by Eric Rutkow
Western Planting’s colonial ideas corresponded with an economic theory in fashion during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It argued that a country’s balance of trade—exports versus imports—determined prosperity. The key was to import raw materials, so-called marketable commodities, and export manufactured goods. North American colonies, Hakluyt argued, could provide a steady stream of marketable commodities to England and in exchange receive goods that the home country manufactured. And colonial importation was vastly preferable to trading between independent states because there would be no duties and no risk of diplomatic problems.
For this idea to work, however, Hakluyt needed to identify marketable commodities in North America. They would need to be raw materials that were plentiful overseas, easy for settlers to obtain, and scarce in England.
Hakluyt’s years of studying travel literature had familiarized him with North America’s raw materials. The topic appeared frequently in the writings of overseas adventurers, who typically surveyed the land with an eye toward exploitation. John Ribault, one of the first Englishmen to record a voyage to North America, in 1564, wrote “the Contrie . . . is the fairest, frutefullest, and pleasauntest of all the worlde, aboundinge in honye, waxe, venison, wilde fowle, fforrestes, [and] wooddes of all sortes.” The potential resource list was long, so much so that Hakluyt suggested, hyperbolically though not insincerely, that the land could yield “all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as far as we were wonte to travel.”
One raw material, however, stood out above all the rest in Hakluyt’s manuscript: trees. There were certainly others, among them fish and furs, two commodities that different geographers and explorers identified as the most essential resource. And there were the speculative commodities as well, such as gold and silver deposits. But none of these held equal footing with trees for Hakluyt. North America, he wrote, was “infinitely full fraughte with sweet wooddes . . . and divers other kindes of goodly trees.” Colonists could immediately be put to work “settynge upp mylles to sawe them” and producing boards “ready to be turned into goodly chests, cupboordes, stooles, tables, desks, etc.” Trees would be the ideal marketable commodity for a colonial expedition: unlimited in supply, simple to harvest, and able to serve as the raw material for countless manufactured goods. Hakluyt concluded: “So that were there no other peculier commodities, this onely [wood] I say were ynoughe to defraye all the chardges of all the begynnynge of the enterprise, and that oute of hande.” Trees, Hakluyt assured, were the guarantee that the colonial venture would succeed financially.
North America’s woody resources, however, fulfilled only the supply half of the economic calculus. For trees to qualify as a marketable commodity, there would also need to be strong demand. And this was the case, because of a problem Hakluyt diplomatically labeled “the present wante of tymber in the Realme.” In truth, England was suffering from a severe timber crisis that, at the time of his writing, left the poor literally freezing to death in wintertime for want of firewood.
Originally, the British island had been a woodland. Forests of oak and other hardwoods had filled the southern lands, while conifer stands populated the higher latitudes. Sheepherders over the centuries converted much of this to pastureland, but the domestic wood supply remained great enough to handle timber and firewood demands. Then, beginning in the 1540s, came new manufacturing industries that razed the forests for their fuel. This new wave of deforestation started with the iron industry, an early royal effort to boost manufacturing in accord with the trade-based economic theory—the production of iron required immense amounts of heat and, initially, used charcoal (which is derived from wood) as fuel. In 1543, Parliament first addressed the impending timber shortage with the Act for the Preservation of Woods, which restricted farmers from exploiting woodlands more than two furlongs (440 yards) from their homes. Sherwood Forest was becoming as much a myth as Robin Hood.
The situation worsened during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). She promoted numerous other wood-fuel-driven manufacturing industries, including copper smelting, salt making, and glass production. (The coal industry, which was beginning, could not meet the skyrocketing demand for fuel.) One writer from this period commented, “Never so much [oak] hath been spent in a hundred years before as is in 10 years of our time.” The price of firewood doubled between 1540 and 1570. This pushed some citizens out of the firewood market, and it became commonplace for the poor to shiver through the winters. The timber shortage had commoditized a product once freely available for the cutting.
But fuel needs did not fully account for England’s timber demand. Wood was also necessary in the construction of ships. And Queen Elizabeth, in addition to promoting domestic manufacturing, had championed shipbuilding, part of the Crown’s long-term strategy to contest Spanish sea power and strengthen English commercial trade.
Few industries in history have depended on wood quite like shipbuilding (at least before the conversion to iron and steel hulls in the mid-nineteenth century). A large naval warship, known as a ship of the line and constructed almost entirely from wood, weighed over one hundred tons in Hakluyt’s day. The bodies of such vessels required about two thousand mature oaks, which meant at least fifty acres of forest had to be stripped. While oak supplied the timber for much of the ship, it was too inflexible and heavy for ship masts, the poles that supported the canvas sails. Instead, these required lighter and more shock-resistant softwoods, such as pines and firs. The largest masts were more than three feet wide at their base and over one hundred feet tall—roughly one yard in height per inch in width. To maintain these wooden cathedrals of the sea, shipwrights relied on a range of forest products, known as naval stores, extracted from pines and firs as well. Most notable were the tar, pitch, and turpentine used to condition and preserve the hull, mast, and other components.
