A History of the American People Part 1

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Paul Johnson.

PREFACE.

This work is a labor of love. When I was a little boy, my parents and elder sisters taught me a great deal of Greek, Roman, and English history, but America did not come into it. At Stonyhurst, my school, I was given a magnificent grounding in English const.i.tutional history, but again the name of America scarcely intruded. At Oxford, in the late 1940s, the School of Modern History was at the height of its glory, dominated by such paladins as A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sir Maurice Powicke, K. B. McFarlane, and Sir Richard Southern, two of whom I was fortunate to have as tutors and all of whose lectures I attended. But nothing was said of America, except in so far as it lay at the margin of English history. I do not recall any course of lectures on American history as such. A. J. P. Taylor, at the conclusion of a tutorial, in which the name of America had cropped up, said grimly: 'You can study American history when you have graduated, if you can bear it.' His only other observation on the subject was: 'One of the penalties of being President of the United States is that you must subsist for four years without drinking anything except Californian wine.' American history was nothing but a black hole in the Oxford curriculum. Of course things have now changed completely, but I am talking of the Oxford academic world of half a century ago. Oxford was not alone in treating American history as a non-subject. Reading the memoirs of that outstanding American journalist Stewart Alsop, I was intrigued to discover that, when he was a boy at Groton in the 1930s, he was taught only Greek, Roman, and English history.

As a result of this lacuna in my education, I eventually came to American history completely fresh, with no schoolboy or student prejudices or antipathies. Indeed my first contacts with American history were entirely non-academic: I discussed it with officers of the US Sixth Fleet when I was an officer in the Garrison at Gibraltar, during my military service, and later in the 1950s when I was working as a journalist in Paris and had the chance to meet such formidable figures as John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his successor at SHAPE Headquarters, General Matthew Ridgeway. From the late 1950s I began visiting the United States regularly, three or four times a year, traveling all over the country and meeting men and women who were shaping its continuing history. Over forty years I have grown to know and admire the United States and its people, making innumerable friends and acquaintances, reading its splendid literature, visiting many of its universities to give lectures and partic.i.p.ate in debates, and attending scores of conferences held by American businesses and other inst.i.tutions.

In short, I entered the study of American history through the back door. But I also got to know about it directly during the research for a number of books I wrote in these years: A History of Christianity, A History o f the Jews, Modern Times: the World from the Twenties to the Nineties, and The Birth o f the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830. Some of the material acquired in preparing these books I have used in the present one, but updated, revised, corrected, expanded, and refined. As I worked on the study of the past, and learned about the present by traveling all over the world-but especially in the United States-my desire to discover more about that extraordinary country, its origins and its evolution, grew and grew, so that I determined in the end to write a history of it, knowing from experience that to produce a book is the only way to study a subject systematically, purposefully, and retentively. My editor in New York, Ca.s.s Canfield Jr of HarperCollins, encouraged me warmly. So this project was born, out of enthusiasm and excitement, and now, after many years, it is complete.

Writing a history of the American people, covering over 400 years, from the late 16th century to the end of the 20th, and dealing with the physical background and development of an immense tract of diverse territory, is a herculean task. It can be accomplished only by the ruthless selection and rejection of material, and made readable only by moving in close to certain aspects, and dealing with them in fascinating detail, at the price of merely summarizing others. That has been my method, as in earlier books covering immense subjects, though my aim nonetheless has been to produce a comprehensive account, full of facts and dates and figures, which can be used with confidence by students who wish to acquire a general grasp of American history. The book has new and often trenchant things to say about every aspect and period of America's past, and I do not seek, as some historians do, to conceal my opinions. They are there for all to see, and take account of or discount. But I have endeavored, at all stages, to present the facts fully, squarely, honestly, and objectively, and to select the material as untendentiously as I know how. Such a fact-filled and lengthy volume as this is bound to contain errors. If readers spot any, I would be grateful if they would write to me at my private address: 29 Newton Road, London W25JR; so that they may be corrected; and if they find any expressions of mine or opinions insupportable, they are welcome to give me their comments so that I may weigh them.

The notes at the end of the book serve a variety of purposes: to give the sources of facts, figures, quotations, and a.s.sertions; to acknowledge my indebtedness to other scholars; to serve as a guide to further reading; and to indicate where scholarly opinion differs, directing the reader to works which challenge the views I have formed. I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the flyblown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen. I love them and salute them, and this is their story.

PART ONE.

'A City on a Hill'

Colonial America, 1580 -1750.

The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind. It now spans four centuries and, as we enter the new millennium, we need to retell it, for if we can learn these lessons and build upon them, the whole of humanity will benefit in the new age which is now opening. American history raises three fundamental questions. First, can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them? All nations are born in war, conquest, and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its t.i.tle-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history, and the stains on them are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of an indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race. In the judgmental scales of history, such grievous wrongs must be balanced by the erection of a society dedicated to justice and fairness. Has the United States done this? Has it expiated its organic sins? The second question provides the key to the first. In the process of nation-building, can ideals and altruism-the desire to build the perfect community-be mixed successfully with acquisitiveness and ambition, without which no dynamic society can be built at all? Have the Americans got the mixture right? Have they forged a nation where righteousness has the edge over the needful self-interest? Thirdly, the Americans originally aimed to build an other-worldly 'City on a Hill,' but found themselves designing a republic of the people, to be a model for the entire planet. Have they made good their audacious claims? Have they indeed proved exemplars for humanity? And will they continue to be so in the new millennium?

We must never forget that the settlement of what is now the United States was only part of a larger enterprise. And this was the work of the best and the brightest of the entire European continent. They were greedy. As Christopher Columbus said, men crossed the Atlantic primarily in search of gold. But they were also idealists. These adventurous young men thought they could transform the world for the better. Europe was too small for them-for their energies, their ambitions, and their visions. In the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, they had gone east, seeking to reChristianize the Holy Land and its surroundings, and also to acquire land there. The mixture of religious zeal, personal ambition-not to say cupidity-and l.u.s.t for adventure which inspired generations of Crusaders was the prototype for the enterprise of the Americas.

In the east, however, Christian expansion was blocked by the stiffening resistance of the Moslem world, and eventually by the expansive militarism of the Ottoman Turks. Frustrated there, Christian youth spent its ambitious energies at home: in France, in the extermination of heresy, and the acquisition of confiscated property; in the Iberian peninsula, in the reconquest of territory held by Islam since the 8th century, a process finally completed in the 1490s with the destruction of the Moslem kingdom of Granada, and the expulsion, or forcible conversion, of the last Moors in Spain. It is no coincidence that this decade, which marked the h.o.m.ogenization of western Europe as a Christian ent.i.ty and unity, also saw the first successful efforts to carry Europe, and Christianity, into the western hemisphere. As one task ended, another was undertaken in earnest.

