by John Butman
Given all this, we have generally modernized the original language. In some cases, however, we have retained the original spelling where it was comprehensible and added some meaning or color to the phrase—for example, Dee’s “ilandish” empire or Christopher Newport’s arm, which was “strooken off” in a sea battle.
Names (1): Indians. Columbus gave the name Indians to the people living in the islands when he first reached the New World in 1492, because he hoped and believed he had arrived in India or the East Indies, although he hadn’t. For Europeans, the name stuck for people living in all parts of the New World, including what were then called Peru, Brazil, the West Indies, New Spain, Florida, Virginia, and New France. English people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries referred to the people of the New World with a variety of other terms, none of which are now tolerable.
Today, a number of terms are used, including Native Americans, Amerindians, indigenous peoples or, whenever possible, the name of a specific tribe of peoples, such as Incans or Aztecs, Algonquins, Abenakis, or Inuits. Even during the period of this book, some European visitors to the New World took the trouble to understand and name the local peoples. In his Generall Historie, John Smith was careful to list some thirty different New England tribal or regional names, from the Penobscot in the north to the Massachusett in the south.9
We have embraced the reasoning of Charles Mann, who uses the word “Indian” in his books 1491 and 1493 for the simple and irrefutable reason that, as he puts it, “The overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in both North and South America describe themselves as Indians.”10
Names (2): Aristocratic Titles. We have used family names for people with titles, while often including the title, as well. This is to avoid the problem of having to keep track of a succession of titles and remembering that William Cecil, for example, was one and the same as Lord Burghley, also known as Baron Burghley and sometimes referred to simply as Burghley, whose son was Robert Cecil, who became the first Earl of Salisbury.
Money. We have made no attempt to convert coinage, currency values, or other monetary amounts or financial data into modern-day equivalents because of the great complexity involved and the ultimate futility of the exercise. Our hope is that the reader will gradually get a relative sense of the economy and money and values, through the many examples of costs, investments, incomes, losses, and the like—such as the cost of a suit of armor (£25) or a ship (the Bark Raleigh was valued at £2,000); a meager annual income (£8 for a laborer) and a high-end annual salary (£100 for Walsingham as secretary of state); the cost of an overseas venture (£1,500 to £7,000 or so) and the value of a fortune (the £150,000 estimate of the Madre de Dios prize).
Distances. There was little standard measurement of much of anything in those days on land or at sea. Distances might be measured by “days walked” or the length of a cannonball’s travel. Measures that sound standard were not. A league, for example, was calculated differently in different cultures. One was as one-twenty-fifth of a degree of latitude, or about 2.6 miles. A mariner’s league was one-twentieth of a degree. A day’s horseback ride was typically figured as seven leagues.11 Distances at sea are almost impossible to figure, because no ship traveled in a straight line between two points, so time is a better comparative measure.
Dates. Until 1582, the countries of Western Europe followed the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC and accepted by the Christian Roman emperor Constantine I in AD 325. But then, Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new calendar, and overnight, the calendar leapt forward by ten days. The purpose was to synchronize the holy and feast days with the equinoxes and solstices—after more than one thousand years, they had drifted apart. In particular, the Pope wanted to fix the date of Easter. Spain, as a dutiful Catholic nation, introduced the so-called Gregorian calendar across its empire. France followed suit. But England, deeming this to be a Catholic plot, refused to change its calendar. John Dee was asked to devise an alternative calendar. This he did, calling it “Queen Elizabeth’s Perpetual Calendar,” fixing the meridian in London and thereby making the Protestant English master of time. But, for various reasons, Dee’s calendar was not introduced. It would not be until 1752 that England finally adopted the Gregorian calendar, by which time the calendar had to leap forward by eleven days. So, throughout this book, we use the Julian, or Old Style, dating system—with one difference: the year is assumed to have begun on January 1 rather than March 25.12
John Dee
John Dudley
Martin Waldseemüller’s map of the world, 1507
A group of “grave” merchants and advisors initiated England’s first attempt to pioneer overseas commercial markets for its chief export, cloth, and to strengthen its commonwealth.
Thomas Smith’s treatise of 1549
Sebastian Cabot
Three well-organized and well-funded voyages, 1576–78, sought an American settlement site and a northern route to the riches of Cathay.
Martin Frobisher
Anne Dudley
William Cecil
Matthew Baker (right)
Frobisher’s map showing the Northwest Passage, 1578
The English hoped to find new sources of wealth to rival Spain’s incredibly lucrative silver mining operations in Mexico and Peru.
