Invading America. David Childs
been nominated for Adventures in these or any other of our Letters Patent, or having been otherwise admitted and nominated to be of the said company, have nevertheless either not put in any adventure at all for and towards the said Plantation, or else have refused or neglected, or shall refuse and neglect to bring his or their Adventure, by word or writing, promised within six months after the same shall be so payable and due. And, whereas the failing and nonpayment of such monies as have been promised in Adventure, for the advancement of the said Plantation, hath been often by experience found to be dangerous and prejudicial to the same, and much hindered the progress and proceeding of the said Plantation, and for that it seemeth to us a thing most reasonable, that such persons, as by their hand writing have engaged themselves for the payment of their adventures and after have neglected their faith and promise, should be compelled to make good and keep the same; therefore, our will and pleasure is, that any suit or suits commenced, or to be commenced in any of our Courts of Westminster, or elsewhere, by the said Treasurer and Company, or otherwise against any such persons, that our judges for the time being . . . do favour and further the said suits so far as law and equity will in any wise further and permit.
This was a longwinded way of advertising the fact that the Company was in trouble: it would certainly not have been able to argue its case should a seventeenth-century credit agency have removed its AAA rating, if it had ever warranted one. Michael Lok, the Treasurer of the Cathay Company in 1578, had found himself in a similar position as far as non-payment of promised investment was concerned but, lacking the robust endorsement of his sovereign, it was he and not they who went to prison. The long quotation above serves to illustrate that the Charters were not just a means whereby the Crown gave and granted rights to a ‘suit of divers and sundry loving subjects’ but that they also served as a business prospectus to attract adventurers. For the most part their lengthy verbiage did not lead to long lines of emigrants queuing at the docks or investors’ carriages rolling into the City. Those people that did not go did not ignore a golden opportunity for, by staying away, the probability is that they either, in the case of voyagers, saved their lives, or, in the case of investors, kept their savings. It was, in the modern jargon, a no-brainer.
The first settler groups that had landed at Jamestown had been about the size of a small English village, such as Scrooby in Lincolnshire, from where William Brewster and many of the Pilgrim Father separatists hailed. From the sweat of their brow the households of such villages had to support themselves and, probably, the lord of the manor and his family, and the local priest, while a few artisans, millers, blacksmiths and thatchers provided support either of a fixed or seasonal nature. Thus, in such communities, the majority worked the land and produced a sufficient surplus to feed a few more mouths than were hungrily opened by their own family, for it was an age of both feast and famine. Most of these communities were not entirely self-sufficient. Markets had to be visited to buy some items, while itinerants offered both extra labour when required, and additional skills when desired. Surplus? There was little or none and yet, from Virginia, such a village was meant to reward thousands!
THE CONVERSION OF SOULS
Queen Elizabeth famously stated that, as far as religion was concerned, she did not wish to have a window into men’s souls. She may have well included the ‘heathen’ in this rubric because, despite the emphasis that both Richard Hakluyts placed on the idea that ‘this western discovery will be greatly for the enlargement of the gospel’, such an aim did not feature in her Charters. It was present in those awarded by King James but the emphasis varied over time. Thus in the first Charter of Virginia of 1606, paragraph three stated:
We, greatly commending and graciously accepting of, their desire for the furtherance of such noble work, which may through the providence of Almighty God, glorify his Divine Majesty, in propagating the Christian Religion to such people that live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the knowledge and worship of God, and may in time civilize, the infidels and savages, living in those parts, to live in settled and quiet government . . .
In the lengthy and businesslike Charter of 1609, this requirement was moved to the very end, where it set down: ‘Lastly, because the principal effect which we always desire or expect of this action is the conversion and reduction of the native people to the worship of God and the Christianity . . . we should be loathe that any person should be permitted to pass that we suspected to affect the superstitions of the Church of Rome . . .’
Of the two aims it was probably the latter to which the King held most dear. Having managed to wind two threads together, James did likewise in the 1620 Charter of New England, in which he linked the abandonment of the land by the native population (in fact due to the ravages of imported disease) to the need for their conversion:
those large and bountiful regions, deserted by their natural inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by such of our subjects and people who . . . are directed hither . . . that we may boldly go to the settling of so hopeful a work which will lead to the reduction and conversion of such savages as remain wandering in desolation and distress, to civilization.
By the time that Charles I awarded a royal patent to the Massachusetts Bay Company, in 1629, the proselytizing mission had been amended. No longer was there to be a mission of conversion but the guiding text, at least within the Charter, seems to have been Matthew 5:16. ‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’ This was transliterated into the Charter in the form: ‘whereby our people inhabiting there, may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed, as their good life and orderly conversation, may win and encourage the natives to the knowledge and obedience of the one true God and saviour of Mankind and the Christian faith . . .’
This was the Company whose very seal depicted a naked savage imploring, in the words of Saint Paul’s Macedonian, ‘Come over and Help us.’ The Christians who answered that call came over and helped themselves, aided by the grants graciously bestowed upon them by their sovereign. What the ‘natives of the country’ received were bullets rather than Bibles.
The Virginia Company made sure that, as far as its public face was concerned, it behaved in a way appropriate to the royal wishes and so it was careful to issue with its propaganda an argument to persuade the morally squeamish that the settlements could only improve the lot of the natives from whom no land would be taken unfairly. To this end it commissioned the Reverend Robert Gray to write a book entitled A Good Speed to Virginia, which was published on 28 April 1609, just a month before the Charter was issued, and which assured its readers that, although:
The report goeth, that in Virginia the people are savage and incredibly rude, they worship the devil, offer their young children in sacrifice unto him, wander up and down like beasts, and in manners and conditions, differ very little from beasts, having no Art, nor science, nor trade, to employ themselves, or give themselves unto, yet by nature loving and, gentle, and desirous to embrace a better condition. Oh how happy were that man which could reduce this people from brutishness, to civility, to religion, to Christianity, to the saving of their souls: happy is that man and blest of God, whom God hath endued, either with means or will to attempt this business, but far be it from the nature of the English, to exercise any bloody cruelty amongst these people: far be it from the hearts of the English, to give them occasion, that the holy name of God, should be dishonoured among the Infidels, or that in the plantation of that continent, they should give any cause to the world, to say that they sought the wealth of that country above or before the glory of God, and the propagation of his kingdom.
Massachusetts Bay Company seal. The apotheosis of hypocrisy: the Indian’s plaintive call for help was a travesty of the treatment that they were to receive.
Serendipitous geology led the Spanish to find gold where the landed in the new world. The English refused to believe that they too would not discover similar wealth and chose to ignore the evidence of its absence in the ores with which their ships’ holds were filled. (National Maritime Museum)
Yet, hidden from the public