Invading America. David Childs
those they had almost conned into taking passage had to face with uncertain support from their backers. Their misfortune was that they were, for the most part, not able to command that which they had created.
The Jacobean Charters continued the tradition of awarding a generous grant of resources, which, of course, were not the king’s to give, allowing the settlers to ‘have all the lands, woods, soil, grounds, havens, ports, rivers, mines, minerals, woods, waters, marshes, fishings, commodities, and hereditaments, whatsoever, from the said place of their first plantation . . .’
Among the minerals expressly mentioned, copper, after it was reported as being much used by the native Amerindians, joined gold and silver as being one of the minerals for whose extraction the Crown required a percentage payment. The overwhelming desire for gold was nowhere more evident than in the change of plan for Frobisher’s northern voyages, for no sooner had he returned from his first expedition in 1576 with a lump of black rock, than the search for a route to Cathay was abandoned in favour of gathering vast quantities of this worthless stone. The resulting attempt to establish a settlement near Baffin Island in 1578 might have been doomed, but the 100 people who were selected to form this early English colony in the new world were wisely chosen as far as their trade was concerned. They included forty seamen, thirty miners and thirty soldiers, all under the command of Edward Fenton. Luckily circumstances enabled them to avoid trying to endure the unendurable – an Arctic winter – but the mix of skills is hard to fault. This was not so in Virginia.
The 1606 first Charter for Virginia had within its framework the seeds for success, which were encouragingly watered by the issue, the following November, of Instructions for Government, which were enforced in December by Orders for the Council for Virginia, which assigned ships and their captains, to whom were issued sealed orders. However, at the same time, the London Council for Virginia issued Instructions Given by way of Advice . . . for the Intended Voyage to Virginia to Be Observed by those Captains and Company which Are Sent at This Present to Plant. This proved to be the inhibitor for the southern group, for it moved away from the simple aim of establishing a successful colony that would export what it was able to glean, to one which was to have, amongst several aims, the requirement for further exploration, specifically to find a way to the ‘Other Sea’, the Pacific Ocean, and to search for gold. It was in choosing to follow rivers that might lead to this mythical route that the colonists lost their way. The error they imported is obvious from the text which, assuming they numbered 120 and not the 104 that disembarked, required forty of them to build the fort and protect the settlement, thirty to clear and plant, ten to man a watchtower at the river entrance and forty to spend two months in exploring the route to the Pacific. In commanding this division the Council failed to appreciate several things: the challenges that the settlers would meet; the priorities that would be imposed by their circumstance; the nature and size of the terrain on which they would disembark and, probably most significant of all, the composition of the force that they would require to secure their beachhead. Records of the known occupation of some 240 of the 295 individuals who arrived in Virginia before October 1608 show that they included, inter alia: 119 gentlemen, forty-seven labourers, fifteen artisans, seven tailors, four carpenters and four surgeons, some ‘boys’, and a cooper, a couple of blacksmiths, brickies and refiners, two apothecaries, a gunsmith, a fishmonger and a fisherman, and several other individual specialists among whom was the most remarkable defensive inadequacy of an army captain, a sergeant, a soldier and a drummer.
Reading the above list of occupations one might interpret it as representing those present at a gentlemen’s club picnic outing to an area where it had been rumoured some unruly behaviour had been reported but where it was still intended to construct a barbecue and spend some time choosing a selection of local valuables to take home as trinkets to pacify absent wives. In fact, as far as Jamestown was concerned, the majority of the gentlemen were a burden in several ways; firstly, they would not labour; secondly, they needed to be fed, and thirdly, they spent time in fractious intrigues that made a mockery of governance.
The contrast with the establishment proposed by the anonymous wellwisher of 1584 for Ralegh’s Roanoke voyage, which laid down the trades necessary to be deployed, is all the more remarkable not only because it was again ignored but also because no lessons had been learned from the failures of 1577, 1578, 1585 and 1587. No one, it seems, drew up a profile of the ideal group necessary for establishing a colony and then sought to recruit the skills indicated. Instead, a disparate collection of motley, unhardened, untested and disunited individuals were dispatched to their doom. Had the Charter, or even the Advice, laid down the trades required and told the leaders to concentrate on establishing a settlement before any other activity, the result might have been less tragic and more successful.
When it became obvious, after a short while, that the northern Virginian enterprise had failed and that the southern one was not going to reward its investors in accordance with their expectations, a second Charter was drawn up, in 1609, by the King ‘at the humble suit and request of sundry of our loving and well-disposed subjects’. If the first Charter failed to deliver mainly through its application rather than its text, the same could not be said of the second, which is one of the most over-optimistic pieces of paper ever penned in that, although it established a far better form of government for the settlers themselves, it created a vast joint-stock company, eager to benefit from the output of the plantation. Although not as stark as a death warrant, it was one of the longest assisted suicide notes in history, killing with kindness and an indigestible surfeit.
The kindness came with the land grant. Whereas the first Charter had granted land within fifty miles either side of the initial settlement and stretching up to a hundred miles inland, the second Charter was far less restrictive, offering the settlers dominion from sea to sea, stating:
we do also of our special Grace . . . give, grant and confirm, unto the said Treasurer and Company, and their Successors . . . all those Lands, Countries, and Territories, situate, lying, and being in that Part of America, called Virginia, from the Point of Land, called Cape or Pointe Comfort all along the sea coast to the northward two hundred miles and from the said Point or Cape Comfort all along the sea coast to the southward two hundred miles; and all that space and circuit of land lying from the sea coast of the precinct aforesaid up unto the land, throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest; and also all the islands being within one hundred miles along the coast of both seas of the precinct aforesaid.
These boundaries encompassed the lands explored and mapped by John Smith but also kept alive the idea that somewhere in their inner regions lay the much-sought route to the Pacific.
The surfeit was created by the number of individuals and organizations who were encouraged to invest in the enterprise – pages of them. This multitude consisted of 659 individuals and 56 London livery companies as well as a number of the settlers themselves, all of whom invested in a share, or shares, worth £12 10s, or multiples thereof, a not insignificant sum, the attraction of which was partly based on the erroneous report by the returning Captain Newport that gold had been discovered in Virginia. Among those recruited to purchase stock were eight earls, one viscount, one bishop, five lords, seventy-two knights and thirty-nine naval captains, as well as the usual crowd of gentlemen and esquires. Among the guilds were the Grocers, Brewers, Fishmongers, Tallow-Chandlers, Masons, Plumbers, Brownbakers, Carpenters, Haberdashers, Gardeners, Ironmongers and Barber-Surgeons, many of whose members, if they travelled, would have had practical skills to offer the settlers; while some, such as the Company of Goldsmiths, had skills desired but unwarranted. The take-up was oversubscribed for what was on offer and included both the stay-at-homes and adventurers willing to travel towards a better life. Those who chose to venture across to Virginia were offered, for their one share, after seven years’ labour, a grant of land and a share of the profit from ‘such mines and minerals of gold, silver, and other metal or treasure . . . or profits whatsoever which shall be obtained’.
A clear indication that the investors realized, too late, that they were not on to a good thing, can be read in the third Charter of 1611, which stated that the Company had:
power and authority to expulse, disfranchise, and put out from their said Company and Society for ever, all and every such person and persons, as having been promised or subscribed their names to becoming adventurers to the said Plantation, of the