American Deposit at New Orleans,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 11:4 (November 1931): 485-502.

Pertinent literature about the Louisiana Purchase (1803) includes: Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York, 1976), Patricia L. Dooley, ed., Jon Kukla, A Wilderness so immense: the Louisiana Purchase and the destiny of America (New York, 2003), and Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Louisiana Purchase, A Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, 2002).

Source material on early Gulf South printing for this article is derived from: Douglas C. McMurtrie, A Bibliography of Mississippi Imprints, 1798-1830 (Beauvoir Community, Miss., 1945); Douglas C. McMurtrie, “The Pioneer Printer of New Orleans,” The Southern Printer (Chicago, 1930; Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Cybèle T. Gontar is a PhD candidate at the the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is completing her dissertation “José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza and Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans: Portraiture, Identity, and Plantation Society in New Orleans, 1790-1890.” She currently teaches Global New Orleans: Art and Material Culture in the Gulf South, 1718-present at Tulane University.

Commercial correspondence rarely qualifies as an exciting read, as I learned while going through the correspondence of an eighteenth-century flour merchant from Philadelphia, Levi Hollingsworth. His letters are kept at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and I was using them as part of a larger, quantitative project on commercial profit in the early modern era. I was working from digital copies acquired by my Paris research unit, and my primary task was to compile all the information the letters contained on the suppliers and customers listed in an account book for 1786. I read each letter carefully, looking for names. This was not always easy: Hollingsworth sold flour on commission on behalf of a number of countryside farmers, millers, and storekeepers from eastern Pennsylvania or northern Delaware, who also bought exotic products from him, such as molasses, rum, or tobacco. Some letters were written in barely legible English, sometimes mixed with words in Dutch or German. Even in more legible correspondence, abbreviations were ubiquitous, and a lot of sentences were too allusive to determine who the person mentioned actually was.

The contents were also rather repetitive. Rural customers and suppliers usually mentioned goods sent and received, and apologized for delayed payment, with the requisite reference to the lack of metallic currency—but next month, surely, things would look up. Merchants sent similar information, but their payments were more timely as a rule, and there were added elements: details of complex transactions including personal IOU’s (“bills” or “notes of hand”) endorsed, accepted, or discounted, considerations on the “dearness of money,” i.e. the level of interest rates (always too high), and information on the state of the market in which they operated—this last, a gesture of goodwill toward their correspondent. Hollingsworth’s agent downriver from Philadelphia along the Delaware, Solomon Maxwell, reported news of cargo sent, of Jamaican captains buying foodstuffs, and helped link his principal to the network of local economic actors supplying him with the flour he would resell, for a fee—usually the customary 2.5 percent.

I quickly determined what Maxwell’s role was, and would have neglected the rest of his letters, with their humdrum news given in between the repetitive formulas of “Dear Sir” and “Your obed^t servant,” had I not been on the lookout for any information I could find on any other people the correspondence would mention. There was a Mr. Potts, for instance, appearing in a letter from Maxwell dated December 22, 1786, and written in Port Penn, a landing below Wilmington, on the west bank of the Delaware river. Hollingsworth’s emissary wrote that “W.M.&Swanwick’s Mr. Potts is here & says T Canby has sold them 500 bbs @ 40/- & he expects remainder at that price but I shall engage all near this place early tomorrow & they must call on us for remandr.”

Translated into today’s English, this meant that a Mr. Potts, working for the firm Willing, Morris & Swanwick, with whom Hollingsworth also had dealings (and which belonged in part to Robert Morris of Revolutionary War fame), had bought 500 barrels (“bbs”) of flour, since the letter spoke of nothing else, from one Thomas Canby, to whom Hollingsworth occasionally sold tobacco and rum. The Canby family owned a mill in Wilmington, Delaware, and Thomas Canby (not to be confused with a homonymous earlier member of the Colonial Assembly of Pennsylvania who may have been his grandfather) may have run a store next to it. The price Potts paid was 40 shillings a barrel, that is, two (Pennsylvania) pounds, an amount which fit with similar sales recorded in Holligsworth’s account books the month before.

