Invading America. David Childs
the temporary Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, that his four priorities were:
1. To discover either a route to the Pacific or gold mines.
2. To establish trade with distant ports.
3. To exact tribute [i.e. forced payment in goods by the natives].
4. To establish local exporting industries such as glass-making.
The first of these remained the enervating chimera that John Smith railed against Christopher Newport for investing so much impractical energy. Newport had not only tried to portage a great boat over the James Falls at modern Richmond but had ordered the settlers to stop work on building houses and planting crops so that everyone might fossick for gold. ‘There was no talk, no hope, no work but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold,’ wrote Anas Todkill, while Smith himself in a memorable phrase spoke of ‘Freighting a drunken ship with gilded dirt’. As with Frobisher’s efforts before, the investors chose to ignore Newport’s assayed failure and continued to press for the ground to be opened up to yield its non-existent riches. Acting as an entrepôt was also an impractical aim as long as Spain retained its adamantine opposition to any English settlement in the Americas.
Examples of the ores brought back by Frobisher erroneously thought to contain gold. (National Maritime Museum)
The third priority represented a major geopolitical move. When he had returned to Virginia in 1608, Christopher Newport carried out the Company’s instructions by forcing a crown upon Powhatan’s head and presenting him with a double bed by way of acknowledging his regal status, while Powhatan confirmed his view of his position by stating that, ‘If your king has sent me presents, I also am a king, and this is my land,’ although his return gift of a second-hand pair of worn-out moccasins and a cloak might have just implied what the local ruler thought of this imposed relationship. Now the Company wanted to dispense with and dispel such hypocritical niceties: Powhatan was to be taken captive and forced to pay tribute while lesser chiefs would be forced to acknowledge King James’s overlordship. This was conquest in the Norman style, with each tribe being required to provide corn at every harvest and to labour weekly for the English. Feudalism, dying out in England, was to be re-established in America. It did not take hold, but from its failing sprang up a greater evil – slavery. At the time of the 1609 Charter, however, the secret orders guaranteed war where peace was the most important policy.
Outside the excavated remains of Jamestown the modern visitor can see a line of low-lying grassy banks which mark the houses and workshops of the artisans who were brought to Virginia to establish the settlement’s export industry. A short distance away down an old track is the remains of the glass works. A large mulberry tree also hints at early hopes of a silk-weaving industry: the fact that it was the wrong sort of mulberry for silk worms is an arboreal indication of the lack of planning that went into meeting Gates’s fourth target, which Smith also condemned by pointing out that the Baltic lands were far better able to export that which the investors demanded. Thus each instruction carried with it the seeds of failure and it was not until the settlers themselves decided to grow tobacco, or in the case of New England export furs, that commercial success ensued.
When the initial enthusiasm for shares diminished in the light of no quick return the Virginia Company hit upon another wheeze, which the King backed by the issue of the third Charter of Virginia in March 1611. This authorized a lottery to be held. With a first prize of £1,000, it proved to be an instant success and once more the coffers of the Company, but not the pockets of the investors, were filled.
The continuing failure of Virginia to deliver a sizeable and reliable return rekindled interest in the northern plantation, now renamed New England. Although this had been abandoned in 1608, interest in the area had remained because of both the great catches of fish netted from the waters off Maine and the proselytizing work of John Smith, who had published his work A Description of New England to encourage re-colonization, a venture in which he wished to play a key role. In March 1619 the King was presented with a somewhat grovelling and self-justifying, but short, petition for a new Charter of New England. By 3 November of that year the lengthy, fairly indigestible, Charter had been written and promulgated. Its main point was that it remained a West Country initiative, uncoupled from the arrangement with its London twin.
Those who still viewed the expanding world as one in which privateering had a part to play could also see value in retaining a settlement in Newfoundland, especially if the Government were charged ‘to maintain a couple of good ships and two pinnaces in warlike manner upon the coast’, for the sites selected lay not too far off the route home from the West Indies and were also a convenient halfway port of call for vessels bound for Virginia. St John’s had, of course, been claimed for the Crown by Humphrey Gilbert, but the Charter of 1610, which awarded the whole island to the London and Bristol Company, did not mention this fact. Instead it attempted to link London capital with Bristol experience to create a going concern based on managing the fisheries and, that inevitable chimera, mining for gold and other precious metals. However, the company had learned from the obvious errors committed by its Virginia forerunner. In particular the first settlers sent out to Newfoundland were mainly labourers, fishermen and people with practical skills who were instructed to settle away from swampy ground, to keep busy and to establish good relations with the few native people that they encountered in this land ‘so desolate of inhabitance’. The governor selected was also not an untested ‘gentleman’ but an experienced merchant who knew this new world well enough. The flaw in the Newfoundland Charter was the belief held by both propagandists and investors that settlement could create added value to the already efficient offshore fishing industry. It could not, nor could a land where survival alone was challenging enough provide a return to shareholders. Gradually, the latter, along with the gentlemen adventurers, moved away, but the labourers stayed. They needed no Charter to continue to eke out a living for they had sufficient land that they could call their own to support a family in freedom. Harsh as it undoubtedly was, many of them had more to lose by leaving than they would gain by remaining. More limpet than tree root, they clung on and survived.
The Charter for Nova Scotia, issued in September 1621, granted almost sovereign powers to Sir William Alexander over a tract of land stretching between Newfoundland and Maine which had previously been known by the French name of Acadia. In a supplementary document the King gave his reasons for making the grant as:
Having ever been ready to embrace any good occasion whereby the honour or profit of our Kingdom may be advanced, and considering that no kind of conquest can be more easy and innocent than that which proceeds from plantations specially in a country commodious for men to live in, yet remaining altogether desert or at least only inhabited by infidels the conversion of whom to the Christian faith (intended by this means) might tend much to the glory of God considering how populous our Kingdom (Scotland) is at this present and the necessity that idle people should be employed, preventing worse courses there are many that might be spared, of minds as resolute and of bodies as able to overcome the difficulties that such adventures must at first encounter the enterprise doth crave the transportation of nothing but only men, women, cattle, and victuals, and not of money, and may give a good return of a new trade at this time when traffic is so much decayed. Therefore we have the more willingly hearkened to Sir William Alexander who has made choice of lands lying between New England and Newfoundland, both the Governors whereof have encouraged him thereunto . . .
It is a succinct summary of all the reasons for plantation that had appeared in earlier Charters.
When, as had happened in earlier Charters, Alexander found that he could not persuade sufficient ‘idle people’ to head out to the commodious lands, and, finding that the enterprise was in need of money, he hit upon the ingenious idea of offering land for honours, centuries before Lloyd George, and later politicians, saw that titles were saleable assets. He persuaded the King to create a new order of twenty-two barons, each of whom would hold titles in Nova Scotia. The estates that accompanied the titles covered up to 12,000 acres each and were available for the down payment of 1,000 marks and the dispatch of six settlers.
But sextets wishing to sail for what was in reality