Michael Lok’s accounts, 1576
Silver mining at Potosí
London, c. 1560
Most of the developers of England’s New World ventures were based in the thriving capital and commercial center of London.
Thomas Gresham
The Royal Exchange, c. 1569
Gilbert’s map of the world, 1576
Francis Walsingham
Humphrey Gilbert
As tensions between England and Spain heightened, prominent courtiers and adventurers dreamed of establishing an empire in the New World.
The Roanoke Colony, established in Virginia in 1585, was the first English settlement in America. Despite repeated efforts to keep it going, a supply mission of 1590 found the colony abandoned. The fate of the “lost colonists” remains unknown.
Walter Ralegh
John White’s drawings of Indians at Roanoke, 1585
Drake’s circumnavigation in 1580 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada by English naval forces in 1588 boosted England’s self-confidence and enhanced its standing as a force in global affairs.
Francis Drake
Elizabeth I
Philip II of Spain
The signing of a peace treaty between England and Spain after the accession of James I opened the way to English settlement at Sagadahoc, Jamestown, Plymouth, and elsewhere in America.
Treaty of London ceremony, 1604
Thomas Smythe
James I
John Smith
Pocahontas
Acknowledgments
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne, who briefly hankered after the job of secretary of the Jamestown colony. And no writers are either. We leaned heavily on several people throughout the writing of this book.
First comes Henry Jupiter Butman, who worked closely with us over a three-year period, from the development of the publishing proposal through to the submission of the manuscript. He has acted as thought partner, collaborator, and researcher: digging out great sources, drafting copious and compelling research notes, and providing extremely valuable commentary on the entire manuscript. Also, Henry set up and managed the Evernote database of notes and sources, developed an interactive timeline, and mastered the intricacies of the Calendar of State Papers online resource. Henry, thank you: we really couldn’t have done this without you.
We would also like to thank John T. “Ike” Williams and Katherine Flynn of the Kneerim & Williams Literary Agency in Boston. Right from the beginning, they have been staunch supporters, encouraging us and guiding us through to publication. Both have a special feeling for historical material, and this period in particular, and contributed th
eir knowledge and analysis of the content, in addition to their professional expertise. John also thanks his colleague, John De Lancey, who conducted valuable research.
We were honored and happy to find a home for the book with Little, Brown. This was entirely down to our editor, Vanessa Mobley. She came in late to the placement process but showed such passion for the topic that she and Little, Brown were the obvious choice. The fact that Little, Brown was the first trade publisher of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation in 1856—which we only realized later—has given us the feeling that our collaboration was written in the stars. Throughout the writing process, Vanessa has proffered wise counsel and her boundless enthusiasm has propelled us forward.
We have also been blessed to have received the support of Little, Brown publisher, Reagan Arthur, and the contributions of editorial assistant Joseph Lee, production editor Michael Noon, publicist Elizabeth Garriga, marketing manager Lauren Velasquez, copyeditor David Coen, and cartographer Jeffrey Ward.
During the writing of New World Inc., we have been constantly aware of the debt we owe the scholars who have done much of the heavy lifting of research in this period, creating a host of essential collections of original manuscripts, monographs, articles, and papers. We hope our extensive bibliography pays tribute to their work. Some of the sources are only accessible in libraries, and we consulted the physical collections at the British Library, Boston Public Library, Boston Athenaeum, Cambridge University Library, London Library, and the National Archives at Kew. But we have been almost ineffably facilitated by online resources—such as the British History Online database (which includes the Calendar of State Papers) and the JSTOR database of articles—and by online tools, such as Evernote, which facilitates the storage, organization, search, and access of huge quantities of information in many forms.
Continuing the digital theme, we would also like to recognize the role played by Skype. This book is an Anglo-American collaboration that would have been difficult, not to say impossible, to accomplish without the face-to-face conversations that we conducted over Skype on a weekly basis over a period of two years.
Above all, we would like to pay tribute to our families for their encouragement, tolerance, understanding, advice, forebearance, interest, and love during the all-consuming process of creating this book. John wishes to thank his family, Nancy, Jeremy, and Henry, for their contributions and support and expresses his deep appreciation to his father, Robert, who instilled in him a fascination with exploration, but did not live to see the publication of this book. Simon would like to thank his parents, Val and Pete, who are no longer here, but who were always there for him when they were, and who fostered his passion for the past. To his family, Alison, Ella, and Martha, who listened enthusiastically to the latest reports from yesteryear and who were never short of constructive criticism, he would like to say the biggest thank-you of all.
