White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (4 page)

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colony who had returned to Britain before the colonists vanished, and Thomas Smythe, a young man destined to play a big role in bringing white slavery to Virginia. Smythe had his own vision of the New World and would become the driving force in the Virginia project.

Like Gilbert and Raleigh, Smythe had made his mark in war, both in Ireland and on the Continent, and, like them, he was much more than a simple soldier. He was a financial genius and no Englishman better fits the title ‘merchant prince’. He could be called England’s – or, indeed, America’s – first tycoon.

Smythe’s father, also a Thomas, was a rich merchant who during the reign of Bloody Mary had secured one of the most lucrative franchises in the country. He became chief collector of customs duties, called the ‘farmer of customs’. This involved paying an agreed annual sum to the royal exchequer and then collecting what he could. ‘Customer Smythe’, as he became known, kept the job when Elizabeth came to the throne, and made a fortune. Some of the proceeds were used to back the piratical expeditions of Drake and later of Raleigh, his son’s friend. Both would have been hugely successful investments.

However, young Thomas left the Customer standing. This was the era of the first joint stock companies, those harbingers of capitalism that opened up world trade and would eventually make Britain the dominant world commercial power. Smythe Junior would play a leading role in almost all of them. Wherever England traded in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Smythe left his fingerprints. In a ruthless, cut-throat age, he conjured deals with rulers across the globe, from the Emperor of Japan to the Tsar of Russia. Just about every major English company that started up in a thirty-five-year period was either initiated or run by him – the East India Company, the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the Somers Island Company, the North-West Passage Company, the Merchant Adventurers and, eventually, the Virginia Company.

By the time Thomas Smythe bought into the Virginia enterprise he was well on his way to becoming the wealthiest merchant in London.

With money and commercial success went power. Smythe rose 29

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through the ranks of London aldermen to become city auditor, Sheriff of the City of London and captain of the city’s trained bands (London’s militia), giving him command of 2,000 men. He also succeeded his father as collector of customs, reportedly increasing the take by 100 per cent.

Smythe was at the centre of the debates over the lawless and the poor that raged during the 1590s. The decade had started with record harvests but England was soon hit by the gravest agrarian crisis since the Black Death two centuries earlier. For five successive years, the skies opened and the harvest failed. The price of corn doubled and starvation and plague spread across the nation.

Following what was supposed to be a triumphal tour of the realm to mark victory over the Spanish Armada, the Queen complained that ‘paupers are everywhere’. Magistrates were ordered to take control of corn supplies and profiteers were punished. In Colchester in Essex, aldermen were required to donate loans of

£20, and councillors £10, to buy corn to feed the poor. A baker was appointed in every ward to bake ‘three seams of bread’ a day to give to the hungry.

Parliament’s response was to introduce another new law in the late 1590s to control the poor. One of the most daunting and corrupt of Elizabeth’s ministers, her Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham, drew up the bill; Smythe served on the grand committee that debated it. The ferocious measure required parishes to support the ‘impotent poor’ (the old, disabled and sick) but specified severe punishment for the able-bodied, those ‘rogues and vagabonds’

who, in the view of the better placed, should be able to look after themselves. Tinkers, gypsies, begging scholars, palm readers, wandering musicians and actors were all defined as vagabonds. One William Shakespeare, who had possibly been a wandering actor not many years before, must have felt relieved that his aristocratic patronage would have protected him from the act.

Among the punishments was transportation. The new law decreed that those

who would not be reformed of their roguish kind of life . . .

shall be banished out of this realm and . . . shall be conveyed 30

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into such parts beyond the seas as shall be at any time hereafter for that purpose assigned by the Privy Council.

But transported where? At this stage, it evidently didn’t matter. The imperative was simply to get rid of undesirables. Sir John Popham announced that the act would be used ‘to drive from here thieves and traitors to be drowned in the sea’. But as the Elizabethan era drew to a close, the legislation lay in abeyance, unused for several years while the country became consumed with the succession to the throne.

