The frontiers, for a space, had but a hazardous peace. In August, 1717, Shute had gone to Arrowsick (Georgetown, Me.) to hold a conference with the Indians, and had learned from a letter received there from Sebastian Rasle, the Jesuit missionary at Norridgewock, that any attempt to occupy the lands beyond the Kennebec would lead to war, and as we shall see the war came.[225] Meanwhile, life in Boston was full of change and shadow. Pirates beset the people’s shipping, and when the notorious “Whidaw” was cast away on Cape Cod (1717) they heard with some satisfaction of the hundred dead bodies which were washed ashore from the wreck. There was consequently one less terror for their coasters and for the paltry sloops which were now beginning to venture out for whales from Cape Cod and Nantucket.[226] There was occasion, indeed, to foster and protect that and all industries, for the purchasing power of their paper money was sinking lower and lower, to the disturbance of all trade. When the province sought to make the English manufacturers afford some slight contribution to restoration of prosperity by imposing a duty of one per cent. on their manufactures sent over, the bill was negatived by the king, with threats of loss of their charter if any such device were repeated. In the same spirit Parliament tried to suppress all iron-working in the province;[227] but after much insistence the people were allowed the boon of making their own nails![228] Some Scotch Irish had come over in 1718, and though most of them went to New Hampshire and introduced the potato,[229] enough remained in Boston to teach the art of linen-making. Spinning under this prompting became a popular employment, and Boston appointed a committee to consider the establishment of spinning schools.[230] Perhaps they could spin, if they could not forge; and Boston, with her 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants to be clothed and fed, needed to do something, if Parliament would permit. Her spirit was not always subdued. In 1721 she instructed her representatives not to be deterred by frown or threat from maintaining their charter privileges. “When you come to grant allowances,” she said, “do not forget the growing difficulties that we at this day labor under, and that poverty is coming upon us as an armed man.”[231] The General Court emphasized its call for frugality by forbidding the extravagant outlay for funerals, which was becoming the fashion.[232] There might have been some scandal at the haberdashery trade which the profuse habits of bestowing upon their parsons gloves and rings made a possible circumstance, to say the least, in more than one minister’s house. But a little innocent truck in the study was not the ministers’ most pressing diversion. Cotton, or rather Doctor Cotton Mather, as he had been called since Glasgow, in 1712, had given him a Doctorate of Divinity, bid for an ally against the liberals.[233] When he and his father assisted in the ordination of