The Charter of Maryland having passed seals, Cecil Calvert, the Second Lord Baltimore, stayed in England to fend off political attacks against his Proprietary Colony. He asked his younger brother Leonard to lead the first settlers in the Ark and the Dove to the banks of the Potomac River. When they get there in the early spring of 1634, they meet Henry Fleet, an English trader who had been in the area since 1621, four of those years as the captive of one of the tribes in the northern Chesapeake. Fleet would turn out to be instrumental in the very successful first year of the Maryland settlement, at St. Mary’s City.

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Selected references for this episode

Matthew Page Andrews, The Founding of Maryland

George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America, Volume 1

Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689

A. J. Morrison, “The Virginia Indian Trade to 1673,” The William and Mary Quarterly, October 1921