New World, Inc.
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Even more sensationally, Smith suggested that members of the Roanoke Colony might still be alive. Ever since 1587, when John White left the colonists, there had been rumors that they had survived—but nothing more. Near the coastline, Smith marked a village called Pakerakanick, and wrote, “Here remain 4 men clothed that came from Roanoke to Okanahowan.”27 The English did not wish to let go of the hope that Sir Walter Ralegh’s colony still existed, somewhere.
IN AUGUST 1608, Newport led a second supply mission to Jamestown, this time carrying seventy new colonists with him. He was sailing west as the Popham colonists were sailing east and home to London, having abandoned their little fort at Sagadahoc. Newport carried new instructions for the colonists to search for “the South Sea, a mine of gold” or for any of those people who had been “sent by Sir Walter Ralegh”—that is, the lost Roanoke settlers. Newport also carried a letter (now lost) from Sir Thomas Smythe that dripped with frustration. Addressing Smith and his fellow colonists, Smythe expressed his anger at being fed “with ‘ifs’ and ‘ands,’ hopes and some few proofs.” He apparently warned that if the colonists did not send commodities to defray the costs of the latest supply fleet—the princely sum of two thousand pounds—they would be “banished men.”
This raised the ire of Captain Smith, who fired off a reply that he himself admitted was a “rude answer.” He mocked Newport’s new instructions, even though it had been his report and sketch map that had encouraged the investors to get excited about a passage to Cathay. He criticized the company’s efforts to resupply the colony, saying the victuals were not “worth twenty pounds.” And he warned Smythe not to expect a quick return or compare Jamestown’s commercial output to that of the Muscovy Company. “Though your factors there can buy as much in a week as will freight you a ship,” Smith wrote, “you must not expect from us any such matter.” In Jamestown, he revealed, the settlers were “scarce able” to get enough to live.28
When Smythe received Smith’s letter and other reports, including a more detailed map of Virginia, he and the other members of the King’s Council were persuaded that something more, and something different, needed to be done if Jamestown was to thrive and the company was to turn a profit. He convened a series of “solemn meetings” to discuss the way forward, inviting Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot, now in his late forties and arguably England’s most experienced colonist, to one of these meetings, held at the London residence of Thomas Cecil, Robert Cecil’s elder brother and a leading investor.29 They resolved to take three main actions: reshape the leadership structure, broaden the territorial domain of the colony, and increase the number of investors.
The difficulties with the leadership structure were made clear in Smith’s letter. The office of Jamestown president had not been endowed with sufficient power. During Smith’s tenure, the other council members broke into factions and looked for every opportunity to undermine him. One colonist later noted that “such envy, dissensions and jars were daily sown amongst them, that they choked the seeds and blasted the fruits of all men’s labors.”30 Acknowledging their “error” in making the president first among equals, the members of the King’s Council resolved to appoint “one able and absolute Governor.”31
The Smythe group also decided that the governor should preside over a larger territory. The map and report that Captain Smith sent Smythe—which was later published as A Map of Virginia. With a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion—set out very clearly the opportunity for England to establish a vast colony in the New World.32 Accordingly, Sir Edwin Sandys, a gifted parliamentary speaker, was tasked with drawing up a revised, or second, charter that would extend the London Company’s territorial claims. This he did, and the resulting document, which James I signed in May 1609, significantly enlarged the territory that could be claimed by the shareholders—from 10,000 miles to more than a million square miles.33
This stretched from “sea to sea”—an indication that Smythe and his associates were determined to find a fast passage to the Pacific Ocean and to Cathay. Also, it stretched from Jamestown and its environs in the north to Roanoke in the south—an indication that they were committed to find the survivors of Ralegh’s colony. As Smythe and the other leaders of the London Company later wrote, they believed that “some of our Nation planted by Sir Walter Ralegh” were “yet alive, within fifty miles of our fort.” If they could be found, they could “open the womb and bowels of this country”—in other words, they could divulge the secrets of the land.34
As well as new leadership and a bolder colonial vision, Smythe and his associates sought one further reform: a new company with a wider group of investors. The colony was a costly business, and they realized that they needed to put the whole enterprise on a firmer financial footing. For this, they received royal support, enshrined in the charter, for a new corporation, the Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia. Better known as the Virginia Company, this came about after a flurry of promotional activity designed to attract new investors.
One of Smythe’s first moves was to invite the merchants of the Plymouth Company to join the London contingent at twenty-five dollars per share, which would bring them “all privileges and liberties” of membership. It was, in effect, a corporate merger. Smythe believed that they would be stronger together. “If we join freely together and, with one common and patient purse, maintain and perfect our foundations,” he argued, then they would benefit from “a most fruitful country” that was “aboundant in rich commodities.”35 He discussed the proposal with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, but in the end the talks came to nothing. Gorges and his fellow investors were still reeling from the failure of the Sagadahoc settlement, and they seem to have had scant appetite for further costly colonial ventures.
