Invading America. David Childs
nervous not only about the fate of his settlers but also about the time expiry of his Virginian Charter, dispatched several further voyages, but the colonists remained lost and no further settlement was attempted that century.
A V for Virginia
Ralegh’s interest in Virginia waned but would have ended anyway with his trial for treason, which began shortly after James I came to the English throne in 1603. A peace treaty with Spain also removed the opportunity for privateering raids into the Caribbean, but the new King was not averse to using the arm’s length advantage that the Charter system provided to permit a new attempt at invading Virginia to get underway.
This time a two-fingered approach was made, with the Virginia Company Charter of 1606 having both a southern digit, based around the Chesapeake, and a northern one which started in Maine before, accidentally, slipping into the region around Cape Cod.
Rejecting the navigational difficulties of the Carolina Outer Banks for the more protected waters of the Chesapeake was a logical move and, as they lie just ninety miles north of the Roanoke, the passage thither was known. So, on 20 December 1606, the 120-ton Susan Constant, the forty-ton Godspeed and the twenty-ton Discovery sailed from London with 71 crew and 105 colonists for the long voyage to Virginia. Arriving on 26 April 1608 they moved up the James River, well away from the coast, before deciding to disembark on an island site they named Jamestown on 13 May. Here they clung on through a dismal winter until Captain Newport returned with some supplies. They were then required to seek out both a northwest passage and to mine for gold, two fruitless occupations that contributed adversely to their chance of survival. The winter of 1609/1610, aptly named the ‘Starving Time’, encouraged them to evacuate onboard a fleet of four resupply vessels, which included two remarkable ships, Deliverance and Patience, both more or less constructed from local timber and the wreck of Sea Venture, the ‘admiral’ of an earlier resupply fleet that had been run aground and wrecked in the Bermudas. They did not make it to the open ocean, for the incoming tide brought with it news of the arrival of a new Governor, Lord De La Warr, and he was not going to allow his office to end in ignominy before it began. The ships went about and sailed back with 150 new arrivals carried in the ship De La Warr, modestly named after the Governor.
From then on Jamestown grew, weakly, but with sufficient vitality and fresh arrivals to compensate for a mortality rate so high that the Amerindian massacre of 1622, in which 357 settlers died, shows up merely as a blip on a graph of lives lost. Yet, before that incident, the economic future of the settlement was secured, not by the growing of European crops or the establishment of English industries, but through the production of a native plant, unknown and not previously desired in England: tobacco.
In 1624, exasperated by the mismanagement by its Board, the royal hand twitched when King James decided to dissolve the Virginia Company and to make the settlement a royal colony. It was a move which, although of little impact on the banks of the James, probably guaranteed the survival of the settlement.
Unlike the build-up to the Roanoke venture, it is unclear what catalyst fomented the urge to sail to North Virginia in 1602 but, once begun, a series of such voyages established a new colonial current that would carry the most famous of all the early settlers, the Pilgrim Fathers, to the shores of Cape Cod in 1620. Before that, between 1602 and 1619 some thirty-five transatlantic crossings took place steadily and unspectacularly to this land, which lay between 40º and 45º North. While still part of greater Virginia, the area also had a name change of genius, when John Smith proposed, in 1616, to refer to it as New England rather than the native name of Norumbega. This gave the country a feeling of homeliness, a begin-again sort of place, that was not going to be too outlandish or dangerous. Indeed, the goods that were evident upon arrival were those that England needed, not because they were either valuable or exotic but because they were commonplace but in danger of exhaustion back home. In short, they were timber for masts and planks and, for a while, sassafras, a sweet-smelling shrub which was erroneously thought to cure syphilis. For their own support the colonists could rely on raising crops that they were used to growing in English soil. This new familiarity would attract sturdy, steady, level-headed folk, not the flamboyant risk-takers that might wish to seek their fortune further south. Right from the start, then, the two groups, established as parts of the same Charter by James I, would see themselves as differing from each other. It would take a war to unite them.
The series of voyages began when Bartholomew Gosnold in Concord sailed from Falmouth on 26 March 1602 bound for ‘North Virginia’ to establish a trading post at which twenty of his complement of thirty-two would overwinter. They arrived off modern-day Maine on 14 May and sailed south around Cape Cod, which thus they named, through the shoal waters of the aptly named ‘Tucker’s Terror’, to Martha’s Vineyard, a tribute to the captain’s daughter. On nearby Elizabeth’s Isle, they built their trading fort on an islet in a lake but then decided to abandon it and to return home, leaving no men behind. An initial attempt to build on this work by establishing a colony of loyal Catholics came to grief with the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot, but further exploratory voyages followed, so the northern group were prepared and ready to go as soon as they knew that the King was going to present them with their Charter for settlement. From that moment all turned sour. Sir Ralph Bingley, employed to take the 160-ton Triall to Maine, turned pirate while, on the next voyage, Richard, under the command of Captain Henry Challons, having sailed in August 1606, was captured by the Spanish in November in the Florida Channel. Well before this disaster was reported, a second mission had been dispatched to support Challons’s settlement. This was commanded by Thomas Hanham with Martin Pring as master but, having arrived successfully, they scoured the coast and, finding no sign of Challons, returned home.
The following year a more determined effort was made to establish a presence in the region when, at the end of May, Captain George Popham, accepting the presidency of the North Virginia Colony, sailed from Plymouth on 31 May in Gifte of God in company with Mary and John, commanded by Raleigh Gilbert. A quiet voyage saw them arrive off Maine by late July, where they navigated their way through offshore islands and encounters with Amerindians, eventually to establish a fort at the mouth of the Sagadahoc (now Kennebec) River in mid-August, where they intended their 100 potential settlers to live. They called it Fort St George, a neat tribute to both their president and their patron saint, but they were not to live beneath their flag for long. Shortage of supplies led to half the colony sailing home in Gifte of God in December. Then, in February 1608 George Popham died, while the March relief vessels brought with them news of the death of his relative and their sponsor, Sir John Popham. Worse news for the settlers came in September when they learned that Raleigh Gilbert, who had taken up the presidency, had succeeded to the Compton Castle estate. The new heir did not hesitate, choosing to return home to a far more certain and comfortable fortune. Deprived of both sponsorship and leadership, the remaining colonists decided to return with him, embarking in Mary and John and Virginia, a pinnace that they had built themselves and which has the lasting glory of being the first English ship to be constructed in the new world.
Annapolis Royal, 1604. Lying on the sheltered side of Nova Scotia, the deep inlet on which Annapolis Royal now lies proved an attractive settlement site for both the French and the English. Champlain’s jolly map shows both the wonderful natural harbour of Port Royal and the young whale that amused the French with its daily performances in the bay.
And there the whole endeavour might have ended had it not been for the decision of a small group of English Puritans, exiled in Leiden, Holland, to seek a life for their community free from persecution in the new world. The first attempt to achieve this failed in 1619, when 180 separatists were crammed into a small ship for a winter voyage to Virginia. By the time they reached America 130 of them, including their leader, had died. Yet, soon afterwards, much perturbed, and after much discussion and some dissembling, the 102 passengers of Mayflower watched the frame of their first house being raised at their Plymouth plantation on the far side of Cape Cod Bay. It was Christmas Day 1620 and, appropriately, it was Christian families seeking a self-sufficient life and freedom to practise a simple faith to whom the success of the English