White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (6 page)

The Spanish Ambassador to London, Don Pedro de Zuniga, was worried about the threat to Spanish interests in America. He complained to Popham and was assured that colonisation aimed only ‘to drive thieves out of England’. They were then to be

‘drowned in the Sea’.

In May 1606, Popham and Gorges organised a trial voyage. A vessel called the
Richard
was dispatched across the Atlantic with twenty-nine men to establish a bridgehead. Also on board were two of the captured Native Americans sent along to act as guides.

The expedition put Popham eight months ahead of the rival London Company, which was fitting out its small fleet in the Port of London as Christmas approached.

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THE JUDGE’S DREAM

The
Richard
never made landfall. Her captain, Henry Challons, ignored instructions to sail directly west and took the more traditional, and supposedly safer, route south, hugging the African coast before turning the helm westwards. He ran straight into a Spanish fleet off Santa Domingo and the
Richard
was captured.

Her ship’s company and her would-be colonisers ended up as galley slaves.

It is thought significant by historians that Popham made no effort to free his colonists. ‘It must be admitted,’ says his biographer, that

‘he was not full of urgency about the men’s recovery.’16 One reason suggested was that, ‘If they were . . . criminals it was natural that he should leave them to their fate.’ In a letter to Robert Cecil, Popham wrote: ‘If the natives were to be had again in my opinion it would serve to good purpose’, but he made no remarks about the others from the
Richard
.

A year later, the judge was ready to try again, with a much larger expedition. In May 1607, 120 men shipped out from Plymouth.

They sailed in two vessels: the
Mary and John
, captained by Raleigh Gilbert, a son of Sir Humphrey Gilbert; and the wonderfully named
Gift of God
, a shallow-draughted ‘flyboat’ designed to navigate shallow unexplored rivers. She was captained by Popham’s nephew, George, who was appointed leader of the expedition. Their orders were secret, not to be revealed until they arrived in the New World.

Skidwarres, one of the tribesmen captured by Waymouth, was sent as a guide. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was still very much involved in the venture but it was now so much the Lord Chief Justice’s project that the colony they planned would be known by everyone

– and by history, too – as the Popham colony.

Sir Ferdinando, it seems, contented himself with dreaming of his profits. One of his early biographers, the one-time Governor of Massachusetts, James Sullivan, described Gorges as wanting a colony run on feudal lines in which he ‘expected to enjoy the profits at his ease without crossing the Atlantic . . . his expectations were very great’.17

The
Gift of God
arrived at the mouth of the Kennebec on 13

August and the
Mary and John
followed three days later. The 120

colonists were rowed ashore to the windy headland and gathered 43

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together for what was first business of every European expedition to the New World – a service of thanks on dry land. The group thanked the Lord for a safe delivery. Next came the moment all those present had been waiting for – their orders. A list of secret instructions issued by Sir John Popham was taken from the sealed chest in which it had travelled. George Popham read them out.

Few details survive but the imperative was undoubtedly the search for gold. The ‘discovery of mines was the main intended benefit’, reported William Strachey, secretary of the Virginia Company who wrote a history of Virginia in 1612.18 Woe betide all if gold wasn’t found. According to historian George Chalmers, Judge Popham’s instructions ‘imperiously required that the interior should be explored for gold and threatened that in the event of failure the colonists should . . . remain as banished men in Virginia’.19

Convicts probably weren’t employed on the search but laboured to construct a star-shaped fort. From surviving records, it appears the fort was thrown up at a furious pace, mostly by unskilled labour. Walls, church, storehouse and around fifty wattle-and-daub dwellings were completed by winter. The trick, it seems, was to use simple building techniques demanding mainly muscle and sweat.

George Popham was in charge. He was said to be ‘timorously fearful to offend’ his peers but not, one would suspect, the gangs of men toiling on the banks of the Kennebec that autumn. The very name of Popham would have put the fear of God into most of them.