The Portuguese, a predominantly seagoing people, were the first to begin the new enterprise, early in the 15th century. In 1415, the year the English King Henry V destroyed the French army at Agincourt, Portuguese adventurers took Ceuta, on the north African coast, and turned it into a trading depot. Then they pushed southwest into the Atlantic, occupying in turn Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores, turning all of them into colonies of the Portuguese crown. The Portuguese adventurers were excited by these discoveries: they felt, already, that they were bringing into existence a new world, though the phrase itself did not pa.s.s into common currency until 1494. These early settlers believed they were beginning civilization afresh: the first boy and girl born on Madeira were christened Adam and Eve.1 But almost immediately came the Fall, which in time was to envelop the entire Atlantic. In Europe itself, the slave-system of antiquity had been virtually extinguished by the rise of Christian society. In the 1440s, exploring the African coast from their newly acquired islands, the Portuguese rediscovered slavery as a working commercial inst.i.tution. Slavery had always existed in Africa, where it was operated extensively by local rulers, often with the a.s.sistance of Arab traders. Slaves were captives, outsiders, people who had lost tribal status; once enslaved, they became exchangeable commodities, indeed an important form of currency.

The Portuguese entered the slave-trade in the mid-15th century, took it over and, in the process, transformed it into something more impersonal, and horrible, than it had been either in antiquity or medieval Africa. The new Portuguese colony of Madeira became the center of a sugar industry, which soon made itself the largest supplier for western Europe. The first sugar-mill, worked by slaves, was erected in Madeira in 1452. This cash-industry was so successful that the Portuguese soon began laying out fields for sugar-cane on the Biafran Islands, off the African coast. An island off Cap Blanco in Mauretania became a slave-depot. From there, when the trade was in its infancy, several hundred slaves a year were s.h.i.+pped to Lisbon. As the sugar industry expanded, slaves began to be numbered in thousands: by 1550, some 50,000 African slaves had been imported into Sao Tome alone, which likewise became a slave entrepot. These profitable activities were conducted, under the aegis of the Portuguese crown, by a mixed collection of Christians from all over Europe-Spanish, Normans, and Flemish, as well as Portuguese, and Italians from the Aegean and the Levant. Being energetic, single young males, they mated with whatever women they could find, and sometimes married them. Their mixed progeny, mulattos, proved less susceptible than pure-bred Europeans to yellow fever and malaria, and so flourished. Neither Europeans nor mulattos could live on the African coast itself. But they multiplied in the Cape Verde Islands, 300 miles off the West African coast. The mulatto trading-cla.s.s in Cape Verde were known as Lancados. Speaking both Creole and the native languages, and practicing Christianity spiced with paganism, they ran the European end of the slave-trade, just as Arabs ran the African end.2 This new-style slave-trade was quickly characterized by the scale and intensity with which it was conducted, and by the cash nexus which linked African and Arab suppliers, Portuguese and Lancado traders, and the purchasers. The slave-markets were huge. The slaves were overwhelmingly male, employed in large-scale agriculture and mining. There was little attempt to acculturalize them and they were treated as body-units of varying quality, mere commodities. At Sao Tome in particular this modern pattern of slavery took shape. The Portuguese were soon selling African slaves to the Spanish, who, following the example in Madeira, occupied the Canaries and began to grow cane and mill sugar there too. By the time exploration and colonization spread from the islands across the Atlantic, the slave-system was already in place.3 In moving out into the Atlantic islands, the Portuguese discovered the basic meteorological fact about the North Atlantic, which forms an ocean weather-basin of its own. There were strong currents running clockwise, especially in the summer. These are a.s.sisted by northeast trade winds in the south, westerlies in the north. So seafarers went out in a southwest direction, and returned to Europe in a northeasterly one. Using this weather system, the Spanish landed on the Canaries and occupied them. The indigenous Guanches were either sold as slaves in mainland Spain, or converted and turned into farm-labourers by their mainly Castilian conquerors.4 Profiting from the experience of the Canaries in using the North Atlantic weather system, Christopher Columbus made landfall in the western hemisphere in 1492. His venture was characteristic of the internationalism of the American enterprise. He operated from the Spanish city of Seville but he came from Genoa and he was by nationality a citizen of the Republic of Venice, which then ran an island empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. The finance for his transatlantic expedition was provided by himself and other Genoa merchants in Seville, and topped up by the Spanish Queen Isabella, who had seized quant.i.ties of cash when her troops occupied Granada earlier in the year.5 The Spanish did not find American colonization easy. The first island-town Columbus founded, which he called Isabella, failed completely. He then ran out of money and the crown took over. The first successful settlement took place in 1502, when Nicolas de Ovando landed in Santo Domingo with thirty s.h.i.+ps and no fewer than 2,500 men. This was a deliberate colonizing enterprise, using the experience Spain had acquired in its reconquista, and based on a network of towns copied from the model of New Castile in Spain itself. That in turn had been based on the bastides of medieval France, themselves derived from Roman colony-towns, an improved version of Greek models going back to the beginning of the first millennium BC. So the system was very ancient. The first move, once a beachhead or harbour had been secured, was for an official called the adelantana to pace out the streetgrid.6 Apart from forts, the first substantial building was the church. Clerics, especially from the orders of friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans, played a major part in the colonizing process, and as early as 1512 the first bishopric in the New World was founded. Nine years before, the crown had established a Casa de la Contracion in Seville, as headquarters of the entire transatlantic effort, and considerable state funds were poured into the venture. By 1520 at least 10,000 Spanishspeaking Europeans were living on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, food was being grown regularly and a definite pattern of trade with Europeans had been established.7 The year before, Hernando Cortes had broken into the American mainland by a.s.saulting the ancient civilization of Mexico. The expansion was astonis.h.i.+ngly rapid, the fastest in the history of mankind, comparable in speed with and far more exacting in thoroughness and permanency than the conquests of Alexander the Great. In a sense, the new empire of Spain superimposed itself on the old one of the Aztecs rather as Rome had absorbed the Greek colonies.8 Within a few years, the Spaniards were 1,000 miles north of Mexico City, the vast new grid-town which Cortes built on the ruins of the old Aztec capital, Tenocht.i.tlan.