It turned out that Potts did not appear anywhere in Hollingsworth’s accounts, and in and of itself the particular transaction between he and Canby that the letter reported was unremarkable. But the sentence was striking in another respect. Was Maxwell really explaining that he would buy off the entire supply in the area, so that the unfortunate Potts would have to come to him to get more flour, and presumably be forced to pay a higher price? Could we assume that this lowly agent of a midsize flour dealer on the lower Delaware was behaving like Jay Gould a hundred years later? Apparently, yes. A few minutes later, I stumbled upon a second letter from Maxwell, this time sent on December 27, five days later, from Christiana Bridge, a key transportation hub on the road to Maryland, inland to the northwest of Port Penn and a few miles southwest of Wilmington. Maxwell wrote that “M^r Potts is down for W.M.&Swanwick can’t get their load as yet & in consequence of M^r Emblen coming & applying to R. Tuckness & others to load him before I saw him thought best to take in sundry Millers at Back Creek & Bohemia & Keep what was in Shallops.”

There was only one possible interpretation of these two sentences, as far as I could see: Maxwell was running a very efficient, very ruthless market-cornering operation. He was tracking closely not only Potts, but anybody willing to give Potts a hand—Emblen, who appears elsewhere in the correspondence as a Hollingsworth ally, had unwittingly stepped in on the wrong side of Maxwell’s speculation, offering to help the newcomer, whereupon our monopolist made sure to take off the market not only his own flour held on sloops along the Delaware, but also whatever flour held by neighboring millers would have been obtainable through the would-be Good Samaritan, who was probably also told to stop interfering.

So the meaning of the original sentence was indeed that of a large-scale, successful market manipulation, freezing out an interloper by refusing to sell. This, in turn, had major implications for the structure and functioning of this market. Both letters could be written only in a universe in which a whole population of farmers, storekeepers, and millers was networked efficiently enough to be turned into a market-controlling, unified whole across an area of maybe twenty or thirty square miles around Wilmington, at least for a few days, by one individual. In other words, each and every local flour provider in the region had accepted to act in concert with Maxwell, as a member of a disciplined group.

This was an amazing feat of coordination. Large firms such as the various European East India companies did achieve at least partial control of the markets in high-value, exotic products—tea comes to mind; but their monopoly was legally sanctioned. And by studying large colonial merchants in France, I had myself found out that they were able to create similar informal monopolies on niche markets in colonial products at the level of large Atlantic ports, as with sugar from the West Indies in Bordeaux. But flour was not a rare commodity, and the flour markets of the early republic were very open, with many actors both on the buying and the selling side. How could monopoly control possibly be achieved in such markets? There was no mention of coercion, and no basis in what I knew of Delaware in 1786 to imagine jackbooted agents of a flour dealer going door to door to enforce the will of their boss. So what economic sociologist Avner Greif has called “weak ties”—informal personal relationships between actors based on socially accepted behavioral standards—must have been enough to enforce the unity Maxwell’s plan required.

I knew that Hollingsworth had personal relationships with many people in the area, whether through business dealings or family ties. He was an agent for dozens of farmers and millers around Wilmington—his “flour book” for the year 1784-86, in which he listed all the people whose flour he sold on commission, contained hundreds of accounts. Anyone relying on him to access the flour markets in Philadelphia or on the Delaware would enter a continuous, long-term cooperative process, extending over years. In many cases, the letters I had read also revealed the routine exchange of small services and favors, letters and small parcels passed on, common acquaintances taken care of. Credit was also an issue; Hollingsworth often allowed his customers to overdraft their accounts, acting as a bank making small loans. When he drew up his balance sheet in 1788, our Philadelphia merchant listed no fewer than 389 names of people owing him money on their account. And there was also the fact that he was a very good agent, as proved by his success at winning over such a large clientele: one’s flour would be in good hands with him, and would be sold at a good price.

Being frozen out of Hollingsworth’s network thus meant losing access to a range of services, to easy credit, and potentially losing money by having to use a less savvy agent. And there were other, more local considerations. Hollingsworth’s family owned large holdings in both Delaware and Maryland around neighboring Head of Elk (today’s Elktown), and breaking with him could lead to a tarnished local reputation and loss of standing. Overall, it would have been both financially and socially irrational to cross a powerful and influential figure such as Hollingsworth just to help a complete unknown such as Potts. This is why, if the Philadelphia merchant was willing to draw on the goodwill he had gained over the years in order to block Potts’ entry into the local flour market, local storekeepers and millers would certainly oblige. Indeed, Maxwell did not seem to find the whole operation exceptional or difficult, and mentioned it only in passing.

