The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  By 1700, a large proportion of colonists were native born. Population growth in the Chesapeake basin colonies had been slower than elsewhere thanks in part to the shortage of women and a high death rate. A twenty-year-old immigrant who survived seasoning might expect to live another twenty years, while a locally born Virginian or Marylander who picked up some immunities would survive a further ten years. Life expectancy in the more astringent climate of New England was sixty.

  The lack of women was a handicap in the early phases of colonisation, but it was unavoidable. Clearing forests, breaking ground, tending crops and building houses required a male workforce, a fact of life that was reflected in the occupations of those emigrants who were in most demand by settlement companies and proprietors. The most urgent need was always for skilled artisans. On board the Increase, which sailed for New England in 1636, were 116 passengers including a butcher, carpenter, clothier, stonemason, ploughwright, sawyer, surgeon, tailor, two linen weavers, a joiner and a dozen farm labourers. There were also, well down the list, twelve men without trades, twenty-four adult women, twenty-six girls under eighteen and thirty boys.6 This distribution of occupation, age and sex was typical, although there was no certainty as to whether it would be reproduced in the colony because of losses during the voyage and acclimatisation.

  The ideal colonists were described by the Massachusetts Bay Company in the 1630s as ‘endowed with grace and furnished with means’. The first quality was essential for the fulfilment of the Puritan vision of a settlement peopled with men and women who knew themselves to be chosen by God and therefore were glad to submit themselves to disciplined labour and regulations based on Old Testament texts.

  At the same time an immigrant needed cash and a stock of tools. The transatlantic fare was about £5 a person, to which had to be added the price of food during the voyage, and freightage was £4 a ton. An English yeoman farmer with his family and their farming implements and domestic utensils would expect to pay at least £100 for transit to North America. Given that such a man’s annual income might be between £40 and £60, if he wished to emigrate, he would be forced to sell his land. In other words, his decision to leave would have to be final.7 Of course there were many cases where companies subsidised colonists who were, at least for the Massachusetts Bay Company, carefully screened beforehand to weed out the morally unsuitable. One who passed the test was John Dane who, having considered emigration to one of the Caribbean islands, directly asked God for guidance. ‘Utterly forlorn in my spirit’ and anxious to be ‘free from temptation’, he followed current Puritan practice and randomly opened his Bible. He found the text, ‘Come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you shall be my people.’ He immediately left his native Hertfordshire and its temptations and took ship for New England.8

  There were more direct inducements. In 1667 the potential colonist for the Cape Florida settlement was lured with the promise of a hundred acres for himself and a further hundred for each of his children and musket-armed servants (this was Indian country) at an annual rent of ten shillings for every thousand acres. A further fifty acres would be granted for every female servant or slave in his possession.

  On the expiry of his contract, every indentured servant was to be given a hundred acres by his master, together with farming tools and two suits of clothing.9 This pledge was deliberately framed to attract men who already enjoyed considerable wealth in England, for they would have had to have provided the costs of shipping and sufficient stocks of food to see themselves and their households through the time it took to cultivate, harvest and market cash crops.

  To a large extent the existing, but never inflexible, British social hierarchy was transported across the Atlantic and re-erected in North America and the Caribbean. In the colonies gentlemen commanded the same respect as they did in Britain. One gentleman, who died during the early days of Virginia, had a memorial brass imported for his gravestone which showed him in full armour, an anachronism on the battlefield but still the accepted public token of his social standing. It was set in the floor of Jamestown church from where it was later stolen. Looking back on his childhood in the 1690s, a Virginian farmer recalled, ‘A periwig, in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle-folk.’ The same adornment denoted a gentleman in Britain.

  As in the home country, property was the ultimate measure of social position for, as one tobacco planter observed, ‘If a [man] has Money, Negroes and Land enough he is a complete Gentleman.’ Another, who had all three, wrote in 1726:

  I have a large Family of my own, and my Doors are open to Every Body, yet I have no Bills to pay, and half-a-crown will rest undisturbed in my Pocket for many Moons together. Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women [indentured labourers], and every sort of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of Independence on everyone but Providence.10

  In outlook and circumstances such men were little different from their near-contemporaries, Squires Allworthy and Western in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones.