During the plotting that developed in the Queen’s last years, Smythe’s contribution to history was nearly cut short. He seems to have been a thoroughly political creature, with a reassuring, all-things-to-all-men persona that he deployed to recruit allies where he could. One friendship he established was with Elizabeth’s greatest favourite: the flamboyant, vain Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

In 1596, the budding merchant prince emerged from his counting house to join the Earl of Essex in an expedition that climaxed in the famous attack on Cadiz. There was no military or political purpose; it was simply a raid for plunder and it was a financial triumph. The city was sacked and the raiders returned home laden with booty. One report has Essex knighting Smythe for bravery on the Spanish dockside.

Given their rapport, it was hardly surprising that when Essex tried to mount a coup d’état against Elizabeth in 1601 he might have expected support from Smythe and his city militia. He was to be disappointed. On the morning of the coup, Essex arrived at Smythe’s door with armed supporters, only to find the clearly agitated merchant refusing to help. Grabbing the bridle of the Earl’s horse, Smythe urged his friend to give himself up and then retreated into his mansion.

Essex surrendered later that day and was swiftly executed.

Thomas Smythe nearly followed him. Under interrogation, the Earl’s supporters claimed that Smythe had egged Essex on and vowed to deploy his militia in support. Suspicions were heightened by a report that an emissary from the Earl had delivered a letter to 31

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Smythe’s wife just before the coup. There was also the matter of the Earl’s arrival at Smythe’s house. Smythe and his wife were hauled off to the Tower of London. Denying everything, Smythe claimed he had had no communication with the Earl for years and that he met him on the fateful morning merely to pass on a message from the Lord Mayor.

As stories go, it was a lamer excuse than told by many a commoner condemned for treason and sent to Tyburn’s triple tree, there to be castrated, disembowelled, hanged, beheaded and dismembered.

Smythe was spared, perhaps because he had lent Elizabeth £31,000

to help equip the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada, perhaps because it was thought not to be financially prudent to kill the richest man in the country. Whatever the reason, Smythe was deprived of all his offices and ordered to pay a substantial fine. In the language of the Privy Council, Thomas Smythe had ‘forgotten his duty to her Majesty’.

The great merchant did not languish long in disgrace. In March 1603, the 69-year-old Elizabeth was overcome by an illness that signalled the end of her long reign. Her successor, James I, was generous to all those who had been linked to the Essex rebellion, including Thomas Smythe. The main reason was that James himself had plotted with Essex. Within a month of assuming the English throne, James not only restored Smythe to all his offices but also knighted him. Sir Thomas Smythe would be James I’s chief adviser on trade, with a special interest in the colonisation of the New World. Smythe would hold this position for the rest of his life and use it to ensure that when England’s new colony was eventually planted in America it would survive, whatever the human cost in life or liberty. He had taken the first step three years later when he joined a race to plant the first permanent colony in Virginia and found that his rival was the most feared man in the realm, Sir John Popham.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE JUDGE’S DREAM

The Kennebec River runs gently down through the wooded uplands of Maine to the sea. Its source is Moosehead Lake, a stretch of water so large that it was once mistaken for the China Sea. From this great lake, the Kennebec flows 150 miles through New England before draining into the North Atlantic near a windy point of land called Sabino Head. It was here that 400 years ago a fortress was built by Englishmen used by other Englishmen as their chattels or slaves.

Fort St George would be formidable had it survived. A blueprint discovered nearly 300 years later shows it with thick battlements, great crenellated gates, several mansions, a church, fifty other buildings and a walled garden. A dozen cannon point towards the sea. Construction was well under way when the settlement was suddenly deserted, leaving the fort to crumble back into the earth.