This incursion from Europe brought huge changes in the demography, the flora and fauna, and the economics of the Americas. Just as the Europeans were vulnerable to yellow fever, so the indigenous Indians were at the mercy of smallpox, which the Europeans brought with them. Europeans had learned to cope with it over many generations but it remained extraordinarily infectious and to the Indians it almost invariably proved fatal. We do not know with any certainty how many people lived in the Americas before the Europeans came. North of what is now the Mexican border, the Indians were spa.r.s.e and tribal, still at the hunter-gatherer stage in many cases, and engaged in perpetual inter-tribal warfare, though some tribes grew corn in addition to hunting and lived part of the year in villages-perhaps one million of them, all told. Further south there were far more advanced societies, and two great empires, the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru. In central and south America, the total population was about 20 million. Within a few decades, conquest and the disease it brought had reduced the Indians to 2 million, or even less. Hence, very early in the conquest, African slaves were in demand to supply labor. In addition to smallpox, the Europeans imported a host of welcome novelties: wheat and barley, and the ploughs to make it possible to grow them; sugarcanes and vineyards; above all, a variety of livestock. The American Indians had failed to domesticate any fauna except dogs, alpacas and llamas. The Europeans brought in cattle, including oxen for ploughing, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, pigs and poultry. Almost from the start, horses of high quality, as well as first-cla.s.s mules and donkeys, were successfully bred in the Americas. The Spanish were the only west Europeans with experience of running large herds of cattle on horseback, and this became an outstanding feature of the New World, where enormous ranches were soon supplying cattle for food and mules for work in great quant.i.ties for the mining districts.9 The Spaniards, hearts hardened in the long struggle to expel the Moors, were ruthless in handling the Indians. But they were persistent in the way they set about colonizing vast areas. The English, when they followed them into the New World, noted both characteristics. John Hooker, one Elizabethan commentator, regarded the Spanish as morally inferior 'because with all cruel inhumanity ... they subdued a naked and yielding people, whom they sought for gain and not for any religion or plantation of a commonwealth, did most cruelly tyrannize and against the course of all human nature did scorch and roast them to death, as by their own histories doth appear.' At the same time the English admired 'the industry, the travails of the Spaniard, their exceeding charge in furnis.h.i.+ng so many s.h.i.+ps ... their continual supplies to further their attempts and their active and undaunted spirits in executing matters of that quality and difficulty, and lastly their constant resolution of plantation."10 With the Spanish established in the Americas, it was inevitable that the Portuguese would follow them. Portugal, vulnerable to invasion by Spain, was careful to keep its overseas relations with its larger neighbor on a strictly legal basis. As early as 1479 Spain and Portugal signed an agreement regulating their respective spheres of trade outside European waters. The papacy, consulted, drew an imaginary longitudinal line running a hundred leagues west of the Azores: west of it was Spanish, east of it Portuguese. The award was made permanent between the two powers by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which drew the lines 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. This gave the Portuguese a gigantic segment of South America, including most of what is now modern Brazil. They knew of this coast at least from 1500 when a Portuguese squadron, on its way to the Indian Ocean, pushed into the Atlantic to avoid headwinds and, to its surprise, struck land which lay east of the treaty line and clearly was not Africa. But their resources were too committed to exploring the African coast and the routes to Asia and the East Indies, where they were already opening posts, to invest in the Americas. Their first colony in Brazil was not planted till 1532, where it was done on the model of their Atlantic island possessions, the crown appointing 'captains,' who invested in land-grants called donatorios. Most of this first wave failed, and it was not until the Portuguese transported the sugar-plantation system, based on slavery, from Cape Verde and the Biafran Islands, to the part of Brazil they called Pernambuco, that profits were made and settlers dug themselves in. The real development of Brazil on a large scale began only in 1549, when the crown made a large investment, sent over 1,000 colonists and appointed Martin Alfonso de Sousa governor-general with wide powers. Thereafter progress was rapid and irreversible, a ma.s.sive sugar industry grew up across the Atlantic, and during the last quarter of the 16th century Brazil became the largest slave-importing center in the world, and remained so. Over 300 years, Brazil absorbed more African slaves than anywhere else and became, as it were, an Afro-American territory. Throughout the 16th century the Portuguese had a virtual monopoly of the Atlantic slave trade. By 1600 nearly 300,000 African slaves had been transported by sea to plantations-25,000 to Madeira, 50,000 to Europe, 75,000 to Cape Sao Tome, and the rest to America. By this date, indeed, four out of five slaves were heading for the New World."

It is important to appreciate that this system of plantation slavery, organized by the Portuguese and patronized by the Spanish for their mines as well as their sugar-fields, had been in place, expanding steadily, long before other European powers got a footing in the New World. But the prodigious fortunes made by the Spanish from mining American silver, and by both Spanish and Portuguese in the sugar trade, attracted adventurers from all over Europe. While the Spanish and Portuguese were careful to respect each other's spheres of interest, which in any event were consolidated when the two crowns were united under the Habsburgs in 1580, no such inhibitions held back other nations. Any chance that the papal division of the Atlantic spoils between Spain and Portugal would hold was destroyed by the Reformation of the 1520s and 1530s, during which large parts of maritime northwest Europe renounced any allegiance to Rome. Protestantism took special hold in the trading communities and seaports of Atlantic France and the Low Countries, in London, already the largest commercial city in Europe, and among the seafaring men of southwest England. In 1561, Queen Elizabeth I's Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, carried out an investigation into the international law of the Atlantic, and firmly told the Spanish amba.s.sador that the pope had had no authority for his award. In any case there had long been a tradition, tenaciously held by French Huguenot seamen, who dismissed Catholic claims on principle, that the normal rules of peace and war were suspended beyond a certain imaginary line running down the midAtlantic. This line was even more vague than the pope's original award, and no one knew exactly where it was. But the theory, and indeed the practice, of 'No Peace Beyond the Line' was a 16th-century fact of life.' It is very significant indeed that, almost from its origins, the New World was widely regarded as a hemisphere where the rule of law did not apply and where violence was to be expected.