To cast his net wider, Smythe commissioned Robert Johnson, one of his close business associates and a leading merchant of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, to write a promotional pamphlet called Nova Britannia, echoing the language of Drake’s Nova Albion, located in similar latitudes on the other side of the American continent. This was the first part of an ambitious marketing campaign that added a new element to the promotional pitch.
Johnson urged the pamphlet’s readers not to make the same mistake as their English “forefathers” had—losing “the prime and fairest proffer of the greatest wealth in the world” when they spurned Christopher Columbus’s offer to discover a new route to China. “Let it not be accounted hereafter, as a prize in the hands of fools, that had not hearts to use it,” he warned.36 With his soaring rhetoric, Johnson sought to stir not only national sentiment but also religious conviction. Ever since the days of the Mysterie, merchants had paid lip service to the importance of proselytizing non-Christian peoples as a motivation for overseas ventures but they had taken little tangible action to preach the gospel and win over converts. Now, Johnson insisted that the overriding purpose of English colonial efforts was the “advancing and spreading the kingdom of God.”37 The message of Nova Britannia came through loud and clear. Give whatever you can give, no matter how little. By investing in Virginia, you are giving to your country, and to God.
The religious message was reinforced from the country’s pulpits. In March 1609, Richard Crakanthorpe, an Oxford theologian, praised anyone who would commit to the Virginia effort. Their investment would help to bring about “a new Britain in another world” and would also ensure that the “heathen barbarians and brutish people” would learn the word of God.38 The following month, William Symonds, another Oxford scholar, delivered a sermon before leading supporters of the Virginia enterprise. Symonds, quoting from the Bible, likened the colonists’ task to that of Abraham, who was instructed to leave the land of his father and build “a great Nation.”39
Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador, could barely contain his contempt for this new approach. He wrote to Philip III that the English “have actually made the ministers in their s
ermons dwell upon the importance of filling the world with their religion and demand that all make an effort to give what they have” to forward the cause.40 Virginia was no longer just a commercial venture. It was becoming a crusade for Protestantism, national expansion, and social good. But the appeal to religious conviction was more than a cynical commercial ruse: Smythe and other leaders were devout men driven by their Protestant beliefs. Smythe himself had been raised in a godly household, and his first wife was the daughter of Richard Culverwell, who was closely associated with the founding of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the puritan academy attended by John Harvard, who gave his library to the college that later took his name.41
As the clergymen preached from the pulpits of London, the members of the King’s Council put pressure on their friends and colleagues to support and promote the campaign. They sent letters to the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and livery companies of London, soliciting subscriptions to their colony—“an action pleasing to God and happy for this Common Wealth.”42 The Lord Mayor, in turn, entreated London’s great livery companies to “deal very earnestly and effectually” with their members “to make some adventure in so good and honourable action.”43
Smythe’s dynamic marketing campaign was compelling, but investors may also have been lured by another novel feature: affordability. In the early 1550s, the Mysterie had set the share price at twenty-five pounds, which was a princely sum. Half a century later, a single share in the East India Company had gone for two hundred pounds.44 But when setting the share price for the Virginia Company, Smythe offered a drastic reduction: an individual share could be purchased for the bargain price of twelve pounds and ten shillings. The reward would be a division of land and a division of the proceeds of the colony—after seven years. In Nova Britannia, Johnson confidently predicted that investors would receive “at least” five hundred acres for every share.45
The combination of national pride, religious conviction, appealing marketing, and low price worked. The first Virginia charter had listed eight subscribers. By contrast, the second charter listed nearly a hundred times as many: 659 individuals and fifty-six livery companies and other corporate bodies. The great livery companies—the Mercers, Clothworkers, Goldsmiths, and Haberdashers—were joined by some lesser companies such as the poulterers, fruiterers, plasterers, basketmakers, and embroiderers. Mirroring this diversity, the individual investors came from across the social spectrum: not only noblemen but also doctors, captains, brewers, and even a shoemaker.46 The campaign’s success alarmed Zuñiga, who told the Spanish king that “there has been gotten together in 20 days a sum of money for this voyage which amazes one.” He reported that fourteen “counts and barons” had pledged “40,000 ducats,” that “the merchants give much more,” and that “there is no poor little man, nor woman, who is not willing to subscribe something for this enterprise.”47
It had been three years since the first colonists had arrived at Cape Henry, and the track record so far was disappointing, not to say disastrous. As one contemporary observer put it, “the plantation went rather backwards than forwards.”48 In previous years, such setbacks had doomed colonial projects. But Sir Thomas Smythe and his fellow leaders did not abandon the enterprise, as so many others had given up on their ventures in times gone by. At last, they seemed to accept that the process would be bumpy, that constant adaptation would be required, and that it would take time to establish a thriving enterprise. “Planting of countries is like planting of woods,” noted Sir Francis Bacon, the country’s attorney general, who was involved in drafting the second charter. “You must make account to leese [lose] almost twenty years’ profit, and expect your recompense in the end.”49
So far, Jamestown had to be counted as a failure—a graveyard of people and dreams. Now, it was time for a reset. Adopting a new attitude, the leaders listened to the advice of men with great knowledge and experience—John Smith, Richard Hakluyt, and Thomas Harriot—and rethought the mission, ditched what did not work, and considered what might work better in the future. They embraced, as it were, the processes of trial and error and incremental improvement. They were encouraged in their efforts because they had the ear of the king, the support of the City, the hearty participation of the people—and, they fervently believed, the blessing of God.
