Invading America. David Childs
of the author’s optimistic opinions and a refutation of those who would report otherwise. Harriot excelled as a caustic critic, stating that:
Of our company that returned some for their misdemeanour and ill dealing in the country, have been there worthily punished, who by reason of their bad natures, have maliciously not only spoken ill of their Governors, but for their sakes slandered the country itself. The like also have those done which were their consort.
Some being ignorant of the state thereof, notwithstanding since their return amongst their friends and acquaintances, and also others, especially if they were in company where they might not be gainsaid, would seem to know so much as no men more, and make no men so great travellers as themselves. They stood so much, as it may seem, upon their credit and reputation, that having been a twelve month in the country, it would have been a great disgrace unto them as they thought, if they could not have said much whether it were true or false. Of which some have spoken of more than ever they saw, or otherwise knew to be there: other some have not been ashamed to make absolute denial of that, which although not by them, yet by others is most certainly and there plentifully known, and some make difficulties of those things they have no skill of.
Harriot was writing of what had been a successful, although foreshortened, sojourn. Indeed, if loss of life, or rather the lack of it, is the major criterion, the year of Lane’s occupancy, 1585/1586, was the most successful of any of the ventures in the period under discussion. In the years that followed, others would write or return home with harrowing accounts of events that the sponsors and investors would dearly liked to have kept from the public gaze. It was the dissemination of such works, balancing out those written for the purposes of propaganda, which meant that the Virginian voyages were never viewed with uncritical approval and thus wholehearted national support.
In 1609 the Virginia Company felt it had been traduced by the publication of John Smith’s acerbic A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia since the First Planting of that Colony. The counterblast to what had in fact been a work forecasting an optimistic outlook once the errors of leadership had been sorted out was led by Prince Henry through his chaplain, Daniel Price, who, in an open air sermon outside St Paul’s Cathedral, dismissed the sceptics and pointed out the many opportunities for both social, financial and moral advance that awaited those who ventured to the plantation of Virginia, well away from the sinful city of London. A flood of books with Virginia as their theme poured forth but, like many such floods, soon ebbed.
A similar maelstrom came out of the 1622 massacre, with the Virginia Company rapidly refuting the eyewitness accounts of the state of the colony published by such authorities as Captain Nathaniel Butler, whose The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia as it Was in the Winter of the Year 1622, which was made available to the nation and the Privy Council, was, together with the heartbreaking letters dispatched by the survivors, responsible for a Crown Commission being established to investigate the affairs of the Virginia Company. Its unfavourable report led to the winding up of the Company in 1624. No positive propaganda had such a telling effect.
Promotional tracts did, however, continue to be published and widely read. One of the most significant was John Smith’s Description of New England, which was issued in 1616, to be followed in 1620 by New England Trials, both written to encourage emigration. Smith wrote well and spoke honestly; there is little exaggeration in his statement that ‘you shall scarce find any bay, shallow shore or cove of sand, where you may not take many clams or lobsters . . . or isles where you find not fruits, birds, crabs and mussels’. But he added a homely warning for the over-enthusiastic: ‘all which are to be had in abundance observing but their seasons: but if a man will go at Christmas to gather cherries in Kent, though there be plenty in summer, he may be deceived; so here these plenties have each their season . . .’ With such unglossed descriptions, along with his 1624 work, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, Smith should done have much to put wind in the sails of those contemplating emigration.
TRADE
For a long time, the English were reluctant blue water adventurers. Their homeland itself gave forth an increase which was generally sufficient to feed its population, while shoals of fish still offered a net-filling sea harvest. The wealthy, mostly the aristocracy, could afford to pay for both wines from France and the expensive spices brought by Venetian galleys annually to London and Southampton. The rising number of affluent merchants, trading mainly in wool and woollen products across the narrow seas, were also aware of their station and the problems that would confront those uppity enough to try and outshine the established hierarchy. There was, however, one trading difficulty which the English struggled to overcome. Their northerly island, warmed by the ocean current, produced woollens – too warm to be worn by their neighbours in the populous lands to the south – while the colder lands on their own latitude, or further north, were too sparsely populated and had too few goods to exchange to make trade with them worthwhile. England needed new outlets and northwest seemed best. This dilemma Richard Hakluyt spelt out in the opening paragraphs of his account of the Willoughby and Chancellor voyage, which set out in 1553 to seek out a northeast passage ‘to new and unknown kingdoms’ in which he stated:
At what time our merchants perceived the commodities and wares of England to be in small request with the countries and people about us, and near to us, and that those merchandises were now neglected, and the price thereof abated, certain grave citizens of London, and men careful for the good of their country, began to think with themselves, how this mischief might be remedied.
Seeing that the wealth of the Spaniards and Portuguese, by the discovery and search of new trades and countries was marvellously increased, supposing the same to be a course and mean for them also to obtain the like, they thereupon resolved upon a new and strange navigation. After much speech and conference together, it was at last concluded that three ships should be prepared and furnished out, for the search and discovery of the northern part of the world . . .
Yet trade, as it was promoted by Hakluyt, meant dealing directly with Cathay, so finding a route to this eastern market became an imperative, to the detriment of focusing on new world settlement. Or did it? There were some propagandists such as the Reverend Daniel Price, quoted earlier, who preached that America was its own cornucopia, equalling:
Tyrus for colours, Basan for wood, 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 wanted.
Why venture further? The propagandists, dreamers and schemers listened, believed and continued to invest to send others out to lose their ships and their lives trying to bypass America through the adamantine barrier of ice.
LAND RIGHTS
If the merchants and investors could be won over by suggestions of increased trade, potential settlers needed to be persuaded that a land lay waiting for them to work, a land to which they could stake a better claim than in nearby Ireland. In this respect, the legal justification the English used to legitimize their claim to America was also used to excuse the removal of the indigenous people from the land on which they lived. The argument advanced was that these people were merely sojourners in a land over which they roamed but could claim no title by right of settlement. The usurpation began with the very naming of the land and its inhabitants: the continent was called North America, after an Italian who never visited there; the English lands, Virginia, after a queen who did not invest in them, and the people, Indians, after a race who lived half a world away. Of these it was the name, Virginia, that was to do the most damage, for it hinted broadly that the land was unoccupied, untamed, unowned and ripe for possession, when, in fact, the inhabitants themselves referred to the eastern littoral as Tsenacommacah, which means ‘densely inhabited land’. So it was until, in the north, European diseases, the harbingers of settlement, widowed the world on which the Puritans would step ashore.
By using the term Virginia, Ralegh implied that the land was still ‘as God made it’ but not that, unlike his Queen, it should not be penetrated. If