Just at this time the Pilgrims took advantage of a new contact. Responding to earlier Dutch offers to trade for beaver, Governor Bradford invited Isaack de Rasieres, the chief merchant in New Amsterdam, to pay a visit. The portly burgher arrived at the Aptucxet post in October 1627 and came ashore “accompanied with a noise of trumpeters.” Finding the journey overland to Plymouth too far to walk, he requested that a small boat be sent for him, visited the little town, and in due course wrote a description of it. The intercourse thus opened with the Dutch plantation at the mouth of the Hudson lasted several years. It not only offered the Pilgrims desirable goods, such as sugar, linen cloth, and other stuffs, but in the long run greatly enhanced the colony’s opportunities for Indian trade by selling them a quantity of wampum. This valuable native shell money, made by the Narragansetts, now promoted gainful dealings with the Abnakis of the Kennebec country and other tribes. De Rasieres felt it necessary to justify his selling the Pilgrims the first fifty fathom of sewan (wampum) by saying that he hoped to keep them from seeking it themselves at its source of manufacture and so discovering the profitable fur trade inland. He must have meant by this the trade with the Iroquois the Dutch had tapped through their control of the Hudson River, or that of the upper Connecticut Valley.[38] Plymouth obtains a new patent to protect its trading rights The rival shipmasters and settlers now ranging along the rocky coves and inlets of the Maine coast alarmed Plymouth lest they take control of the mouth of the Kennebec River. Since the autumn of 1625, most of the beaver collected had been furnished by the Abnaki Indians of this region. To secure this area and to define the boundaries of the colony, which had been unspecified in the Peirce patent, Isaac Allerton was directed to seek a new patent from the Council for New England. Some money was laid out for this purpose in his accounts with Sherley in 1628. The first grant he obtained proved to be so “strait and ill bounded,” however, that he had to apply for its enlargement. Sherley reported that Allerton was “so turmoiled about it” that he would not have undertaken such trouble, even for a thousand pounds.