Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  You should govern according to the state of affairs in that city and kingdom, paying chief attention to its peace and relief, which is what matters most and is the goal to which everything we do has to aim. So we remit everything to your prudence, and what I have told you here is for your information only.76

  The judges appointed by the revolutionaries retained their offices. Such flexibility, and the desire to preserve convivenza at all costs, helps to explain why, even though catastrophes caused by both human and natural agents continued, the revolt of Messina remained the only serious challenge that the Spanish Habsburgs faced in Italy after 1648. Unfurling the ‘red flag as a sign of war’ offered too few attractions.

  15

  The ‘dark continents’: The Americas, Africa and Australia1

  ALTHOUGH THE HUMAN AND NATURAL ‘ARCHIVES’ FROM THE MID-SEVENTEENTH century are abundant, they relate overwhelmingly to only two continents: Europe and Asia. We lack a human archive for much of the Americas and most of Africa, because few indigenous populations left written or pictorial records that can be precisely dated; and although the natural archive (above all tree rings), supplemented by archaeological remains, indicates that global cooling afflicted both these continents, its impact on their human population remains obscure. Thus while many Europeans in North America realized that the indigenous population was declining rapidly – in New Mexico, ‘where three Pecos had lived in 1622, only two lived in 1641 and only one in 1694’; in New England ‘by the 1640s the number of Iroquois (and of their Indian neighbours) had probably already been halved’ – none suggested the probable causes.2 In Australia, although only archaeology and the natural archive provide reliable testimony, little of it is currently available, and (as elsewhere) much of it lacks chronological precision. So despite the immense size of these continents (16 million square miles for North and South America, almost 12 million for Africa, and 3 million for Australia), historians can reconstruct the experience of their inhabitants in the seventeenth century only for those areas where literate residents or travellers from other regions – most of them Europeans – compiled written records that have survived.

  The Americas

  In both North and South America, substantial records exist only for the European colonies that stretched from the tundra of Newfoundland at 49 degrees north, through the rain forests of Brazil, to the tundra of Chile at 39 degrees south: the French settlements along the St Lawrence river and the southern Great Lakes; the English colonies of New England, the Chesapeake and the Caribbean; the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru; and coastal Brazil. Despite the distance that separated these colonies, and their environmental differences, their histories in the seventeenth century shared five striking similarities:

  • From Newfoundland to Patagonia, the Americas experienced notably colder winters and cooler summers in the 1640s and 1660s; while 1675, a ‘year without a summer’, remains the second coldest recorded in North America during the last six centuries.3

  • Areas normally affected by episodes of El Niño suffered more, because the frequency of these episodes doubled in the mid-seventeenth century: more rain and floods along the Pacific coast and throughout the Caribbean; more droughts in the Pacific Northwest; more cold winters in the Atlantic Northeast. Moreover, both seismic and volcanic activity along America's Pacific shores increased.4

  • Almost all surviving harvest records show dearth in the 1640s and 1650s.

  • In the words of John McNeill, ‘From Canada to Chile, the Americas in the seventeenth century served as a playing field for the ambitions of several European statesmen and countless independent warrior-entrepreneurs.’5 Several regions experienced wars of unusual ferocity: the Pequot War and King Philip's War in New England; the ‘Beaver Wars’ in New France; and the Dutch–Portuguese struggle in Brazil. As in Europe and China, wars waged at a time of climatic adversity caused extensive damage to both property and people.

  • Finally, all the indigenous peoples who came into contact with Europeans, whether directly or indirectly, suffered losses – sometimes catastrophic losses. In New England and New France (but only there), this decline was partially offset by a dramatic growth in the number of settlers, both through strong immigration and because many appear to have lived longer than any other group of humans in the entire early modern world.

