Table Of ContentJOHN NELSON,
MERCHANT ADVENTURER
This page intentionally left blank
JOHN NELSON
M E R C H A NT
A D V E N T U R ER
A Life Between Empires
RICHARD R. JOHNSON
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1991
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1991 by Richard R. Johnson
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Richard R., 1942-
John Nelson, merchant adventurer : a life between empires /
Richard R. Johnson,
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-506505-0
1. Nelson, John, d. 1734. 2. Boston (Mass.)—Biography.
3. Adventure and adventurers—Massachusetts—Boston—Biography.
4. Merchants—Massachusetts—Boston—Biography.
5. Boston (Mass.)—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.
I. Title. 1-73.4.J67 1991
974.4'6I02'092—dc20
[Bl 90-33286
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
P R E F A CE
This book seeks to recover the life of a man—John Nelson, who died
in 1734 in his eighty-first year—more honored by his contemporaries
than by posterity. True, many of those closest to him remained attentive
to his memory: relatives both distant and direct preserved his portrait
(the artist John Singleton Copley was called upon to repair one treasured
copy), and a string of sons christened John Nelson have borne their
ancestor's name even down to the present day.1 Scattered echoes of his
life reverberate elsewhere—a glowing footnote in Thomas Hutchinson's
History of Massachusetts-Bay, a page in one of Francis Parkman's vol-
umes, an historical romance from the pen of a nineteenth-century Boston
antiquarian, even a public park bearing Nelson's name on the south
shore of Boston Harbor, hard by what was once his island home.2 All
testify to a life of unusual enterprise and daring that ranged across the
face of the late seventeenth-century North Atlantic community, from
London, Boston, and the Bay of Fundy, to Quebec, the Bastille in Paris,
the corridors of England's Whitehall, and back once more to Boston.
The very character of this life suggests, however, why Nelson's con-
temporary fame proved fleeting: restless, adventurous, and careless of
political power or office, he built no monuments to himself. Neither did
his ways and beliefs match up to any pattern of emerging American
i Preface
v
nationalism appealing to a later, republican age. Yet different genera-
tions find new windows into the past, and from my own perspective—
and in apologia for recovering another's life—it was precisely this restless
ubiquity that drew me to retracing Nelson's career. In the course of
writing a more general account of the New England colonies during
these years, I found myself continually intrigued by how often his name
surfaced amid familiar events, linking farflung personalities and powers
in ways I had not previously suspected. In some of these events, as in
New England's relations with Acadia and Boston's overthrow of Gov-
ernor Andros in 1689, Nelson played a formative role; in others, as
during his long imprisonment by the French and his years in London,
his part was more passive but still exceptionally revealing of larger forces
at work.
The study that follows, therefore, aspires to be both biography and
something more than biography. It certainly seeks to relate (in both
senses of the word) Nelson's lives as spy, speculator, multinational mer-
chant, memorialist, politician, prisoner, parent, friend, and gentleman.
This is a story worth telling for its own sake. Yet—and with apologies
to an individual who clearly disdained being used by anybody—it also
endeavors to employ his protean career as a symbol of, and guide
through, the abrupt changes and fierce conflicts overtaking the North
Atlantic world during the span of Nelson's life. For even as New England
and New France moved into closer political conjunction with their parent
countries, so they also plunged into conflict with each other—a double
pas de deux joined to form a deadly quadrille, with America's first
settlers, the Indians, entangled in the dance. The complexities of this
interplay, and its significance for the history of each participant as well
as for that of the whole, are often neglected by studies centered on
particular colonies, peoples, or nation-states. Nelson supplies a thread
through this labyrinth, one that in marking his own particular path is
nonetheless sufficiently intricate and wide-ranging to illuminate the
whole.
In addition, I believe, Nelson's career suggests the importance during
these years of a handful of individuals who were neither typical of their
time nor set in the highest seats of authority. Recent scholarship has
taught us much about both the broad socioeconomic forces that confi-
gured colonial society and the goals and mechanisms of London's policy-
making. Yet there remains a missing ingredient. On the one hand, social
history tells us little about the forces and personalities shaping the day-
to-day events of this intensely political age. On the other, to chart the
unfolding of transatlantic ties during these years too exclusively in terms
Preface vii
of London's actions slights the extent to which royal officialdom did not
so much initiate events as respond to situations set in motion by others.
We have been too ready to read a purposeful, Victorian-style imperi-
alism into what was more accurately the working out of the ambitions
of adventurers, traders, land-hungry settlers, and religious visionaries;
and we must give more credit to the shaping of events and policy by
private solicitation and personal enterprise. A variety of such individuals
appear in the pages of this book, some pursuing their ambitions within
the service of the Crown, and others shifting their loyalties to match
their circumstances. Still others, a more shadowy and forgotten group,
preferred to remain more on the margins of their respective worlds.
