But if the Dutch traders, reflectively smoking their pipes, acceded to his demands while the guns of the _Treasurer_ pointed at their huts, they lost little time in expanding their beaver trade along the eastern and northern coasts once the hot-headed Englishman left. The very next spring they began the prosecution of a highly profitable business in and about Long Island Sound, up the valley of the Connecticut, and in the Narragansett country. The Indians as far east as Buzzard’s Bay acquired special longings for Dutch sugar, liquor, ornaments, cloth and firearms, and the Hollanders were able to maintain a virtual monopoly on this trade for some years. Captain John Smith didn’t see anything of these Dutch competitors when he visited northern Virginia in 1614. But then he traded along the coasts no farther south than Cape Cod. The only foreigners he encountered were a couple of poaching French ships bartering with the Indians for pelts some forty leagues below the mouth of the Kennebec River. Being recovered from his wound and being much interested in planting an English colony in the north, Captain Smith had helped promote enough capital to supply two ships for this voyage. Of course the venture’s immediate object was not colonization. No money could have been raised for that. Rather it was to “Take whales and make tryalls of a Myne of Gold and Copper,” Smith said. “If those failed, Fish and Furres was then our refuge.” The venturers discovered no mines. And, although there were plenty of whales in sight, they weren’t able to catch any. The English hadn’t yet learned to whale. So, while the sailors turned to fishing, John Smith set out with eight or nine men in a shallop to investigate the country, to map the bays and rivers, and to trade with the natives--in preparation for the colonization he secretly planned. He ranged the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, and “got for trifles neer 1100 Bever skinnes, 100 martins and neer as many Otters.” Most of these were acquired within a distance of twenty leagues, he said, for “Eastwards our commodities were not esteemed, they were so neare the French who affords them better.” At Sagadahoc, at the mouth of the Kennebec, there was competition from an English vessel belonging to Sir Francis Popham, son of the chief justice. This fur-trading ship “had there such an acquaintance, having many yeares used only that porte, that the most parte there was had by him.” And of course to the southwest were the two French trading vessels. The country, Smith later reported, was populated by “Moos, a beast bigger than a Stagge; Deere, red and Fallow; Bevers, Wolves, Foxes, both blacke and other; Aroughconds (raccoons), Wild-cats, Beares, Otters, Martins, Fitches, musquassus (muskrats) and diverse sorts of vermine, whose names I know not.”