  ‘Our people must at least be doubled every twenty years’: The Anglo-Atlantic at Peace

  According to Benjamin Franklin in 1751, New England's white settlers had never been ‘afraid to marry’ because:

  They see that more land is to be had at rates equally easy, all circumstances considered. Hence marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there, that there is but one marriage per annum among one hundred persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but four births to a marriage (many of their marriages being late), we may here reckon eight, of which if one half grow up, and our marriages are made (reckoning one with another) at twenty years of age, our people must at least be doubled every twenty years.6

  Although Franklin lacked any statistical basis for his estimate, as usual he was right. As early as 1634, John Winthrop had commented on the unusually low mortality among the settlers around Massachusetts Bay, and a few years later English pamphleteers likewise extolled the general good health of the colonists, contrasting it with the situation back home. ‘In public assemblies it is strange to hear a man sneeze or cough as ordinarily they do in Old England,’ one wrote; while another claimed that ‘No man living there [in New England] was ever knowne to be troubled with a cold [or] a cough.’ Most comprehensive of all, a group of ‘New-England men’ who had briefly returned to their native land thanked God for ‘Blessing us generally with health and strength … more than ever in our native land; many that were tender and sickly here [in England] are stronger and heartier there.’ And they all knew why: ‘God has so prospered the climate to us that our bodies are hailer, and children there born stronger, whereby our numbers [are] exceedingly increased’.7

  The church records of seventeenth-century New England confirm this claim: over 90 per cent of all colonists married; most women married young (aged 23 or younger at first marriage); and half of all settlers seem to have survived to age 70. ‘Completed marriages’ (ones where both parents survived to bring up their children) produced, on average, six children – most of whom, unlike those born in Europe, survived to childbearing age. Thanks to this remarkable fecundity, and to continued immigration, the settler population of New England increased from about 14,000 in 1640 to over 90,000 in 1700 – a sixfold increase in two generations.

  The experience of British colonists elsewhere in North America was very different. Almost from its foundation in 1607, Virginia experienced (in the words of its first governor) ‘a worlde of miseries’, because drought caused its early settlers ‘to feele the sharpe pricke of hunger’, forcing some to eat ‘doggs, catts, ratts and myce’ as well as ‘bootes, shoes or any other leather’. In desperation, ‘many of our men this starveinge tyme did runn away unto the salvages’ – but the ‘salvages’ could offer little help because the years 1607–12 saw the most prolonged drought registered in the Tidewater region near Jamestown in eight centuries, and it affected natives as well as newcomers.8 Demographic growth therefore remained slow: although at least 6,000 English men, women and children had come to Virginia from England since 1607, by 1624 the colony still numbered only 1,200.

  Several other circumstances contributed to this slow growth. First, although in 1618 the Virginia Company decided to recruit and send out far more colonists than before, it failed to send sufficient provisions to feed them – and the newcomers arrived just as a new drought reduced the local crops. Many soon died, and in 1621 the Company complained petulantly that ‘some have beene pleased to write’ that their colonial venture was no more than ‘a more regulated kind of killinge of men’. The following year was far worse, because another s
evere drought forced natives and newcomers to compete for the scarce food, culminating in a massacre that cost the lives of almost 350 English men, women and children. Then, according to a prominent settler, there followed ‘a generall sicknes, insomuch as wee have lost I believe few lesse than 500, and not manie of the rest that have not knockt at the doores of death’. Nevertheless, he continued,

  With our small and weake forces wee have chased the Indians from their aboade, burnt their houses, taken their corne and slayne not a few. The great king now sues for peace and offers a restitucion for his prisoners; for whose sakes wee seeme to bee inclineable thereunto, and will trie if wee can make them as secure as wee were, that wee may [later] follow their example in destroying them.

