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ОглавлениеThe sending forth of Colonies (seeming a novelty) is esteemed now to be a strange thing, as not only being above the courage of common men, but altogether alienated from their knowledge, which is no wonder, since that course, though both ancient and usual, hath been by the intermission of so many ages discontinued, yea was impossible to be practised so long as there was no vast ground, howsoever men had been willing, whereupon Plantations might have been made, yet there is none who will doubt but that the world in her infancy, and innocency, was first peopled after this manner.
Sir William Alexander, An Encouragement of Colonies, 1630
When, in 1597, John of Gaunt’s famous soliloquy eulogizing England’s ‘scepter’d isle’ first appeared in print, Ralegh’s Roanoke experiment had finished in failure and his Guiana expedition had ended in ignominy. However, thanks to Howard of Effingham’s navy, the ‘moat defensive’ had kept an envious Spanish army from landing on ‘this blessed plot’. Shakespeare, his Queen, and his fellow countrymen thus had every right to feel proudly and defiantly insular, and John of Gaunt’s word choice seemed to throw down a challenge to those who would seek an ‘other Eden’ across the seas. However, by November 1611, when Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, staged The Tempest in front of Elizabeth’s successor, their patron James I, the Jamestown settlement had been in existence for four years and this play drew its opening imagery from William Strachey’s vivid account of the wreck of Sea Venture on the Bermudas while transporting settlers to Virginia in 1609. Yet, given the material, currency and opportunity to write a play about a newfound land, the nation’s greatest playwright remained European in outlook. The Tempest is set on a desert island lying between Tunis and Naples, and its principal human characters are Italian noblemen and their relations. Indeed, the often-quoted lines from the play, which some suggest hark forward to a triumphant colonial future, Miranda’s joyful
By 1587 Mercator was able to show the true extent of the American hinterland, but he still showed a narrow navigable passage passing over the North and leading to the Pacific.
How beautiful mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
refers, not to the comely and almost-naked ‘savages’ that welcomed Ralegh’s men, but to her first sighting of sea-soiled courtiers in whose company she will return to their ancient kingdom leaving the native, the ‘aborred slave’ Caliban, alone with two marooned drunks, the same number of people that Thomas Gates left in Bermuda in the original voyage. No hint of discovery and distant voyages there. Mentions of cannibals and anthropophagi and a few hints in Twelfth Night that Shakespeare had seen ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ that had appeared in Hakluyt’s second edition of his Voyages and Discoveries is but dust in a great folio that is indifferent to the wonders of a newly discovered world.
Indeed the most popular play to be inspired by the nascent colony in Virginia was Eastward Ho, a satirical farce written in 1605 by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, that so mocked the endeavours of those working towards the American plantations that the King had Chapman and Jonson imprisoned in the Tower until they saw the unfunny side of their jokes. Perhaps the dour King had a point: what was about to be undertaken under his Charters was to have more elements of tragedy than comedy.
It was the same in the world of poetry. The major English work of the time, Edward Spenser’s Faerie Queen, was a lengthy historical allegory, the first instalment of which was published in 1590. Throughout the epic, Gloriana, the Faerie Queen, an obvious reference to Elizabeth, is served by faithful knights who undertake quests on her behalf around England, Ireland and the Netherlands; although they wander on an allegorical sea it does not take them to the newfound land that Spenser’s friend, fellow poet and neighbour in Ireland, Walter Ralegh, was trying to settle. England’s great Tudor epic verse is most insular in outlook, as was the remainder of English poesy. A voyage through the poems anthologized in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse and the Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse reveals two centuries of poets obsessed with the legends of Greece and Rome and the works of Virgil, Homer and Ovid. Just one indifferent poem on the subject of the new world, Michael Drayton’s 1619 ode, ‘To the Virginian Voyage’, is thought worthy of inclusion. That is, apart from the most erotic poem in the English language, John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’, which was written in 1593 but was not published until 1633, denying a generation of young men the seductive aid of:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee!
It is doubtful if Donne would have been inspired to use his principal metaphor had not Ralegh bestowed upon the newfound land the potentially erotic name of Virginia. But that was it: English popular entertainment looked to the classics for its subject matter; the newfound lands were not considered suitable or popular material.
More surprisingly, the same indifference holds true with the plastic arts. Surprisingly, because Ralegh sent a most accomplished artist, John White, with the first Roanoke party to work with his protégé, the astronomer, anthropologist, cartographer, mathematician, linguist and polymathical genius Thomas Harriot, to record what they saw. Although much of his work may have been dumped overboard in the haste to depart with Drake’s fleet, White produced an accomplished portfolio depicting a brave new world with wonderful people in it. The works’ significance became immediately apparent to the Flemish engraver Theodore de Bry, who left England after a three-year stay in 1588 to establish a press in Frankfurt, where White’s work was copied and embellished. English artists remained wedded to the court and classical literature.
The contrast with Portugal could not be more obvious; the Portuguese national epic poem, The Lusiads, tells the story of how Portuguese mariners created a trading empire around the world. Published in 1572, it was written by Luis Vaz de Camoëns, and was based not only on the accounts of foreign ventures, but on his own service and adventures, in Ceuta, Goa and Macau. No English poet or playwright was similarly inspired by overseas adventures, nor did English bards wish to sail to new worlds. If England was to establish a commonwealth, as a small cabal of thinkers wished, then a great deal of persuasion and propaganda was going to be necessary. And it needed to start at the very top.
The lack of a presence in popular poetry and plays may imply but not confirm that colonial enterprises did not engage the public imagination. Yet it is quite possible to read a scholarly and detailed history of the Tudor and Stuart regimes, or even individual biographies of the monarchs and their leading counsellors, and not come across a reference to America. This would not be possible in works about the Spanish and Portuguese courts of the same period, for their monarchs were very much occupied with overseas enterprises.
