110 Industrial Experiments in Colonial America. 



towns; and such grants to be improved estates, or enclosed 

 lands. The townships were very indefinite, and sometimes 

 twenty miles long and not one-tenth inhabited.^ If the Queen 

 were to be excluded from these, it would render the masting 

 more difficult and expensive, because the masts must be cut 

 far up in the woods, miles from the water side, where there was 

 danger from the Indians, and whence the trees could be hauled 

 only when there was snow on the ground. - 



Bridger got into a violent quarrel with another contractor, 

 ColHns, and his agent, Mico, by seizing 300 masts which, the 

 latter claimed, had been legally cut.^ Mico tried to get Bridger 

 put out of office, "* and, according to Bridger's story, at the same 

 time offered him money to keep still about his misdeeds. 

 Bridger wrote to the Board of Trade that Mico had been guilty 

 of the following offenses: He and his workmen had every year 

 cut the full number of masts, and dehvered only three ship- 

 loads; they had exceeded the number and dimensions of the 

 contract; "last year, in particular," he says, "they destroyed 

 near 30 masts 29 to 36 inches in diameter, which I saw, and 

 measured some." There were nine ship-loadings due, or 576 

 masts, which should have been delivered yearly, according to 

 the contract, and their not having been sent was "a great disap- 

 pointment to the service." All the masts were rotting In the 



^Mr, Bridg:er to the Board of Trade, B. T. New Eng., R: 39. 



^Mr. Bridger to the Board of Trade, B. T. New Eng., S: 89. Bur- 

 naby, in his "Travels Through the Middle Settlements of America," 

 (1759-60), thus describes the process of hauling trees: "They never 

 cut them down but in times of deep snow, as it would be impossi- 

 ble, in any other season, to get them down the river. When the 

 trees are fallen, they yoke from seventy to eighty pair of oxen and 

 drag them along the snow. It is exceedingly difficult to put them 

 first in motion, which they call "raising" them; and when they 

 have once effected this, they never stop on any account whatsoever, 

 till they arrive at the water's side. Frequently some of the oxen 

 are taken ill, upon which they immediately cut them out of the gear, 

 and are sometimes obliged, as I was told, to destroy five or six pair 

 of them." 



"Mr. Bridger to the Board of Trade, B. T. New Eng., S: 97. 



-•Cf. Part II, Ch. II, p. 92. 



