Invading America. David Childs
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John White’s all-round technical skill as a draftsman is clearly indicated in this excellent 1585 map of the Carribean and Carolinas, which he had little time to record in detail. The sketches of flying fish, dolphins and whales shows his love of recording flora and fauna, for which he had an excellent eye. (British Museum)
The propagandists were far more successful in wooing the Court than the rest of the country. Royal letters patent did get issued to the supplicants, giving them very much what their petitions requested. However, finding sufficient volunteers to travel to these gifted domains was not so easy. Frobisher’s first settlement group was selected from convicted criminals; Ralegh was licensed to impress seamen for the Roanoke voyage and dispatched with White fewer settlers than he intended; in 1618 it was planned to send 100 ‘superfluous . . . young boys and girls that lay starving in the streets’ of London to Virginia; in 1623 a memorandum suggested that encouraging emigration to New England would ‘offer employment to the starving unemployed and so rid England of the expense of maintaining them’, as well as giving bankrupt gentlemen an opportunity to recover their fortune. Thus, although individual ships might have been crowded, voyages were not oversubscribed. Even the Pilgrims were reduced in numbers by last-minute withdrawals.
The comparison with Spain is informative: in the sixteenth century that nation sent 240,000 of its citizens to America, with a further 450,000 joining them in the next century. To replace the lost handful that the English dispatched in the 1580s, just 150,000 souls emigrated from England in the seventeenth century, and all but a few thousand of them departed after 1630. The enthusiastic efforts of the Scot, Sir William Alexander to encourage his fellow countrymen to sail to Nova Scotia were eclipsed by the numbers of them who were prepared to be ferried over to Ireland. This would be a continuing imbalance. Between 1650 and 1700 just 7,000 Scots crossed the Atlantic to the new world, while 70,000 emigrated to Ulster. The trickle of emigrants is all the more surprising because the land from which they came was subject to dearth: the real earnings of a labourer between 1585 and 1630 never matched those of his great-grandfather during his short working life (his life expectancy was under thirty-five years). To such as these the new world should have exerted an irresistible pull; it did not.
The propaganda failed. What did succeed in the years to come and turned the invasion into a conquest was religious persecution. The Bible, or conflicting interpretations of the same, recruited far more families than did the promotional tracts. The word of the Lord, or its limited exclusive interpretation by Archbishop Laud, persuaded tens of thousands to sail west, far more than all the propagandists combined.
The Charters: Come Over and Help Yourselves
There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.
Acts 16: 9, King James Bible, 1611
Come over and help us.
Motto of Massachusetts Bay Company, 1629
In an age of centralized authority, few Englishmen dared venture abroad without royal approval. This meant that each of the fingers thrust towards America wore upon them a signet ring in the form of a royal letters patent, or Charter (listed in Appendix 2). The exception to this was Frobisher’s thumb, to whose ‘Company of Cathay’ the canny Queen Elizabeth, refused to give her seal of approval having lost her original investment of £1,000 in Frobisher’s gold prospecting voyages. She was not to repeat that mistake. Henceforward she would always choose the cheapest option, passing off her parsimony as prudence. The publication of royal Charters would ensure that she, and succeeding monarchs, could claim a copyright without investing cash.
So, for a Crown that wished to control but not command, to create but not contribute, a concessionary awarding Charter leading to the creation of a colonial commonwealth was a very clever concept. Through the issue of such documents the monarch could claim rights and rewards without responsibilities, and authority without administration: an arrangement that demanded influence without commensurate investment. So England instilled at the start of its American adventure a system and a relationship whose final logical outcome would be a revolution proclaiming ‘no taxation without representation’. There was another advantage that the Charter system had for its investors – it created a closed market. This was the age of monopolies, the purchase of which guaranteed both the seller, the sovereign, and the selected purchaser a rich return for no investment. It was not until 1624 that Parliament, manned by men of property, felt able to challenge the Crown by declaring monopolies were contrary to the fundamental laws of the land. King Charles ignored their strictures. Thus the produce of America was perceived as being beneficial to existing monopolies, such as glass, soap and silk, as well as creating new ones such as tobacco, sassafras and beaver fur.
As the century developed, and as the concept of a commonwealth matured, successive rulers introduced their own ideas as to how best to manage their overseas infants. Thus Henry VII was content to let a foreign national work speculatively for England’s cause. Elizabeth, an admirer and user of favourites, felt her newfound lands were best when, in Donne’s words, they were ‘by one man manned’, which meant Walter Ralegh. James I, who liked not Ralegh and whose own intimate ‘sweethearts’, Somerset and Buckingham, were not interested in overseas, began by appointing committees over whom, as his confidence waxed and their capabilities waned, he exercised gradually more management until, in 1624, the Crown took direct control of Virginia while still awarding blocks of land to a coterie.
Whoever the beneficiary, the Charter process can be summed up along the lines proposed by Francis Jennings:
1. The Crown was petitioned to lay claim to territories previously outside its jurisdiction and over which it had no true legal claim.
2. The Crown authorized a person or organized group by charter to conquer the claimed territory and to exercise a monopoly over its trade.
3. The successful conqueror became the possessor and governor of the territory, subject to the terms of the charter and the continuing acknowledgement of the sovereign’s overlordship.
4. The charter holder was authorized to encourage settlement through the issues of land, mineral and fishing rights and to raise capital through the issue of shares, estates or lottery tickets to sponsors.
5. The Crown would be a beneficiary but not an investor.
If the state was going to risk little then it had, paradoxically, an interest in offering the grantee much for two very valid reasons. The first was that, having laid claim to these lands, the Crown wished to exclude any other state from either counter-claiming or muscling in on these new domains. The Charters were thus being used like balloons inserted flaccid through a small hole into a large vacuum and then blown up to fill all the space available, providing a thin but taut membrane which, if penetrated, would cause a loud explosion. No matter that the empty space was filled largely with air, it was the boundary rather than what it contained that was important. The second reason was that, by offering much, the Crown hoped that its gift would contain enough, albeit thinly spread, to produce a reasonable return. What the state never comprehended was just how vast America was and how great would be the resources necessary to tame it.
In 1496 Henry VII’s Charter implied that Cabot and his crew were capable of seizing and occupying a land which, by its very description, as having towns and cities, was settled by a civilized people. In response to the King’s horizon-stretching largesse, John Day reported to Spain that Cabot, after he landed in America, ‘Since he was with just a few people . . . did not dare advance inland beyond the shooting distance of a cross-bow’, which was hardly the action of a potential conquistador or even major explorer.
By the time Elizabeth was persuaded to award her first colonial Charters, the government concept of what such grants involved had matured. Thus the letters patent granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, his heirs and assignees in 1578 gave him very similar benefits to those awarded to Cabot, but added permission ‘to build and fortify’ and additional rights for