Organizing Settlement: the Massachusetts Bay Company

Chapter 3 Organizing Settlement: The Massachusetts Bay Company The Massachusetts Bay Company holds an uncomfortable position in the history of New England. It was clearly the organization through which colonizing the good land was rendered practically and financially possible, yet its original members have been denied their agency in the creation of the Massachusetts settlement by the historiographic tradition of a Puritan takeover of the corporation sometime before the onset of the Great Migration.1 The history of the Company therefore tends to begin with the crossing of the Winthrop fleet in the spring of 1630, apprehended exclusively through the religious and cultural values that motivated it—mainly ascetic Protestantism and its work ethic— leaving aside the institutional development of the structure that made settlement possible.2 There are only a handful of institutional studies of the corporation, dating back to the first half of the twentieth century. William Scott described its founding in a collection of essays about English joint-stock companies, with little concern for the exceptionalism contained in the Puritan plot theory. As part of her antiquarian research into the life and work of the Dorchester rever- end John White, France Rose-Troup traced the birth of the Massachusetts Bay colony back to the colonial ambition of the West Country divine and his many merchant associates, anchoring it firmly within wider early modern English plans for colonial trade and expansion.3 This chapter proceeds from the same assumption: the Massachusetts Bay Company was one among many colonial enterprises in the American North- east, a business venture in the form of a small company founded at the tail end 1 See for instance Bancroft, History of the United States, i: 380, and Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 333. 2 See for instance Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: Norton, 1995), esp. 64–106. 3 William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), esp. ii: 299–317; Frances Rose-Troup, The Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors (New York: Clearfield, 1930) and John White the Patriarch of Dorchester, Dorset and the Founder of Mas- sachusetts, 1575–1648 (New York: Putnam, 1930). See also Edgar A. Johnson, “Economic Ideas of John Winthrop,” neq 3, no. 3 (1930): 235–250. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, �� | doi:10.1163/9789004435�16_005 <UN> Organizing Settlement 91 of gentry investment in American colonization. The evolution of the latter shows that knowledge about colonial practice was shared by investment cir- cles in the metropole, and that innovations were accounted for in their collec- tive textual production, in line with the tradition and expectations of English promotional literature. This chapter tells the story of the Company’s forma- tion, the strategic planning put in place by its members built upon the teach- ings of previous experiences in the region, and the beginnings of John Win- throp’s rule. 1 Fish and Fur The Massachusetts Bay Company was founded in the late 1620s, after the Vir- ginia Massacre and the royal takeover of the Virginia Company, when wide- spread national investment in colonial ventures was dying out. In 1622, the Council for New England had envisaged settling Nova Albion on the banks of the Sagadahoc river, by putting the “poorer sort of people” of every English shire to work the land and “poor children of the City” as apprentices to the fishing industry. But the patentees had been reluctant to invest beyond their initial £110 share in the partnership, and even its trading plans had disappointed, forcing it to mortgage its ship to its members.4 By 1628, only a handful of very small settlements had been founded under the authority of the Council, in- cluding Plymouth, whose modest survival was promoted as a resounding success.5 In spite of the frailty of metropolitan investment and commitment, New England remained an attractive region for two essential prospects: fish and fur. Those were the raisons d’être of the sporadic English settlements along the coast of New England and Nova Scotia, which competed fiercely for workers and resources. Scott estimated that there were up to thirty-five ships active in the New England fishing industry in 1622, and about fifty at the end of the de- cade, financed mostly by West Country merchants, at between twenty and fifty percent profit.6 The issue raised in the promotion about the region was the duration of the fishing season, with men, like Levett, claiming to know “the mysteries of New England Trade,” and arguing that sending a workforce to live 4 Deane, Records, 31 (“poorer sort”), 13 (“poor children”), 47–48, 52–55 and 66–70 (land divi- sions), 109 (shipping debt). Rabb estimated the Council’s financial capital at £30,000 at best. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, 63. 5 Levett, A Voyage, 28; Alexander, Map and Description of New-England, 30–31. 6 Scott, Joint Stock Companies, ii: 303. <UN>.

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