Today, the fort exists as the merest outline etched in the landscape, revealing little of the philosophy or vision that impelled men to build it. The settlement was the project of Sir John Popham, one of the most powerful men in the government of Queen Elizabeth I. Popham was the first to put to the test Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s proposal for colonising America with the dregs of England. What Popham tried would one day be one of the most hated features of English rule in America; ambitions 33

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buried at Fort St George were to live on and change the face of North America.

Work on the short-lived fortress had begun in August 1607.

It was to be the centrepiece of a new colony. A charter issued the previous year by King James I restated England’s claim to ‘Virginia’

– the entire length of the eastern American seaboard from Canada to Florida – and authorised the establishment of two colonies. One, under the aegis of Sir Thomas Smythe, was to be in the south, between the thirty-eighth and forty-first parallels. The other, under the guidance of the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham, was to be located to the north, in New England.

The charter signalled a new approach to England’s hoped-for conquest and share in the New World. Hitherto, all England’s colonial ventures in America had been individualistic forays, each one ultimately dependent on the vision, finances and staying power of one man. By the early 1600s, this was starting to be recognised as a fatal weakness. An anonymous broadside circulating at the time reflected on twenty years of failure: ‘Private purses are cold comfort to adventurers, and have ever been found fatal to all enterprises hitherto undertaken by the English, by reason of delays, jealousies, and unwillingness to back that project which succeeded not at the first attempt.’1

The broadside argued for ‘a stock’, a joint stock company that could take a long view and ride the kind of setbacks that had been the ruin of so many previous ventures. Joint stock companies were relatively new entities in which individuals owned shares they could sell without reference to their fellow stockholders. These companies were opening the far corners of the globe to English trade, so why not a joint stock company to fund the next big English push to colonise America?

Interest in America had been largely dormant since 1590, when the financial drain persuaded Walter Raleigh to give up his Roanoke adventure. Twelve years went by and then a new round of exploration began. It was led by Bartholomew Gosnold, a friend of Richard Hakluyt and Raleigh. Accompanied by Bartholomew Gilbert, one of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s six sons, Gosnold landed in New England in 1602 and stayed for several months, trading and exploring.

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They returned with sensational reports that rhapsodised over the natural riches of the New World:

The soil is fat and lusty . . . Cherry trees like ours, but the stalks bear the blossom or fruit which are like a cluster of Grapes . . . all sorts of fowls, whose young ones we took and ate at our pleasure . . . Grounds nuts as big as eggs.2

Gosnold summed up their reaction as they caught the first sight of all this plenty: ‘We stood a while as ravished.’

The following year, a merchant from Bristol, Martin Pring, landed in Virginia looking for the sassafras tree, the root of which was then used to treat the ‘French pox’ and is today, in a marvellous piece of serendipity, used in the perfumery trade. Two years after Pring, George Waymouth came looking for a settlement site in what is now Maine. Pring and Waymouth were down-to-earth seamen with none of Gosnold’s descriptive flair. But they did enough to stoke the fires of enthusiasm for America still more.

‘The land is full of God’s Good blessings,’ said Pring.3 Waymouth made the same point more graphically, returning with intriguing samples of plant and animal life and five captured Native Americans all London wanted to see.

Despite the fact that Gosnold and the other mariners had found not a scrap of evidence for the existence of gold mines, these expeditions sparked new speculation about gold waiting to be discovered in America. The fantastical stories of ‘golden cities’

brought back three decades earlier by that wandering seaman David Ingram had not been forgotten and American gold became the talk of the taverns and counting houses. The Spanish dream of
El Dorado
, the golden man, had led to the discovery of fantastic treasures in South America. The English, it was argued, would find theirs in the northern continent.

A taste of the fantastic hopes that developed can be had from Ben Jonson’s satire on gold fever,
Eastward Ho!
, staged at the same time as Shakespeare was putting on
Macbeth
. Jonson imagines the lost Roanoke colonists marrying into the local population and living in a society literally covered in gold. ‘Why, man,’ exclaims a character, 35