The consequence of all this was also that these “market” operations did not take place on what we would call an actual “free market.” Maxwell’s letters proved that he had succeeded in building what economists call barriers to entry, preventing outsiders from coming in and becoming competing market actors. And these barriers were impressively strong; Robert Morris was one of the most powerful men in the United States in 1786, and yet his power evaporated around Wilmington, a mere forty miles south of his residence. One key element was the self-reinforcing network of mutual cooperation that Maxwell’s letters implied, which prevented people like Potts from entering the local market. Another element was information. Potts does not seem to have been even aware of who his opponent was. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which he might discover Maxwell’s shenanigans, short of sheer luck, such as sitting in a tavern next to some drunk who would brag that he had refused to sell flour to an interloper on orders from Mr. Hollingsworth. Maxwell, on the other hand, could apparently follow Potts’s every move on an almost hourly basis. Insider information was a key to market manipulation, then as now.

Wilmington was not the end of the story, either. The fact that Hollingsworth held a dominant position as a flour buyer also meant that he could try to turn it into a dominant position as a flour seller. With such a stranglehold on flour movements toward Philadelphia between the Delaware and the Chesapeake, he must have had a huge comparative advantage within Philadelphia itself, if only because he benefitted from a steady supply from secure and nearby sources. If the area under his control is any indication, it may well have turned out that only a handful of operators in the Quaker city and along the lower Delaware effectively controlled most of the flour supply there. They could easily strike illicit agreements, just as the sugar importers in Bordeaux were doing, in order to freeze out newcomers on the endpoint market as well. And there were other possible comparative advantages, not implied by the letter, such as the ease with which large operators could afford to engage in dumping wars, or the superior knowledge of the product and better ability to guarantee quality which came with being a long-established, strongly positioned dealer.

In the end, this one short sentence I caught almost by accident turned out to be very significant in the research program I was helping implement. Once I had unpacked all its meanings and implications, I could use it as proof of the existence of a self-reinforcing system of market control and manipulation by a circle of insiders, a technique I had already come to suspect to be generalized and constitutive of the early modern political economy. If such an environment as the flour markets in the lower Delaware valley in the 1780s could leave open the possibility of monopolistic control and market manipulation through insider information and informal price-fixing agreements, then any market at the time could be similarly controlled. The fact that the letter’s reference to such monopoly control was so casual also spoke to the breadth and depth of the economic power locally wielded by merchants. All in all, the sentence helped validate our project by confirming that the free, open, transparent market of the economists is not necessarily a fitting model for early modern market mechanisms.

But the main lesson I would take away from this experience was one of method, not of content. In most cases reported here in Tales from the Vault, the process of historical discovery entailed piecing together numerous minute or novel bits of evidence to rebuild a lost picture. The preceding story is different in one respect: the picture I found myself facing was captured in thumbnail form in a lone sentence, which was all the evidence I could find in the batch of letters I ended up reading. Other smoking guns may be buried deep elsewhere, in letters from or to Hollingsworth dating from other years, but I never got around to them. How can I argue then that one sentence could be enough to reach the broad conclusions I present above?

Of course, these conclusions fit our knowledge of merchant practice at the time. But I would go further: the evidence contained in the sentence, however minute, is still hard to gainsay. I have never been able to come up with any other plausible narrative which would explain away its contents—though readers are more than welcome to propose their own interpretation, and prove my lack of imagination by the same token; I promise full acknowledgement in the paper I would have to publish to recant my earlier erronous ways. In the meantime, though, I will stick to the idea that this group of 17 words offered a window onto a whole economic universe, and also that as historians we should be more willing to engage in “microreadings,” focused on drawing large amounts of information from a few highly significant words. This is what Carlo Ginzburg called the “scholarly apprehension of singularity,” crossed with what Natalie Zemon Davis taught us long ago about the necessity of close, anthropological readings sensitive to historical differences, but applied here to a single sentence in a single text. For one single sentence can tell us a lot sometimes, maybe even enough for a whole story, once we are prepared to dig deep into its many implicit meanings.

Further Reading

For Levi Hollingsworth and the Willing, Morris & Swanwick firm of Philadelphia see the archival presentations here and here.

On merchant practice and merchant networks, beyond the seminal article of Avner Greif, “Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition,” American Economic Review 83:3 (June 1993): 525–548, classic descriptions are provided by Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, 1986); David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, 2009); Cathy D. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998); and Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009).