Plans began to go awry early. The search for ‘mines’ of gold or silver was led by 24-year-old Raleigh Gilbert. Week after week, they found nothing. Skidwarres deserted back to his people and relations with the local Wawenoc, Canibas and Arosaguntacook peoples

– initially promising – turned sour. The colonists’ behaviour was to blame. After one incident when four tribesmen were dragged by their hair aboard the
Gift of God
, an attack was mounted and fourteen colonists were killed. Then an inordinately grim winter descended. And all the time not a speck of gold.

A sudden piece of dramatic news appeared to have transformed their fortunes. Members of the Abenake tribe told Popham and Gilbert about a huge stretch of water just seven days’ walk away.

44

THE JUDGE’S DREAM

George Popham wrote a breathless letter to King James claiming the greatest discovery of the new century: ‘This cannot be other than the Southern ocean reaching to the regions of China.’ They had, he claimed, found the fabled North-West Passage. It was, of course, nonsense. The tribesmen were almost certainly referring to Moosehead Lake.

What became known as the ‘ill-fated Popham colony’ soon ended. After less than a year and a terrible winter, George Popham died, believing he had established a permanent foothold in the New World and would go down in history. ‘I die content,’ he wrote.

‘My name will always be associated with the first planting of the English race in the New World. My remains will not be neglected away from the home of my fathers and my kindred.’20

George Popham was wrong. He was forgotten and so, almost, was the colony. Raleigh Gilbert took over the leadership, supposedly with great plans for expansion. Instead, he packed up and went home. His change of heart surprised everyone, but not for long.

The
Mary and John
had just returned from England packed with provisions – and with news: Gilbert’s brother, Sir John Gilbert, was dead. Raleigh was heir to his estate and title. It must have been a bombshell for the youngest of seven children, forced to seek his fortune in the New World, but he did not hesitate. He was going home.

There had been another death, too. This was the news that really gripped the colony: Sir John Popham had died. The ogre was no more. No retribution for failure awaited them on the quay at Plymouth. Everybody could now go home, and everybody did.

The Popham colony decamped for England en masse, leaving the fort to decay.

The colony had lasted little more than a year and the colonists returned with little more than a few hundred furs. Most of those involved blamed the dreadful winter. Across the northern hemisphere it had been the worst in memory. ‘All our hopes have been frozen to death,’ wrote Sir Ferdinando Gorges.21 The returning colonists reported that America was ‘over cold, and in respect of that not habitable by our nation’. In years to come, some patriotic American historians expressed relief that the venture had 45

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failed. ‘The abortion of Sagadahocke was the first, the last, the only attempt of the English Corporation to fasten a moral pestilence on our northern shores,’ declared the nineteenth-century historian, John Wingate Thorton.22

The Popham colony might have failed but its philosophy would be revived many miles to the south, where the rival colony, named Jamestown, succeeded in putting down permanent roots. Within a decade, convicts and other representatives of England’s cast-offs would begin to arrive in the New World with the King’s blessing.

46

CHAPTER THREE

THE MERCHANT PRINCE

Six hundred and fifty miles south of the Popham colony, the London Company had secured its own precarious foothold in Virginia. Its settlers would face far worse than Popham’s men and they would survive, though only just. It would be here, along the James River, that England would begin to dump its unwanted and treat them like livestock. One eighteenth-century writer would call conditions in the colony ‘a worse than Egyptian bondage’.

The London Company’s expedition was led by a fierce one-armed veteran. Christopher Newport had made his reputation more than a decade earlier, plundering and burning on the Spanish Main as one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s captains. He was grizzled and gruff and could have accumulated enough money to retire long before the London Company approached him. In 1592, he helped to capture the
Madre de Dios
, the huge Spanish treasure ship seized off Santa Domingo. Captain Newport sailed her back to England, the richest prize that English privateers ever recorded. She carried gold and silver worth about £15 million at today’s prices. It is not known what Christopher Newport’s share was. As well as bullion, the
Madre de Dios
was said to be carrying a fabulous hoard of precious stones. The gems had vanished by the time Newport dropped anchor in home waters and welcomed visitors aboard.