The twin demands of shipbuilding and wood-fuel-hungry manufacturing had turned England into a net wood importer. In particular, the country had to trade for masts and naval stores, since it had no suitably commercial conifer forests. The preferred mast trees, called Riga firs or Scotch pines, came from an Eastern European region around the city of Riga (in present-day Latvia), but several northern countries had giant spruce forests that were also exploited for naval stores. The trade centered on ports in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea—the latter, which included Riga, was accessible only through narrow straits between Denmark and Sweden. Rulers who controlled the various ports and access to the straits knew that England’s sea power depended on forest products and, consequently, kept duties, taxes, and shipping fees high. The Danish, for example, collected tolls for each crossing. If England ever lost access to these ports, it would cripple the entire shipping industry, and with it the Royal Navy.
Hakluyt saw the solution to this potential dilemma in the woods of North America as well. If his travel narratives agreed on anything, they “agreed that the New World was an inexhaustible source of naval supplies,” according to historian Howard Mumford Jones. Hakluyt stressed this same point in Western Planting: “And England posessinge the purposed place of platinge . . . [will] have plenty of excellent trees for mastes, of goodly timber to builde shippes and to make greate navies, of pitche, tarr, hempe, and all thinges incident for a navie royall, and that for no price and withoute money or request.” A foothold in tree-rich North America would shore up the Royal Navy’s greatest vulnerability and seemingly do so at little cost.
Viewed more broadly, Hakluyt’s Western Planting was attempting to translate into economic and political terms a majestic wooded landscape that Europeans could hardly comprehend. Many of the North American tree varieties were unknown on the continent, and even the familiar species possessed inconceivable size and number. Giovanni da Verrazzano, in 1524, wrote of “mightie greate wooddes . . . with divers sorts of trees [as] plesaunte and delectable to beholde as is possible to imagine.” The early voyagers simply ran out of adjectives to describe the abundance, grandeur, and range of the vir
gin forests. Geographers estimate that woodlands covered about 95 percent of presettlement New England and contained three-quarters of a million trees for every ten square miles. The mature specimens in any given stretch generally stood over one hundred feet high and were three feet thick at chest height. They towered above the forest floor, often free of branches for thirty to fifty feet, their leafy crowns floating like green fortresses in the sky. England, by comparison, was a barren wasteland. Sir Thomas Culpepper, a seventeenth-century British economist, lamented that “no man can let his Timber stand, nor his Wood grow to such years growth as is best for the Common-Wealth.”
In late 1584, Hakluyt met personally with Elizabeth, the virgin queen, to discuss his book and to make an appeal for colonization on behalf of his patron Raleigh. It was Hakluyt’s first royal audience (and the last before his meeting with James I twenty-one years later). During the meeting, the geographer presented the queen a copy of Western Planting. They then almost certainly discussed the various colonial arguments: the economic promise of North American forests, the twin political advantages of a New World check on Spain and of a secure naval supply chain, the religious opportunities to spread the reformed Protestant gospel to the infidels, the possibilities of mineral wealth or a direct passage to China and the East Indies spice trade.
Despite Hakluyt’s best efforts, however, he failed to secure a charter authorizing permanent settlements. The problem seemed to be that equally compelling reasons against colonization existed. To begin with, such an aggressive undertaking was an incredibly dangerous proposition in the early 1580s. Spain still ruled the seas and showed interest in North America. Committing England to a colonization project risked war with the most powerful nation in Europe. But even without the Spanish menace, the project was precarious. In 1578, Elizabeth had granted a six-year exploratory charter to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, but he never returned from the trip, his crew lost at sea. (Hakluyt had turned down an opportunity to travel with Gilbert, a decision that unquestionably saved his life.)
Perhaps Hakluyt’s unwavering enthusiasm struck Queen Elizabeth as zealotry. It was common for colonial propagandists to face charges of exaggeration and mendacity, claims that did not always lack merit. After all, Hakluyt, a man who had never seen North America, was promising the queen resources greater than those of all of Europe. His fantastical-sounding assurances may have outweighed his inchoate reputation for pragmatism and integrity. Still, the geographer must have impressed Elizabeth, for two years later he received a clerical advancement to Bristol Cathedral on her mandate.
Raleigh, meanwhile, pursued his colonial plans without the royal charter he desired. The year after Hakluyt’s royal audience, the explorer founded a colony in North America called Roanoke (on an island near present-day North Carolina). The project lasted for two years, but the original settlers all disappeared under mysterious circumstances, this doomed adventure remembered by history as the “Lost Colony.”
Hakluyt, in the period between his two royal audiences, continued his colonial advocacy unabated, as scholar, propagandist, and agitator. In 1589 he published the first edition of a massive compendium of North American travel narratives called Principall Navigations, which reappeared ten years later in a three-volume expanded format. The revised edition of the book remains the definitive text of precolonial exploration. Many consider it one of the most important documents from the Elizabethan age and have dubbed Hakluyt the “English Homer.” Shakespeare is thought to have referenced one of the maps from Principall Navigations in his play Twelfth Night.