CONVINCING THE COURT
In 1387 Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt, married João I of Portugal, and left her countrymen’s insular views behind her as she encouraged, even to her deathbed, her adopted country’s overseas expansion. Her third son, known to the world as Prince Henry the Navigator, dedicated his life to the foundation and support of a school of navigation and exploration at Sagres on the south coast. From here, the Portuguese island-hopped their way to India and, along the way, cornered the market in gold, ivory, spices and slaves. Impressed by what he had heard, Ferdinand of Aragon created at Seville in 1503 the Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade), with similar aims to Prince Henry, to support global expansion and trade. Ten years later Henry VIII of England founded Trinity House to chart and mark the mudflats and sandbanks of the Thames.
A somewhat sylvan early representation of Cupid’s Cove, more beckoning than the windswept reality of a harsh Newfoundland winter, which would have attracted few immigrants.
England did have princes who shared their distant Portuguese cousin’s global outlook but both died young. The first was Edward VI, who famously dragged himself from his final sickbed to watch Willoughby and Chancellor slip down the Thames in 1553 on their voyage to search for a northeast passage to Cathay. The second was another Henry, James I’s son and heir, the Prince of Wales who, on arrival in England at the age of nine, had been urged by Ben Jonson to, ‘Look over the strict Ocean . . . and think where, you may lead us forth’. Defying his father, Henry even visited the imprisoned Ralegh to learn from the dreamer’s own lips of the glories that awaited the bold voyager either to Virginia or Guiana. For Henry this was no passing teenage passion. In 1609 he visited the ships of the third supply as they gathered at Woolwich, and he championed the cause of the planters so strongly that the Spanish ambassador, Velasco, felt that the enterprise was surviving ‘just because the Prince of Wales lends them very warmly his support’. Henry’s enthusiasm for the Virginia venture was opposed by Sir Robert Cecil, the King’s most trusted advisor, who may have had a hand in trying to arrange a marriage with a Spanish princess for the Prince, who would thus have been forced to accept a new virgin love and abandon the old one, Virginia. In this aim both the King and the new Spanish ambassador, Zuñiga, were reported to be in concord following their friendly meetings in July 1612. Henry, however, took matters into his own hands by dying on 2 November. The impact of his death was summed up by Sir Thomas Dale, the deputy governor of Virginia, when he wrote: ‘He was the great captain of our Israel, the hope to have builded up this heavenly New Jerusalem. He interred the whole frame of this business [when he] fell into his grave.’
Apart from Edward, none of the nation’s Tudor monarchs nailed their colours firmly to the colonists’ masts. Catholic Mary would not encourage acts contrary to the wishes of her papal father and Spanish husband, while Elizabeth seemed to view such American expeditions as a way of indulging the fantasies of her favourites. This detached position changed with James who, although not wishing to be drawn into an argument with Spain, was nonetheless prepared to issue Charters to his petitioners as long as this did not involve any monetary commitment by the Crown.
This caution was in accord with the views of the Privy Council, who were often openly hostile to the proposed plans for settlement. Both Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil discouraged, and even may have tried to sabotage, settlement plans, which led to a lack of unity at the highest level, preventing the creation of a coherent and enthusiastically supported plan of occupation.
Throughout King James I’s reign no opportunity was missed to publish tracts to encourage the restless to improve their lot through emigrating to a new and bountiful world.
With no overt encouragement from the Crown, those interested in organizing overseas voyages needed to prepare well their proposition before putting it forward for a royal patent. Cabot had the least difficulty but Henry VII had far fewer problems with his European neighbours than did Henry VIII, Elizabeth or James I, who needed more persuading. An early revivalist of the western vision was Humphrey Gilbert, who, in 1576, proposed assembling a fleet in the Bermudas that would fall upon the Spanish treasure fleets and seize Cuba and Santo Domingo. Gilbert’s tracts clearly indicate that the writer had some difficulty in separating the practical from the impossible and fact from fictive hope. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Elizabeth granted him a Charter to venture westward a year after Frobisher’s expeditions had failed; perhaps she did not read Gilbert’s works. She would have found the pamphlet produced by Richard Hakluyt in 1584, Particular Discourse on the Western Planting, more digestible. In this work Hakluyt emphasized how an English colony in America would help in the struggle against Spain by providing a base from which raids could be launched on the annual Plate Fleet as well as Spanish settlements in the Indies. Once the colonists had settled peacefully and converted the natives to Christianity, boundless trading opportunities would arise that would, Hakluyt suggested, make England self-sufficient in essential commodities such as furs and timber. In other words, Hakluyt laid out the very arguments for colonization that would appeal to a hard-up and threatened monarchy.
The Crown and Council, however, needed not only to be convinced that the ideas of settlement were sound but also that they would be recognized internationally as legitimate when held up against the powerful papal authority of the Treaty of Tordesillas. The campaign to convince the sceptics was waged with flattery and the force of law.
The flattery was applied by Richard Hakluyt the younger (to distinguish him from his older cousin, also Richard, who enthused and inspired him), who in 1582 published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, following this up in 1589 with the book that would make him famous, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. The second, much larger edition, published in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, included the additional significant word, Traffiques, in the title after Voyages, for Hakluyt had appreciated that trade was going to be the mainsail that would power discovery forward, as without the hope of gain there would be no viable voyages. The first edition of this work was dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham, ‘Principal Secretary to Her Majesty, and one of Her Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council’. The second volume of the second edition, published in 1599, was dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, ‘Principal Secretary to Her Majesty’. The dates of publication are important. Ralegh’s Virginia adventure had ended ignominiously, giving the Queen’s advisors ample opportunity to deflect her from supporting further such ventures. Hakluyt counterblasted this potential threat by stating, ‘There is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia; the inland whereof is found of late to be so sweet and wholesome a climate, so rich and abundant in silver mines, so apt and capable of all commodities . . . [and] acknowledged inland to be a better and richer country than Mexico.’ With such an enthusiastic description of Virginia, Hakluyt’s nose stretched, Pinocchio-like, across the Atlantic. When the later editions of his book were being printed, England was at war with Spain, so Hakluyt, in addition to emphasizing the desire to establish a woollen trade with Cathay, made it very clear that he had included within the volumes detailed descriptions of every Spanish port in the West Indies to ease the task of would-be raiders. However, to encourage the peacemakers as well as the warmongers at Court, Hakluyt wrote:
If upon a good and godly peace obtained, it shall please the almighty to stir up Her Majesty’s heart to continue with transporting one or two thousand of her people, and such others as upon mine own knowledge will most willingly at their own charges become adventurers in good numbers with their bodies and goods; she shall by God’s assistance, in short space, work many great and unlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her coffers, and reduce many pagans to the faith of Christ.
