White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (7 page)

When the flotilla finally sighted mainland America, at what should have been a moment for rejoicing, a row broke out. It was just after dawn on a Sunday in April 1607. The ships had been blown by a storm to the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. When Newport opted to make for the invitingly sheltered waters of the bay, he was furiously criticised by Bartholomew Gosnold, who insisted it was a bad decision and tried to force Newport to head out again and steer northwards. Newport indignantly refused.

They entered the bay and anchored, sending a party of twenty men ashore to scout around. According to John Smith, the party was met with a shower of arrows from the natives. A volley of musket fire from the
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put the attackers to flight but it was a bad start.

What followed in the Chesapeake would be far grimmer than anything experienced by Sir John Popham’s colonists. The latter would be lambasted for scurrying back home after a harsh winter and a small number of deaths. Disease, desertion and attack by Native Americans cut the London Company’s numbers far more savagely over a similar period – and cut them again and again after reinforcements arrived. As a modern British historian puts it: ‘The more the early history of Virginia is studied the more it must (and did) appear miraculous that the colony survived.’2

Sir Thomas Smythe and the other members of the Royal Council of Virginia had not expected the expedition to be anything less than hard going, as was evident from the secret instructions. They were the foundations for what Richard Hakluyt would later call

‘a prison without walls’.3 One instruction barred anyone from quitting the colony: ‘Suffer no man to return but by passport.’

Another banned all communication with the homeland. And one warned of ‘disorder’, directing that in laying out the settlement every street should be wide and straight so that with ‘low field pieces you may command every street throughout’.

It is doubtful that all the instructions were read out to every one of the 120 men and boys in the party. If they had been read out, it is unlikely that many would have been especially bothered. Most of the young adventurers were too gripped by gold fever to worry 50

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about much else. They spent several weeks exploring, endowing every striking spur and landmark with an English name, usually of a British royal or a Protestant saint, like tomcats marking their territory. Finally, they identified what seemed the ideal location for a fort, on an easily defensible island on the James River, and so Fort James was established. It would later become known as Jamestown. The site proved anything but ideal.

The fragility of the project was swiftly brought home to them

– or should have been. Having picked the site for their fort, the most capable leaders, Gosnold and Newport, left others to begin constructing it and took men off on a week-long search for gold.

While they were gone, an attack by Algonquin tribesmen almost overwhelmed those left behind. The colonists were busy clearing the ground and were so oblivious to danger that firearms had not even been distributed. When the attack came, it was claimed that 200 or more tribesmen were involved. As the Algonquin charged out of concealment in the woods, several ‘gentlemen’ with guns just managed to hold them off but it took cannon and musketry from the
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to turn the attackers back. It was a close call: ‘Most of the Council was hurt, a boy slain in the pinnace and thirteen or fourteen more hurt.’4 For days, the future Jamestown was under virtual siege.

On–off war with the local inhabitants became par for the course.

Little was known in England about the Algonquin people who had named the great inlet around which they lived, Chesapeake, ‘Great Shellfish Bay’. The secret instructions called for ‘great care’ to be taken not to offend the ‘natural people of the country’ but also assumed the worst. The colonists were instructed that if they shot at ‘the naturals’, they should employ the best marksmen: ‘If you miss, they will think your weapons not so terrible.’ No doubt the still greater shock-and-awe capacity of a
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broadside was added comfort for the colonists.

One of the other forces undermining the colonists – disease –

struck almost as quickly as the Algonquin. The riverside site chosen for Jamestown was on top of a mosquito-ridden swamp, used by some of the party as a latrine and drinking well. Within a month of the departure of Christopher Newport’s flotilla for England in 51

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July for supplies and new recruits, the colonists began to die in ones and twos. The suffering has been depicted with gothic gusto by later historians but the roll call of death recorded by one of the colonists is coldly eloquent:

The sixth of August there died John Asbie of the bloody Flux.

