Penguin History of the United States of America (4 page)

Hakluyt made a complete case for colonization. In his pages it is easy to learn what the Elizabethans hoped to achieve in the West. Later propaganda confirms the lesson. From the whole corpus we can discover the appeal of America to all classes, and why the English made the great discovery, that tilling the soil – not gold, or even trade – would best bring permanence and wealth to the conquerors of North America.

To the rich, it seems, Virginia meant in the first place dreams of quick profit – if not from gold-mines, then from the North-West Passage to Cathay, which was no doubt close at hand,
³
or from timber, soap-manufacturing or the export of pitch. Investors were also tempted by the idea of producing Mediterranean commodities, such as wine and olive oil. Land on a scale no longer available in England was as attractive to squires pent in petty acres as it was to labourers with none.

Other factors played their part. There was the usual missionary excuse
to sanctify the enterprise. Englishmen were professedly as ready as Spaniards ‘to preach and baptize into
Christian Religion,
and by propagation of the
Gospel
to recover out of the arms of the Devil a number of poor and miserable souls, wrapt up in death, in almost invincible ignorance’.
⁴
The legend of Prince Madoc was useful reinforcement to the claim deriving from John Cabot, for it proved (at any rate to Englishmen and Welshmen) that ‘that country was by Britons discovered, long before Columbus led any Spaniards thither’. Such were the sops to conscience, which made despoiling the Indians possible. More positive appeals could be made to the desire for glory in the high Roman fashion:

You brave heroic minds [wrote Michael Drayton]

Worthy your country’s name,

That honour still pursue,

Go and subdue!

Whilst loitering hinds

Lurk here at home with shame…

And in regions far,

Such heroes bring ye forth

As those from whom we came;

And plant our name

Under that star

Not known unto our North…

(The poem ends with a puff for ‘Industrious Hakluyt’ and his
Voyages.)

A less lofty motive was to be found in the general anxiety about the large vagrant population which wars, the rise in prices, enclosures and the growth of the towns had created in England. The well-to-do were vividly aware of the fragility of the social peace which the Civil Wars were soon to shatter. Hakluyt offered the New World as a literally God-given solution to the problem of ‘valiant youths rusting and hurtful by lack of employment’ – ‘idle persons’, John Donne called them, ‘and the children of idle persons’. ‘A monstrous swarm of beggars,’ said others. Prisons could be emptied of the ‘able men to serve their Country, which for small robberies are daily hanged up in great numbers’. Virginia and the voyage thither would not only free England of criminals, it would turn them into ‘sober, modest persons’, promised another authority. Unemployed soldiers could be used against the ‘stubborn Savages’ (no doubt in the intervals of preaching the gospel to them). It was all very tempting and convincing to a class which felt threatened from below. Transportation of convicts and, later, the encouragement of emigration became for centuries a settled policy of the government for dealing with this order of problems.

The upper classes were also encouraged by the precedent set in Ireland, which served as an experimental laboratory for identifying and solving the problems of colonization: the ‘wild Irish’ standing for the Indians. What seemed to be the absolute strategic necessity of securing Ireland to English rule, and the resistance of the inhabitants to that rule, had suggested the idea of colonizing the sister island; and what could be done there could be done in Virginia. By the same token, Irish setbacks inured the English rich to Virginian ones: they became prepared, in some measure, for a long haul.

The same could not be said of the English poor, who were the instruments of these schemes. Ireland as a place of settlement had little attraction for them. The soldiery knew it as a place of bad pay, food shortages, incompetent officers, native treachery and native cruelty. The civilians heard of it as a place where civilians were massacred. Both, therefore, ‘had as lief go to the gallows as to the Irish wars’; Ireland and war were nearly synonymous terms.

All this applied, with the added terrors of the stormy Atlantic, distance and the unknown, to North America. Only the strongest motives could override a distaste for colonization based on a certain knowledge of some extremely unpleasant facts. How sensible that distaste was, how reliable that knowledge, was demonstrated when at last a permanent settlement was achieved in Virginia. The first inhabitants died easily and in large numbers; and 300 of the survivors returned to England in the first nine years of the little colony’s existence.

The quest of the seventeenth-century capitalist was therefore the same as that of today’s historian. What, both asked, could induce the labouring classes of England to abandon their homes for the dangers of the Virginia voyage?

The answer cannot, today, be taken direct from the men and women best capable of giving it. To us, the poorer social classes are dumb. They had few means to tell their thoughts to posterity, since they were largely illiterate and since the presses were mostly used for the purposes of their betters, which did not include making surveys of mass opinion. However, among those purposes was a wish to induce large numbers of the better sort of lowly Englishmen to sail for the West. Successful plantations could be built only out of human material superior to that which could be swept together from the prisons, brothels and slums of London and compelled to go to America. The result was a vast literature of propaganda and persuasion directed not so much at the man looking for an investment as at the man looking for a chance in life. From that literature can be learned what their contemporaries thought would move the working men. And on such matters contemporaries are likely to be broadly right. It is only a matter of using the evidence with caution. Who could not learn a lot about the motivation of England today from such a study of English advertising?