LEGITIMIZING CONQUEST
The legal issues were handled by the polymath John Dee, who set out to challenge the belief that the unknown world had been divided up between Spain and Portugal, using a mixture of historical myth, geographic guesswork and incisive, incontestable, well-reasoned legalistic opinion.
To provide the proof to support the historical right of England to the lands between Florida and the Arctic, Dee turned to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had woven into his History of the Kings of Britain, finished in 1136, sufficient myth to demonstrate the pre-existence of a sizeable British Empire which, through King Arthur’s conquests, included Ireland and the island chain that stretched to the Americas via the Shetlands, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador, establishing a prior claim that was reinforced by the Welshman Madoc in 1170 as far south as Florida. This ancient right of ownership over these lands was later strengthened, so Dee suggested, by the voyages of the Cabots and Frobisher, which were made while most of North America was still terra incognita to the Spanish.
Dee based his argument for the legitimacy of English settlement in America on Roman law, which proclaimed that rights of sovereignty over any land depended on both a demonstrable historical intent to occupy and a corporate presence being established in the territory. In other words, a ruler, or their representative, needed to be present both in body and in soul, which the Spanish evidently, were not. Furthermore, the Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century AD, had stated that, ‘what presently belongs to no one becomes by natural reason the property of the first taker’. Dee expanded on this decree by demonstrating that it was insufficient to claim ownership merely by discovery; that legal title to territory depended on taking physical possession as well as putting the land to productive use. Cleverly, by the use of legal and scriptural argument drawn from irrefutable sources acceptable to both Catholic and Protestant alike, Dee ensured that his rationale could not be dismissed as heretical. Even more cannily, Dee used the same argument to support the Spanish colonization of the lands to the south of Virginia, including Florida, despite his suggestion of a prior English interest in this region.
John Dee, an influential polymath with interests in exploration, cartography, mathematics, astrology and the dark arts, occasionally mixed his enthusiasms to prove that a navigable northwest route to Cathay existed.
He then moved from mere clever discourse to genius in the way he managed to support the implications of the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the linked papal bull, Inter Caetera, while dismissing its application. The trouble lay, said Dee, not with the intention of the bull, but in the way the Spanish and Portuguese had implemented and interpreted it in their favour. The two states had not, for example, drawn an eastern longitudinal line to complement that in the Atlantic Ocean and thus had singularly failed to divide the world into equal spheres of influence. Even the Atlantic line, drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, only stretched between 45º North and 54º South, proving, so Dee evinced, that they knew nothing of the lands that lay beyond those latitudes. What is more, the bull only granted to the Iberians those lands that had not either been ‘discovered earlier by others’ and those seas ‘which have not hitherto been navigated’. For both these reasons they could not lay claim to those northern lands to which the British Crown had ancient title. Indeed, far from being a generous donative global gift of all hitherto unoccupied lands, Dee explained that the Pope’s main purpose was to establish limits to the competitive Iberian states and thus reduce the causes of tension.
Emboldened by his own logic, Dee ventured to play with fire by claiming that the English would be breaking the law themselves if they failed to convert the heathen in the lands to which they laid claim, just as the Catholics claimed to be doing in their newfound lands. The justification for this obligation was seen by his equating Elizabeth’s position as an emperor entitled to issue charters, to that of the similarly endowed Pope.
Dee’s detailed, forensic, legalistic arguments were never going to command a wide readership, so the popular proselytizing was left to Hakluyt, who demonstrated his more robust and populist view by declaring, in Discourse of Western Planting, that the Treaty of Tordesillas was invalid because ‘no Pope had any lawful authority to give any such donation’. That was a language that the English could understand.
PUBLIC SUPPORT
The ambivalence of the Privy Council was mirrored by the public at large, who were subjected to conflicting reports as to the virtues of the American enterprise. The battle for the hearts and minds of both investors and settlers began early and created a rhythmic rise and fall in popular support. Buoyed up on a tide of paper propaganda, settlers sailed westwards only for evidence of the wreckage of their hopes to return as scraps of scribbled flotsam scrawled by those whose optimism had not survived the reality of life abroad. Naturally, the death of both Cabot and Gilbert while they were deployed, with nothing achieved, won no converts, neither did the farce of Frobisher’s worthless aggregate. To counter this condemnatory current, something good had to come out of America.
The good news was provided by Ralegh, who, falling prey to his own propaganda, ‘sexed up’ both Arthur Barlowe’s report on his reconnaissance, and Thomas Harriot’s account of his stay at Roanoke to better suit his purpose and to discredit the doubters. Indeed, the first few pages of Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, as printed by Hakluyt in 1589, are a defence of the author’s optimistic opinions and a refutation of those who would report otherwise. Harriot excelled as a caustic critic, stating that:
Of our company that returned some for their misdemeanour and ill dealing in the country, have been there worthily punished, who by reason of their bad natures, have maliciously not only spoken ill of their Governors, but for their sakes slandered the country itself. The like also have those done which were their consort.
