In another few years, due to continued disturbances, Kent Island was to be laid waste without hope of recovery, the mill and the forts destroyed, its former population scattered abroad. Soldiers armed with ordnance taken from Kent were also sent in 1638 to Palmer’s Island in the Susquehanna River where they “utterly ruined” the plantation and reduced the palisaded fort which had been built there the previous year. They seized all of Claiborne’s goods and chattels. Leonard Calvert himself, following the expedition, triumphantly supervised the conversion of this trade outpost to “Fort Conquest” of Maryland. The spoils were divided. Claiborne’s bonded servants, cattle and other goods at Palmer’s Island went to John Lewger, Secretary of Maryland. His books were sequestered by a petty officer, as was a wooden chest belonging to the unfortunate Captain Tom Smith. Gone was the “Plantation in the Sasquesahonoughs Country” at the mouth of the river, for which Captain Claiborne had been willing to pay the king a rental of fifty pounds sterling a year including rights “to the head of the said River, and to the Grand Lake of Canada to be held in fee from the Crown of England.” In fact, forever gone was the “greate trade of beaver and other furrs which Claiborne might have had with the mountayn Indians which live upon the lakes of the river of Canada.” The Marylanders carried on a profitable local fur trade, in spite of Indian disturbances, for some years. But they were no threat to the French or the Dutch as they were never successful in tapping the northern lake-country trade on the backside of Virginia through either the valley of the Susquehanna or the Potomac. Their relations with the Indians were not up to it, and they were more inclined to agricultural pursuits anyway. The French were therefore able to continue their penetration of America without the interference they might have had from the Virginians who settled Kent and Palmer’s Islands. In fact, they were now almost unmolested in an encirclement of the English colonies that would not stop until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River. And the Dutch were undisturbed by the Marylanders even in the neighboring valley of the Delaware, where they were now settling and trading in pelts under the very noses of Lord Baltimore’s people who claimed jurisdiction over some of those parts. By the end of the century the fur frontier in Maryland had almost disappeared and the trade was no longer important in the economic life of the colony. The average value of skins exported per year didn’t exceed 650 pounds sterling. By then the Governor of Maryland was declaring that “this Countrey is an open Country and deales generally in Tobacco and not in furrs.” XIII _New Netherland’s South River_