One reason for the collapse of these enterprises was the concentration of national energies and resources on the conflict with Spain. Moreover, the largely private-enterprise seaborne war against Spain satisfied those with a taste for glory and quick profits. It attracted sharks like Sir Francis Drake and plenty of minnows who also fared well. Consider George White, a Dorset mariner and owner of the thirty-five-ton Catherine of Weymouth that was valued at £89 and armed with two falcons (three-pounder cannon) and two falconets (two pounders). In 1590–1, the Catherine captured three Portuguese Brazilmen which with their cargoes were worth £3,600. Encouraged by his success, White sold the Catherine and invested in a larger vessel with which he took another Brazilman valued at £4,200 and an East Indiaman crammed with Chinese silk, gems and cochineal.1
White and the other Elizabethan sea dogs had turned a public emergency to private advantage. They belonged to a well-established English tradition that stretched back to the Hundred Years War against France during which aristocratic commanders had fought for royal wages and profits from ransoms and plunder. Soldiers and sailors who went overseas to fight did so in the expectation that they might return richer. A popular life of Drake, published in 1628, urged the youth of ‘this Dull or Effeminate Age to follow his noble steps for Gold and Silver’. Many did for the next two hundred or so years; a strong cord whose fibres were greed and fearlessness linked the Elizabethan sea rover, the eighteenth-century naval captain hungry for prize money and the early Victorian soldier, for whom the storming of an Indian city offered the chance of loot.
Men of this temper, and there were plenty of them kicking their heels in England after the end of the Spanish War in 1604, would have been easily seduced by Captain Seagull’s image of Virginia as a land of precious minerals. It was not, and those who dreamed of instant fortune were quickly disappointed, like the ‘divers gentlemen of fashion’ who returned home from the new colony of Bermuda in 1613 in disgust after having been asked to cut down trees and build a wooden fort.2 Opportunities for such creatures came forty years later with the onset of the intermittent wars against the Netherlands, Spain and France for the control of colonies and oceans.
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In Eastwood Ho Security had described the proposed plantations in North America as ‘excellent uncertainties’. It was an ambiguous expression that may have made investors in the Virginia Company uneasy, bearing in mind the history of previous ventures. There was, however, some comfort to be drawn from the fact that the new enterprise, licensed by James I in 1607, was enthusiastically backed by parliament. More substantial reassurance as to its prospects came from the knowledge that its finances were carefully managed and that its future profitability could be calculated on the basis of sound economic arguments.
A prospectus issued in 1620 promised that the expanding settlements on the Chesapeake Bay would, in time, give Britain a self-sufficiency in materials which had hitherto been imported at a great cost to the country. The North American plantations would replace Scandinavia as a source of tar and timber for ship-building. The colony would also provide the mother country with ‘The Wines, Fruit and Salt of France and Spain’ and ‘the silks of Persia and Italy’. Persuaded by such arguments investors, who included noblemen, courtiers, civil servants, country squires (details of the company’s activities were broadcast in the shires by London newssheets) and merchants, subscribed £200,000 in thirteen years.
The Virginia Company’s promoters and the early settlers had imagined that the entire coastline of North America from Newfoundland south to the Carolinas lay in a temperate zone that enjoyed ‘a moderate equality of heat and cold’.3 At the same time, since the Chesapeake Bay colony shared a common latitude with Spain it was assumed that it would provide an abundance of Mediterranean crops. Vine dressers were among the first ashore and even as late as 1620 plans were in hand for planting olive groves. By then everyone involved should have known better. It was soon discovered that the region lay within a malarial belt and that new arrivals required ‘seasoning’ during the hot summer months when, like timber, they sweated profusely. Winters were bitterly cold and during that of 1609–10 the disheartened wished themselves ‘in England without their limbs’ and begging on the streets rather than in Virginia. Within a dozen years the company was near to bankruptcy and in 1624 its settlements were taken over by the crown.
Tobacco rescued Virginia and made it thrive in a manner that astonished the colonists and the government. The first tentative planting of imported South American tobacco plants had been undertaken in 1617. It was a success and began a revolution that transformed the infant colony and the British economy. At the time, tobacco was still a luxury and smoking the indulgence of the rich, some of whom would pay as much as £2 a pound for the prized Guianan leaf. Mass imports from the Virginian plantations changed this and by mid-century the retail price had plummeted to one shilling (5p) a pound. Smoking became a universal habit embraced by every class in Europe. The opening up of what proved to be an unlimited market for a drug which both calmed and stimulated was the chance result of overproduction in the 1630s. By 1700, Britain imported 13 million pounds of Virginian tobacco for domestic consumption and a further 25 million for re-export to Europe, figures that rose steadily throughout the next century.
The Virginian tobacco boom had a profound impact on Britain and its economy. Viewing the colony’s prosperity during the 1620s, one commentator perceptively observed that ‘Spain is more damaged by the King’s peace than by the Queen’s war’.4 His logic was simple and would be repeated by later advocates of colonial expansion. The wealth which flowed from Virginia contributed to that of Britain and its power grew accordingly. In terms of government revenue the imposts on tobacco raised £421,000 between 1699 and 1701, 20 per cent of all customs duties. By this time, Virginia and its tobacco-producing neighbour Maryland had a population of 92,000 and was a major market for British manufactured goods.