Some being ignorant of the state thereof, notwithstanding since their return amongst their friends and acquaintances, and also others, especially if they were in company where they might not be gainsaid, would seem to know so much as no men more, and make no men so great travellers as themselves. They stood so much, as it may seem, upon their credit and reputation, that having been a twelve month in the country, it would have been a great disgrace unto them as they thought, if they could not have said much whether it were true or false. Of which some have spoken of more than ever they saw, or otherwise knew to be there: other some have not been ashamed to make absolute denial of that, which although not by them, yet by others is most certainly and there plentifully known, and some make difficulties of those things they have no skill of.
Harriot was writing of what had been a successful, although foreshortened, sojourn. Indeed, if loss of life, or rather the lack of it, is the major criterion, the year of Lane’s occupancy, 1585/1586, was the most successful of any of the ventures in the period under discussion. In the years that followed, others would write or return home with harrowing accounts of events that the sponsors and investors would dearly liked to have kept from the public gaze. It was the dissemination of such works, balancing out those written for the purposes of propaganda, which meant that the Virginian voyages were never viewed with uncritical approval and thus wholehearted national support.
In 1609 the Virginia Company felt it had been traduced by the publication of John Smith’s acerbic A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia since the First Planting of that Colony. The counterblast to what had in fact been a work forecasting an optimistic outlook once the errors of leadership had been sorted out was led by Prince Henry through his chaplain, Daniel Price, who, in an open air sermon outside St Paul’s Cathedral, dismissed the sceptics and pointed out the many opportunities for both social, financial and moral advance that awaited those who ventured to the plantation of Virginia, well away from the sinful city of London. A flood of books with Virginia as their theme poured forth but, like many such floods, soon ebbed.
A similar maelstrom came out of the 1622 massacre, with the Virginia Company rapidly refuting the eyewitness accounts of the state of the colony published by such authorities as Captain Nathaniel Butler, whose The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia as it Was in the Winter of the Year 1622, which was made available to the nation and the Privy Council, was, together with the heartbreaking letters dispatched by the survivors, responsible for a Crown Commission being established to investigate the affairs of the Virginia Company. Its unfavourable report led to the winding up of the Company in 1624. No positive propaganda had such a telling effect.
Promotional tracts did, however, continue to be published and widely read. One of the most significant was John Smith’s Description of New England, which was issued in 1616, to be followed in 1620 by New England Trials, both written to encourage emigration. Smith wrote well and spoke honestly; there is little exaggeration in his statement that ‘you shall scarce find any bay, shallow shore or cove of sand, where you may not take many clams or lobsters . . . or isles where you find not fruits, birds, crabs and mussels’. But he added a homely warning for the over-enthusiastic: ‘all which are to be had in abundance observing but their seasons: but if a man will go at Christmas to gather cherries in Kent, though there be plenty in summer, he may be deceived; so here these plenties have each their season . . .’ With such unglossed descriptions, along with his 1624 work, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, Smith should done have much to put wind in the sails of those contemplating emigration.
TRADE
For a long time, the English were reluctant blue water adventurers. Their homeland itself gave forth an increase which was generally sufficient to feed its population, while shoals of fish still offered a net-filling sea harvest. The wealthy, mostly the aristocracy, could afford to pay for both wines from France and the expensive spices brought by Venetian galleys annually to London and Southampton. The rising number of affluent merchants, trading mainly in wool and woollen products across the narrow seas, were also aware of their station and the problems that would confront those uppity enough to try and outshine the established hierarchy. There was, however, one trading difficulty which the English struggled to overcome. Their northerly island, warmed by the ocean current, produced woollens – too warm to be worn by their neighbours in the populous lands to the south – while the colder lands on their own latitude, or further north, were too sparsely populated and had too few goods to exchange to make trade with them worthwhile. England needed new outlets and northwest seemed best. This dilemma Richard Hakluyt spelt out in the opening paragraphs of his account of the Willoughby and Chancellor voyage, which set out in 1553 to seek out a northeast passage ‘to new and unknown kingdoms’ in which he stated:
At what time our merchants perceived the commodities and wares of England to be in small request with the countries and people about us, and near to us, and that those merchandises were now neglected, and the price thereof abated, certain grave citizens of London, and men careful for the good of their country, began to think with themselves, how this mischief might be remedied.
Seeing that the wealth of the Spaniards and Portuguese, by the discovery and search of new trades and countries was marvellously increased, supposing the same to be a course and mean for them also to obtain the like, they thereupon resolved upon a new and strange navigation. After much speech and conference together, it was at last concluded that three ships should be prepared and furnished out, for the search and discovery of the northern part of the world . . .
Yet trade, as it was promoted by Hakluyt, meant dealing directly with Cathay, so finding a route to this eastern market became an imperative, to the detriment of focusing on new world settlement. Or did it? There were some propagandists such as the Reverend Daniel Price, quoted earlier, who preached that America was its own cornucopia, equalling:
Tyrus for colours, Basan for wood, Persia for oils, Arabia for spices, Spain for silks, Narcis for shipping, Netherlands for fish, Pomona for fruit, and by tillage, Babylon for corn, besides the abundance of mulberries, minerals, rubies, pearls, gems, grapes, deer, fowls, drugs for physic, herbs for food, roots for colours, ashes for soap, timber for building, pastures for feeding, rivers for fishing, and whatsoever commodity England wanted.
Why venture further? The propagandists, dreamers and schemers listened, believed and continued to invest to send others out to lose their ships and their lives trying to bypass America through the adamantine barrier of ice.