The ninth day died George Flower of the swelling. The tenth day died William Brewster, gentleman, of a wound given by the Savages. The fourteenth day Jerome Alikock, ancient, died of a wound, the same day Francis Midwinter, Edward Morris, Corporal, died suddenly. The fifteenth day there died Edward Browne and Stephen Galthrope. The sixteenth day there died Thomas Gower, gentleman. The seventeenth day there died Thomas Mounsley. The eighteenth day there died Robert Pennington and John Martine, gentlemen. The nineteenth day died Drew Piggase, gentleman. The two and twentieth day of August there died Captain Bartholomew Gosnold one of our Council.5

More than half would be dead by the time Christopher Newport returned in October. He had left 104 alive. Forty-eight were still living on his return. Most of the reinforcements he brought would soon die, too; so would the majority of the following year’s intake because hunger followed on disease. Too little food had been sent, too much consumed in the early days and too much lost to rats that had migrated with the settlers to the New World.

There had been a belief that sufficient supplies could be traded from the Native Americans to tide the colony over till its own crops were harvested. This was a terrible mistake. In 1608, the rats devoured the first crop of English corn and the fledgling community was driven ‘alternately to negotiate, trade, or raid for foodstuffs’. But none of that was sufficient and famine set in. The

‘starving time’ was approaching.

As conditions worsened, the leaders on the ruling council squabbled and connived and replaced one another. One was hanged for mutiny. In this sorry atmosphere, some young bloods vanished and somehow made their way back to England. But 52

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others were still hypnotised by gold and they remained. It was the same with the colony’s backers in London. The company kept the money flowing on the premise that gold and other rich minerals, principally copper, would be found eventually.

They thought they had found gold on several occasions. A report by an Irishman, Francis Magill, obtained by the Spanish Council of State, claimed that rich samples of gold, silver and copper had been sent to England. Magill reckoned the authorities blocked all communications home not to prevent bad news getting out but quite the opposite – to prevent the outside world knowing that immense wealth was there for the taking.

One of the most embarrassing episodes in the search for gold occurred after a mineral expert from England noticed a glittering clay-like substance used by one of the local tribes to daub their bodies. The expert thought the glitter came from specks of gold.

A party of colonists, led by an Algonquin guide, trekked into the hills to locate the mine from which the gold-bearing clay was extracted. They returned with a barrel load of the stuff. An excited Christopher Newport assumed that he was about to become a very rich man and hurried back to England in the
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with the barrel of clay and the minerals expert.

The impact of the news of the ‘gold’ on those of the settlers who were still alive was described succinctly by John Smith: ‘There was now no talk, no hope, no work, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold.’6 Smith was a lone voice on the council urging other priorities.

In England, Newport and his expert presented the barrel and its glittering contents to Sir Walter Cope, the Chancellor, who was a member of the Royal Council of Virginia. An ecstatic Cope passed the news to Robert Cecil. ‘There is but a barrel full of the earth,’

he said, ‘but there seems a kingdom full of the ore.’ He counselled Cecil that even digging down a couple of spadefuls ‘the ore appears on every part as a solid body, a treasure endlessly proportioned by God’.7

Almost immediately, Sir Walter had to swallow his words. ‘This other day we sent you news of gold, and this day we cannot return you so much as copper. Our new discovery is more like to prove 53

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the land of Canaan than the land of Ophir.’ Four tests by the most experienced men in London showed it was fool’s gold. In the end,

‘all turned to vapour’.

It is not known whether the rethink in London was prompted by this episode or by the increasing number of disaster stories coming from the colony – the deaths and desertions – or by the drain on funds, but rethink there was. The thrust of it was set out in the Jacobean equivalent of a position paper drawn up for Sir Thomas Smythe, treasurer of the London Company, in the early weeks of 1609, under the heading ‘The Colonising of Virginia’. Running to nearly 12,000 words, the unsigned document was an assessment of Virginia by someone closely attuned to James I’s prejudices and ambitions. It urged that gold should be forgotten and a trading colony developed. ‘Trade

.