In terms of the generation of wealth, Virginia overshadowed the smaller colonies of Newfoundland, established in 1610, and those under the control of the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in 1620. In all there was a gap between expectation and reality. A 1611 report of one early settler in Newfoundland, written to drum up further investment, described the tiny colony as ‘very honest, peaceful and hopeful, and very likely to be profitable’. A visitor the previous year wrote home that ‘this savage country of Newfoundland gives men little content but only cruel hard labour hoping to make the best content they can have with small profit.’ The attraction of this bleak land lay in the cod fishing banks offshore which had drawn English fishing fleets since the 1520s. The cod were caught (at first with hook and line) then salted, dried and smoked and, with barrels of their oil, were shipped to the ports of the Iberian Peninsula to be traded for local products. By 1620, 300 ships visited the region annually and, according to a petition for naval protection, employed 10,000 sailors ‘thereby relieving 20,000 more people of the western parts of England, who are wholly dependent on them for their existence’.5
Further south, the Puritan settlers of the fledgling New England colonies faced an equally unkind land. They had crossed the Atlantic ignorant of the local climate which they imagined to be the same as England’s. They were soon disabused and in 1629 one wrote mournfully that ‘from the middest of October to the middest of May there is a sad face of winter upon all this land’ and noted that many were dying from the ‘intolerable cold’.
The death rate was high, but the Puritans were psychologically prepared for it, and for the grinding work of clearing woodlands, ploughing and sowing crops. They were men and women with a profound sense of the working of God’s will who had voluntarily withdrawn from England where their Calvinist creed attracted official mistrust and, during the 1620s and 1630s, systematic persecution by the state-sponsored Church of England. Their exodus in the next decade was an escape from a spiritually uncongenial world and a manifestation of that Divine Providence which they believed was actively
engaged in the affairs of men, promoting some and hindering others. Their settlements were a mark of God’s favour on His chosen people, a view held by the Massachusetts Bay Company’s governor, John Winthrop. In 1634, having heard reports of an epidemic among the local Indians, he wrote in his diary that ‘they are all dead of the small pox so as the Lord cleareth our title to what we possess’.
By 1660 the largely Puritan New England settlements had a population of about 30,000, many of whom were refugees who had challenged and then fled from the rigid orthodoxy of the first, coastal colonies. Theological wrangling was endemic among Puritans and it caused fragmentation as deviant preachers left communities which found their opinions intolerable. Roger Williams, a young divine who like John Milton had learned his Puritanism at Cambridge, arrived in New England in 1631. His doctrinal radicalism, which led him to deny the legal right of James I and Charles I to give away Indian lands to his fellow settlers, caused his voluntary exile in 1636. With a handful of his adherents he founded a new colony, Rhode Island, where he was later joined by other banished heretics.
Plans to rid England of another body of religious dissidents, Catholics, had been considered since the early 1570s. Excluded from Virginia, English Catholics finally gained a colony when Lord Baltimore persuaded a sympathetic Charles I to issue him a charter in 1634. The new settlement was named Maryland, in honour of Charles’s queen Henrietta Maria, and its colonists were officially cautioned to hold their masses discreetly for fear that they might antagonise their Protestant neighbours.
Catholics and Puritans were among those whom Hakluyt had characterised as ‘superfluous persons’ whose removal to overseas settlements would be for the general benefit of society. Beggars and criminals also fell into this category and, in 1615, his proposal was translated into action when a party of convicts was shipped to Virginia which was then suffering a temporary labour shortage. New classes of unwanted people emerged as the century progressed, most notably Irish rebels and prisoners-of-war taken during the civil wars of 1642–52. In 1650, Scottish captives taken at Dunbar were sold for between £15 and £20 a head as indentured labourers bound to undertake a fixed period of work on their masters’ plantations. After 1660 this convenient and profitable method of punishment became increasingly popular.
Such largely unwelcome immigrants were the exception rather than the rule in the North American colonies, at least before 1660. Nearly all who emigrated were free men and women who did so to work for a living. The companies which financed the first colonising projects wanted profits from rents and the sale of land, and therefore a greater part of their initial outlay was spent on shipping and equipping a substantial labour force whose efforts were expected to repay the investment.
But why were men and women willing to leave Britain for what was, even by the standards of the age, a hard and uncertain existence? Perhaps the strongest impulse lay in habit: there was an old and deeply rooted tradition for craftsmen, labourers and domestic servants to move around the countryside looking for employment. London enticed most. Its population swelled from 200,000 in 1600 to 350,000 in 1650, an increase entirely made up by incoming workers for this was a time when the city’s death rate exceeded the birth. It was therefore not a difficult step for, say, a Devonshire tiler accustomed to wandering from town to town for work, to accept passage from Bristol to Jamestown, Virginia. Specialist skills were keenly sought by the Virginia Company which in 1620 was advertising for ‘choice men, born and bred up to labour and industry’, especially Sussex ironworkers.
