White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (3 page)

Inevitably, lawlessness increased. A statute of 1572 begins with the lament:

All the parts of this realm of England and Wales be presently with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars exceedingly pestered, by means whereof daily happeneth in the same realm horrible murders, thefts, and other great outrage, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, and to the great annoyance of the common weal.4

One of the most bloodstained figures of the age, Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Walter Raleigh, promoted the idea of finding a solution in America. Gilbert has been left in the historical shade by his brilliant sibling but he was as much a Renaissance Man as Raleigh. He was born into minor gentry in the West Country and 22

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began his career as a page to the future Queen Elizabeth, before taking to soldiering, whereupon he gained a reputation for cold-blooded ruthlessness. However, he was also a poet, classical scholar and visionary who inspired a generation of fellow Englishmen with thoughts of empire in America.

Humphrey Gilbert made his mark during the religious wars that gripped France in the early 1560s. This was a saga of massacre, torture and atrocity exemplified by the Huguenot captain who wore a necklace of priests’ ears around his neck. Nearly a century later, Pascal wrote of this conflict: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’ While still in his early twenties, Gilbert headed a contingent of 1,000

English Protestants fighting on the Huguenot side. He exhibited dash and bravery but cruelty, too, making a practice of taking no prisoners. Those who were captured were invariably hanged.

Impressed as always by young daredevils, in 1569 the Queen put him in command of English troops in Munster, where the English responded to a revolt by launching an ethnic-cleansing campaign to replace the native Irish with plantations of English Protestants.

In this gory arena, the ambitious young firebrand demonstrated an implacability unsurpassed by either Oliver Cromwell or William of Orange a century later. In every stronghold that offered resistance, Gilbert slaughtered wholesale, scouring the countryside for anyone who got away. ‘I slew all those . . . that did belong to, feed, accompany or maintain any outlaws or traitors . . . how many lives whatsoever it cost putting man, woman and child to the sword.’ The severed heads of his victims were stuck on rows of pikes on either side of the path leading to his tent. Gilbert explained that it brought ‘great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their fathers, brothers, children, kinfolk and friends’. Tens of thousands died; Humphrey Gilbert was knighted.5

It is one of the paradoxes of human nature that the most ruthless often have a well-developed sense of the romantic. And so it was with Sir Humphrey. In France, he is thought to have met seafarers who had crossed the Atlantic and to have developed a fascination with America. Marriage to a Kentish heiress called Anne Aucher in 1570 enabled him to retire from the Queen’s service, buy a seat in 23

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Parliament and devote himself to what soon became his obsession.

Gilbert believed the North American continent was an island and – like a number of contemporaries – burned to prove the existence of a North-West Passage to China through the Arctic Circle. After studying every manuscript and classical text that he could find, he produced a scholarly-looking discourse to support his own theory and with it – almost as an aside – the first detailed blueprint for English colonisation of North America.6 It was said that, ‘His geography, if learned and often ingenious, was mostly preposterous.’7 However, it was convincing enough for the Queen and her council, and in 1578 Gilbert was granted leave to go ahead.

He was given six years to found a colony.

His motives weren’t, of course, purely altruistic. For Gilbert

– as for so many empire builders – personal aggrandisement and the national interest happily went hand in hand. He ordered up written versions of the stories of a sailor called David Ingram who’d been shipwrecked in Florida and spent two years trekking through North America. Ingram had just returned with fantastical tales of native women wearing ‘plates of gold like armour’, men decorated with ‘pearls as big as one’s thumb’ and houses ‘upheld by pillars of gold, silver, and crystal’. If gold there was, Gilbert aimed to grab the lion’s share. In his scheme, the envisaged territory would be a fiefdom of the Crown that he would rule, taking an eighty per cent share of any gold or silver. The humble servant would retain twenty per cent for his Queen.

