Penguin History of the United States of America (151 page)

1
From
The Vinland Sagas
, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Penguin Books, 1965), p. 98.

2
The Portuguese still know better than the English how to make cod palatable.

3
R. A. Billington,
Westward Expansion
(New York, 1949), p. 38. Billington does not give his authority for this striking passage.

4
Though some now think that the earliest Indians may have hunted many great species to extinction immediately after the Ice Age – for instance, the American horse.

1
Charles M. Andrews,
The Colonial Period of American History
(New Haven, Yale paperback edn, 1964), Vol. i, p. 49.

2
The first edition had appeared in 1589, directly after the defeat of the Armada.

3
Ignorance of the North American interior was still almost total. The existence of the Appalachian mountains was known, but their length was not; and the vast extent of the continent was quite unguessed. Knowledge of Caribbean and North American waters, on the other hand, was much improved, thanks to the sea-dogs.

4
In the interests of consistency and general readability I have reluctantly modernized the spelling in this and all other quotations.

5
£12
IOS
was the price of a share in the Virginia Company. See below, p. 24.

6
Andrews,
The Colonial Period
, Vol. i, p. 57.

7
See Carl Bridenbaugh,
Vexed and Troubled Englishmen
(New York, 1968),
passim
, and especially Chapter XI, ‘The First Swarming of the English’. Professor Bridenbaugh estimates that ‘between 1620 and 1642, close to 80,000, or 2 per cent of all Englishmen’ emigrated. He makes the important point that about 20,000 of them went to the continent, not to America; and singles out economic conditions as the chief cause of restlessness.

8
Andrews,
The Colonial Period
, Vol. i, p. 55.

9
Probably giving Trinculo his idea for displaying Caliban at English fairs: ‘when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’ (
The Tempest
, II, 2).

10
For more about Pocahontas see below, p. 21. According to Rolfe, he married her ‘for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our country, for the glory of God, for my own salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbelieving creature’. She is buried at Gravesend.

11
Except that it has been turned into an excellent historical museum.

1
Sassafras was ‘useful’ because it was thought to be a cure for venereal disease.

2
When the settlers’ ships arrived off Jamestown, they ‘moored to the trees in six fathom water’.

3
The name Virginia, originally given to a much vaster area, was soon monopolized by the Jamestown settlement, and the opening-up of New England began the long process of differentiating the various regions of North America by name.

4
Damper and less mild in the seventeenth century than it is today.

5
This was thought to be important, as it was feared that the Spanish might attempt to snuff out the colony before it could be a trouble to them. So they would have, but for the somewhat mysterious forbearance of Philip III. Perhaps he thought the colony was certain to fail. The Virginians themselves were less passive. An expedition was dispatched in 1613 to extinguish a French settlement in Nova Scotia, which it did without undue fuss, tenderness or cruelty.

6
That is, they had to catch the diseases and survive – a kill-or-cure, ‘natural’, indeed Darwinian process of immunization.

7
See below, p. 25.

8
When in 1861 Robert E. Lee agonized over the necessity of choosing between his country and his state and decided for the latter, he was acting in that state’s oldest, and most insurgent, tradition.

9
Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery
(London, 1997), p. 240.

10
Jordan Goodman,
Tobacco in History
(London, 1993), pp. 60-61.

1
See above, pp. 5-6.

2
The successful Puritan insistence on a preaching ministry explains why in America, which has largely taken its religion from the Puritans, the term ‘preacher’ is so widely used as a synonym for priest, clergyman, parson or minister.

3
Epistle to the Romans viii, 30.

4
New England Puritanism, for various reasons, decided that conversion was a slow process, not a lightning flash; but in this, as in several other important respects, it differed sharply from the mainstream – from its English predecessors, and its American successors.

5
See also Ralegh’s lines written in prison under sentence of death:

Give me my scallop shell of quiet,

My staff of faith to walk upon,

My scrip of joy, immortal diet,

My bottle of salvation,

My gown of glory, hope’s true gage!

And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

6
Nor, in view of what was to happen after 1642, can this theory, that popular religion was necessarily subversive, be regarded as altogether mistaken.

7
Of Plymouth Plantation
, by William Bradford, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1966), p. 10. Bradford (1590–1657) was to be for many years the Governor, and the historian, of the first Separatist settlement in New England. I quote him extensively.

8
The second edition of which (1622) contains interesting material describing the first days of the Plymouth settlement.

9
The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
, Book VI. This passage was not published until 1624, after the Pilgrims had settled in New England and sent back accounts of the cold winters and shortage of food. Smith had the true booster attitude to such faintheartedness. If all was not Paradise today, it would be tomorrow.

10
At this date the Company owed £75,000: a debt incurred in its attempt to settle its own lands itself.

11
James I asked how the settlers proposed to live. ‘By fishing,’ was the reply. ‘So God have my soul,’ said the King,’ ‘tis an honest trade, ‘twas the apostles’ own calling.’

12
Andrews,
The Colonial Period
, Vol. i, p. 269 fn. 1. The description is based on likelihoods: no plan or picture of
Mayflower
survives, but she was a typical merchant ship of the period.

13
Early in the eighteenth century a large rock was identified as the first bit of America touched by the Pilgrims’ feet. Being unconvincingly far up Plymouth beach, it had to be moved down to the water’s edge to satisfy visitors’ notions of how history ought to happen.

14
For example, that in the second edition of
New England’s Trials
.

15
Bradford himself.

16
Or, indeed, any of the truly Reformed churches. Prof. Patrick Collinson, in his
Elizabethan Puritan Movement
(London, 1967, p. 94), has well remarked that ‘Protestantism was at least potentially a levelling principle.’ The history of New England shows this potential becoming actual. Henry Jacobs showed the significance of Puritan church organization when he wrote from Leyden in 1611 that ‘each congregation is an entire and independent body-politic, endured with power immediately under and from Christ’. No wonder the descendants of these people turned into republicans and democrats.

17
See H. S. Commager,
The Empire of Reason
(London, 1978), pp. 178-84.

18
Bridenbaugh,
Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, p
. 434.

19
Great mystery surrounds this charter, the only one of its kind not to specify that the Company headquarters must be in London. How it was obtained with this omission remains unknown. But the matter is less important than many historians suppose. As the history of Virginia and Plymouth shows, self-government
de facto
, if not
de jure
, was inevitable in the North American colonies, whatever charters said or did not say.

20
Nor were all Puritans Congregationalists. The other main tendency was Presbyterian and clung to the ideal of a comprehensive, national but Calvinistic church, tightly disciplined from the centre. Understandably, few Presbyterians sailed to Massachusetts, and those who did caused trouble, seeking more influence than they were allowed, and closer ties with England. These Winthrop did not want to allow, for they might hamper New England’s freedom to follow its own path for its own good. ‘We are bound to keep off whatsoever appears to tend to our ruin or damage,’ he said. This attitude was to recur many times in American history.

21
Superseded by the
Laws and Liberties
, 1647 (second edn 1660).

22
Even when refused the Governorship, Winthrop was always elected to the magistracy.

23
See above, p. 47.

24
Oliver did not go so far as to offer it to Catholics, Anglicans, Levellers or Diggers. To offer it to Jews, Antinomians, Anabaptists and Presbyterians was bad enough.

25
A life which was fostered by the Puritans’ belief in a learned ministry (to train which Harvard College was founded as early as 1636) and in a Bible-reading congregation, for which schools were founded in every township.