After the joint stock company had broken up, Standish took £277 worth of beaver with him to pay Sherley. A large haul of 700 pounds was the result of a single autumn voyage to the Kennebec, purchased, remarkably enough, with home-grown corn. No lack of energy on the part of the Plymouth traders had prevented returns, but scarcity of the kind of English trading goods, such as hatchets, knives, and trading cloth, which the Indians wanted. In the early stages such goods had to be bought from passing vessels. On at least one occasion valuable coat beaver, which Bradford expected to bring about 20s. per pound in England, was sold to these at 3s. a pound, in exchange for beads and knives. As the “Undertakers” took over management, it was evident that numerous competing trading posts, settled up and down the New England coast, were beginning to cut into Plymouth’s sources of fur and to raise the price the Indians demanded for it. The scapegrace, Thomas Morton of Merrymount, in particular, aroused their ire by selling the natives the forbidden articles, liquor, guns, and powder. On top of this, his introduction of such pastimes as setting up a May Pole and “drinking and ... dancing and frisking together” with Indian maidens so seriously offended their religious sensibilities that they sent Captain Standish to evict Morton in 1628. In the early stages of the fur trade, transportation presented considerable difficulty. Shallops or open boats were used at first, but a small vessel was needed to coast in and out of the little harbors for several weeks at a time, carrying a few traders and their supplies. To provide for this, an ingenious house carpenter lengthened one of the shallops and built a deck, affording a hold for long voyages in the winter.[37] The “Undertakers” now decided to build a pinnace on the Manomet River, twenty miles south of Plymouth, and to erect there a permanent trading house of hewn oak planks, furnished with trading goods and in the care of two men the year round. Aptucxet was the name of their first post; it was located so strategically in relation to Buzzard’s Bay that its site is at the edge of the modern passage, the Cape Cod Canal. In the seventeenth century a short overland portage, probably accomplished in about six hours, took one across the neck of the Cape from a few miles up the Scusset River, entered from Cape Cod Bay, and thus avoided the hazards of sea passage around the Cape.