.

.

is the best mine and the greatest

wealth which a prince can possess,’ it argued. The anonymous author asserted that trade had transformed England into a wealthy power over the previous century and promised greater things yet if the natural wealth of America was harnessed properly.8

The King evidently listened. In May 1609, he issued a new charter that exchanged royal control of Virginia for commercial control by the merchants of the London branch of the Virginia Company.

The squabbling colonial executive in Jamestown was abolished. In its place, the colony was to be brought under a governor with dictatorial powers. Above him in London was a new Royal Council and the London Company’s court, or board of directors. Above them all was the guiding hand of the company’s treasurer, Sir Thomas Smythe. And it would be his hand that planted the seeds of white slavery.

Few Englishmen could have appeared better qualified than Smythe to turn Virginia into a success. He is a strangely forgotten figure now but for centuries his commercial stature was recognised by historians. The great Victorian Alexander Brown said of him:

‘He was . . . the head of every one (and a founder of most of them) of the English companies directly interested in foreign colonies and commerce, which have ever since been the chief sources of the wealth and power of Great Britain.’9

In Muscovy, the Tsar publicly acknowledged Smythe’s eminence.

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When the merchant arrived at the head of an English mission, he was allowed to remain hatted in the royal presence, a signal honour.

In Agra, the Great Mogul had a portrait of Smythe hanging in his palace. In the Cape, men of the Khoi tribe reportedly chanted, ‘Sir Thomas Smid! English ship!’ whenever a ship flying the red-and-white striped flag of the East India Company anchored in Table Bay.

Smythe combined astute risk-taking with ruthlessness and the wooing of princes. In India, he learned that the Great Mogul and his son were heavy drinkers and regularly supplied the Mogul with the best burgundy. Smythe also sent the Mogul a full-sized replica of the Lord Mayor of London’s coach – like that used to this day to lead the Lord Mayor’s annual procession.

Smythe constantly cultivated the Court of St James. After the King developed an interest in exotic mammals and birds, Smythe had his captains return with parakeets and monkeys, big cats and bears for the royal cages. When James expressed interest in the flying squirrels rumoured to exist in America, the order went out to Smythe’s ships to bring some back.

King James was also fascinated by ships, so in 1610 Smythe invited him to launch one of his Indiamen, a 1,200-ton monster called the
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. The event gives a glimpse of the style of the man and his relationship with the King. On the day of the launch, James, together with the Queen, the heir to the throne, Prince Henry and other members of the royal family, were rowed in the royal barge to Deptford, where the ship had been built. Other members of the court followed in what must have been, in the manner of the times, a splendid cavalcade stretching downstream from the Palace of Whitehall to Deptford. After the launch came a

‘bountiful banquet’, with all kinds of ‘delicates in fine china dishes’

and then a royal presentation. ‘The King,’ it was reported, ‘graced Sir Thomas Smythe, the Governor, with a very faire chain of gold

. . . with a jewel wherein was the King’s picture hanging at it; and the King put it about his neck with his own hands.’10

A few months before the
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was launched, Smythe took over the direction of Virginia. An immediate and crucial decision was the appointment of the right calibre of men to take 55

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control of the colony on the ground. Whoever was picked as governor would have autocratic powers and an almost monarchical status. The choice eventually fell on 34-year-old Thomas West, Baron De La Warr. He and Thomas Smythe were old comrades.

They had fought alongside each other in the raid on Cadiz, where both had been commended for bravery, and both had later been caught up in the Essex rebellion but survived. They had much in common and no doubt were of a mind on how to revive fortunes in America.

Smythe appointed three seasoned fighting men to serve under De La Warr: Sir George Somers, who had fought under Walter Raleigh, was made admiral of a new fleet to relieve the colony; Sir Thomas Gates, a veteran of war in the Netherlands, was appointed Deputy Governor; and Sir Thomas Dale, another veteran of the Dutch wars, was made High Marshal.