For recent research on merchant practice, including monopoly and market manipulation, see Manuel Covo, “I, François B.: Merchant, Protestant and Refugee—a Tale of Failure in the Atlantic World,” French History 25:1 (January 2011): 69– 88; Pierre Gervais, “Neither imperial, nor Atlantic: a merchant perspective on international trade in the eighteenth century,” History of European Ideas 34:4 (December 2008): 465–473; Pierre Gervais, “Crédit et filières marchandes au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales ESC 67:4 (October-December 2012): 1011-1048 (a translated English version is also available); and Silvia Marzagalli, “Establishing Transatlantic Trade Networks in Time of War: Bordeaux and the United States, 1793-1815,” Business History Review 79:4 (Winter 2005): 811-844.

Lastly, the idea of micro-readings is not new, nor does it come from history. One of the first theoretical expositions of it came from Jean-Pierre Richard, Microlectures (Paris, 1979). A historian’s version can be found in Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20:1 (October 1993): 10-35.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Pierre Gervais is professor of American history and civilization at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in Paris. A graduate of ENS Ulm, École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Princeton University, he studied the Industrial Revolution at first; his 2004 book, Les origines de la révolution industrielle aux États-Unis, received the Willi Paul Adams prize for best foreign book from the OAH in 2006. He turned then to the merchant economy, as head of the research project MARPROF, which led him to the Hollingsworth fund. The results of this project were published in Pierre Gervais, Lemarchand Yannick et Margairaz Dominique (dirs.), Merchants and Profit in the Age of Commerce, 1680–1830 (2014).

An Atlantic tale

In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht ended what the English called the War of Spanish Succession and what the English in America called Queen Anne’s War. With the coming of peace, English ships flocked to colonial ports, anxious to renew the trading links that had been strained during the long years of conflict. Among the ports that received the influx of English shipping was Charleston, South Carolina, whose exports vaulted upwards in the 1710s. And among the vessels that tied up at Charleston—or Charles Town as it was known to its colonial inhabitants—was the Crowley of London, new-built in 1715. The Ambrose, launched in 1716, was quick to follow.

Both ships were owned by John Crowley, Britain’s largest metalware manufacturer. Together they commemorated John Crowley’s father, Ambrose, who had died in 1713, shortly after the end of hostilities that had wracked western and central Europe, with only a short intermission, since 1689. The wars that had pitted an Anglo-Dutch alliance against Louis XIV’s France had brought misery to much of Europe’s population. For Ambrose Crowley, however, the generation-long conflict had been a time of opportunity. From small beginnings in the 1680s, he had established a metal-working empire that turned out a profusion of nails, fittings, fixtures, cast wares, anchors, and edge tools. By the time of his death, Sir Ambrose Crowley (he was knighted in 1707) controlled three factories of unparalleled size in the northeast of England and a set of warehouses in the English midlands that supplied rod iron to a swarm of out-workers. The latter, working in their own homes, hammered the rods into nails—thousands each day.

Crowley’s success was attributable in part to his indomitable disposition. He was a man of unquenchable ambition and energy. But Sir Ambrose was also fortunate in his timing. His business career coincided with an epoch of near-continuous war, and it was the demands of the wartime state that sustained the Crowley firm’s growth. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had turned Britain, a peripheral actor in European affairs in the 1670s, into a key antagonist of France. King William’s War (1689-1697) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), fought to thwart Bourbon expansionism, brought about a major overhaul of the British state. Naval and military expenditure grew stupendously, and it was as a naval contractor that Crowley grew rich. Sir Ambrose’s main depot was at Greenwich on the Thames, hard by the Royal Navy’s principal dockyards. At the time of his death he was owed over £50,000 sterling by the Navy Board—the government agency responsible for fitting out the fleet. For the Crowleys, then, the prospect of peace was troubling indeed.

The appearance of the Crowley and the Ambrose at Charleston’s quayside signaled a reorientation of the business that John Crowley had inherited from his father. Naval contracting remained an important activity, but it was much reduced in scale after the peace of Utrecht. New sources of revenue had to be sought out: hence the priority now given to transatlantic markets. John Crowley, deprived of the naval orders that had been so lucrative in his father’s time, turned to the West Indies and to that portion of mainland North America that most closely resembled the plantation complex of the Caribbean: South Carolina. These distant colonies formed a substantial market for agricultural tools—a civilian substitute for the lost military orders.

The Caribbean sugar islands represented the largest single source of transatlantic demand for the Crowleys’ hardware, but South Carolina showed the most rapid growth. “The Inhabitants,” trumpeted one of the province’s early boosters, “by their wise Management and Industry, have much improv’d the Country, which is in as thriving Circumstances at this Time, as any Colony on the Continent of English America.” Economic improvement there had been, but it was born of violence and ruthless expropriation rather than “wise Management.”