LAND RIGHTS
If the merchants and investors could be won over by suggestions of increased trade, potential settlers needed to be persuaded that a land lay waiting for them to work, a land to which they could stake a better claim than in nearby Ireland. In this respect, the legal justification the English used to legitimize their claim to America was also used to excuse the removal of the indigenous people from the land on which they lived. The argument advanced was that these people were merely sojourners in a land over which they roamed but could claim no title by right of settlement. The usurpation began with the very naming of the land and its inhabitants: the continent was called North America, after an Italian who never visited there; the English lands, Virginia, after a queen who did not invest in them, and the people, Indians, after a race who lived half a world away. Of these it was the name, Virginia, that was to do the most damage, for it hinted broadly that the land was unoccupied, untamed, unowned and ripe for possession, when, in fact, the inhabitants themselves referred to the eastern littoral as Tsenacommacah, which means ‘densely inhabited land’. So it was until, in the north, European diseases, the harbingers of settlement, widowed the world on which the Puritans would step ashore.
By using the term Virginia, Ralegh implied that the land was still ‘as God made it’ but not that, unlike his Queen, it should not be penetrated. If this sounds too coarse then we have his views on his other new world, Guiana, to support this interpretation; for of that land, he wrote:
Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought; the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance, the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges nor the images pulled down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered by any Christian prince.
One impression that did hold sway, for a while, was the view that the ‘naturals’ would warmly welcome the settlers. Arthur Barlowe, having had his feet and clothes washed by attentive Amerindian maidens, considered his reconnaissance party to have been ‘entertained with all love and kindness’ by a people who were ‘most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age’. Fatefully for them this included the, incorrect, observation that, like the lilies of the field, they toiled not, for ‘the earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labour’. Such a naive comment, based on inadequate research, was to support the idea that the land was indeed ‘virgin’ and thus vacuum domicilium, that is, it was legally waste because the Amerindians had not ‘subdued’ it in a way that was recognized by European law. In fact, all along the coast the population fed itself mainly through the clever symbiotic husbandry of Indian corn (maize), beans and squashes, to which hunting provided merely a supplement. Far from being savage they were, in fact, incredibly well adapted to their sauvage, the country.
For most of those who intended to settle in America, arguments over the morality of land ownership were irrelevant; what they wanted was sufficient land granted to them on which they could raise both a family and a profit. If this was not going to be given, then the terms of tenure needed also to be tempting. This was the great argument that the Mayflower voyagers waged with their sponsors and which they would, through the advantage of distance, eventually win.
Each potential colony had its band of propagandists. Thus William Vaughan, a Welsh landowner from Carmarthenshire, wrote a rambling work, The Golden Grove, which encouraged the colonization of Newfoundland as a cure for overcrowding and which, combined with fishing ‘Neptune’s sheep’, would restore the nation to economic prosperity. Newfoundland, for the occupation of which letters patent were signed on 2 May 1610, marked the first real attempt to excite interest in a land, as it was, as opposed to how it was envisioned. John Guy, the first Governor, less open to self-deception than either Ralegh or the Virginia Company, reported on what he saw; ten years later so did John Mason in his A Brief Discourse of the New-Found-Land . . . Inciting our Nation to Go Forward in that Hope-Full Plantation Begunne, in which, after admitting that the country had neither the fertility nor the pleasing climate of Virginia, he proposed the following reasons why Newfoundland might be preferred to Virginia:
1. The nearness to Britain, ‘being but half of the way to Virginia, having a convenient passage’, which made for both a short outward and a shorter return journey.
2. The great and valuable fishing trade that existed and supported thousands of English families.
3. The availability and thus the cheapness of passage for both settlers and stores.
4. The ‘security from foreign and domestic enemies’ because of the scarcity of ‘savages’ by whom ‘the planters as yet never suffered damage’.
In 1620, Richard Whitbourne, a seasoned and pioneer traveller to Newfoundland who had been present when Humphrey Gilbert laid claim to the islands, published, to popular acclaim, his Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland with Many Reasons to Prove How Worthy and Beneficial a Plantation May There Be Made . . ., which ran to three editions between 1620 and 1623. His key suggestion was the need to establish a beneficial link between fishing and settlement which would provide, unlike the more southern settlements, a quick profitable return. What is more, settlements would create a demand for goods which the fishing fleet could deliver, thus giving them an income on their outward voyage as well as facilitating their drying and loading of fish for the return journey, which might be to southern Europe, to exchange fish, much in demand, for goods for sale in England. Moreover, Whitbourne saw Newfoundland as being a link to a line of settlements that would stretch down the coast of the continent.
Whitbourne’s work was designed to influence Lord Falkland’s decision to establish a colony in Newfoundland. It is lengthy, detailed, discursive and, for the most part, full of the sort of practical advice for would-be settlers that is conspicuously and devastatingly absent from other such works, particularly those linked to the southern settlements.
Compared with both Roanoke/Jamestown and Newfoundland, very little propaganda was produced for the encouragement of settlement in New England. Indeed, it is difficult to establish how and why the spotlight first fell on the cliffs of Maine and creeks of Cape Cod. That it did was due, not to armchair enthusiasts picking up their pens, but to the firsthand accounts by those who had sailed into these seas and landed on those shores.
The proposal to settle in Norumbega, or northern Virginia, was predicated on two main concepts. The first was the idea that its waters might provide a source of seafood as rich as that already being heavily exploited off Newfoundland; the second, inspired by the Catholic Lord Arundel of Wardour, in Wiltshire, was to establish a Catholic colony. The idea of a religious settlement had been first mooted in 1582 but was dropped through too much Spanish hostility and too little English support. Both ideas induced exploratory voyages, designed not only to report back but also to make initial trading contacts with the local population. The reports were all lucid, descriptive and positive. They began with Gabriel Archer and John Brereton’s separate narratives of the voyage of Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602. These were followed by Martin Pring’s account of his 1603 voyage from Bristol, which had been directly inspired by the city’s cathedral prebendary, one Richard Hakluyt. George Waymouth, another seasoned voyager, produced in The Jewell of Artes a detailed account of the skills needed by those commanding a voyage of discovery, including how best to fortify a settlement in the new world. Yet, although the work of Hakluyt, Smith, Whitbourne, Waymouth and others was read by hundreds, there was one work of prose that would be read by thousands and have far more of an influence on the decisions of potential emigrants and their behaviour once they had stepped ashore in America – the Bible.