From the earliest years of the 16th century, Breton, Norman, Basque, and French fishermen (from La Roch.e.l.le) had been working the rich fis.h.i.+ng grounds of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and Labrador. Encouraged by their rich hauls, and reports of riches on land, they went further. In 1534 the French seafarer Jacques Cartier, from St Malo, went up the St Lawrence River, spent the winter at what he called Stadacona (Quebec) and penetrated as far as Hochelaga (Montreal). He was back again in 1541, looking for the 'Kingdom of Saguenay,' reported to be rich in gold and diamonds. But the gold turned out to be iron pyrites and the diamonds mere quartz crystals, and his expedition failed. As the wars of religion began to tear Europe apart, the great French Protestant leader Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, sent an expedition to colonize an island in what is now the immense harbor of Rio de Janeiro. This was in 1555 and the next year 300 reinforcements were dispatched to join them, many picked personally by Jean Calvin himself. But it did not prosper, and in 1560 the Portuguese, seeing that the colony was weak, attacked and hanged all its inhabitants. The French also set up Huguenot colonies at Fort Caroline in northern Florida, and at Charles Fort, near the Savannah River, in 1562 and 1564. But the Spaniards, whose great explorer Hernando de Soto had reconnoitered the entire area in the years 1539-42, were on the watch for intruders, especially Protestants. In 1565 they attacked Fort Caroline in force and ma.s.sacred the entire colony. They did the same at Charles Fort the next year, and erected their own strongholds at St Augustine and St Catherine's Island. Six years later, in 1572, French Catholic militants staged the Ma.s.sacre of St Bartholomew, in which Admiral Coligny was murdered, thus bringing to an end the first phase of French transatlantic expansion."

Into the vacuum left by the discomfiture of French Protestantism stepped the English, and it from their appearance on the scene that we date the ultimate origins of the American people. The Englishman John Cabot had been off the coast of Labrador as long ago as 1497, and off Nova Scotia the following year. Nothing came of these early ventures, but the English were soon fis.h.i.+ng off the Banks in strength, occasionally wintering in Newfoundland. Henry VIII took many Huguenot seamen and adventurers into his service and under his daughter Elizabeth maritime entrepreneurs like Sir John Hawkins worked closely with French Protestants in planning raids on Spanish commerce 'beyond the line.' The West Country gentleman-seafarer Humphrey Gilbert helped the Huguenots to fortify their harbour-bastion of La Roch.e.l.le in 1562, was made privy to their Atlantic schemes, and conceived some of his own. He came of a ramifying family clan which included the young Walter Ralegh, his half-brother, and their cousin Richard Grenville. In 1578 Gilbert obtained Letters Patent in which Queen Elizabeth signified her willingness to permit him to 'discover and occupy' such lands as were 'not possessed by any Christian prince,' and to exercise jurisdiction over them, 'agreeable to the form of the laws and policies of England. He was in touch with various scholars and publicists who did everything in their power to promote English enterprise on the high seas. One was Dr John Dee, the Queen's unofficial scientific adviser; another was the young mathematician Thomas Harlot, friend and follower of Ralegh. The most important by far, however, was Richard Hakluyt.

Hakluyt was the son of a Middle Temple lawyer who had made a collection of maps and ma.n.u.scripts on ocean travel. What his father followed as a hobby, young Hakluyt made his lifework. His countless publications, ranging from pamphlets to books, reinforced by powerful letters to the great and the good of Elizabethan England, were the biggest single impulse in persuading England to look west for its future, as well as our greatest single repository of information about the Atlantic in the 16th century. Young Hakluyt has some claims to be considered the first geopolitical strategist, certainly the first English speaking one. What Dr Dee was already calling the future 'British Empire,' and exhorting Queen Elizabeth to create, was to Hakluyt not a distant vision but something to be brought about in the next few years by getting seamen and entrepreneurs and 'planters' of 'colonies'-two new words which had first appeared in the language in the 1550s-to set about launching a specific settlement on the American coast.' In 1582, Hakluyt published an account of some of the voyages to the northwest Atlantic, with a preface addressed to the popular young hero Sir Philip Sidney, who had already arranged with Gilbert to take land in any colony he should found. Hakluyt complained in it that the English were missing opportunities and should seize the moment:

I marvel not a little that since the first discovery of America (which is now full forescore and ten years) after so great conquest and planting by the Spaniards and the Portingales there, that we of England could never have the grace to set fast footing in such fertile and temperate places as are left as yet unpossessed by them. But again when I consider that there is a time for all men, and see the Portingales' time to be out of date and that the nakedness of the Spaniards and their long-hidden secrets are at length espied ... I conceive great hope that the time approacheth and now is that we of England may share and part stakes (if we will ourselves) both with the Spaniard and Portingale in part of America and other regions as yet undiscovered.

Gilbert immediately took up Hakluyt's challenge and set out with five s.h.i.+ps, one of them owned by Ralegh, and 260 men. These included 'masons, carpenters, smiths and such like requisites,' but also 'mineral men and refiners,' indicating that Gilbert's mind, like those of most of the early adventurers, was still focussed on gold. But he did not survive the voyage: his tiny s.h.i.+p, the Squirrel, which was only 110 tons, foundered-Gilbert was last glimpsed reading a book on deck, a typical Elizabethan touch." So Ralegh took his place and immediately secured a new charter from the Queen to found a colony. Ralegh is the first great man in the story of the American people to come into close focus from the doc.u.ments, and it is worth looking at him in detail.

Ralegh was, in a sense, a proto-American. He had certain strongly marked characteristics which were to be a.s.sociated with the American archetype. He was energetic, brash, hugely ambitious, money-conscious, none too scrupulous, far-sighted and ahead of his time, with a pa.s.sion for the new and, not least, a streak of idealism which clashed violently with his overweening desire to get on and make a fortune. He was of ancient family, but penniless, born in Devon about 1554 and 'spake broad Devons.h.i.+re until his dying day.' He was, wrote John Aubrey, who devoted one of his Brief Lives to him, 'a tall, handsome and bold man,' with a lot of swagger, 'd.a.m.nably proud.' His good looks caught the Queen's eye when he came to court, for she liked necessitous youngsters from good families, who looked the part and whom she could 'make.' But what made her single him out from the crowd of smart-looking gallants who jostled for attention was his sheer brain-power and his grasp of new, especially scientific, knowledge. The court was amazed at his rapid rise in favor. As Sir Robert Naunton, an eyewitness, put it, 'true it is, he had gotten the Queen's ear at a trice, and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to her demands. And the truth is, she took him for a kind of oracle, which nettled them all. Ralegh was one of the first young courtiers to make use of the new luxury, tobacco, which the Spaniards had brought back from America, and typical of the way he intrigued the Queen was his demonstration, with the help of a small pair of scales, of how you measured the weight of tobacco-smoke, by first measuring the pristine weed, then the ashes. His mathematical friend, Hariot, fed him new ideas and experiments with which to keep up the Queen's interest."