Entrepreneurs operating ahead of the governments and settled societies
they came from, they interwove conventions and conditions derived
from a variety of different and often competing cultures, precipitating
both conflict and accommodation. John Nelson, these pages argue, was
such a man.
* * *
Both the cosmopolitanism of Nelson's life and its distance from the
present day raise certain problems of presentation that require expla-
nation to the modern reader. With the exception of a few phrases, I
have translated into English all direct quotations from French materials.
French names and titles have been rendered according to the guidelines
provided by the invaluable Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Overall,
when quoting from seventeenth-century materials, I have reproduced
spelling and punctuation as it appears in the printed and manuscript
materials of the time, save for expanding abbreviations and replacing
the old usages of "v", "j", and "b" (thorn) with "u", "i", and "th". A
more complex and potentially more confusing problem arises from Prot-
estant England's stubborn refusal, until 1751, to adopt the Gregorian
or New Style calendar used by Catholic countries since 1582. The loyalty
of seventeenth-century Englishmen to the Julian or Old Style calendar
meant that they continued to begin each year on March 25 instead of
January 1 and that they had come to lag ten (and, after 1700, eleven)
days behind those using the New Style calendar. Hence it was possible
for John Nelson—in imitation of the young man named Bright whose
speed was much faster than light—to leave English Boston, sail for a
week, and still arrive in French Port Royal several days before his
departure, according to the calendars in use in each country. This should
be kept in mind, for rather than redating all French documents to accord
with English Old Style reckoning I have cited them according to the
viii Preface
French New Style employed by their authors. In keeping with the usual
scholarly practice, however, I have modernized all Old Style dates to
conform with both modern American usage and a calendar year begin-
ning January 1, so that a date recorded by Nelson and other Englishmen
as 15 February, 1685 (or 1685/6), is given as February 15, 1686.
In the making of this book, I have come to realize, my greatest debt
is owed to its subject, for living such a life and for requiring my ac-
quaintance with so many fascinating people and places. To a believer
in original sin, there is nothing quite so gratifying as a working holiday
with scholarly pretensions, and I have much enjoyed my duty of pursuing
John Nelson's trail through New England, Nova Scotia, Ottawa, France,
England, southern California, and the Caribbean. Nelson did not visit
quite all these places, but all contain some record of his life, and I
gratefully acknowledge the courtesies and hospitality extended by the
staffs of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Massachusetts State
Archives, Harvard University's Houghton Library, the Boston Public
Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress,
the Public Archives of Canada, England's Public Record Office, the
Bodleian and University Libraries of Oxford and Cambridge Univer-
sities, the municipal archives of Angouleme, and the Henry E. Hun-
tington Library in San Marino, California. I acknowledge, too, the
permission granted to me by these institutions to quote from the man-
uscript materials in their care. The Huntington Library not only opened
up its incomparable collections to me but also provided a six-month
period to study there in the form of a fellowship funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, for which I am deeply grateful to the
Library and its officers, especially Robert Middlekauff and Martin
Ridge. Closer to my professional home, the staff of the University of
Washington's superb Suzzallo Library never failed in their advice and
assistance. I am also conscious of a considerable debt owed to scholars
who have mapped out many of my paths before me by editing source
materials or by writing their own analyses of the period. I hope that my
footnotes acknowledge a part of this indebtedness, but 1 would pay
particular tribute, for inspiration and guidance, to the work of Francis
Parkman, W. J. Eccles, George A. Rawlyk, Jean Daigle, and John G.
Reid.
Scholarly projects provide wonderful opportunities to renew old
friendships and weave new ones, and this book is no exception. At
several points along the way, Jonathan Chu and John McCusker pro-
vided advice and warm hospitality; in Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Orme
Wilson not only introduced me to a clan of distinguished descendants
Preface 1X
of John Nelson but allowed me access to the portrait of Elizabeth Nelson
reproduced in this book. Richard Saunders of Middlebury College,
Thomas Gardiner, and John Tyler of the Colonial Society of Massa-
chusetts also furnished valuable help in tracking down portraits and
illustrations. I am grateful to Gail Cooper and Karen Wolny of Oxford
University Press for their editorial skills, and to John Murrin of Prince-
ton University for advice and support over many years. Back in Seattle,
my colleagues in the Department of History are also, to my great good
fortune, my close friends, and I am especially grateful to Carol Thomas
and Bill Rorabaugh for reading the manuscript and offering encour-
agement and correction. Peter Hansen, now of Brandeis University,
helped in many ways. And without the interest shown by the members
of the Department's History Research Group, I should not have realized
that Nelson's life had its parallels as far away as Hapsburg Hungary and
seventeenth-century Formosa. Finally—and most deeply and satisfy-
ingly—I am indebted to Carol and Mary Susan, dearest friends, for their
love, concern, and support.