THE WORD OF GOD
In a voyage almost as long in time and far more dangerous than many of those that Hakluyt described, a noble few had fought bravely to make an English translation of the Bible widely available since the 1520s. The first fruits were delivered by William Tyndale between 1525 and 1534, any further work being brutally cut short by his being burnt at the stake in Brussels in 1536. Coverdale continued what Tyndale and begun and presented his work to King Henry VIII in 1535. Henry then approved the production of the so-called Matthew Bible, which was placed in every parish church between 1539 and 1541, only to be burnt during Mary’s reign, forcing the work of translation abroad, so that one edition of the early bibles took its name from the city where it was printed, Geneva. James I, finding the Geneva Bible and its linked works objectionable, called for a new translation, the result of which was one of the greatest works in the English language, the Authorized Version, which was published in 1611.
For many English people the Bible was the only printed word that was read to them. They thus got to know its stories and moral teachings extremely well, so that, although the Pilgrims and their coeval Protestant planters in New England generally come to mind when the influence of biblical teaching on the settlement of America is considered, it is very apparent that both the Bible story and its moral teaching infused every aspect of colonial life from the beginning. Richard Hakluyt, in the first paragraph of the epistle dedicatory of the first edition of his Navigations and Voyages, tells of his being inspired by the words in Psalm 107, ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’ In similar vein Sir William Alexander, the sponsor of Nova Scotia, continued his introduction to his In Praise of Colonies, quoted at the head of this chapter, with the words:
The next generations succeeding Shem planted in Asia, Ham in Africa and Japheth in Europe: Abraham and Lot were Captains of Colonies, the Land then being as free as the Seas are now, since they parted them in every part where they passed, not taking notice of natives without impediment. That memorable troop of Jews which Moses led from Egypt to Canaan was a kind of Colony though miraculously conducted by God, who intended thereby to advance his Church and to destroy the rejected Ethnics. [author’s italics]
These comely figures, drawn by John White, reflect the positive opinion of the natives during most of the months that Ralph Lane’s expedition was ashore on Roanoke. Later, disillusionment would transform them into the Caliban-like creatures of Shakespeare’s imagination. (National Maritime Museum)
Alexander’s view was much in keeping with the earlier opinion of the priest Richard Hakluyt, and most other Protestant Englishmen: that the business that they were going about was that of their heavenly Father. Thus, as the true inheritors of God’s word, they were called upon to enter the new, promised land, where they were, paradoxically, to spread the gospel of truth while being able to treat the native population as did the ancient Israelites. Thus they preached conversion and practised cant, with the result that many of the people who walked in darkness would see, not a great light but the shades of the valley of the shadow of death.
Before this ambiguity took hold, Thomas Harriot, in his account of the 1585 Roanoke settlement, seemed genuinely to believe that the Amerindians were thirsty for living water when he wrote:
Many times and in every town where I came, according as I was able, I made declaration of the contents of the Bible, that therein was set forth the true and only God, and his mighty works, that therein was contained the true doctrine of salvation through Christ, with many particularities of miracles and chief points of religion, as I was able then to utter, and thought fit at the time. And although I told them the book materially and of itself was not of any such virtue, as I thought they did conceive, but only the doctrine therein contained: yet would many be glad to touch it . . . to show their hungry desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.
They also, according to Harriot, liked to take part in psalmody and asked for the English to pray to their God for a good harvest and for the cure of their sick.
The Harriot school of thought, with its belief that the natives, ‘by means of good government . . . may in short time be brought to civility and the embracing of true religion’, persisted throughout the period, with many preachers and even the Virginia Company emphasizing the need to treat the natives with converting kindness. Set against this were the pragmatic views of Catholics such as Sir George Peckham, who used his grounding in the same faith as Harriot to sanction the taking of the Amerindians’ lands, ‘to plant, possess and subdue’ the inhabitants by force. This contradictory view reflected the difference between the Old and New Testaments.
The conquer-by-force school based their argument on texts such as Deuteronomy 7: ‘When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it and hath cast out many nations before thee . . . the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee: thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them nor shew mercy unto them.’ Pragmatically, the English delayed applying this stern directive until the Amerindian nations had succoured the English strangers that they had found outside their gates. It was only once the possession was advanced far enough to create a feeling of self-sufficiency that the native peoples would be subject to the wrath of the English God.
The convert-through-kindness school quoted Christ who, in sending out the twelve apostles to preach, told them that, although they would be as sheep in the midst of wolves, yet they had to be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves, treating all with respect. Sadly, many of the adherents to this kinder course of action were better preachers than practitioners, while missionaries, as such, were not sent to help convert the people.
However, conversion from pagan rituals was a useful propaganda aim for the Virginia Company, and many a text could be appropriated to support this cause. Thus the opening lines of Genesis 12: ‘Now the Lord said unto Abraham, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing’ were used to support a moral as well as commercial crusade to Virginia, where the English were being called to minister to ‘a nation that never heard of Christ’. In time the Church would move from seeing these people, in 1584, as the most ‘kind and loving people’ in the world, to the view held in 1609 by the Reverend Richard Crakanthorpe, that they were ‘heathen barbarians and brutish people’ in desperate need of conversion. John Smith shared the sentiment but not the vitriol, writing in his 1608 A True Relation, that the aim remained: ‘to the high Glory of God, to the erecting of true religion among infidels, to the overthrow of superstition and idolatry, to the winning of many thousands of wandering sheep unto Christ’s fold, who now, and until now, have strayed in the unknown paths of Paganism, Idolatry and superstition’.
