Meanwhile, even before the government was organized, the merchants and shippers of the company had bought or built boats and had begun to trade along the coasts to the north and to the south. During the first winter while some of the people, like the family of Michael Wigglesworth, were still living in cellars dug in the river-banks, Master George Lamberton was sailing in his sloop, the Cock, on a trading voyage to Virginia. Other New Haven ships soon established commercial relations with Boston and New Amsterdam, with Delaware, where beaver skins could be obtained in abundance, with Virginia, whose great staple was tobacco, and with other plantations still farther away, such as Barbados in the West Indies, where sugar was the most important article of exchange. Now and then we hear of a New Haven ship in strange and foreign parts of the world. There was one which set out in December, 1642, for the Canary Islands, laden with clapboards, and fell in with pirates near the Island of Palma, one of the Canaries. A Turkish pirate ship of three hundred tons with two hundred men on board and twenty-six guns, attacked this small New Haven ship of one hundred and eighty tons, which had only seven guns fit for use and twenty men armed with rusty muskets. The fight lasted for three hours, and Captain Carman, the master of the New Haven ship, and his men succeeded in killing a good many Turks in spite of being taken at a disadvantage. But at last the pirates put their ship alongside and sent one hundred men on board the New Haven ship, When, however, they found that their captain was shot and the rudder of their ship broken, the pirates hauled, down their flag and drew off so quickly that they left fifty of their men behind. "Then the master [Captain Carman] and some of his men came up and fought those fifty hand to hand and slew so many of them that the rest leaped overboard. The master had many wounds on his head and body and divers of his men were wounded, yet but one slain. So with much difficulty he got to the Island [of Palma], where he was very courteously entertained, and supplied with whatever he needed."