America Climbs the Cornstalk 89 



corn. The beaver shipped to England sold for 327. Not a poor 

 profit to take from thirteen gallons of seed! 



The fur-trading posts were the first extensions of the colony. 

 Later came the founding of Lynn and Salem, encouraged by 

 a promise given by the Plymouth settlers that they would sup- 

 ply the newcomers with corn for one year. Intercourse be- 

 tween the settlements was necessarily by boat. Only Indian 

 trails cut the forests. New England had practically no roads, 

 and no horses to travel them before 1650. Endicott, at Salem, 

 lamented that spring freshets and the state of his health made 

 fording streams impossible, preventing his coming posthaste 

 to Boston to argue a point with Governor Winthrop. Ships 

 were an immediate necessity if New England was to grow, 

 and pay its indebtedness. 



The speed with which those first fleets were cut from the 

 forest and sent down the ways makes one gasp. They were 

 sizable vessels, too. The Desire launched in Marblehead in 

 1635 weighed 120 tons. Salem made a specialty of large decked 

 shallops, of from twenty to thirty tons. These traded with the 

 new settlements on the Connecticut River and along the 

 Sound and even with Lord Baltimore's Avalon in the New- 

 foundland. Some sailed to Bermuda with cargoes of pork, corn 

 and salt fish, and brought back potatoes, oranges and lemons 

 for the Salem folk to gawk at. On a single day in 1643, five 

 vessels cleared from Boston. Two were of three hundred tons 

 each, one of one hundred and sixty tons. All five had been 

 built in America. 



Since there was little currency in the colonies, and that a 

 random collection of English, Dutch and Spanish silver 

 pieces, labor was paid in corn. In 1631, maize was made legal 

 tender for debts, taxes and fines, at a fixed rate of six shillings 

 the bushel. A law prohibited the feeding of this "country pay" 

 to swine, except when a plentiful harvest sent the value of 

 the grain below the six shillings rate. Still later, however, the 

 County Court passed a law that "no one within these liberties 



