On Topic: Busy as beavers

Back when I taught American lit in high school, in a medium-sized Ohio district for all of two years and four days, I would start the year with the Puritans.

Jonathan Edwards's rousing sermon, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was ideal for shaking awake dozing high-schoolers, especially during first period - 'The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked …

!”

Great stuff - not only because of the theatrical, hellfire-and-brimstone imagery and all those obvious similes and metaphors, but some of those rotten juveniles in fact were pretty loathsome.

But now director Ric Burns comes along to tell us the story of the Puritans really is as much a business lesson as it is a tale of religious freedom and exploration.

Aired on PBS the day before Thanksgiving, 'The Pilgrims” takes much of its narrative from 'Of Plimoth Plantation,” the 21-year accounting of the Massachusetts colony established by English religious separatists - 'a very small group of very extreme people,” as one historian puts it. The book was written by John Bradford, governor of the New Plymouth colony from 1621 to 1657 and is accepted to be more or less accurate, except for some of the more horrific actions he glossed over or simply didn't include.

But the documentary makes it clear the whole enterprise was financed by investors who expected a significant return. Organized by a London broker named Thomas Weston, the investors called themselves the Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers - pretty colorful, right? - and they desired beaver pelts, lots of beaver pelts.

For those of you not up on the economic principles of North American beaver pelts in the 17th century, Nick Bunker, one of talking heads in 'The Pilgrims” and author of 'Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World, a New History,” explains that, 'In the 1620s, a single beaver pelt fetched the same amount of money required to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year.”

So to Weston and the Fellowship, this seemed liked a reasonable business risk: Put up the cash for a number determined folk who were in a rush to flee the country - King James I referred to the Puritans as 'pestes,” and the 30-Years War was about to chase them out of the Netherlands where these one-time farmers had taken up clothing-factory jobs - and then, oh boy, just wait for those spiffy beaver pelts to come flowing back.

But as with many a business venture, several calculations came undone. One of the two hired ships sprung more leaks than a rusty colander and had to turn back.

During the ocean crossing, passengers became ill. They got into squabbles with the crew and some of the non-Separatists the Fellowship had insisted on sending along. (Burns makes it clear these Puritans weren't the most tolerant of folk with others who might hold different world views.)

The Mayflower was crowded. There were dogs. There were sailors.

And, in their dash to get going, they'd shipped out in September 1620 rather than wait until spring. That meant by the time they reached North America, two months later, planting season - and one assumes, beaver-catching season - was well and truly past.

And, even worse, they landed 200 miles off course. What they found upon arrival was not other colonists but 'a whole country of woods and thickets.”

Almost half the colonists died that first winter, and the Mayflower was sent back to England in 1621 with no financial benefit for the investors.

So the colonists employed a traditional business tactic - they sought out partners. Enter the Wampanoag, who had seen a plague four years earlier kill more than half their population and who feared the Narragansett. So a collaboration/alliance with these new settlers seemed like a good idea at the time.

In spring, corn was planted. Pelts and timber were gathered and loaded aboard the Fortune, a ship sent by an anxious Weston who, remember, had expected a quick repayment on his money. (Fronting the cash for an entire, ongoing settlement was expensive.)

But that ship was plundered - by pirates? PETA? - on its return voyage. So Weston, pretty fed up with the Separatists and the gamble he'd made, financed three more ships and established a competing pelt post 30 miles up the coast.

But then circumstances smiled on the in-arrears Puritans. The competing business failed - poor work ethic. The Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers declared bankruptcy, and that debt was inherited by some of New Plymouth colonists.

And in 1626 and 1627, the price of beaver pelt quadrupled.

The Pilgrims - and by now, other more-recently arrived colonists, too - learned beavers hung out farther north, in Maine. In the 1630s, they shipped some 2,000 pelts to England, Bunker notes in his book.

The bottom line, in the end, worked out well for the Puritans.

It was a different matter for the Wampanoag and the beavers, of course.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michaelchevy.castranova@thegazette.com