Ralegh was not just an intellectual but a man of action since youth, having fought with the Huguenots, aged fifteen, and taken part in a desperate naval action under his half-brother Gilbert. He had also been twice in jail for 'affrays.' But his main experience of action, which was directly relevant to the American adventure, was in Ireland. The English had been trying to subdue Ireland, and 'reduce it to civility' as they put it, since the mid-12th century. Their success had been very limited. From the very beginning English settlers who planted themselves in Ireland and took up lands to turn into English-style estates had shown a disturbing tendency to go native and join the 'wild Irish.' To combat this, the English government had pa.s.sed a series of laws, in the 14th century, known as the Statutes of Kilkenny, which const.i.tuted an early form of apartheid. Fully Anglicized territory, radiating from Dublin, the capital, was known as the Pale, and the Irish were allowed inside it only under close supervision. The English might not sell the Irish weapons or horses and under no circ.u.mstances were to put on Irish dress, or speak the local Gaelic language, or employ 'harpers and rhymers.' Conversely the Irish were banned from a whole range of activities and from acquiring land in the Pale, and staying there overnight. But these laws were constantly broken, and had to be renewed periodically, and even so English settlers continued to 'degenerate' and intermarry with the Irish and become Irish themselves, and indeed foment and lead revolts against the English authorities. One such uprising had occurred in 1580, in Munster, and Ralegh had raised a band of l00 footmen from the City of London and taken a ruthless part in suppressing it. He had killed hundreds of 'Irish savages,' as he termed them, and hanged scores more for treason, and had been handsomely rewarded with confiscated Irish lands which he was engaged in 'planting.' In the American enterprise, Ireland played the same part for the English as the war against the Moors had done for the Spaniards-it was a training-ground both in suppressing and uprooting an alien race and culture, and in settling conquered lands and building towns. And, just as the money from the reconquista went into financing the Spanish conquest of the Americas, so Ralegh put the profits from his Irish estates towards financing his transatlantic expedition."

Ralegh's colonizing venture is worth examining in a little detail because it held important lessons for the future. His first expedition of two s.h.i.+ps, a reconnaissance, set out on April 27, 1584, watered at the Canaries and Puerto Rico, headed north up the Florida Channel, and reached the Carolina Banks at midsummer. On July 13, they found a pa.s.sage through the banks leading to what they called Roanoke Island, 'And after thanks given to G.o.d for our safe arrival hither, we manned our boats and went to view the land next adjoining, and to take possession of the same, in the right of the Queen's most excellent Majesty."' The men spent six weeks on the Banks and noted deer, rabbits, birds of all kind, and in the woods pines, cypress, sa.s.safras, sweat gum and the highest and reddest cedars in the world.' What struck them most was the total absence of any pollution: 'sweet and aromatic smells lay in the air.' On the third day they spotted a small boat paddling towards the island with three men in it. One of them got out at a point opposite the English s.h.i.+ps and waited, 'never making any show of fear or doubt' as a party rowed out to him. Then:

After he had spoken of many things not understood by us we brought him with his own good liking aboard the s.h.i.+ps, and gave him a s.h.i.+rt, a hat and some other things, and made him taste of our wine and our meat, which he liked very well; and after having viewed both barks, he departed and went to his own boat again, which he had left in a little cove or creek adjoining: as soon as he was two bowshots into the water, he fell to fis.h.i.+ng, and in less than half an hour he had laden his boat as deep as it could swim, with which he came again to the point of land, and there he divided his fish into two parts, pointing one part to the s.h.i.+ps and the other to the pinnace: which after he had (as much as he might) requited the former benefits received, he departed out of our sight.

There followed further friendly contact with the Indians, and exchanges of deerskins and buffalo hides, maize, fruit, and vegetables, on the one hand, and pots, axes, and tun dishes, from the s.h.i.+p's stores, on the other. When the s.h.i.+ps left Roanoke at the end of August, two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, went with them. All were back in the west of England by mid-September, bringing with them valuable skins and pearls. Ralegh was persuaded by the detailed account of one of the masters, Captain Arthur Barlow, that the landfall of Roanoke was suitable for a plantation and at once began a publicity campaign, using Hakluyt and other scribes, to attract investors. He had just become member of parliament for Devons.h.i.+re, and in December he raised the matter in the Commons, elaborating his plans for a colony. On January 6, 1585 a delighted Queen knighted him at Greenwich and gave him permission to call the proposed territory Virginia, after her. In April an expedition of seven s.h.i.+ps, carrying 600 men, half of them soldiers, a.s.sembled at Plymouth. The fleet was put under the command of Ralegh's cousin Sir Richard Grenville, with an experienced Irish campaigner, Ralph Lane, in charge of the troops. It carried aboard Harlot, as scientific expert. He had been learning the local language from the two Indians, and was given special instructions to make scientific measurements and observe flora and fauna, climate and geology. Also recruited was John White, England's first watercolor-painter of distinction, who was appointed surveyor and painter, and a number of other specialists-an apothecary, a surgeon, and skilled craftsmen.

After various misadventures, some losses, prize-taking from the Spaniards, and quarreling between Grenville and Lane, the bulk of the fleet reached the Roanoke area in July. There they discovered, and Hariot noted, one of the main difficulties which faced the early colonists in America. 'The sea coasts of Virginia,' Hariot wrote, 'are full of islands whereby the entrance into the main land is hard to find. For although they be separated with divers and sundry large divisions, which seemed to yield convenient entrance, yet to our great peril we proved that they were shallow and full of dangerous flats." There are literally thousands of islands off the American coasts, especially in the region of the great rivers which formed highways inland, and early voyagers could spend weeks or even months finding their way among them to the mainland, or to the princ.i.p.al river-system. And when they occupied a particular island, relief and reinforcements expeditions often found immense difficulty in identifying it. Moreover, the topography of the coast was constantly changing. Ralegh's Virginia lies between Cape Fear and Cape Henry, from lat.i.tude 33.50 to 36.56, mainly in what is now North Carolina, though a portion is in modern Virginia. The Carolina Banks, screening the Roanoke colony, are now greatly changed by wind and sea-action, though it is just possible to identify the 16th-century outlines.