18
A STAKE IN THE GROUND
WITH THIS EXTRAORDINARY mandate, Smythe and his colleagues organized a majestically outfitted expedition. The nine-vessel fleet was led by the Sea Venture, a 250-ton ship purpose-built for transporting large numbers of people to the New World. Six hundred settlers, including an unprecedented one hundred women, had taken up the challenge. Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, two of the original patentees, took command.
Gates, a diplomat and soldier whom even the Spanish regarded as “very special,” having seen him fight against them in the Netherlands, was to take the role of the newly defined governor of Jamestown and to oversee the expansion of the colony beyond Jamestown. In addition, he was to search for “rich copper mines” and the “four of the English alive”—the Roanoke settlers who were supposedly living not far away, oblivious of the creation of the new colony.1
The fleet set sail from Falmouth at the beginning of June 1609. But, a week out of England, the Virginia—the pinnace constructed by colonists at Sagadahoc—was forced to return to port with its passengers.2 The other eight ships continued on, but toward the end of July they were hit by a hurricane that scattered the fleet. Seven vessels staggered into Jamestown in mid-August and unloaded some four hundred passengers. But there was no sign of the Sea Venture, the flagship. As days drifted into weeks, the colonists assumed that everyone and everything must have been lost at sea: Gates, Newport, and Somers, 150 of the settlers, the charter and instructions, and significant supplies for the colony. It was a devastating blow.
News of the disaster reached Smythe and his fellow leaders in October 1609, when a ship from Jamestown returned to England, carrying a letter from Gabriel Archer, one of the original colonists. Archer reported the “absence” of Sir Thomas Gates and warned that, given the loss of the flagship’s provisions, the colonists would not be able to devote themselves to commercial activities. You “must pardon us,” he wrote, “if you find not [the] return of commodit[ies] so ample as you may expect.” He said the colonists would have to “seek sustenance first” and only then “labour to content you afterwards.”3
Soon after, another ship arrived in London from Jamestown, this one with an unexpected passenger aboard: John Smith. As president of the colony, Smith had faced persistent opposition. In particular, George Percy, one of his aristocratic rivals, accused him of acting like an absolute king and exercising “sovereign rule.”4 As tension mounted, Smith was the victim of an explosion caused by a spark igniting the gunpowder pouch that he carried on his belt. As he later recorded, the blast “tore the flesh from his body and thighs, nine or ten inches square in a most pitiful manner.” He was lucky to survive. To this day, the event is shrouded in mystery. Was it an accident or an assassination attempt? No one knows for sure. But, whatever the truth, Smith was forced to return to England in order to recuperate. It marked the end of his tenure as president in Jamestown. His archrival, George Percy, soon took his place.5
This episode confirmed the Virginia Company in its view that Jamestown was being hampered by rivalry among the colonial leaders. But Smythe and his associates were concerned above all else by the news about the Sea Venture. If it had sunk or been destroyed, it would be a cataclysmic loss for the colonial project. With the colony’s future in the balance, the leaders turned to promotion once more, publishing A True and Sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation. In a bold statement, they appealed to investors not to withdraw their support, arguing that the hurricane that struck the Sea Venture was an act of God. They urged them to reflect on their resolve: “Is he fit to take any action whose courage is shaken and dissolved with one storm?”6
With Gates out of the pi
cture, the company announced that Sir Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, would be sent to Jamestown to serve as “Lord Governor” and “Captain General” for life. Aged thirty-two, West was a Privy Councillor, an original member of the King’s Council of Virginia, and the single biggest investor, having pledged five hundred pounds.7 The company authorized West to govern by his “own discretion.” He was to exert martial law, if necessary, and make sure the colonists were “exercised and trained up in martial manner and warlike discipline.” If it transpired that Thomas Gates had survived and had managed to make his way to Jamestown, then West was to install him as lieutenant governor.8
Mindful of the expectations of hundreds of investors, Smythe instructed the new lord governor to focus the efforts of the settlers on commercial activity. A list of the most important commodities was drawn up.9 It included beaver and otter skins; sassafras, worth fifty pounds per ton; pine trees, worth eighteen pounds per ton; and oak trees, which were prized for their hardwood for the making of clapboard. Also, West was, “with convenient speed,” to set the colonists to work on that most reliable commercial endeavor: fishing. It was hoped any catch would offset the considerable costs of this unscheduled expedition.10 The rivers were said to be “stored with sturgeon,” whose roe—caviar—could bring as much as forty pounds per every hundred pounds of haul.11
In the quest for profit, the religious rationale dropped down the list of important factors for the colony’s new leaders. Almost as an afterthought, West was urged to spend time on “the conversion of the natives” in order to promote “the knowledge and worship of the true God.”12