Hakluyt was the greatest author of promotion literature, but he had
countless imitators. One theme dominates overwhelmingly in their appeals to the people: land-hunger. ‘In Virginia land free and labour scarce; in England land scarce and labour plenty’ was the slogan that summed it up. In a pre-industrial age land was bound to be the most precious commodity, while the labour of his body was often all that a man had to sell. Virginia could, therefore, easily be presented as a land of unique opportunity. To the very poor, a country where an illimitable forest provided an inexhaustible supply of free fuel and free housing materials was patently a land ‘more like the Garden of Eden: which the Lord planted, than any part else of all Earth’. And, as has been noted, the very poor were very numerous in Tudor and Stuart England. So to them was sung:

To such as to Virginia

Do purpose to repair;

And when that they shall hither come,

Each man shall have his share,

Day wages for the labourer,

And for his more content,

A house and garden plot shall have

Besides ‘tis further meant

That every man shall have a post

And not thereof denied

Of general profit, as if that he

Twelve pounds, ten shillings paid.

The better-off could best be tempted by larger, if similar, inducements:

With what content shall the particular person employ himself there when he shall find that for a £12 10s. adventure he shall be made lord of 200 acres of land, to him and his heirs forever. And for the charge of transportation of himself, his family and tenants he shall be allotted for every person he carries 100 acres more. And what labourer soever shall transport himself thither at his own charge to have the like proportion of land upon the aforesaid conditions and be sure of employment to his good content for his present maintenance.
⁵

Not only was there plenty of the arable land that had grown so expensive, because so scarce, in England. In America there were none of the oppressive feudal laws that encumbered landholding in England: there, copyholders could become freeholders. No enclosing of common lands in America: there, men could eat sheep, not sheep men. It is little wonder that, according to Andrews, ‘the bulk of the colonial population was of the artisan and tenant class which in England held by some form of burgage or copyhold
tenure’.
⁶
Life in England held little charm for many such: they might reckon themselves fortunate to have a way of escape. Plague and famine are not pleasant things in themselves, and both were common; they also had disastrous effects on the economy, effects which, inevitably, bore hardest on the poorest. Misgovernment, as symbolized under James I by Alderman Cockayne’s scheme, which wrecked the cloth-trade in the 1620s, or international tragedy, such as the Thirty Years War, which completed Cockayne’s work, were only a little less inevitable. Human misfortune on a national or continental scale has been one of the most constant forces behind emigration to America from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.
⁷

The promoters, in fact, were in a seller’s market. All they had to do was to overcome memories of Ireland by doubling and redoubling their assurances that America was the true demi-Paradise. Nor did they fail. The Reverend Daniel Price displayed the true colours of Celtic fantasy when, in a sermon in 1609, he rhapsodized that Virginia was

Tyrus for colours, Basan for woods, 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 wanteth.
⁸

Not only Wales spoke in this strain. It was an English play which, four years before Mr Price gave tongue, asserted that in Virginia ‘wild boar is as common as our tamest Bacon is here’ (the wild boar is not an American species). Curiosity and ignorance about the New World could be advantageously manipulated in a hundred ways. Thus, in 1605 five Indians were brought over and paraded round the country, to its vast excitement.
⁹
They were an excellent advertisement for Virginia: the best sort of proof that it did actually exist. Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian ‘Princess’ whom John Rolfe married a few years later
¹⁰
and brought to England, must have been an even stronger stimulus to the imagination.

It is true that another motive, the religious, played a major, indeed a heroic part in stimulating English settlement in America; but it can best be studied through the history of New England. And many years before the Pilgrims sailed, the twin desires of the capitalists for gain and of the poor for land, both stimulated by the tribe of Hakluyt, succeeded at last in planting Englishmen permanently in the New World. As a motive, materialism had proved sufficient. In 1605 two companies, for London and for Plymouth, were chartered, their business being to establish colonies in America. After some exploratory journeys and yet another abortive attempt by the Plymouth Company to establish a settlement (this time at Sagadahoc, in what is now the state of Maine) the London Company founded the first enduring English plantation, on 24 May 1607, on the James river in Virginia. It was small, and already unfortunate, since of the company of 144 that had embarked in three little ships
(Susan Constant, Godspeed, Discovery)
only 105 had survived the voyage. The place they founded, Jamestown, has long been abandoned.
¹¹
But with Jamestown begins the history proper of the people known as Americans.

And cheerfully at sea

Success you still entice

To get the pearl and gold,

And ours to hold

Virginia
,

Earth’s only paradise.

Where nature hath in store

Fowl, venison, and fish,

And the fruitfull’st soil

Without your toil

Three harvests more,

All greater than your wish.

And the ambitious vine

Crowns with his purple mass

The cedar reaching high

To kiss the sky,

The cypress, pine,

And useful sassafras.
¹

Michael Drayton

Disaster dogged the first Virginians, and disappointment their patrons, for nearly twenty years.

The reasons were many and complicated.

Nothing, on a long view, could be said against the region that they had chosen for their experiment. The James river winds, wide and deep, fifty miles into the interior and is only one of a score of navigable waterways. The coast, in fact, is extravagantly indented and proved ideal for that
seaborne traffic with the outer world without which the colony could not have lived. The land itself, sloping gently upwards towards the foothills of the Alleghenies, was extremely fertile, rich in game and timber.
²
The local Indians, though fully capable of resenting and punishing injuries, were less formidable and thinner on the ground (thanks to European diseases) than many tribes to be encountered elsewhere, by others, later on. The frightful American climate -jungle-hot in summer, tundra-cold in winter, unbearably humid whenever it isn’t freezing – is, as it happens, far more agreeable in Virginia
³
than in most of the rest of the Eastern seaboard. Captain John Smith summed it up accurately:

The summer is hot as in Spain; the winter cold as in France or England. The heat of summer is in June, July, and August, but commonly the cold breezes assuage the vehemency of the heat. The chief of winter is half December, January, February, and half March. The cold is extreme sharp, but here the proverb is true, that no extreme long continueth.