No satisfactory harbor was found, though a fort was built on the north of Roanoke Island. Lane was left with 107 men to hold it, while Grenville returned to England in August to report progress. On the return voyage, Grenville took a 300-ton Spanish vessel, the Santa Maria, which had strayed from the annual treasure convoy, and brought it into Plymouth harbor on October I8. The prize and contents were valued at I5,000, which yielded a handsome dividend for all who had invested in the 1585 expedition. But the fact that Grenville had allowed himself to be diverted into commerce-raiding betrayed the confusion of aims of the Ralegh enterprise. Was its object to found a permanent, viable colony, with an eye to the long term, or was it to make quick profits by preying on Spain's existing empire? Ralegh himself could not have answered this question; or, rather, he would have replied 'Both,' without realizing that they were incompatible.

Meanwhile Lane had failed to find what he regarded as essential to a settlement, a proper harbor, had s.h.i.+fted the location of the colony, fallen foul of the local Indians and fought a pitched battle; and he had been relieved by a large expedition under Sir Francis Drake, which was cruising up the east coast of America after plundering the Spanish Caribbean. Lane was a good soldier and resourceful leader, but he knew nothing about planting, especially crop-raising. The colonists he had with him were not, for the most part, colonists at all but soldiers and adventurers. Hariot noted: 'Some also were of a nice bringing up, only in cities or towns, and such as never (as I may say) had seen the world before.' He said they missed their 'accustomed dainty food' and 'soft beds of down and feathers' and so were 'miserable.' They thought they would find treasure and 'after gold and silver was not to be found, as it was by them looked for, had little or no care for any other thing but to pamper their bellies.' Lane himself concluded that the venture was hopeless as the area had fatal drawbacks: 'For that the discovery of a good mine, by the goodness of G.o.d, or a pa.s.sage to the south sea, or some way to it, and nothing else can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation.' Lane decided to bring his men back to England, while he still had the means to do so. The only tangible results of the venture were the detailed findings of Harlot, published in 1588 as A Briefe and true report of Virginia, and a number of high-quality watercolor drawings by White, now in the British Museum, which show the Indians, their villages, their dances, their agriculture, and their way of life. White also made a detailed map, and elaborate colored sketches of flora and fauna, including a Hoopoe, a Blue Striped Grunt Fish, a Loggerhead Turtle, and a plantain.

A further expedition of three s.h.i.+ps set out for Roanoke on May 8, 1587, with 150 colonists abroad, this time including some women and children, and John White in charge as governor. His journal is a record of the expedition. Again there were divided aims, for Captain Simon Fernandez, master of the fleet, was anxious to engage in piracy and so quarreled with White. Roanoke was reached, and on August 18 John White's daughter, Elenora, who was married to his a.s.sistant Ananias Dare, gave birth to a girl, who was named Virginia, 'because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia.' But there was more trouble with the Indians, and Fernandez was anxious to get his s.h.i.+ps away to prey on the Spaniards while their treasure fleet was still on the high seas. So 114 colonists, including Elenora and little Virginia, sixteen other women, and ten children, were left behind while White sailed back with Fernandez to persuade Ralegh to send a back-up fleet quickly. White reached Southampton on November 8 and immediately set about organizing relief. But he found the country in the midst of what was to be its first global conflict, preparing feverishly to resist the Spanish invasion-armada, which was expected in the spring. All s.h.i.+pping was stayed by government order in English ports, to be available for defensive flotillas, and when Ralegh and Grenville got together eight vessels in Devon in March 1588, with the object of equipping them for Roanoke, the Privy Council commanded Grenville 'on his allegiance to forbear to go his intended voyage' and to place them under the flag of Sir Francis Drake, to join his anti-Armada fleet. White's attempt to set out himself, with two small pinnaces, proved hopeless.'

As a result of the Armada campaign and its aftermath, White found it impossible to get his relief expedition to Virginia until August 17, 1590. He anch.o.r.ed at Roanoke Island at nightfall, lit by the lurid flickers of a forest fire. He recorded: 'We let fall our grapnel near the sh.o.r.e, and sounded with a trumpet and call, and afterwards many familiar English tunes and songs, and called to them friendly. But we had no answer.' When they landed the next day, White found no sign of his daughter or granddaughter, or anyone else. Five chests were found, broken open, obviously by Indians. Three belonged to White himself, containing books, framed maps, and pictures with which he had intended to furnish the governor's mansion, to be built in the new town he had planned and called Ralegh. They were all, he said, 'rotten and spoyled with raine.' They found three letters, 'CRO,' carved on a tree, and nearby the full word 'Croatoan,' on a post, 'in fayre Capital letters.' White had agreed with the colonists that, if forced to quit Roanoke, they would leave behind a carved signpost of their destination; and in the event of trouble they were to put a Maltese cross beside it. There was no cross. But all the other evidence-the defensive palisade and the cabins overgrown with weed-indicated a hasty departure. And where the colonists went to was never discovered, though White searched long and anxiously. But he failed to get to Croatoan Island, and whether the frightened colonists reached it can never be known. To this day, no further trace of the lost colony has ever been found. Ralegh himself tried to sail past Virginia in 1595, on his way home from a voyage to Guyana, and he sent another search-party in 1602. But nothing came of either attempt. The most likely explanation is that the colony was overwhelmed by Indians on their way from Roanoke to Croatoan, the males killed, the women and children absorbed into the tribe, as was the Indian custom. So the bloodline of the first Virginians merged with that of the Indians they intended to subdue.

In 1625 Sir Francis Bacon, no friend of Ralegh-who in the meantime had been executed by King James I-wrote an essay, 'On Plantations,' in which he tried to sum up the lessons of the tragic lost colony. He pointed out that any counting on quick profits was fatal, that there was a need for expert personnel of all kinds, strongly motivated in their commitment to a long-term venture, and, not least, that it was hopeless to try to win over the Indians with trifles 'instead of treating them justly and graciously.' Above all, back-up expeditions were essential: 'It is the sinfullest thing in the world to forsake or dest.i.tute a plantation once in forwardness; for besides the dishonour, it is the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable persons.'

There are two points which need to be added. First, as the historian A. L. Rowse has pointed out, the failure of the Roanoke colony may have been a blessing in disguise. Had it taken root, the Spanish would certainly have become aware of this English intrusion in a continent all of which they claimed. They would have identified its exact location and strength and have sent out a powerful punitive expedition, as they did against the French in Florida in the 1560s. At that stage in the game they were still in a military and naval position to annihilate any English venture on the coast. Moreover, they would almost certainly have built forts in the vicinity to deter further English ventures and have laid specific claim to the entire coast of what is now the eastern seaboard of the United States, and so made it much less likely that the English would have returned, after the turn of the 17th century and in the new reign of James I. James was anxious to be on peaceful terms with Spain and would, in those circ.u.mstances, have forbidden any more attempts to colonize Virginia. So English America might never have come into existence."

