Invading America. David Childs
world, Guiana, to support this interpretation; for of that land, he wrote:
Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought; the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance, the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges nor the images pulled down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered by any Christian prince.
One impression that did hold sway, for a while, was the view that the ‘naturals’ would warmly welcome the settlers. Arthur Barlowe, having had his feet and clothes washed by attentive Amerindian maidens, considered his reconnaissance party to have been ‘entertained with all love and kindness’ by a people who were ‘most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age’. Fatefully for them this included the, incorrect, observation that, like the lilies of the field, they toiled not, for ‘the earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labour’. Such a naive comment, based on inadequate research, was to support the idea that the land was indeed ‘virgin’ and thus vacuum domicilium, that is, it was legally waste because the Amerindians had not ‘subdued’ it in a way that was recognized by European law. In fact, all along the coast the population fed itself mainly through the clever symbiotic husbandry of Indian corn (maize), beans and squashes, to which hunting provided merely a supplement. Far from being savage they were, in fact, incredibly well adapted to their sauvage, the country.
For most of those who intended to settle in America, arguments over the morality of land ownership were irrelevant; what they wanted was sufficient land granted to them on which they could raise both a family and a profit. If this was not going to be given, then the terms of tenure needed also to be tempting. This was the great argument that the Mayflower voyagers waged with their sponsors and which they would, through the advantage of distance, eventually win.
Each potential colony had its band of propagandists. Thus William Vaughan, a Welsh landowner from Carmarthenshire, wrote a rambling work, The Golden Grove, which encouraged the colonization of Newfoundland as a cure for overcrowding and which, combined with fishing ‘Neptune’s sheep’, would restore the nation to economic prosperity. Newfoundland, for the occupation of which letters patent were signed on 2 May 1610, marked the first real attempt to excite interest in a land, as it was, as opposed to how it was envisioned. John Guy, the first Governor, less open to self-deception than either Ralegh or the Virginia Company, reported on what he saw; ten years later so did John Mason in his A Brief Discourse of the New-Found-Land . . . Inciting our Nation to Go Forward in that Hope-Full Plantation Begunne, in which, after admitting that the country had neither the fertility nor the pleasing climate of Virginia, he proposed the following reasons why Newfoundland might be preferred to Virginia:
1. The nearness to Britain, ‘being but half of the way to Virginia, having a convenient passage’, which made for both a short outward and a shorter return journey.
2. The great and valuable fishing trade that existed and supported thousands of English families.
3. The availability and thus the cheapness of passage for both settlers and stores.
4. The ‘security from foreign and domestic enemies’ because of the scarcity of ‘savages’ by whom ‘the planters as yet never suffered damage’.
In 1620, Richard Whitbourne, a seasoned and pioneer traveller to Newfoundland who had been present when Humphrey Gilbert laid claim to the islands, published, to popular acclaim, his Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland with Many Reasons to Prove How Worthy and Beneficial a Plantation May There Be Made . . ., which ran to three editions between 1620 and 1623. His key suggestion was the need to establish a beneficial link between fishing and settlement which would provide, unlike the more southern settlements, a quick profitable return. What is more, settlements would create a demand for goods which the fishing fleet could deliver, thus giving them an income on their outward voyage as well as facilitating their drying and loading of fish for the return journey, which might be to southern Europe, to exchange fish, much in demand, for goods for sale in England. Moreover, Whitbourne saw Newfoundland as being a link to a line of settlements that would stretch down the coast of the continent.
Whitbourne’s work was designed to influence Lord Falkland’s decision to establish a colony in Newfoundland. It is lengthy, detailed, discursive and, for the most part, full of the sort of practical advice for would-be settlers that is conspicuously and devastatingly absent from other such works, particularly those linked to the southern settlements.
Compared with both Roanoke/Jamestown and Newfoundland, very little propaganda was produced for the encouragement of settlement in New England. Indeed, it is difficult to establish how and why the spotlight first fell on the cliffs of Maine and creeks of Cape Cod. That it did was due, not to armchair enthusiasts picking up their pens, but to the firsthand accounts by those who had sailed into these seas and landed on those shores.
The proposal to settle in Norumbega, or northern Virginia, was predicated on two main concepts. The first was the idea that its waters might provide a source of seafood as rich as that already being heavily exploited off Newfoundland; the second, inspired by the Catholic Lord Arundel of Wardour, in Wiltshire, was to establish a Catholic colony. The idea of a religious settlement had been first mooted in 1582 but was dropped through too much Spanish hostility and too little English support. Both ideas induced exploratory voyages, designed not only to report back but also to make initial trading contacts with the local population. The reports were all lucid, descriptive and positive. They began with Gabriel Archer and John Brereton’s separate narratives of the voyage of Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602. These were followed by Martin Pring’s account of his 1603 voyage from Bristol, which had been directly inspired by the city’s cathedral prebendary, one Richard Hakluyt. George Waymouth, another seasoned voyager, produced in The Jewell of Artes a detailed account of the skills needed by those commanding a voyage of discovery, including how best to fortify a settlement in the new world. Yet, although the work of Hakluyt, Smith, Whitbourne, Waymouth and others was read by hundreds, there was one work of prose that would be read by thousands and have far more of an influence on the decisions of potential emigrants and their behaviour once they had stepped ashore in America – the Bible.
THE WORD OF GOD
In a voyage almost as long in time and far more dangerous than many of those that Hakluyt described, a noble few had fought bravely to make an English translation of the Bible widely available since the 1520s. The first fruits were delivered by William Tyndale between 1525 and 1534, any further work being brutally cut short by his being burnt at the stake in Brussels in 1536. Coverdale continued what Tyndale and begun and presented his work to King Henry VIII in 1535. Henry then approved the production of the so-called Matthew Bible, which was placed in every parish church between 1539 and 1541, only to be burnt during Mary’s reign, forcing the work of translation abroad, so that one edition of the early bibles took its name from the city where it was printed, Geneva. James I, finding the Geneva Bible and its linked works objectionable, called for a new translation, the result of which was one of the greatest works in the English language, the Authorized Version, which was published in 1611.
For many English people the Bible was the only printed word that was read to them. They thus got to know its stories and moral teachings extremely well, so that, although the Pilgrims and their coeval Protestant planters in New England generally come to mind when the influence of biblical teaching on the settlement of America is considered, it is very apparent that both the Bible story and its moral teaching infused every aspect of colonial life from the beginning. Richard Hakluyt, in the first paragraph of the epistle dedicatory of the first edition of his Navigations and Voyages, tells of his being inspired by the words in Psalm 107, ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’ In similar vein Sir William Alexander, the sponsor of Nova Scotia, continued his introduction to his In Praise of Colonies, quoted at the head of this chapter, with the words:
The next generations succeeding Shem planted in Asia, Ham in Africa and Japheth in Europe: Abraham and Lot were Captains of Colonies, the Land