  The dominance of the rich gave colonial society a cohesion and made it easy for public order to be maintained since humbler immigrants were already conditioned to accept the magistracy of men of substance and property. In the New England settlements public responsibility was confined to the senior and invariably more prosperous members of church congregations. The laws they framed in their assemblies and enforced from the bench combined the Common Law of England with the injunctions for a pure life extensively laid down in the Old Testament. Blasphemers and homosexuals faced execution, as did masturbators, in New Haven, and fornicators were whipped, a punishment from which, revealingly, gentlemen were excluded. Such laws and proscribed penalties poured from the small legislatures of the New England states and reflected, in an extreme manner, a mentality that prevailed in Britain. Wickedness in all its forms was endemic throughout society and was most concentrated among the lower classes, who required constant and often condign reminders of their duty to God and the civil authorities who upheld His and the King’s laws.

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  This need for a harsh and vigorously enforced code of law was most obvious in the slave-owning colonies. There the élite was ultimately defined by the colour of its skin and, from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, it stood in continual danger of being overwhelmed by the spiralling slave population. In 1628 Barbados contained 14,000 inhabitants, most of them white indentured labourers. There was a rapid influx of negroes after 1650 and by 1673 their total was 33,000 compared with 21,000 whites. As more and more manual work was undertaken by negroes the European population slumped; in 1712 it was 15,000 against 42,000 slaves.

  Fears about security were inevitable. The governor of Barbados expressed misgivings in 1692 about the deployment of the local, all-white militia in the island’s forts which might encourage a negro insurrection. Soon after, a suspected conspirator revealed, under torture, the existence of a plot to seize one of the island’s arsenals in which, interestingly, several disaffected Irishmen were involved.11 The Barbadian demographic pattern was repeated in Jamaica and caused similar alarms about the racial imbalance in population. In 1690 there was an uprising by 500 slaves on a plantation in the middle of the island in which several whites were killed. After its suppression, a relieved governor informed the royal council, ‘The rebellion might have been very bloody considering the number of negroes and the scarcity of white men.’ His apprehension was shared by members of the island’s assembly which, in 1697, pleaded with the government to recruit ‘poor craftsmen’ in England for ‘white men are so scarce that they will easily find employment’12

  The reaction of the West Indian and North American legislatures to the presence in their societies of huge numbers of potentially rebellious slaves was paranoid. Deep fears expressed themselves in sheaves of laws which restricted the movements and activities of slaves and inflicted ferocious penalties, including castration and
burning alive, for every form of insubordination. According to the 1696 Barbadian code, which was later imitated in South Carolina, the negroes’ ‘barbarous, wild, savage natures’ placed them beyond the bounds of the laws by which white men lived. Instead they had their own regulations specially drafted to ‘restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity to which they are naturally prone and inclined’.13 Special prominence was given to bans on sexual relations between negroes and white women. There was also a need to produce a legal definition of slavery, which had not existed in Britain since the early Middle Ages, and the powers exercised by the master over his slave.

  The negro’s place within colonial society was at the bottom of the pile. Like a pet dog he owed his name to his master; among the more popular were: ‘Juno’, ‘Bacchus’, ‘Caesar’, ‘Quashy’, ‘Monday’, ‘Cuffy’, ‘London’ and ‘Sambo’. He also learned to speak and think in a new language, English. Writing in 1724, a Virginian clergyman noted that ‘the languages of the new Negroes are various harsh jargon’, but those born in the colony ‘talk good English, and affect our language, habits and customs’. Assimilation was limited; African traditions and mythology were perpetuated in what became the slaves’ underground culture. A suspect interrogated after the discovery of a plot to seize Antigua in 1736 revealed that a magician or obeah man had used his supernatural powers to ensnare conspirators. ‘I am afraid of the Obey [Obeah] man now,’ he told his inquisitors, ‘he is a bloody fellow, I knew him in Cormantee country.’14 Not surprisingly, colonial lawmakers saw the transmission of African customs as subversive and slaves were forbidden crepuscular drumming, blowing on conch shells and fetish ceremonies.