Secondly, in listing the reasons why Roanoke failed, Francis Bacon omitted one important missing element. It was an entirely secular effort. It had no religious dimension. This was in accordance with Ralegh's own sentiments. Though he was for form's sake an oathtaking, church-attending Protestant, like anyone else who wanted to rise to the top in Elizabethan England, religion meant nothing to him. It is not even clear he was a Christian. It was darkly rumored indeed, by his enemies at the court, that he and his friend Harlot, and others of their circle, were 'atheists'-though the term did not then necessarily imply a denial of G.o.d's existence, merely a rejection of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: in our terminology he was a deist of sorts. At all events, Ralegh was not the man to launch a colonizing venture with a religious purpose. The clergy do not seem to have figured at all in his plans. There was no attempt on his part to recruit G.o.d-fearing, prayerful men.

In these respects Ralegh was unusual for an Elizabethan sea-venturer. Most of the Elizabethan seadogs were strict Protestants, usually Calvinists, who had strong religious motives for resisting Spanish dominance on the high seas and in the western hemisphere. Drake was typical of them: his family were victims of the papist persecution under Queen Mary, and Drake had been brought up in a Thames-side hulk in consequence, educated to thump his Bible and believe in double-predestination and to proselytize among the heathen and the benighted believers in Romish superst.i.tion. He held regular services on board his s.h.i.+ps, preached sermons to his men, and tried to convert his Spanish prisoners. Next to the Bible itself, his favorite book was Foxe's Book of Martyrs, that compendium of the sufferings of English Protestants who resisted the Catholic restoration under 'b.l.o.o.d.y Mary' and died for their faith. Foxe's vast book, published early in Elizabeth's reign, proved immensely popular and, despite its size and expense, had sold over 10,000 copies before the end of it, an unprecedented sale for those times. It was not just a history of persecution: it also embodied the English national-religious myth, which had been growing in power in the later Middle Ages and came to maturity during the Reformation decades-the myth that the English had replaced the Jews as the Elect Nation, and were divinely appointed to do G.o.d's will on earth.

This belief in divine appointment was to become an important factor in American as well as English history, because it was transmitted to the western side of the Atlantic when the English eventually established themselves there. At the origin of the myth was the widely held belief that the Christian faith had been brought to Britain directly by Joseph of Arimathea, on the express instructions of the Apostles. Some thought the agent was St Paul; others that Christ himself had paid a secret visit. It was through Britain that the Roman Empire had embraced the faith: for the Emperor Constantine had been British-his mother Helena was the daughter of the British King Coilus. So, wrote Foxe, 'by the help of the British Army,' Constantine 'obtained ... peace and tranquillity to the whole universal Church of Christ.'

In the reign of Elizabeth the myth became a historical validation of England's role in resisting the Counter-Reformation and the Continental supremacy of the Catholic Habsburgs. The Elect Nation had imperative duties to perform which were both spiritual and geopolitical. In the second year of the Queen's reign, John Aylmer wrote in his An Harborow for faithful and true subjects that England was the virgin mother to a second birth of Christ:

G.o.d is English. For you fight not only in the quarrel of your country, but also and chiefly in defence of His true religion and of His dear son Christ. [England says to her children:] 'G.o.d hath brought forth in me the greatest and excellentest treasure that He hath for your comfort and all the world's. He would that out of my womb should come that servant of Christ John Wyclif, who begat Huss, who begat Luther, who begat the truth.'

The most strident in proclaiming the doctrine of the English as the Chosen Race were the explorers and navigators, the seamen and merchant adventurers, and the colonizers and planters. It is they who gave the myth its most direct geopolitical thrust by urging England's divinely appointed right to break open Spain's doomed empire of the Scarlet Woman, the popish Wh.o.r.e of Babylon, and replace it with an English Protestant paramountcy. One of them, John Davys, put the new English ideology thus:

There is no doubt that we of England are this saved people, by the eternal and infallible presence of the Lord predestined to be sent into these Gentiles in the sea, to those Isles and famous Kingdoms, there to preach the peace of the Lord; for are not we only set on Mount Zion to give light to all the rest of the world? It is only we, therefore, that must be these s.h.i.+ning messengers of the Lord, and none but we!"

It is curious that this powerful religious motivation, so strongly marked in seafaring men and others involved in overseas ventures, was made so little use of by the Englishmen controlling or plotting the attempted settlement of North America in the closing decades of the 16th century and even in the first decade of the 17th century. But so it was. It is part of the larger mystery of why the English, and the French too for that matter, were still so reluctant to settle across the Atlantic a whole century after Columbus' first discoveries, during which the Spanish and Portuguese created vast empires there and possessed themselves of enormous fortunes.

France was totally absorbed in a long and bitter religious-civil war until the 1590s, when the Protestant leader Henri IV reluctantly accepted conversion to Catholicism to end the struggle, and gave the Protestants tolerance by the Edict of Nantes of 1598. Once at peace, eager French minds quickly conceived geopolicies of European and global expansion. The English avoided civil war but in the 1590s and the first decade of the 17th century they were embroiled in desperate struggles to subdue the 'wild Irish,' which they finally achieved-for the moment-in the last year of old Elizabeth's reign. Thereafter their colonial energies were absorbed with 'planting' the conquered country, especially Ulster, until then the wildest part of it. Early in the 1600s Ulster was made the theater of the largest transfer of population ever carried out under the crown-thousands of Scots Presbyterians being allocated parcels of confiscated Catholic land along a defensible military line running along the Ulster border: a line which is still demographically significant to this day and explains why the Ulster problem remains so intractable. This major Ulster planting took root because it was based on agriculture and centered round hard-working, experienced Scots lowland farmers who were also ready to take up arms to defend their new possessions.

In transatlantic expeditions, however, the English maritime intellectuals like Ralegh, Hakluyt, and Hariot were still obsessed with the possibility of quick riches and refused to accept the paramount importance of food-growing capacity to any successful settlement. The Indians could and did grow food, especially maize, but not for cash. Once their own needs were satisfied there was little left over. Colonists had either to grow their own or be dependent on continuing supplies from England-that was the great lesson of Roanoke. And the only way to insure that settlers grew food systematically and successfully was to send them out as entire families. This emerged as the leading principle of English colonization. Hakluyt, in his practical book on planting, wrote in terms of commerce and trading posts. He even recognized that religion could be important and he accepted the need to grow food. But he did not discuss the need to send out independent families and he thought agricultural labor could be supplied by criminals, civil debtors, and the like, sent out to regain their freedom by work.

