The Triangular Trade (at Heard's Wharf / Great Cove / Sawmill Point)

Standing at Sawmill Point across County Rd., we can look out into the wide, shallow bend in the Ipswich River known as Great Cove. At one time, this was a busy part of the river as large ships were able to navigate upstream from Town Wharf. Here at Great Cove there was a public landing, (the steps are still visible at the end of Elm Street) as well as a number of privately owned wharves. When the water is low, you can still see the remains of John Heard’s wharf across the cove and to the right where the yard of the brown house juts into the river. On that property, Heard operated a rum distillery and used the wharf to load his large ships for voyages down to the Caribbean. Heard’s ships would carry the preserved codfish produced here in Ipswich down to sugar plantations in the Caribbean to feed the slaves who were producing molasses that was shipped back up to Ipswich and made into rum. Rum was used to purchase slaves in Africa, which were sent to the Americas and the Caribbean. This triangular network of cyclical exchange brought fortune to many individuals in New England, but it exposes the direct connections between Ipswich and other port towns in the North SHore to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In addition to drying fish for export, as Chance Bradstreet did for the Dodge family, other slaves in Ipswich worked as shipbuilders alongside their masters,once again connecting Ipswich, it’s river and its port to slave labor and the slave trade.

Sources:

Jameson, E. O. “The Choates in America 1643-1896” Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1897 (pg. 37).

Story, Dana A. The Shipbuilders of Essex, A Chronicle of Yankee Endeavor. Ten Pound Island Book co. Gloucester, MA 1995.

Waters, Thomas Franklin, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, v. 2. Ipswich Historical Society, Salem, MA 1917.