  The strategy succeeded: by 1670 a combination of wars and diseases had reduced the indigenous population of the Tidewater from perhaps 20,000 to fewer than 2,000. When Benjamin Franklin and others extolled the fruitfulness of ‘our people’, they meant only people of European descent like them.9

  Even though the English settlers in Virginia successfully ‘chased the Indians from their aboade’, they still suffered from the hostile climate. In 1637 a New England pamphleteer gloated that ‘many men’ had come to Massachusetts ‘sick out of Virginea’, but had ‘instantly recovered with the helpe of the purity of that aire’; and that the Bay Colony ‘in seaven yeares time could show more children livinge that have beene borne there, then in 27 yeares could be shewen in Virginea’. Then in winter 1641–2 the entire Chesapeake Bay froze over, while in winter 1657–8 the Delaware river was ‘frozen so hard that a deer could run over it … an extraordinary case, which the oldest Indians had never known’.10 Even in 1650 only 15,000 colonists lived in Virginia. Not until the 1680s, when their number had reached 60,000 settlers, did the white population become self-sustaining.

  That milestone took even longer to reach in England's Caribbean colonies, thanks largely to tropical diseases – especially two mosquito-borne viruses, malaria and yellow fever, which thrived in the wetter conditions created in the region by increased El Niño activity. Of the 7,000 Englishmen who invaded Jamaica in 1655 as part of Cromwell's ‘Western Design’, more than 5,000 perished during the first ten months; and although some 223,000 Europeans came to Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands in the course of the seventeenth century, their combined white population rose from 34,000 in the 1650s to only 40,000 in the 1690s.11

  Mortality in the seventeenth century among the indigenous inhabitants in Anglo-America was also high. In 1621, in one of the first sermons preached at Plymouth plantation, Reverend Robert Cushman noted how the ‘[Indians] were very much wasted of late, by reason of a great mortality that fell amongst them three years since, which together with their own civil dissentions and bloody wars, hath so wasted them, as I think the twentieth person is scarce left alive’. Archaeologists have found around Massachusetts Bay several Native American mass graves from the early seventeenth century that lack the customary grave goods, suggesting unusually rapid mortality, probably due to smallpox; while Thomas Morton, who arrived in 1622, found piles of ‘bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations’. The copious evidence of sudden death ‘made such a spectacle’ that ‘it seemed to mee a new-found Golgotha’.12

  Morton's chilling image reflects the crucial difference between European and Native American aetiology. Although the native peoples of the Americas suffered from a variety of illnesses before they came into contact with Europeans, to many early colonists they seemed robust, healthy and ‘unusually free from any apparent physical defects and deformities’.13 In part, this reflected the absence of diseases that produced ‘stunting’ and disfigurations, such as smallpox and measles; but, unfortunately, this created a virgin population with no immunity whatsoever when the Europeans arrived. Widespread vulnerability, combined with the probability that several ‘Old World’ diseases (notably smallpox and yellow fever) became more virulent in the seventeenth century (see chapter 4 above), explains not only why Thomas Morton encountered a ‘new-found Golgotha’ in Massachusetts, but also why the same uncommonly high mortality among the indigenous population of New England persisted. In Massachusetts, John Winthrop commented on this phenomenon in 1634, musing that ‘If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts, why did he drive out the natives before us? And why does He still make room for us, by diminishing them as we increase?’14

  Nevertheless, some early settlers of New England still felt overwhelmed by what Roger Williams of Providence colony called in 1637 the ‘ocean of troubles and trialls wherin we saile’. Perhaps he had in mind the hurricane that two years earlier ‘threw down all the corn to the ground, which never rose more’, followed by a harsh winter that forced many settlers who had recently established farms in Connecticut to return starving to the Bay Colony – where they also encountered a ‘great scarcitye of corne’ thanks to a combination of drought and the arrival of more settlers than the plantation could support.15 But most of all, Williams referred to the Pequot War.