About the Authors
John Butman is an author, editor, and collaborative writer whose work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, The Nation, and other publications and has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, and media venues around the world. His previous books include Trading Up: The New American Luxury, a BusinessWeek bestseller, and Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas.
Simon Targett is a writer, historian, and corporate communications adviser. He holds a PhD in history from Cambridge University and has written on British history for various publications. An award-winning journalist, he worked for the Financial Times for twelve years, serving variously as features editor, the editor of FT.com, and the editor of supplements and special reports. He subsequently became global editor in chief of The Boston Consulting Group.
Select Bibliography
Primary Sources: Manuscripts, Maps, Printed Books, Collections
“Accounts, with subsidiary documents, of Michael Lok, treasurer, of first, second and third voyages of Martin Frobisher to Cathay by the north-west passage. Composite volume: E 164/35.” National Archives. Kew, England.
Acts of the Privy Council of England, Volume II, 1547–1550. Edited by John Roche Dasent. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890.
Acts of the Privy Council of England, Volume IX, 1575–1577. Edited by John Roche Dasent. London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1894.
Acts of the Privy Council of England, Volume XI, 1578–1580. Edited by John Roche Dasent. London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1895.
Agricola, Georgius. De Re Metallica. Trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950.
Andrews, Kenneth R. English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies 1588–95. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1959.
Arber, Edward, ed. The First Three English Books on America [?1511]–1555. Birmingham, 1885.
Aubrey, John. Brief Lives, chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696. 2 vols. Edited by Andrew Clark. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1898.
. Brief Lives by John Aubrey. Edited by Richard Barber. London: The Folio Society, 1975.
Bacon, Francis. The Essays. Edited with an introduction by John Pitcher. London: Penguin Books, 1987.
Bancroft, George, ed. The Seven Articles from the Church of Leyden 1617 with an introductory letter by George Bancroft. New York: From the Collections of the New York Historical Society, Second Series, Vol. 3, n.d.
Barbour, Philip L., ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606–1609. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for The Hakluyt Society, 1969.
. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631). 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Beaven, Alfred P. The Aldermen of the City of London Temp. Henry III–1912. London: Corporation of the City of London, 1908.
Bemiss, Samuel M., The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London. With Seven Related Documents: 1606–1621. Williamsburg, VA: 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957; repr. Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 2007.
Benet, Stephen Vincent. The Devil and Daniel Webster and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
Blake, John W., ed. Europeans in West Africa, 1450–1560. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1942.
Biringuccio, Vannoccio. The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio. Trans., with an Introduction and Notes, by Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1990.
Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647. Edited, with introduction and notes, by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Random House, The Modern Library, 1952.
Brown, Alexander, editor and compiler. The Genesis of the United States: A Narrative of the Movement in England, 1605–1616, Which Resulted in the Plantation of North America by Englishmen, Disclosing the Contest Between England and Spain For the Possession of the Soil Now Occupied by the United States of America; Set Forth Through A Series of Historical Manuscripts now first printed: Together with a Reissue of Rare Contemporaneous Tracts, Accompanied by Bibliographical Memoranda, Notes, and Brief Biographies. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890.
Byrne, Muriel St. Clare, ed. The Lisle Letters. An Abridgement. Selected and Arranged by Bridget Boland. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.
Calendar of Carew Manuscripts, 1515–1574. Edited by J. S. Brewer and William Bullen. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1867.
Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House: Volume 18, 1606. Edited by M. S. Giuseppi. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1940.
Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House: Volume 19, 1607. Edited by M. S. Giuseppi and D. McN. Lockie. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1965.
Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward VI. Edited by R. H. Brodie. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924–1929.
Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Philip and Mary. Volume II, 1554–1555. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1936.
Calendar of State Papers Colonia
l, America and West Indies: Volume 1, 1574–1660. Edited by W. Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 9, 1675–1676 and Addenda 1574–1674. Edited by W. Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1893.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, East Indies, China and Japan: Volume 2, 1513–1616. Edited by W. Noel Sainsbury. London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1862.
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Edward VI., Mary, Elizabeth, 1547–1580. Edited by Robert Lemon. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1856.
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth 1581–1590. Edited by Robert Lemon. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865.