  The submission of the negro, and for that matter the Native American, was the foundation of the colonial order. It is symbolised in Defoe’s novel The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) when the Amerindian ‘Friday’ places Crusoe’s foot on his head and acknowledges him as his overlord. Admittedly his life had just been saved, but the gesture would have had a universal significance for Defoe’s readers. So too, but for different reasons, would that section of the story in which Crusoe was shipwrecked on an island somewhere off the coast of modern Venezuela and stranded there. The close examination of his state of mind during his exile and the description of his practical response to his situation transformed the novel into a parable of colonial settlement.

  In the beginning Crusoe, the son of a Hull merchant, becomes a mariner-entrepreneur with ambitions to make his fortune in the slave trade. He is temporarily frustrated when he is taken prisoner by Arab pirates operating from Salé, a Moroccan port. Mediterranean and Caribbean piracy was an everyday hazard throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and, in a lesser degree, the early nineteenth centuries. In 1698, as his ship the Unicorn neared the Leeward Islands, Colin Campbell recalled how every sail sighted on the horizon immediately triggered fears of pirates among the crew.15 If their ship was taken, the passengers and crew faced death, enslavement or, if they appeared to have money, ransom. John Darbey, one of the marginally more fortunate victims of piracy, testified to the governor of Jamaica in 1675 how he had been taken from his ship, a New England barque, by Dutch privateers. He was put ashore at the Spanish port of Havana where he soon found himself ‘in miserable slavery’ building a fort at the orders of the governor. Before his escape he encountered a sadistic Spanish naval captain, Don Philip Fitzgerald (probably an Irish renegade), who shot and stabbed several other captive English seamen in what appears to have been a fit of pique.16

  To judge from his matter-of-fact account of his adventures, Darbey had a considerable degree of stoicism which enabled him to bear up to his misfortunes. A similar, quietistic spirit is demanded of Crusoe when, after his release by the pirates, he is shipwrecked. The only survivor from the crew, Crusoe is able to salvage a stock of muskets, pistols, gunpowder, knives, clothing, preserved food, alcohol and, perhaps most importantly, tools such as a saw and hatchets from his ship. He is equipped with the basic artefacts of contemporary European technology and therefore in a position similar to that of a more conventional colonist. In November 1610 the settlers at Cupid’s Cove, Newfoundland had been supplied with muskets, spades, mattocks, scythes, cheeses, barrels of ‘Irish beef’ and pork, a Bible and a book on ‘the General practise of physick’.

  They were more fortunate than Crusoe in that they possessed an imported sow which had farrowed, poultry, six goats and, oddly, a single rabbit. Crusoe is able to make up for deficiencies in this area by shooting game and, in time, taming some local wild goats. Improvisation and the ingenious use of the tools he has to hand enable Crusoe to impose his will on what he discovers is an uninhabited island wilderness. He gradually investigates the island’s resources which include lime, lemon and cocoa trees and tobacco plants. Some barley recovered from the wreck and carelessly thrown down takes root. Its shoots astonish Crusoe who, like others who settled in the Americas, was constantly amazed by the fecundity of the region. His reaction was the same as that of those early colonists who later explained the natural abundance of the New World in terms of the heat which, it was assumed, encouraged livestock to grow fat and produce more offspring.

  There are drawbacks. It takes Crusoe some years to calculate the correct seasons for planting and harvesting his small crop of barley. Here as in other matters he learns patience and adopts a prudent and rational system of husbanding his resources. At the start he guesses, rightly as it turns out, that he will need to defend himself, and so he constructs what eventually becomes an elaborate network of wooden palisades and hedges around his dwelling and barley field.