  ‘It was Captain Hunger that threatened them most’: The Anglo-Atlantic at War

  Smallpox at first spared the Pequot Nation, whose members occupied some 2,000 square miles of southern New England. Most of them followed a semi-sedentary lifestyle in groups of 10–20 households, although perhaps 70 households lived in a fortified settlement at Mystic (modern Connecticut). Thanks to their numbers and their strategic location, by 1630 the Pequots controlled almost all the trade of the English colonies with the Dutch to the north and east and with other Indian nations to the west – but this increased their exposure to European diseases, and their numbers fell from some 13,000 in 1620 to only 3,000 by 1635. This loss destabilized the entire area and in 1634 John Winthrop noted that the Pequots ‘were now in war with the Narragansett whom till this year they had kept under, and likewise with the Dutch’, so that ‘by these occasions they could not trade safely anywhere’.16 The number of colonists, by contrast, continually increased and groups in search of viable farmland returned to the Connecticut valley. Since the indigenous inhabitants heavily outnumbered them there, the Governor of Massachusetts engaged Lion Gardiner, an engineer with extensive military experience in Europe, to build a new fort at Saybrook. Gardiner advised caution, because

  War is like a three-footed stool: want one foot, and down comes all. And these three feet are men, victuals and munition. Therefore, seeing in peace you are like to be famished, what will or can be done in war? Therefore I think, said I, it will be best only to fight against Captain Hunger, and let fortification alone for a while.17

  Governor Henry Vane, 24 years old and only six weeks in office, did not listen. Instead, early in 1637 he sent a force of colonists, reinforced by Narragansetts and other Native Americans opposed to the Pequots, to launch a surprise attack on Mystic. It succeeded far beyond Vane's expectations. His troops penetrated the palisade and set fire to the wigwams within, which ‘burnte their bowstrings, and made them unservisable’, allowing the colonists and their native allies to shoot down without risk those who tried to flee. Between four and seven hundred Pequots perished in less than an hour. Only seven escaped (Plate 19). The scale of the slaughter and the ‘fearfull sight’ of human beings ‘thus frying in the fyer and the streams of blood quenching the same’ shocked the ‘young soldiers that never had been in war’. Some asked ‘Why should you be so furious?’ But the colonial veterans reassured them that ‘Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. … We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.’18

  As Neal Salisbury has observed, ‘For many settlers, the Pequot slaughter was the ideological as well as military turning point in the war and in their conquest of New England.’ Following the massacre at Mystic, the colonists ‘in a short time, pursued through the wildernesse, slew and took prisoners about 1,400’ Pequots, ‘even all they could find, to the great terrour and amazement of all the Indians to this day’, until in September
1638 representatives of the victorious English and their allies gathered at the Dutch trading post in Hartford to divide up both the vanquished and their assets. The treaty of Hartford forbade the surviving Pequots to use their name and native language, or ‘to live in the country that was formerly theirs but is now the English's by conquest’. It also incorporated the first ‘fugitive slave law’ in North American history: any former Pequot who escaped must be returned to his or her original captor. By 1643, according to the proud boast of a group of Harvard graduates, ‘the name of the Pequots (as of Amaleck) is blotted out from under heaven, there being not one that is or (at least) dare call himself a Pequot’.19 The gender ratio among the Pequots after 1640 sank to one male for every 20 females, and the tribe continued to decline until it numbered just 66 people by the beginning of the twentieth century. By contrast, by 1643 the English population of the Connecticut valley and Long Island already exceeded 5,000, with 2,500 settlers in New Haven alone.

  The maize seized from the Pequots during the war helped the colonists in New England to survive another ‘very hard winter’ when ‘the snow lay from November 4th to March 23rd, half a yard deep’ and a drought in 1639; but then in 1641–2 came the second coldest winter in a century, when Massachusetts Bay ‘was frozen over, so much and so long, as the like, by the Indians' relation, had not been so these forty years’. After this, drought and cold significantly stunted the harvests throughout New England – just as the English Civil War broke out (see chapter 11). Although in 1640 John Winthrop rejoiced when he heard of the Scots' invasion of England and the summoning of the Long Parliament, he regretted that ‘some among us began to think of returning back to England’ and others of ‘removal to the south parts [Virginia], supposing they should find better means of subsistence there, and for this end put off their estates here at very low rates’. Between May and October 1640 the price of grain in Massachusetts fell by almost one-half, and of cattle by three-quarters, which caused,