The years following the foundation of South Carolina in 1670 were years of carnage. Many of the earliest English settlers had come to the area from Barbados. Conscious of the spread of a sugar monoculture in the West Indies and the demand that it generated for labor, the English were soon encouraging the Native Americans with whom they traded to raid neighboring communities for slaves. This triggered a long series of Indian wars that furnished a steady supply of captives for the plantations of the Caribbean and resulted in a massive depletion of the indigenous population. A growing trade in deerskin made these bloody developments all the bloodier. Native traders exchanged the skins, much sought after by European leather workers, for muskets, shot, and knives, as well as other less lethal goods.

As the coastal lowcountry was emptied of its native residents it was repopulated with a new racial group and rededicated to the production of a new commodity. Rice, cultivated by African slaves, replaced animal skins and native captives as the region’s chief export. Experiments in the growing of rice had begun in the 1690s as local planters sought a staple crop that would bring them the kind of fabulous wealth that sugar had brought their counterparts in the West Indies. Climatic and environmental conditions made it impossible for Carolina growers to compete directly with their wealthier West Indian counterparts (or with Chesapeake tobacco growers, for that matter), but the lowcountry’s abundant swamps lent themselves to the planting of rice. By the 1710s the crop was the critical element in the local economy. Rice revolutionized life in Carolina, making the colony the richest in British North America. South Carolina also became home to the American mainland’s most brutal slave regime. It was no coincidence.

Rice cultivation was enormously labor intensive. The conversion of marshes into rice fields could only be accomplished through an injection of African labor, for white servants were in short supply. English migrants found life in the Chesapeake, harsh though it often was, much preferable to the exhausting routine of planting, harvesting, and processing that rice imposed on its growers. Field hands were condemned to endless labor with the hoe, breaking up the soil and clearing weeds. The work was “peculiarly unwholesome, and even fatal to health.” Slaves had to stand “ancle, and even mid-leg deep in water . . . exposed all the while to a burning sun, which makes the very air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furnace of stinking putrid effluvia.” Coercion, and nothing less, was the basis of planters’ fortunes.

The province that had once been an exporter of Amerindian captives was now an importer of African slaves on a massive scale. It helped that some Africans, unlike north Europeans, were experienced cultivators of rice. At first, Africans were obtained through Caribbean slave markets, but by 1714 a direct trade with the Guinea coast was underway. Soon imports began to spiral upwards, culminating in 1738 when 3,658 slaves disembarked in the Carolinas. Rice brought about an Africanization of South Carolina. Blacks had formed a minor part of the province’s nonindigenous population in its early days, just two hundred individuals out of twelve hundred in 1680. By 1700, as rice exports began to climb, blacks made up 43 percent of South Carolina’s inhabitants. By 1720 they accounted for 70 percent of a population that now topped eighteen thousand. Carolina, a Swiss migrant remarked in 1737, “looks more like a negro country than a country settled by white people.”

Rice exports from Charleston averaged 1.8 million pounds in the last five years of Queen Anne’s War; in the five years between 1728 and 1732 they averaged 16.9 million pounds. This massive extension of rice cultivation through the lowcountry called for a wholesale reshaping of the landscape. This, in turn, rested upon an infusion of European-made matériel: hoes by the thousand, axes, spades, ox chains, and the like. It was this requirement that attracted the attention of metalware manufacturers in Britain and this that brought the Crowley and the Ambrose to anchor in the Cooper river, with the Theodosia (named to honor John Crowley’s wife in 1718) and the John (registered in 1721) arriving in their wake.

The inventory of John Crowley’s factories and depots, made after his death in 1728, reveals the full extent of his firm’s reliance on plantation agriculture. It listed “Barbados Hoes” (in eight different types) and “Virginia hoes” (another eight types). Then there were “Carolina Hoes” and “Carolina Axes.” There were also, lying oiled and wrapped in the shuttered darkness of the Greenwich warehouse, padlocks “for Negroes Necks.” Goods like these were regularly consigned to Charleston in the 1720s and 1730s. When one Carolina merchant advised a London correspondent on the assortment of goods most likely to fetch handsome profits in the Charleston market, he stipulated “Crowleys best Broad Hoes & Narrow Hoes”—eighteen dozen of the former and twelve dozen of the latter. That Crowley hoes and hardware were sent to Charleston in bulk is evident from the scale of the debts incurred by the town’s merchants. The biggest debtor, Joseph Wragg, whose brother Samuel was the colony’s agent in London and a major metropolitan slave merchant, owed £3,914 sterling.