  The performance of these and other mundane tasks requires mental as well as physical stamina. Crusoe, hitherto not a religious man, finds this through reading his Bible and surrendering himself to what he calls the ‘dispositions of Providence’. By accepting Divine Providence, Crusoe discovers he can endure the isolation, uncertainty and all the petty frustrations he has to face. Crusoe’s interior development is paralleled by his methodical and largely successful efforts to master his surroundings and make an ordered life for himself.

  This life is finally ended with the successive appearances of Carib Indians from whom Friday, his servant companion, is rescued and the landing of a party of Englishmen, the passengers and officers of a ship whose crew has mutinied. With the assistance of Crusoe and Friday, the mutineers are overthrown and their survivors left on the island. Crusoe sails back to England, enriched by coin and bullion he had earlier salvaged from a grounded Spanish ship. The story concludes in the year 1694 when he returns to his island which he now calls ‘my new colony’. Divided between the survivors of the Spanish shipwreck and the mutinous English seamen, the colony is prospering and Crusoe, a shrewd investor, makes arrangements to have women, skilled craftsmen, livestock and supplies imported.

  What emerges most forcefully from this story is Crusoe’s fortitude and willingness to persevere against the odds. He combines an inner spiritual strength that makes it possible for him to accept his fate as the will of God with an ability to overcome his physical environment by the application of reason and hard work. He is the embodiment of all the virtues needed for a colonist.

  Defoe’s fiction was founded on reality. There were plenty of colonists who showed some if not all of Crusoe’s qualities and prospered accordingly. One who showed remarkable tenacity was a north countryman, Anthony Hilton, who was employed as an agent by a group of Barnstaple merchants trading with Virginia. A visit to St Kitts during one of his transatlantic voyages left him convinced that he had found an ideal site for a tobacco plantation. With backers, who included some ‘gentlemen of Ireland’, he returned to the island, cleared the ground and built wooden houses. His plantation was overrun by local Carib Indians so he moved elsewhere on the island and raised a crop which sold for £1 a pound. Worried by Carib hostility, Hilton hurried back to London and persuaded investors to support a fresh venture on a nearby island, Nevis. The colony was established in 1628 and th
e following year it was attacked by the Spanish who destroyed crops and buildings and expelled the settlers. Undeterred, Hilton restarted the colony which, in time, flourished.

  Hilton’s determination was matched by the ruthlessness of Sir Thomas Warner, ‘a good soldier and man of extraordinary agility’, who also established a plantation on St Kitts in 1624. He made terms with a local Carib chief and prudently built a wooden fort with loopholes for muskets which, he explained to the suspicious Caribs, was an enclosure for chickens. Soon after, he was informed that the Indians were plotting to massacre the settlers. He attacked first when the Caribs were drunk and killed their chief as he lay in his hammock. In its earlier stages colonisation was always a struggle for survival; Crusoe’s first priority had been to build a small fort and he always gave careful attention to the conservation of his gunpowder.

  The diligent management of resources in which Crusoe excelled was the particular skill of the merchant. He was, according to Thomas Mun, an early seventeenth-century apostle of mercantilism, the ‘steward of the Kingdom’s Stock, by way of Commerce with other Nations … so the Private Gain may ever accompany the public good.’ His calling was therefore an elevated one for, ‘There is more Honour and Profit in an Industrious Life, than in a great inheritance which wasteth for want of Virtue.’17 If a merchant flourished he could, with no difficulty, secure himself a substantial inheritance. As Defoe pointed out in his ‘The True-Born Englishman’ of 1703:

  Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes

  Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes:

  Antiquity and birth are needless here;

  ‘Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

  And a good thing too, thought the essayist Richard Addison, who wrote that it served a spendthrift aristocrat right if he was forced to sell out and make way for an ex-merchant who ‘deserves the estate a great deal better when he has got it by industry’.