In response to this call, lip-service missionary work was employed to the advantage of investors. In 1616, following the arrival of Pocahontas in England, travelling under her converted name of Rebecca, the alien wife of Abraham, King James ordered the archbishops of Canterbury and York to organize a collection throughout the kingdom to raise money for an initiative to educate ‘the children of the barbarians’. This aim was manifest through the setting aside of 10,000 acres of ‘College Lands’ near Henricus, on the upper James River, where a school for instruction in English and Christianity would be built. A priest, the Reverend George Thorpe, a highly connected Company investor, was sent out to take charge of this project, for which, by 1620, over £3,000 had been raised. Progress was slow, in part due to the fact that Amerindian mums did not want to send their children to boarding school, but mainly because the by now almost bankrupt Virginia Company was reluctant to part with its windfall delivered from the collection plates of English congregations. The list of Amerindians converted by 1630 would not take long to recite. As well as Princess Rebecca Rolfe they included Manteo, who had been persuaded to go to England with Amadas in 1584 and had returned, twice, as an interpreter and go-between, earning an elevated status which was confirmed by his baptism at Croatoan in August 1586, at which time he was invested as Lord of Roanoke. No such conversion or award was made of Squanto, who played a similar role to that of Manteo, with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Indeed, so distrustful of Christianity was the local sachem, (tribal leader) Massasoit, that he stipulated that future land sales would only be agreed if the English ceased attempting to convert his people.
Scripture was not only available to justify belligerence and to Bible-bash the natives; it could also be used to punish one’s own people. The most notable example of this, during the period of invasion, was when John Smith, having been released from captivity by the Powhatans, because of Pocahontas’s dramatic intervention to prevent his execution, returned to Jamestown on 2 January 1608, but without his companions, Thomas Emery and Jehu Robinson, whom the Amerindians had killed. He was immediately seized by his enemies on the council, tried, and sentenced to death for allowing their slaughter, with the words from Leviticus 24:17, ‘he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death’, providing a justification for this crass illegal act that was not possible under English law. Smith, who seemed to have made a lifetime habit of being timely ripped from the jaws of death was, on this occasion, saved by the arrival of Captain Newport, who saw through the folly and vindictiveness of the council’s behaviour.
Smith himself, who does not give the appearance of being a biblical scholar, was well able to resort to scripture when it was apposite so to do. Thus his most famous adage, ‘He that will not work shall not eat’, was a direct transposition from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, with the added advantage that it conferred upon Smith the enormous and unquestionable authority of Saint Paul: ‘For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.’
Biblical teaching had a major influence on what was a most important aspect of colonial life: the settlers’ relationship with the native women. Naturally, for the sake of good neighbourliness casual liaisons with these ladies was forbidden, while rape was punishable by death. However, on occasions the English, such as Amadas and Smith, were entertained lovingly, and in the case of the latter most suggestively, by ladies whose physical attributes were neither unpleasant nor well hidden. Yet, no sexual link seems to have been made across the racial divide, although the settlers were, for the most part, young unattached males many miles and months from home. Virginia was thus no Tahiti, where Captain Cook’s sex-starved sailors could be well satiated in exchange for a six-inch nail. The only explanation for this enforced abstinence must be biblical teaching. Ezra 9, for example, taught that it was an abomination for the people of Israel dwelling among other nationals to ‘have taken of their daughters for themselves and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands’. So bad was this transgression that Ezra had to call the people together so that they could admit that they had ‘trespassed against our God’ in this matter and separate themselves from these ‘strange wives’. That was mild compared with the orders given by Moses in Numbers 31, in which he castigated the Israeli host for making captives – that is taking into slavery – the Midianite women and children, having slain their men folk. Moses demanded that they ‘kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him’. This is a direct contrast to the Amerindian tradition by which captured women and children were integrated into the tribe to compensate for those lost through warfare and disease.
More justification for separate development of the new world was found in the continuation of Deuteronomy 7 quoted above: ‘Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.’
In 1969 the English band Blue Mink released the song ‘Melting Pot’, which included the lyrics:
What we need is a great big melting pot,
Big enough to hold the world and all it’s got,
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more,
Turn out coffee-coloured children by the score.
It was a song which affirmed the oneness of mankind in the face of the enduring doctrine of racial discrimination and separation and the fear of miscegenation, the sexual relationship of people of mixed races. In the twentieth century this was seen as a black-and-white affair, but in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century greater Virginia the same condemnation, biblically supported, was very much in evidence to prevent close relationships between, mainly, white men and Amerindian women. For these settlers no dusky Ruth would snuggle down beside a white Boaz among the alien corn. Until John Rolfe, that is. His marriage to Pocahontas is as memorable for its uniqueness as for its romance. If any evidence is needed on how a biblical conscience could make hypocritical cowards of those who would court ‘strange women’, then Rolfe’s letter to Governor Dale requesting permission to marry the princess provides, in paragraph after paragraph of sickening sycophancy, proof enough, as when he wrote:
To you therefore (most noble Sir) the patron and Father of us in this country do I utter the effects of this settled and long continued affection (which hath made a mighty war in my meditations) and here I do truly relate, to what issue this dangerous combat is come unto, wherein I have not only examined, but thoroughly tried and pared my thoughts even to the quick, before I could fit wholesome and apt applications to cure so dangerous an ulcer. I never failed to offer my daily and faithful prayers to God, for his sacred and holy assistance. I forgot not to set before mine eyes the frailty of mankind, his proneness to evil, his indulgence of wicked thoughts, with many other imperfections wherein man is daily ensnared, and oftentimes overthrown, and then compared to my present estate. Nor was I ignorant of the heavy displeasure which almighty God conceived against the sons of Levi and Israel for marrying strange wives, nor of the inconveniences which may thereby arise, with other the like good motions which made me look about warily and with good circumspection, into the grounds and principal agitations, which thus should provoke me to be in love with one whose education hath been rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all nurture from myself, that oftentimes with fear and trembling, I have ended my private controversy with this: surely these are wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in man’s destruction; and so with fervent prayers to be ever preserved from such diabolical assaults (as I took those to be) I have taken some rest.