Gilbert’s blueprint covered everything, from the size of the first colony (a mere nine million acres), right down to street layouts and the number of churches. In retrospect, the most significant part of his plan was the suggestion of where to find the colony’s manpower. He proposed transporting ‘such needy people of our country which now trouble the commonwealth and through want here at home are forced to commit outrageous offences whereby they are daily consumed with the gallows’.8 It is difficult to reconcile the humanity infusing this passage with the butcher of Munster. One historian has suggested that Gilbert was mellowed by his experiences in Ireland. A more reliable explanation may be that self-interest hid behind altruism’s lofty mask.

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There were precedents for Gilbert’s scheme. Convict labour had featured from the earliest European forays into the Americas. In Spain, the difficulties of persuading free men to try their luck in the unknown had prompted King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1497 to promise a pardon to convicts facing death if they would agree to go on Christopher Columbus’s third expedition. Half a century later, the Marquis de la Roche, an old adversary of Gilbert’s, took his pick from the Breton jails to man successive expeditions to parts of the New World that Gilbert had an eye on. It was said that de la Roche’s ships were ‘deep freighted with vice’
.
9

At first, the Queen was reluctant to let Gilbert go. She was anxious to keep her former page close at hand to stamp down further eruptions in Ireland. But Gilbert was backed by his persuasive half-brother Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth’s emerging favourite, and she finally agreed. The letters patent allowed him to claim vast tracts of America in the Queen’s name. Only those areas to the south already ruled by ‘Christian princes’ were officially precluded, i.e.

those already invaded by the Spanish and Portuguese. However, with her habitual eye on the main chance, Elizabeth secretly gave Gilbert the go-ahead to plunder the Spanish and Portuguese wherever he found them. In an equally typical move, the Queen would not fund the venture. Gilbert had to raise the money from friends and relations and any adventurous spirits who agreed to accompany him. He recorded how he only managed to fit out his fleet of ten ships after ‘selling the clothes off my wife’s back’.10

In 1578, he set sail with a large fleet and 500 men, including at least one convict who had been reprieved from execution and handed over to him. His 27-year-old half-brother Walter furnished his own ship and came too. For Gilbert, it must have been a mouth-watering prospect. The royal licence entitled him to total control over a land expected to be awash with gold and silver just like the Spanish American colonies. But a combination of bad luck, infighting, bad weather and bad leadership turned the expedition into a disaster when it was barely out of English waters. A decimated fleet returned home without even crossing the Atlantic.

Undeterred, Gilbert tried again in 1583. Without Raleigh this time, he followed in the track of the fishing fleets to the Grand 25

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Banks and made landfall at the bleak fishing outpost of St John’s in Newfoundland. The Basque, Portuguese and French fishermen already at anchor there were no doubt bewildered as Gilbert flourished his royal commission and claimed Newfoundland as English. He then issued licences for them all to continue fishing and just as suddenly departed. His fleet headed west and south, casting along the dangerous eastern seaboard for a site to settle
.

It was not to be, however. ‘Foul weather increased with fogs and mists’ and Gilbert’s largest ship foundered and was lost.11 Morale collapsed and demands grew for a return home. Most of the great Elizabethan seafarers at one time or another were threatened by mutiny in similar situations and most faced down the threat. Gilbert, however, could not. He reluctantly conceded an immediate return but lest anyone think him a coward he announced that he would brave the storms on the journey home by sailing on the smallest, most vulnerable ship, a ten-ton brig called the
Squirrel
. It was a typical act of Elizabethan braggadocio – and fatal.

The
Squirrel
was overloaded with guns, tackle and provisions.

When the fleet encountered heavy seas, Gilbert was urged to transfer to the comparative safety of his flagship the
Golden Hind
but refused. He vowed that he would not desert the shipmates with whom he had faced so many perils. A storm developed and the
Squirrel
began to founder. Gilbert’s last recorded words, shouted to the
Golden Hind
, had a fatalism that made him more famous in England than anything he had previously done.

‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land,’ he called and resumed reading his book as waves broke over the tiny vessel.12 The book was said to have been Thomas More’s
Utopia.
The manner of his death made Gilbert a national hero. Three centuries later, the image of the visionary adventurer swept away under the waves was still being immortalised in verse by Longfellow: Alas! the land-wind failed,

And ice-cold grew the night;

And nevermore, on sea or shore,

Should Sir Humphrey see the light.

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Walter Raleigh waited just long enough to be sure that Gilbert had indeed drowned, then seized his half-brother’s mantle and made the American project his own. The Queen, already showering favours on Raleigh, was prevailed upon to grant him the same free hand given to Gilbert, and Raleigh set to work selling America to would-be backers. Some later romantics would portray Raleigh as one of their own. But essentially, as the historian David Beers Quinn puts it: ‘He was an acute and hard-dealing businessman.

Colonization was a business which he undertook to promote.’13

His first step was to commission what was effectively a market report on the New World.

The man he employed to undertake it was Richard Hakluyt, then at the start of a career that would make him the world’s leading geographer. A clergyman by profession, Hakluyt had become fascinated as a student with the ‘discoveries’ that were opening up the furthest oceans. He made himself an expert in the field by translating every work of navigation and exploration he could find and interviewing every explorer and seafarer he could track down.

Like a sixteenth-century paparazzo, he pounded from port to port to greet the Drakes and Hawkinses and Gilberts returning from their latest trips of piracy in order to cast an eye over their ships’

logs.

Hakluyt had just published his first major work on geography when Raleigh, with his rare eye for young talent, hired him to write about America. The result was a persuasive piece of propaganda, the
Discourse Concerning Western Planting.
Echoing Gilbert’s theme of an England being engulfed by the lawless poor and America as her salvation, Hakluyt claimed that the country was so populous that people were ‘ready to eat up one another’. In their desperation, so many had turned to crime that ‘all the prisons of the land are daily pestered and stuffed full of them, where either they pitifully pine away or . . . are miserably hanged’. How much better, Hakluyt suggested evangelically, to put the wretches to work in a colony overseas. He reeled off a list of America’s resources and set out the different industries that should flourish there. There were more than forty of them, ranging from tar making, gold mining and cotton picking to diving for pearls. It 27

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is a mark of Hakluyt’s judgment that almost all would one day thrive in America.

While Hakluyt was still writing, two of Raleigh’s ships were probing the estuaries of what is now South Carolina for a possible settlement site. In 1584, they sent home reports ranging from the heartening to the ecstatic:

The goodliest soil under the cope of heaven . . . we have found here maize . . . whose ear yielded corn for bread four hundred upon one ear, and the cane makes very good and perfect sugar . . . it is the . . . most pleasing territory of the world. The territory and soil of the Chesapeake . . . for pleasantness of seat, for temperature of climate, for fertility of soil and for the commodity of the sea . . . is not to be excelled by any other whatsoever.14

The next year, a fleet of settlers was dispatched. The story of Raleigh’s ‘lost colony’ is well known: the fateful selection of the mosquito-ridden island of Roanoke as a site; Raleigh’s celebrated naming of the colony Virginia after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen; the three-year struggle to sustain this precarious foothold; the disastrous failure to re-supply the colonists during the war with Spain; the colonists’ unexplained disappearance and the futile expeditions launched by Raleigh in later years to try to find his lost people.

Queen Elizabeth’s beneficence had made Raleigh wealthy: he is reported to have appeared at court encrusted with jewels from head to foot. But the American ventures drained his resources.

He reputedly spent £40,000 on his voyages – equivalent to approximately £6 million in today’s money – and, although he remained obsessed with Virginia, in 1590 he leased out the patent entitling him to colonise it, retaining the right to twenty per cent of all gold or silver discovered – the same cut he had agreed to pay the Queen when his hopes were higher. He also retained the right to veto any other would-be colonists in Virginia.

The new holders of the patent included three of his friends: Richard Hakluyt, John White, the nominal Governor of Raleigh’s 28