Invading America. David Childs
and the aims of these Pilgrim Fathers, the fact that they also had arrived intent on seizing land that was not theirs and holding on to it by force made them just another group of invaders launching an amphibious assault on North America.
Plymouth had not been long established when another group of settlers, linked to the Pilgrims through the entrepreneur Thomas Weston, but dissimilar in most other ways, set out for the region. Their arrival was announced when a shallop belonging to the fishing vessel Sparrow sailed into Plymouth harbour in May 1622 to collect supplies before sailing up the coast to explore a new site for settlement. Finding one at Wessagusset (modern Weymouth), they sent a message back to summon a further sixty rough and ready men who had sailed from England in April 1622 onboard Charity and Swan and who, after a brief stop at Plymouth, reached Wessagusset in July 1622. Their background, demeanour, temperament and behaviour augured not well for success, and by 1624 they were no more.
However, Plymouth was not going to be a lonely outpost for long. Charters to settle both Maine and Massachusetts were soon followed up by the dispatch of hopeful settlers, and in 1629 the governors of the Massachusetts Bay Company made the bold decision to travel out with their fellow investors. At last lessons on governance and numbers had been learned. In 1630, first Mary and John with 140 passengers onboard and then, shortly afterwards, Governor Winthrop’s main fleet of eleven vessels sailed into the bay on whose shores would rise their ‘City upon a Hill’. At long last the cavalry had arrived.
Nova Scotia: Alexander’s Pinkie
The smallest finger of all five was inserted at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, on the initiative of the Scottish patriot, Sir William Alexander, who, annoyed that America had a New England, New Spain, New France, New Holland and New Sweden, persuaded his countryman, King James VI, now James I of England, to grant him, in 1621, a Charter to the land now known because of the original Latin text as Nova Scotia. However, it was not until 1629 that Sir William’s son, another William, sailed for this new world in four ships with a party of seventy men and two women. They selected the most beautiful of all the original sites on which to settle, a headland lying between two rivers, where they built the small Fort Charles. Pleasant it may have been but the conditions they experienced in their first winter left thirty of them dead by the spring, with the survivors weak from scurvy and malnutrition. Another Scottish fort had been established at Baleine, named after two whale-like rocks that lie offshore, near present-day Louisburg, but this was surrendered to the French in April 1629, the very same month that England agreed, under the Treaty of Susa, to return lands captured in America to France. The argument that this did not include Nova Scotia lasted until dowry negotiations for his marriage of Queen Henrietta of France persuaded the bankrupt Charles I that he had more to gain from its release than its retention.
On 24 May 1624 the Virginia Company’s Charter was revoked and responsibility for the colony was placed under the direct control of the Crown. Coincident with that decision, the age of coastal conflict ended and the age of continental conquest began. The English would now move out from their beachheads to horizon-challenging frontiers, from their forts to villages and townships, and from sea to shining sea.
Thus, in their early years, none of the five fingers delivered what was expected of it. Their failure to make an impression was due mostly to the fact that expectations were based on mythical views of world geography, geology and botany, and the importance of greed as a motive for investment. Without the strong guiding will of the sovereign to control and coordinate the movement of the fingers, even at arm’s length, the English in America would lack the strength or coordination to grasp the land which their lord had granted to them.
Map 1: The primary routes of the English invasion of North America, 1497–1630.
The sending forth of Colonies (seeming a novelty) is esteemed now to be a strange thing, as not only being above the courage of common men, but altogether alienated from their knowledge, which is no wonder, since that course, though both ancient and usual, hath been by the intermission of so many ages discontinued, yea was impossible to be practised so long as there was no vast ground, howsoever men had been willing, whereupon Plantations might have been made, yet there is none who will doubt but that the world in her infancy, and innocency, was first peopled after this manner.
Sir William Alexander, An Encouragement of Colonies, 1630
When, in 1597, John of Gaunt’s famous soliloquy eulogizing England’s ‘scepter’d isle’ first appeared in print, Ralegh’s Roanoke experiment had finished in failure and his Guiana expedition had ended in ignominy. However, thanks to Howard of Effingham’s navy, the ‘moat defensive’ had kept an envious Spanish army from landing on ‘this blessed plot’. Shakespeare, his Queen, and his fellow countrymen thus had every right to feel proudly and defiantly insular, and John of Gaunt’s word choice seemed to throw down a challenge to those who would seek an ‘other Eden’ across the seas. However, by November 1611, when Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, staged The Tempest in front of Elizabeth’s successor, their patron James I, the Jamestown settlement had been in existence for four years and this play drew its opening imagery from William Strachey’s vivid account of the wreck of Sea Venture on the Bermudas while transporting settlers to Virginia in 1609. Yet, given the material, currency and opportunity to write a play about a newfound land, the nation’s greatest playwright remained European in outlook. The Tempest is set on a desert island lying between Tunis and Naples, and its principal human characters are Italian noblemen and their relations. Indeed, the often-quoted lines from the play, which some suggest hark forward to a triumphant colonial future, Miranda’s joyful
By 1587 Mercator was able to show the true extent of the American hinterland, but he still showed a narrow navigable passage passing over the North and leading to the Pacific.
How beautiful mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
refers, not to the comely and almost-naked ‘savages’ that welcomed Ralegh’s men, but to her first sighting of sea-soiled courtiers in whose company she will return to their ancient kingdom leaving the native, the ‘aborred slave’ Caliban, alone with two marooned drunks, the same number of people that Thomas Gates left in Bermuda in the original voyage. No hint of discovery and distant voyages there. Mentions of cannibals and anthropophagi and a few hints in Twelfth Night that Shakespeare had seen ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ that had appeared in Hakluyt’s second edition of his Voyages and Discoveries is but dust in a great folio that is indifferent to the wonders of a newly discovered world.
Indeed the most popular play to be inspired by the nascent colony in Virginia was Eastward Ho, a satirical farce written in 1605 by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, that so mocked the endeavours of those working towards the American plantations that the King had Chapman and Jonson imprisoned in the Tower until they saw the unfunny side of their jokes. Perhaps the dour King had a point: what was about to be undertaken under his Charters was to have more elements of tragedy than comedy.
It was the same in the world of poetry. The major English work of the time, Edward Spenser’s Faerie Queen, was a lengthy historical allegory, the first instalment of which was published in 1590. Throughout the epic, Gloriana, the Faerie Queen, an obvious reference to Elizabeth, is served by faithful knights who undertake quests on her behalf around England, Ireland and the Netherlands; although they wander on an allegorical sea it does not take them to the newfound land that Spenser’s friend, fellow poet and neighbour in Ireland, Walter Ralegh, was trying to settle. England’s