Visitors to the Crowleys’ northern factories were quick to notice how many of the articles manufactured at Swalwell or Winlaton Mill were designed specifically for transatlantic markets. The Swede Johan Robsahm who visited the enormous Swalwell plant in 1761 walked through numerous smiths’ shops “where shovels, mattocks, and hoes were made.” Hoes and mattocks, Robsahm noted to himself, “are implements used in America for cultivating the ground instead of ploughs.” Another Swede, Reinhold Angerstein, who toured Swalwell in 1754, counted twenty-two workshops, each with three workers, devoted to turning out hoes. He also watched the making of a “certain kind of axe, 1 inch long, ground and polished all over,” which was intended for the Indian trade. The axes, Angerstein noted, were intended for ceremonial rather than practical purposes, so the edge was not “ground really sharp but left dull.” (Were these the “Carolina Axes,” over a thousand of which were boxed ready for shipment in the Greenwich warehouse in 1728?)

Robsahm and Angerstein were not the first Swedes to visit the Crowley works in the eighteenth century. The Swalwell-Winlaton complex was, in fact, an almost obligatory port of call for those Swedes, mainly state officials, who crisscrossed central and western Europe from the late seventeenth century onwards as “industrial tourists.” Mines, furnaces, factories, and warehouses rather than the architectural remains of classical antiquity drew these gentleman travelers abroad. They were not, as might be assumed, engaged in industrial espionage. Swedish travelers, it is true, were keenly interested in the new mechanical devices they encountered in Britain’s industrial districts but not with a view to transplanting them in Sweden. Angerstein and his ilk were far more concerned with western Europe as a market for Swedish iron than as a source of technological novelty.

Although there was plenty of iron ore in England, there was very little wood to fuel the smelting process. In Sweden, abundant forests provided a cheap source of charcoal fuel. Only in the 1790s, with the broad adoption of coal-based smelting methods, was the British iron industry able to free itself from dependence on foreign iron.

Sweden had emerged as a great European power in the seventeenth century on the basis of mining and metal processing. Iron exports, which had averaged little more than three thousand tons per annum in the late 1620s, leapt to eleven thousand tons in 1640, then to eighteen thousand tons in 1650, and twenty-seven thousand tons in 1680. This startling escalation was a matter of policy. The Swedish state entertained territorial ambitions, but these could only be fulfilled if the poor and sparsely populated kingdom of the warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus could exploit its latent mineral wealth.

It so happened that iron was needed in the capital-rich Netherlands and capital was needed in iron-rich Sweden. In the 1620s, a group of opportunistic Dutch merchants capitalized on these needs, heralding a transformation of Sweden’s industries. The Dutchmen were awarded wide-ranging privileges by the Swedish state, allowing them to establish a network of processing plants. The newcomers were able to take control of Sweden’s copper resources (which were Europe’s richest), set up cannon foundries at a time when endemic warfare made the gun trade especially lucrative, and redirect Swedish iron exports westwards. The greatly increased export revenues enabled Gustavus Adolphus to make his sensational entry into the Thirty Years’ War, the immense dynastic and religious struggle that convulsed Europe in the 1620s and 1630s. It was this twin military-industrial initiative that ushered in Sweden’s “Age of Greatness” (stormaktstiden).

This was Sweden’s era of imperial success, when her provinces stretched all around the Baltic, from Finland to Pomerania. Riga and Bremen were Swedish cities; the marshy delta on which St. Petersburg would one day be built was an as yet insignificant corner of the Swedish province of Ingermanland. Yet Swedish power, for all its martial lustre, was insecure. Despite a considerable increase in numbers during the seventeenth century, Sweden remained thinly populated. Sweden’s enemies, on the other hand, were numerous. Were they to combine—as the Russians, the Poles, and the Danes did in 1699—the consequences would be severe. The Swedish crown lacked the manpower to compensate for battlefield losses, so when Sweden’s principal field army was annihilated at Poltava in the Ukraine in 1709, the curtain fell on stormaktstiden. The Baltic empire was lost, ceded for the most part to Peter the Great’s Russia.

