Always the peltry traffic had been invested in certain leaders at Plymouth who managed the whole trade in the interests of the communalty in order that the Pilgrims’ debt to the merchants in England might be paid. In 1627 William Bradford, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, Miles Standish and a few others in partnership undertook to assume this entire indebtedness. In return, these “undertakers” were to enjoy any and all profits from the traffic in peltries for six years. They were empowered to do what they pleased with all furs and trucking goods in the common store, and they alone were to use the colony’s trading posts, truck houses and shallops. From that time forward the Plymouth Plantation enjoyed real economic success. In 1628 furs to the value of 659 English pounds were exported in one cargo. Although no total figures are available for 1628 to 1630, a very large amount of peltry went to England according to Governor Bradford. From 1631 to 1636 over 12,000 pounds of beaver and 1,000 pounds of otter were shipped, most of which brought 20 shillings a pound and none less than 14 shillings. Bradford said that the beaver alone during these years brought 10,000 pounds sterling and that the otter was more than sufficient to pay all costs of transport and auction. Considering the size of the plantation this was indeed big business. In spite of the financial bungling of the partnership’s agents in England, and even outright irregularities there, the debt was paid off. Additional profits from the sale of beaver skins bought many other things the Pilgrims needed, and in the end it was the earnings from the fur trade that provided the foundation for Plymouth’s next economic development, cattle farming. In the meantime the Pilgrims’ profitable trade in furs on the Maine coast and on rivers leading to the interior was jealously regarded by the French who, after all, considered that territory within their own limits. And neighboring French traders were doing something about it. X _A Border Fixed on the Coast of Maine_ The planting of trading posts farther and farther up the coast of Maine by the New Englanders did not go unchallenged by the French. Although in English eyes it had been well established ever since Captain Argall’s raids in the Bay of Fundy that English claims to the coast now extended well above the 45th parallel, even to the St. Lawrence valley, no such admission had ever been made by the French. There were always French traders in Acadia (Nova Scotia) who envisaged their preserves as extending well down the coast of Maine and who intended to resist further encroachments in those parts. In fact, as it came about, these fur traders protected and maintained the French claim to much of this coastal region during an incident of the Thirty Years’ War which put most of New France under the English flag for three years, from 1629 to 1632.