It was found useful both as a currency and commodity, and afterwards the settlers learned to make it from the shells on the sea-shore.[19] It was not till five years later that this peaceful correspondence with the Dutch was disturbed.
Unfriendliness characterized, from the first, the relations with the French.

They claimed that Acadia extended as far south as Pemaquid, and one day in 1631, when the manager of the Penobscot factory was away, a French privateer appeared in port and landed its crew.

In the story, as told by Bradford, the levity of the French and the solemn seriousness of the Puritans afford a delightful contrast.

The Frenchmen were profuse in "compliments" and "congees," but taking the English at a disadvantage forced them to an unconditional surrender.
They stripped the factory of its goods, and as they sailed away bade their victims tell the manager when he came back "that the Isle of Rhe gentlemen had been there."[20] In 1633, after Razilly's appointment as governor-general, De la Tour, one of his lieutenants, attacked and drove away the Plymouth men at Machias Bay,[21] and in 1635 D'Aulnay, another lieutenant, dispossessed the English at Penobscot.
The Plymouth people, greatly incensed, sent two armed ships to punish the French, but the expedition proved a failure.

Then they appealed to Massachusetts for help, but the great men of that colony, hoping, as Bradford intimates, to arrange a trade with the French on their own account, declined to be at any expense in the matter,[22] and so the Penobscot remained in unfriendly hands for many years.
This appeal to Massachusetts showed that another power had stepped to the front in New England.