Iron exports had laid the basis for Sweden’s imperial experience in the seventeenth century. For Swedish officials in the eighteenth century it thus stood to reason that success in the iron trade would be the foundation of national renewal. This explains the avidity with which Swedes visited Britain, the destination for most Swedish iron exports. They were anxious to check that the bar iron manufactured in Bergslagen, the mining district that extended in a broad arc to the north and west of Stockholm, met with the approval of users in Europe’s most dynamic iron market.

Reinhold Angerstein made a rough calculation of the annual consumption of iron at the Crowleys’ Swalwell and Winlaton works. It amounted to 2,350 tons, to which the two in-house forges contributed no more than 400 tons. The remaining 1,950 tons were imported, largely from Sweden. Travelers like Angerstein were able to monitor the use of Swedish iron quite closely because every bar bore, by state edict, a stamp that identified the forge from which it came. Thus, Robsahm was able to note with satisfaction that the hoes and mattocks being made at Swalwell in 1761 for the American market were hammered out of iron bearing “the stamp ‘C and Crown’ from Älvkarleö.” Robsahm had further reason for satisfaction as he described the manufacturing process. The hoes were forged for the most part from malleable iron, but the cutting edge that was to slice into the soil of the lowcountry was steel. And this steel, as Robsahm well knew, was made from the elite brands of Swedish iron, converted to steely hardness in the cementation furnaces of the northeast of England. Swalwell was just one node in a commodity chain that originated in the ore pits of Bergslagen and that snaked onwards into the Atlantic.

Few in the lowcountry were aware of it at the time, but South Carolina’s economy in the first decades of the eighteenth century was developing in dialectical tension with events in the Baltic region. The Great Northern War (1699-1721), the grinding conflict that brought about Sweden’s eclipse as a major power, afforded Carolina’s rice planters their point of entry into world markets. By disrupting the outflow of Polish wheat—the dietary mainstay of western Europe’s urban poor for two centuries—the war encouraged grain merchants to look further afield for alternatives.

They found one such alternative in Carolina rice. The seemingly endless cycle of European war, which was echoed distantly in the assaults that South Carolina’s colonists launched against Spanish settlements in Florida in 1702, 1703, and 1708, drove up the demand for Swedish iron, especially in Britain, where the consumption of iron and steel surged far ahead of local supply. This was a matter of some anxiety to the British authorities who fretted at their inability to command secure supplies of so strategic a material. Worse, from a strategic point of view, was the reliance of the Royal Navy on Russian hemp or Swedish tar. It was this that prompted the British Parliament to identify South Carolina as a counterpoise to the Baltic. Given adequate encouragement, could not tar and pitch be obtained from the pine forests of Carolina? That was the aim of legislation passed in 1705 to award a bounty on imports of naval stores from the American colonies.

This was the context in which John Crowley’s ships sailed for Carolina with their cargoes of hardware. On their return they would carry rice, deerskins, and naval stores. When the Crowley cleared Charleston in November 1723, for example, she was loaded with 222 barrels of rice, 5 chests of deerskins, 457 barrels of pitch, and 267 barrels of tar. Others were quick to recognize the opportunities that Crowley had spotted. A Quaker merchant who traded out of Bristol, the premier port in western Britain, was one of them. He had the singular name of Graffin Prankard. Prankard’s main business was with Stockholm, whence he imported large volumes of iron, but his ship the Parham, launched in 1722, also sailed for Charleston every winter. Her cargo would include metalwares, such as hoes and chains, and nails by the hundred thousand. Lead shot and gunpowder, staples of the Indian trade, also featured prominently. The return cargo from Charleston was of course rice, augmented by naval stores and dyestuffs. It was a flourishing trade, for Prankard soon built a new, far-larger ship to join the 100-ton Parham. The 226-ton Baltick Merchant, registered at Bristol in 1732, was capable of carrying over thirteen hundred barrels of rice.

There was no paradox in a ship named the Baltick Merchant engaging in transatlantic trade, for Graffin Prankard, even more than John Crowley, was seeking to capitalize on a potential symmetry between Baltic commerce and the passage of goods to and from Charleston. There was a complementarity between Swedish iron and Carolina rice that would allow Prankard to employ his shipping in a continual, year-round circuit. He dispatched the Baltick Merchant to Charleston in the autumn, just as ice was closing the more-northerly Baltic ports to shipping. While the Baltick Merchant struggled across a rough, wintry Atlantic, the Carolina rice crop, planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, was being prepared for shipment. Slaves were engaged in laboriously “pounding out” the rice in order to separate the husk from the grain. At the year’s end, when the Baltick Merchant tied up at Charleston, hundreds of barrels of rice were ready to be stowed on board. Graffin Prankard’s ships usually cleared Charleston in February or March, just as bar iron was on the move from forges in Bergslagen to Stockholm. Sledges carried the iron over the frozen lakes and snowy roads of the Swedish midlands to the thawing Baltic ports.

