consent of the community. With
the grant generally went rights in woodland and pasture; and even meadow
land, after the hay was got in, was open to the use of the villagers.
The early New England town took into consideration the welfare and
contentment of the individual, but it rated as of even greater
importance the interests of the whole body.

The settlements of New England inevitably presented great variations of
local life and color, stretching as they did from the Plymouth trucking
posts in Maine, through the fishing villages of Saco and York, and those
on the Piscataqua, to the towns of Long Island and the frontier
communities of western Connecticut--Stamford and Greenwich. The
inhabitants to the number of more than thirty thousand in 1640 were not
only in possession of the coast but were also pushing their way into the
interior. To fishing and agriculture they added trading, lumbering, and
commerce, and were constantly reaching out for new lands and wider
opportunities. The Pilgrims had hardly weathered their first hard winter
when they rebuilt one of their shallops and sent it northward on fishing
and trading voyages; and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and
another to open up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam.
Pynchon was making Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the
interior, though an overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits
and compelling the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of
all the colonies, New Haven was the most distinctly commercial. Stephen
Goodyear built a trucking house on an island below the great falls of
the Housatonic in 1642; other New Haven colonists engaged in ventures on
Delaware Bay; and in 1645, the colony endeavored to open a direct trade
with England. But nearly every New Haven enterprise failed, and by 1660
the wealth of the colony had materially diminished and the settlement
had become "little else than a colony of discouraged farmers." Among all
the colonies in New England and elsewhere there was considerable
coasting traffic, and vessels went to Newfoundland and Bermuda, and even
to the distant West Indies, to Madeira, and to Bilboa across the ocean.
Ever since Winthrop built the _Blessing of the Bay_ in 1631, the first
sea-going craft launched in New England, Massachusetts had been the
leading commercial colony, and her vessels occasionally made the long
triangular voyage to Jamaica, and England, and back to the Bay. The
v