When the twice-widowed Rolfe penned his letter to Dale he must have worded it in a way that he knew his stern boss would both appreciate and understand. The whole purpose of the plea was to ask for special exemption from the strict moral biblical code that both men must have known well.
Even more sickening was the attempt, a little later, by the married Dale to procure Pocahontas’s younger sister, a child of eleven, for his own bed. So upright was Dale himself that he dispatched Ralph Hamor to Powhatan, her father, to act as his pimp. Centuries later it is difficult to find any part of the following extract in the procuring bid that does not stick in the throat. Hamor told Chief Powhatan that Dale had sent him there as his suitor for the girl:
for this purpose . . . to entreat you by that brotherly friendship you make profession of to permit her to return with me unto him, partly for the desire which himself hath, and partly for the desire her sister [Pocahontas] hath to see her, of whom, if fame hath not been prodigal, as likely enough it hath not, your brother by your favour would gladly make his nearest companion, wife, and bedfellow . . .
The most famous of the kidnapped natives, Pocahontas suffered the fate of many of her countrymen, dying in England without seeing her native land again. (National Maritime Museum)
Waterfalls cut short every expedition up the rivers of the Chesapeake aimed at seeking a passage from sea to sea. Only Henry Hudson, in reaching Albany high up the river that bears his name, made a significant voyage into the interior.
Mourts Relation, 1622. Even the separatists, convinced of the rightness of their actions in moving to their New Jerusalem, felt it necessary to include in their account a defence of the lawfulness of their actions.
That Powhatan did not drive Hamor away, or worse, says much for his composure. What he did do was report that his daughter was already engaged, that no additional dowry would affect that arrangement and that he loved his daughter too much to let her go, saying, ‘I hold it not a brotherly part of your King to desire to bereave me of two of my children at once.’ Thus was the possibility of marriage alliances between two people, who could have intermingled and lived together, prevented by biblical law and one man’s lust.
The propagandists have long been regarded as successful encouragers of western planting, yet these dreamers and schemers never convinced sufficient of their countrymen to ensure that the invasion gained the support essential for its success. In neither the plays, prose, poetry, parliamentary, nor Privy Council reports that have survived from the period is there sufficient reference to the new world to indicate that England, as a nation, was ready to embark on what would one day be its voyage to a global empire.
After more than a century of propaganda the outcome was close to failure. Following the 1622 massacre on the James River, Nathaniel Butler, homeward bound, via Jamestown, from his three-year governorship of Bermuda, berated the maladministration of the Virginia Company and the appalling casualty rate sustained during the invasion. Butler was of the opinion that, of the ‘not fewer than ten thousand souls transported thither, there are not, through aforementioned abuses and neglects, above two thousand of them at present to be found alive . . . instead of a Plantation, it will shortly get the name of a slaughter house.’ Against this loss of life Butler thought that the 347 killed in the massacre represented an insignificant number. The Company issued a refutation that damned itself in its defence, and it was left to writers such as Smith and Purchas to continue the ultimately correct propaganda, ‘shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdom from American English Plantations and especially those of Virginia and Summer Islands’.
John White’s all-round technical skill as a draftsman is clearly indicated in this excellent 1585 map of the Carribean and Carolinas, which he had little time to record in detail. The sketches of flying fish, dolphins and whales shows his love of recording flora and fauna, for which he had an excellent eye. (British Museum)
The propagandists were far more successful in wooing the Court than the rest of the country. Royal letters patent did get issued to the supplicants, giving them very much what their petitions requested. However, finding sufficient volunteers to travel to these gifted domains was not so easy. Frobisher’s first settlement group was selected from convicted criminals; Ralegh was licensed to impress seamen for the Roanoke voyage and dispatched with White fewer settlers than he intended; in 1618 it was planned to send 100 ‘superfluous . . . young boys and girls that lay starving in the streets’ of London to Virginia; in 1623 a memorandum suggested that encouraging emigration to New England would ‘offer employment to the starving unemployed and so rid England of the expense of maintaining them’, as well as giving bankrupt gentlemen an opportunity to recover their fortune. Thus, although individual ships might have been crowded, voyages were not oversubscribed. Even the Pilgrims were reduced in numbers by last-minute withdrawals.
The comparison with Spain is informative: in the sixteenth century that nation sent 240,000 of its citizens to America, with a further 450,000 joining them in the next century. To replace the lost handful that the English dispatched in the 1580s, just 150,000 souls emigrated from England in the seventeenth century, and all but a few thousand of them departed after 1630. The enthusiastic efforts of the Scot, Sir William Alexander to encourage his fellow countrymen to sail to Nova Scotia were eclipsed by the numbers of them who were prepared to be ferried over to Ireland. This would be a continuing imbalance. Between 1650 and 1700 just 7,000 Scots crossed the Atlantic to the new world, while 70,000 emigrated to Ulster. The trickle of emigrants is all the more surprising because the land from which they came was subject to dearth: the real earnings of a labourer between 1585 and 1630 never matched those of his great-grandfather during his short working life (his life expectancy was under thirty-five years). To such as these the new world should have exerted an irresistible pull; it did not.
The propaganda failed. What did succeed in the years to come and turned the invasion into a conquest was religious persecution. The Bible, or conflicting interpretations of the same, recruited far more families than did the promotional tracts. The word of the Lord, or its limited exclusive interpretation by Archbishop Laud, persuaded tens of thousands to sail west, far more than all the propagandists combined.
