1629 - 1634
Like most settlers, Nat and Thomas Steele aren’t farmers, and those who are realize that the peninsula can support only the barest subsistence crops. Nat becomes a small trader, buying directly from ships bringing settlers and supplies and selling to townsfolk and farmers spreading along the valleys of the Charles and the Mystic.
Nat frequently crosses the bay to Noddles Island,
bailiwick of Samuel Maverick, an “old planter” who came with Robert Gorges.
Maverick, a well-educated man of twenty-eight, keeps a lively court behind a
stockade armed with four “murtherers” in what is now East Boston.
The most
successful trader on the coast, Maverick owns three African slaves, one a female said
to have been “a Queene of her Owne Countrey.”
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| Portrait of an African Slavewoman Attr. Annibale Carraci 1580 |
Stung by onerous taxes and a
governing council’s attempts to monopolize Boston’s trade, Nat joins Maverick
and other merchants who fight tooth and nail to keep their market free.
From this scrappy beginning will come the great trading house of Steele & Sons, reaching across the oceans from Boston to
the China Sea and beyond. – Spanning the centuries, too, to the boardroom of
The Houqua Fund at 60 State Street, Boston, twenty-first century venture
capitalists with all the dash and daring of their forbears who came first to
these shores.
Thomas becomes a zealous watchdog for Governor
Winthrop, eager to sniff out sumptuary offenders carrying one slash too many on
a sleeve or extravagant needlework embellishing a bonnet.
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| Old village stocks, Chapeltown, Lancashire, England |
When the first tavern
opens, Thomas is there, a proto-prohibitionist with authority to cut off
tipplers at Cole’s, “where he thrusts himself uninvited into a stranger’s
company, and if the man calls for more burnt Madeira than he thinks he can
soberly bear away, he countermands it and appoints the proportion beyond which
the fellow cannot get one drop.”
Nat is on his toes around Thomas, believing his
brother will cheerfully see him thrown into the stocks for the simplest error.
This doesn’t stop Nat from carousing in the ordinaries or tramping to a
mud-walled shack on one of Boston’s hills, where a mother and daughter from
London’s Penny Lane have come to get rich in America.
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| Gin Lane - William Hogarth |
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