William Claiborne and Kent Island
On the whole how advantageously are the Marylanders placed! There is peace
with the Indians. Huts, lodges, are already built, fields already cleared
or planted. The site is high and healthful. They have at first few
dissensions among themselves. Nor are they entirely alone or isolated in
the New World. There is a New England to the north of them and a Virginia
to the south. From the one they get in the autumn salted fish, from the
other store of swine and cattle. Famine and pestilence are far from them.
They build a "fort" and perhaps a stockade, but there are none of the
stealthy deaths given by arrow and tomahawk in the north, nor are there
any of the Spanish alarms that terrified the south. From the first they
have with them women and children. They know that their settlement is
"home." Soon other ships and colonists follow the Ark and the Dove to St.
Mary's, and the history of this middle colony is well begun.
In Virginia, meantime, there was jealousy enough of the new colony,
taking as it did territory held to be Virginian and renaming it, not for
the old, independent, Protestant, virgin queen, but for a French,
Catholic, queen consort -- even settling it with believers in the Mass and
bringing in Jesuits! It was, says a Jamestown settler, "accounted a crime
almost as heinous as treason to favour, nay to speak well of that colony."
Beside the Virginian folk as a whole, one man, in particular, William
Claiborne, nursed an individual grievance. He had it from Governor Calvert
that he might dwell on in Kent Island, trading from there, but only under
license from the Lord Proprietor and as an inhabitant of Maryland, not of
Virginia. Claiborne, with the Assembly at Jamestown secretly on his side,
resisted this interference with his rights, and, as he continued to trade
with a high hand, he soon fell under suspicion of stirring up the Indians
against the Marylanders.
At the time, this quarrel rang loud through Maryland and Virginia,
and even echoed across the Atlantic. Leonard Calvert had a trading-boat of
Claiborne's seized in the Patuxent River. Thereupon Claiborne's men, with
the shallop Cockatrice, in retaliation attacked Maryland pinnaces and lost
both their lives and their boat. For several years Maryland and Kent
Island continued intermittently to make petty war on each other. At last,
in 1638, Calvert took the island by main force and hanged for piracy a
captain of Claiborne's. The Maryland Assembly brought the trader under a
Bill of Attainder; and a little later, in England, the Lords Commissioners
of Foreign Plantations formally awarded Kent Island to the Lord
Proprietor. Thus defeated, Claiborne, nursing his wrath, moved down the
bay to Virginia.
Back to: Virginia and the Southern Colonies