The notion of using overseas colonies for getting rid of 'human offal,' as it was termed, was coming to be accepted. A generation before, Gilbert had thought of using persecuted and discontented papists as settlers, but did nothing about it. In the 1590s, increasingly, life in England was made hard for the Presbyterians and other Nonconformists, but to begin with they migrated to Calvinist Holland. Certainly, by the turn of the century, there were many ill-fitting groups in society for whom the new business of exporting humans seemed the obvious solution. Population was rising fast, the number of 'st.u.r.dy beggars,' as parliament referred to them, was growing. In 1598 the House of Commons laid down banishment beyond the realm as one punishment for begging. The same year the French founded their first overseas penal colony. It was only a matter of time before the English state recognized that North America had the answer to many social problems.

Then too, international trade was increasing steadily. In the later Middle Ages trade outside Europe had been falling off as Europe's own meager gold and silver mines became exhausted and the Continent was gradually stripped of its specie to pay for imports. The discovery by the Spanish of precious metals in the Americas had a profound effect on world trade. Once and for all, Europe became a money-economy. Merchants began to operate on an ever-increasing scale. The huge quant.i.ties of silver brought to Europe pushed up commodity prices, and since wages and rents lagged behind, those involved in commerce made handsome profits, built themselves grand houses, and upgraded their importance in society. As trade spread throughout the world, and its quant.i.ty rose, the importance of colonizing ventures to expand the system became obvious. And finally there was North Atlantic fis.h.i.+ng, increasing all the time. By the turn of the century both English and French had semi-permanent fis.h.i.+ng settlements off what is now Labrador, Newfoundland, and Canada. Sable Island in the Atlantic was the first French permanent post. They set up another at Tadoussac at the mouth of the Sanguenay River. Their great explorer-entrepreneur Samuel de Champlain came there in 1603 and his party moved into Acadia, Cape Breton Island, and Canada itself. In 1608 Champlain established Quebec. Much of this early French enterprise was conducted by Huguenots, though when the French crown took over in the 1620s, Catholic paramountcy was established. It was now the French, rather than the Spanish, who caused forward-looking Englishmen uneasiness and spurred them to move out across the Atlantic themselves, before it was too late.

All these threads began to come together in the early years of the 17th century. James I was keen on colonization, provided it could be carried out without conflict with either Spain or France. As in Elizabethan times, the method was for the crown to issue charters to 'companies of adventurers,' who risked their own money. The Ulster plantation, which began in earnest in 1606, absorbed most of the available resources, but the same year the Virginia Company was refounded with a new charter. It had a Plymouth-based northern sector, and a southern sector based on London. The Plymouth men settled Sagadahoc on the Kennebec River, but abandoned it in 1608. A related, Bristol-based company founded settlements in southwest Newfoundland two years later. Meanwhile the Londoners followed up the old Roanoke settlement by entering the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 and marking out a city they called Jamestown, after their sovereign, 40 miles up the Powhatan River, renamed the James too.

The Jamestown settlement is of historic importance because it began the continuous English presence in North America. But as a colony it left much to be desired. This time, the men who ran the Virginia Company from London did not leave out the religious element, though they saw their divine purpose largely in terms of converting Indians. The company a.s.serted that its object was 'to preach and baptise into the Christian Religion and by propagation of the Gospell, to recover out of the arms of the Divell, a number of poure and miserable soules, wrapt up into death, in almost invincible ignorance.", The true benefits of colonization, wrote Sir George Peckham in a pamphlet, would accrue to the 'natives,' brought by the settlers 'from falsehood to truth, from darkness to light, from the highway of death to the path of life, from superst.i.tious idolatry to sincere Christianity, from the Devil to Christ, from h.e.l.l to Heaven.' He added: 'And if in respect of all the commodities [colonies] can yield us (were they many more) that they should but receive this only benefit of Christianity, they were more fully recompensed."

There was also the 'human offal' argument. The New Britannia, published at the time of the Jamestown foundation, justified it by urging that 'our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, which having no means of labor to relieve their misery, do likewise swarm in lewd and naughtie practises, so that if we seek not some ways for their foreign employment, we must supply shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions. It is no new thing but most profitable for our state, to rid our mult.i.tudes of such who lie at home [inflicting on] the land pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villainy worse than the plague itself.'

Converting Indians, getting rid of criminals and the idle poor-that was not a formula for a successful colony. The financing, however, was right: this was a speculative company investment, in which individuals put their cash into a joint stock to furnish and equip the expedition, and reinforce it. The crown had nothing to do with the money side to begin with. Over the years, this method of financing plantations turned out to be the best one and is one reason why the English colonies in America proved eventually so successful and created such a numerous and solidly based community: capitalism, financed by private individuals and the compet.i.tive money-market, was there from the start. At Jamestown, in return for their investment, each stockholder received l00 acres in fee simple (in effect perpetual freehold) for each share owned, and another -100 acres when the grant was 'seated,' that is, actually taken up. Each shareholder also received a 'head right' of 50 acres for each man he transported and paid for. That was the theory. But in practice the settlers, who were adventurers rather than farmers-most were actually company employees-did not know how to make the most of their acres.

It was on May 6, 1607 that three s.h.i.+ps of the Virginia Company, the G.o.dspeed, the Discovery, and the Sarah Constant, sighted the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. The settlers numbered 105, and they built a fort, a church, and huts with roofs of thatch. None of the original settlement survives but an elaborate reconstruction shows us what it looked like, and it was extremely primitive. It was in fact more like a Dark Age settlement in western Europe during the 6th or 7th centuries than a neat towns.h.i.+p of log cabins-as though the English in establis.h.i.+ng a foothold on the new continent had had to go back a thousand years into their past. As it was, lacking a family unit basis, the colony was fortunate to survive at all. Half died by the end of 1608, leaving a mere fifty-three emaciated survivors.

The rest might have perished too had it not been for the leaders.h.i.+p of Captain John Smith (c.1579-1631). Smith was a Lincolns.h.i.+re man, who had had an adventurous career as a mercenary fighting the Turks. He Joined the Jamestown expedition not as an investor but as a hired soldier. His terms of engagem