The successful completion of the circuit Prankard had initiated the previous autumn required careful synchronization among his agents across northern Europe. The cargo of rice would be delivered to Hamburg or Bremen in April or May. At the end of May, just as thousands of Africans were spreading out across the rice fields of Carolina to plant the new season’s crop, the Baltick Merchant would pass east through the Sound en route to Stockholm. The cargo of iron and timber that awaited her would be loaded without delay, for the ship was to return to Bristol in time for St James’s fair in July, the highpoint of the city’s commercial calendar. St James’s fair attracted buyers and sellers from across the southwest of England and the Midlands. And it was here that Graffin Prankard met the ironmongers and manufacturers who bought his iron and who supplied him with the exportable iron wares that would allow the transatlantic cycle to begin anew.

This pattern of trade thrived through the 1730s. The Baltick Merchant made the trip to Charleston every year. But the headlong development of South Carolina’s rice economy was about to undergo a sharp deceleration. The outbreak of war between Britain and Spain in 1739 brought a general disruption to Atlantic traffic; the slave rebellion at Stono, near Charleston, delivered an abrupt check to the Carolina trade in particular. The Stono uprising was, in fact, facilitated by Anglo-Spanish antagonism. The armed slaves who gathered at Stono on September 9, 1739, had heard of an edict issued by the Spanish governor of Florida promising freedom to refugee English slaves. The rebels who marched south, intent on reaching Spanish territory, were for the most part Angolans and in all likelihood Catholics. As they headed toward the hoped-for Spanish sanctuary, the conspirators killed the Europeans they encountered. (Their first victim, a storekeeper named Robert Bathurst, provided a ghoulish demonstration of the cutting quality of English steel: his head was severed and left on the steps of his shop.) The rebels were surrounded by militia forces before the day was out, but the brevity of the rebellion could not disguise its seriousness. Nearly two dozen slaveholders had died in an enterprise that clearly suggested concerted planning among the rebels. The colony’s rulers were seized by panic.

The 1730s was also a time of mounting slave resistance on the Caribbean islands whose economies were so closely connected with Carolina’s. The British authorities in Jamaica were engaged in a bitter war of suppression against the “Maroons,” the runaway slaves who defied their erstwhile masters from mountain hideouts in the interior of the island, while a major revolt was only just thwarted in Antigua in 1736. Rebellious outbreaks sprouted across the Caribbean whether the islands were claimed by the English, the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, or the Danish. These insurrections reverberated in the Carolinas. Slave conspiracies were detected in 1730, 1733, 1734, 1737, and 1738. Amid such tensions South Carolina’s rulers were inescapably drawn to the question of the province’s racial imbalance. Steps were needed, it was decided, to curb the continuing inflow of African labor. Unless this was done, blacks would reach such a numerical preponderance that the Europeans would lose the coercive critical mass upon which their security rested. Moreover, the government set out to reduce the ratio of African-born slaves in the unfree population. Africans, officials increasingly feared, were intransigently wedded to memories of their former freedom, whereas American-born blacks, knowing nothing but servitude, were more biddable. Accordingly, the “Negro duty bill,” enacted in April 1740, placed a prohibitively high tax on the importation of slaves. The effect was instantaneous. Slave sales collapsed: in the 1730s, 22,215 slaves had been landed in the Carolinas, but just 2,841 were disembarked in the 1740s. Nearly twenty years would pass before slave imports returned to their former level, and so the Carolina economy lost the ebullience that had attracted first John Crowley, then Graffin Prankard in the aftermath of Queen Anne’s War.

The downturn in Carolina’s fortunes coincided with the collapse of Graffin Prankard’s. The Baltick Merchant sailed from Charleston for the last time in May 1740 with her usual cargo of rice and logwood. All was well until the ship was within sight of the Scilly Isles, off the southwest tip of England. But there she encountered a Spanish privateer. Being so close to home, the men of the Baltick Merchant resolved to make a fight of it. A four-hour pursuit ensued. The two ships were well matched in terms of cannon, but the Spanish vessel carried a larger crew, and as soon as the ships came within musket range, this numerical superiority began to tell: “we had,” said Nathaniel Alloway, the Baltick Merchant