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Once Upon a Time in Connecticut by Caroline Clifford Newton
page 35 of 125 (28%)
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
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