Nearly all those who went to North America went as indentured servants, legally bound to labour on the plantations, or practising their own craft for fixed periods of between four and ten years in return for wages. When their terms of service had expired they were free to enter the local labour market or return home. Between 1654 and 1660 just over 3,000 of these indentured servants were shipped from Bristol, more than half destined for the tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Former yeomen farmers and farmhands were the biggest group but there was a scattering of skilled artisans such as blacksmiths and coopers. Most came from the counties adjacent to Bristol and South Wales and were between eighteen and twenty-five.6
Such young men (and women too) were the sinews of the new colonies. All hoped to flourish in a society where the domestic obstructions to advancement did not exist. In time it was widely imagined that those with talent, application and an injection of good luck would flourish irrespective of birth or connections. At the beginning of the next century, Daniel Defoe used the fictional career of Moll Flanders to illustrate this principle. Moll, born in Newgate gaol, returns there after a sequence of picaresque adventures in which she displays resource and intelligence. Transported as a felon to Virginia she and her highwayman husband eventually overcome their backgrounds and become respected and wealthy planters.
Moll Flanders was not pure fantasy, nor a tract by a writer who believed that a person’s place in the world should be determined by ability. In 1755 an officer serving with General Edward Braddock’s army in Virginia recalled having supper with a ‘rich planter’. His wife, he discovered, ‘had passed through the education of the college of Newgate as great numbers from thence arrive here yearly; most being cunning jades, some pick up foolish planters.’ But this man was no fool, he had married his wife for her charms and her ‘art and skill’ in managing his business.
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The pursuit of profit remained the most powerful driving force behind Britain’s bid for North American colonies. But from the start it was closely linked to a moral imperative founded upon contemporary conceptions of Divine Providence and the nature of the world and its inhabitants.
In a sermon compiled in 1609 by a clerical apologist for the Virginia Company, America was described as a land which had been ‘wrongly usurped by wild beasts and unreasonable creatures’ (i.e. native Americans, or Indians as they were then known); according to the author, God intended the land to be redeemed by English settlement. In 1625, Simon Purchas, a churchman and disciple of Hakluyt, insisted that what he called the ‘Virgin Portion’ of North America had been divinely allocated to his countrymen, ‘God in wisdom having enriched the savage countries, that those riches be attractive for Christian suitors’.
The conceit that the American continent was a richly endowed virgin bride awaiting a husband enjoyed considerable usage at this time. It was not just a courtier’s knack for flattery that had inspired Raleigh to name the eastern seaboard of North America ‘Virginia’ in honour of Elizabeth I. A deeper meaning was intended since Raleigh, in his plea for the occupation of Guiana, had described it as ‘a country that hath yet her Maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought, the face of earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and the salt of the soil spent by manurance’.7 In coarser vein, Captain Seagull rallied the settlers in Eastward Ho with the cry, ‘Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead.’ Most famously this likeness of America to an unblemished maiden is employed by John Donne (among other things a chaplain to the Virginia Company) in his ‘To his Mistris Going to Bed’, in which the seducer is both explorer and planter:
License my roaving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land …
The moral question faced by Englishmen was, by what authority could they claim the fertile, untilled lands of North America? A broad and infallible answer was provided by the prevailing view of the divine ordering of the world and man’s place in it. ‘God’, wrote John Milton in a defence of colonisation, ‘having made the world for use of men … ordained them to replenish it.’ The newly revealed American continent was favoured with abundant natural resources by a benevolent God, but it was peopled by races who had never recognised nor acted upon their good fortune. Their wilful inertia, combined with other moral shortcomings, debarred them from their inheritance which passed to more industrious outsiders. Similar arguments, with variations, wo
uld later be applied to Australasia and Africa.
One hundred years of detailed reports from European explorers had created a literature in which, almost without exception, the Amerindians were represented as a degenerate and inferior species of mankind. Sir Martin Frobisher, encountering the Inuits of Northern Canada in the 1580s, described them as ‘brute beasts’ who ‘neither use table, stool or tablecloth for cleanliness’ and lived in caves. Fifty years later a French Jesuit missionary, horrified by the cannibalism and public torture of prisoners among the Indians of the St Lawrence basin, called them ‘ferocious beasts having nothing human about them save the exterior formation of body’. The standards of Renaissance European civilisation were absolute and, judged by them, the native Americans were found wanting.
The natives of America, when first confronted with Europeans, believed they were in the presence of supernatural beings. In Mexico, the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma imagined that his people’s conqueror, Hernán Cortés, was a reincarnation of the god Quetzalcoatl. Sixty years later, in 1569, when Drake landed in California, the Miwok Indians identified him and his party as gods. Sacrifices were immediately offered and, much to their visitors’ distress, some Miwoks mutilated themselves, as they did when they fancied themselves in the presence of ghosts. Everywhere Amerindians regarded Europeans as gods whose ships were floating islands, their sails white clouds and their cannon the makers of thunder and lightning. Such naïveté was easily exploited; in 1633 a French sea captain entranced Indians by using a magnetised sword blade to pick up a knife so that, in his words, they would ‘imagine some great power in us and for that love and fear us’.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 2