Ever the pragmatist, Hakluyt eventually contributed his unrivaled reputation to a business partnership with seven other men in order to found a permanent settlement in North America. Known as the Virginia Company, they hoped to succeed where Gilbert and Raleigh had failed. And it was with this group that Hakluyt was going to petition King James in 1605.
The circumstances for colonization, meanwhile, had grown more favorable in the two decades since Hakluyt’s first royal audience. In 1585, war had erupted between Spain and England with control of the seas the winner’s prize. Sir Francis Drake, the famed British explorer, defeated a Spanish fleet in a 1587 preemptive strike, proving that the Spanish were not invulnerable upon the seas and could not defend the extensive territories that they claimed. The following year, a coalition of English naval and merchant ships conquered Spain’s great Armada, arguably the most important sea battle in history. In August 1604, King James I signed a peace treaty with Spain, meaning that English-flagged ships could sail through Atlantic waters for the first time without fear of Spanish attack. England suddenly controlled the world’s waterways, a position it would maintain into the nineteenth century.
During this sea change, several English voyages to North America had reinforced Hakluyt’s claim that timber-trade-based colonization could be profitable and benefit the Crown. In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold—an eventual member of Hakluyt’s Virginia Company—had sailed to North America and returned with a ship weighed down with cuttings of sassafras, a tree that became briefly invaluable amid rumors that its extract cured syphilis. George Weymouth, another English explorer, had traveled to North America two years later and reported that the entire coast was indeed covered with dense woods. He determined, among other things, that the trees produced turpentine in “marvellous plenty” and “so sweet,” which “would be a great benefit for making Tarre and Pitch.”
Against this backdrop, Hakluyt and his Virginia Company met with King James I. The geographer’s arguments, little changed since Western Planting, had gained force, especially since the timber crisis had only deepened and the Royal Navy had grown in power. Hakluyt himself had also gained force, no longer the young novitiate, but an asset to his country, the patriotic expert in a field of self-interested explorers and businessmen. Once again he set forth the manifold reasons for colonization that he had earlier given Elizabeth, this time with twenty more years of reputation, knowledge, and favorable political developments to assist him. And this time he succeeded.
On April 10, 1606, James I issued the First Charter of Virginia. It granted the men of the Virginia Company the right “to make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia.” The charter split the Virginia Company into two sections, a London-based group that included Hakluyt (known as the London Company) and a Plymouth-based group (the Plymouth Company). Hakluyt’s team received rights to the southern half of the territory. The northern half went to the Plymouth Company. The geographer had finally persuaded the Crown to support North American colonization, and his long-standing dream was on the verge of being realized.
Of course, the charter was nothing more than a document and a promise of governmental assistance. It would have meant little if the Virginia Company had failed like all of the previous unchartered colonization attempts, such as Roanoke.
Almost exactly one year after James issued the charter, on April 26, 1607, the first colonists from the London Company reached Virginia. They formed a small settlement in the Chesapeake region that they called Jamestown, in honor of the king. Captain John Smith, a man contracted to oversee the adventure, proved a gifted leader, able to manage the settlers and negotiate with the native population. Soon, the colonists started to send shipments back to England, especially trees. A 1608 letter stated, “I heare not of any novelties or other commodities she hath brought more then sweet woode.”
The early years nonetheless proved difficult. Of the original 214 colonists, only 60 survived a brutal winter in 1609, known as the “Starving Time.”
Colonial promotional literature, designed to garner financial support and dampen bad publicity, emphasized the claims Hakluyt had long been making about trees as a commodity. The most famous pamphlet, from the more than twenty the London Company printed, quoted one of the founding company members, who had traveled to the new colony, as swearing under oath “that the country yeeldeth abundance of wood . . . which a
re the materials, of . . . Clap boards, Pipe-staves, Masts and excellent boardes of forty, fifty and sixtie length.” The publication concluded, “[N]either the scattered Forrest of England, nor the diminished Groves of Ireland, will supply the defect of our Navy. When in Virginia there is nothing wanting, but onely mens labours, to furnish both Prince, State and merchant, without charge or difficulty.”
Despite these claims, the London Company struggled financially for the next fifteen years, largely because exporting the abundant commodities proved more challenging and expensive than anticipated. Jamestown, however, was the first permanent English settlement in North America and became the foundation of present-day Virginia.
Meanwhile, the Plymouth Company was simultaneously working to colonize the northern territories, which roughly correspond to present-day New England. George Popham, a founding member of the Virginia Company, led an expedition that settled on the shore of present-day Maine on August 13, 1607. Problems such as an unexpectedly cold winter and food shortages plagued the new settlement. The colonists put all their efforts toward constructing a ship—a foreshadowing of New England’s future—and produced a thirty-ton vessel named Virginia. But Popham died during that first winter, and all forty-five colonists returned to England the next spring. The Plymouth Company was then inactive until a revival in 1620 when, among other activities, it granted settlement rights to a group of religious dissidents known as the Pilgrims, who had earlier negotiated with the London Company but accidentally landed far north of their intended destination and became New England’s first permanent English colonists.