As W. J. Eccles has pointed out, the French government initially saw
the fur trade as a means to finance the Catholic missions that aimed to con-
vert the Indians; but from about 1700 the trade was used “mainly as a
political instrument to further the imperial aims of France.”
Inadvertently, the fishermen also introduced smallpox and other Euro-
pean diseases against which the Indians had no immunities. By the late
sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, these new diseases had
virtually wiped out at least one tribe, the Patuxet, in the Massachusetts
area. In the North, as in the South, disease turned the European encounter
with the Native Americans into a silent genocide.
For a century or more, the British, Dutch, and French governments
paid little attention to the fishermen. But as the fur trade, fishing, and
piracy grew in scale, these governments began to take a greater interest in
Atlantic shipping. Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, the
northern European states had no significant navies. But they soon discov-
ered that they could create a virtual navy from the already armed, sturdy
doggers. To enlist the sailors of these little ships, they had to offer an incen-
tive. The easiest (and cheapest) incentive was to let sailors engage in what
amounted practically to piracy. From time to time, the governments pro-
vided the fishermen with documents known as letters of marque, which
turned (private) pirates into (official) privateers.
The French led the way in using privateers against the Spanish.
François I spent much of his reign locked in a bitter conflict with Charles V
of Spain. On land, François I could do little about the papal bull of 1493 or
the Hispano-Portuguese Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which effectively cut
France off from the New World. Spain’s infantry was then unbeatable, as
François learned in 1512, but already fearful of the formidable Spanish
infantry, he had entered into an alliance with Henry VIII of England (in
the grand concourse of the “Cloth of Gold” in 1520), but England added
little to French power. If on land he was blocked, François could make
at least a symbolic gesture at sea. That gesture was to send a mission to
the New World to dispute Spain’s monopoly. Since France had no man
with the necessary technical skills, François hired another of those restless
Italian seamen who went to work for foreign magnates, Giovanni da
Verrazzano.
Fish, Fur, and Piracy 55