rim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended
destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much to
clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing settlement.
Like the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had steered across to
harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected to wrest a livelihood
mostly from salt water. The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was
that it offered a good harbor for boats and was "a place of profitable
fishing." Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the
wilderness and the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where
they were soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the
Kennebec colony.

Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the Puritans who
came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing carpenters and shipbuilders
with them to hew the pine and oak so close at hand into keelsons,
frames, and planking. Two years later, Governor John Winthrop launched
his thirty-ton sloop Blessing of the Bay, and sent her to open "friendly
commercial relations" with the Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the
traffic was in furs and wampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem
were not content to voyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled,
adventurous seamen of them, and what they caught with hook and line,
when dried and salted, was readily exchanged for other merchandise in
Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe.

A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives in the
ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden schooners are
fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker, took their pay
in shares. They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who
supplied stores and material; and when the ship was afloat, the master,
the mates, and even the seamen, were allowed cargo space for commodities
which they might buy and sell to their own advantage. Thus early
they learned to trade as shrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage
directly concerned a whole neighborhood.

This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other
resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more interested
in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the Great Lakes and in
finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on the Hudson were similarly
engaged by means of the western trails to the country of the Iroquois,
while the planters of Virginia had discovered an easy opulence in the
toba