Every member of the crew is thought to have shared in them, presumably the captain amongst them.

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The London Company put Christopher Newport in command of a difficult group of men on board three ships. There was a 120-ton merchantman named the
Susan Constant
and two smaller vessels, the
Godspeed
and the
Discovery
. Spread among them were 120 men and boys. A few were craftsmen and twenty were listed as labourers. The biggest group comprised young ‘gentlemen’ of one sort or another who had contracted to stay with the company for seven years as tenants. They included young bloods dreaming of easy riches and troublesome ne’er-do-wells dispatched by their families to get rid of them or teach them a lesson. One member of the party described them as ‘unruly gallants . . . sent to Virginia to escape ill destinies’. This voyage into the unknown was, he suggested, a chance for parents to ‘disburden themselves of lascivious sons, masters of bad servants and wives of ill husbands’.1

Later, the alleged misbehaviour of this gallant band would be used to justify the suspension of individual rights for the majority of colonial settlers.

On this first voyage, it was the behaviour of the leaders that most threatened the enterprise. They were domineering, fractious characters. There was Newport’s number two, the aggressively self-confident Bartholomew Gosnold, whose own expedition five years earlier had done so much to turn English eyes towards America again. There was the former soldier Edward Maria Wingfield, who had mortgaged his estate to take a block of shares in the venture. He was the only major stockholder coming along to risk his life as well as his money. There was Captain John Martin, the son of London’s leading goldsmith, who was obsessed with finding gold; and George Percy, the arrogant brother of the Duke of Northumberland. Most disruptive of all was the turbulent adventurer John Smith, a yeoman farmer’s son who, according to his own account, would one day be saved from death by the Native American princess Pocahontas.

Smith was a vividly persuasive writer who portrayed himself as the heroic saviour of the colony and perhaps he was. He would certainly go down in history as one of the most significant players in the American story.

Of the rest of the party, the histories of some gentlemen on board are known but nothing about the ‘fry’ – the scattering of 48

THE MERCHANT PRINCE

servants and the twenty labourers brought to do the manual work.

In the 1600s, there was no Robert Tressell to record their stories.

All we know is that they were ‘waged men’ and that there would soon be complaints that there weren’t nearly enough of them to build a colony.

The flotilla set sail from London in Christmas week 1606, watched wistfully, no doubt, by an eminent prisoner in the Tower, the inspiration of them all, Sir Walter Raleigh. The battlements of his prison must have afforded a fine view of the three ships as they upped anchor and made their way downstream. Of all the spectators who witnessed them depart, Raleigh was among the few who could have had an inkling of how momentous the event taking place might prove to be.

It was a meticulously planned expedition, equipped with mining and building tools, large stocks of arms and ammunition and food calculated to feed everyone for a year. Carried in Christopher Newport’s cabin was a sealed list of instructions from the Royal Council for Virginia that were to be opened within twenty-four hours of landing. In five pages, the instructions covered everything from relations with the ‘natural people of the country’ to who should lead the hunt for gold. The document also contained the names of seven men picked to form an administrative council that would choose a president and rule the colony. Not even those named yet knew who they were.

Newport’s problems began when, like Henry Challons, he chose the longer route to America via the Azores. A series of setbacks en route saw the party spend nineteen fractious weeks at sea, eating into their food supplies and into their tempers. Long claustrophobic days at sea could have fatal results. On both the first circumnavigation of the world by Ferdinand Magellan and the second by Sir Francis Drake, shipboard relations took such terrible turns that the commanders hanged good friends, on both occasions crying mutiny. Newport found himself similarly placed, as the collection of super-sized egos around him clashed. Finally, at a stopover in the Azores, he erected gallows, fully intending to execute John Smith.

Although Newport relented and postponed the execution, the 49

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rancour and bickering continued up to the moment of landing.