If we accept that the English were not overly interested in the idea of building an empire but were forever conscious of the activities of their traditional adversaries, the French and Spanish, then we have to wonder at what stage it was that the indifference towards expanding commercially and politically into the New World was replaced by a concern that certainly the Spanish were building areas of interest that could threaten the English.
About three-quarters of the way through the sixteenth century differences among the major European States (and we should include the English in this sweep) became obvious. We only have to consider the circumstances that led to the Spanish Armada. More directly was the plight of the Huguenots. They had been persecuted in Europe and so great numbers sought refuge outside of Continental Europe. Franco-English Huguenots crossed the Atlantic in the 1570s and settled, for a while, in Florida. Little wonder that the Protestants there used the Florida coast and the cays to attack the Spanish galleons, which represented, of course, their former persecutors. The Spanish were not going to stand for this for very long and it was a pretty easy task to bombard the settlement and then land marines to sack it. There is some irony that is easily recognizable in international situations today; it seems unlikely that until the Spanish plundered the Huguenot settlement that the English started to make sensible assessments of how much commercial benefit the Spaniards were drawing from the region. The Spanish conflict with the Huguenots took place in the 1570s. The Spanish conflict with the English followed and continued until 1604 when James VI and I, made a sort of peace with Spain.
In the meantime, the geography of the Americas was slowly being recognized. America itself was seen as a continent which, in the late sixteenth century, was an incentive to investors who wondered what lay beyond the eastern seaboard. Yet there was still no rush to discover riches, partly because it was too costly to mount expeditions; secondly, the capabilities were few and thirdly, they needed royal as well as banking approval. The discovering of riches and territorial claims (apart from traditional and family claims in France) was a relatively unexplored system to the English. Nevertheless, the main incentive as it was for the whole of the colonial experience remained commercial and this began to sort itself into a procedure of recording journeys, registering claims and appealing for patents. How could this be any other way? To mount an expedition, to risk capital investment never mind lives, cost a lot of money. It had to be supported by Royal Assent in the form of a patent or charter bearing the monarch’s signature.
None would invest a sixpence or a reputation unless there was a very good chance of huge financial gain. While we should not disregard the sense of adventure, everyone was into the business of colony-making for the simple reason that it was a business. The adventurers and entrepreneurs that built the two British Empires between the late fifteenth and early twentieth centuries were morally and commercially no different from those who built international commercial empires in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Money ruled and without it very little other than poetry and cubism was created.
If we accept the mercantile instincts of the original explorers without, for the moment, any judgement of how it was exercised we will find more revealing the first records of English travellers to this new world. There were chroniclers, just as there are today competing sections of the media (growing almost daily from the beginning of the sixteenth century), and of course academic and commercial published analysis. To write up an assessment of what existed and what was possible for future ventures gave authors some distinction as well as commercial possibilities. Whatever their reasoning and motives we have only to look at the records of, for example, Samuel Purchas (1577–1626) in his Purchas, His Pilgrims, to sense the very real adventure.32
Having said that, the English as a nation seemed indifferent to colonization outside of Ireland until the late sixteenth-century exploits of Humphrey Gilbert, as explored in Chapter Nineteen. Gilbert had been heavily involved in Elizabeth I’s attempts to protect the Protestant Huguenots from the French Catholics before he turned his attention to exploration. He wanted to find a safe route to China by heading West, while Francis Drake was being encouraged to look for Australia. The excitement of exploration and riches was growing at an unprecedented rate among investors in Western Europe. There was now a convincing stream of information arriving in England that riches were to be found and profits made. Also, there was a large element at Elizabeth’s court who encouraged the likes of Drake, Gilbert and Hawkins because they saw this as a way of robbing the Spanish. Elizabeth became convinced that the way to get at the Spaniards and Catholicism was not through hopeless and prohibitively expensive land skirmishes but by attacking the Spaniards at the source of their new wealth – their empire. Little wonder that the court could see the sense, especially economically, of the English having their own empire.
After Gilbert’s adventure of founding a colony in Newfoundland and Ralegh’s settlement of Virginia, English attention turned towards the West Indies. This curved archipelago stretching north of Trinidad for some 500 miles was always to figure greatly in British history. The first proper settlement was made in 1623 when a Captain Warner, decided that St Kitt’s, towards the north of the Leeward Islands, would be a very good place to grow tobacco, which was becoming if not a staple crop then a very good export to England.
Barbados was occupied by 1627 and although it is not much bigger than the Isle of Wight became a dumping ground for slaves and as a place of deportation, long before Australia was used. For example, those wretches not hanged by the infamous Judge Jeffreys after the Monmouth uprising in 1685 and the Bloody Assizes were deported. About 800 of them were sent to Barbados, which was almost entirely a huge sugar plantation and therefore a lucrative port of call for the slave traders. Almost the entire workforce had been kidnapped from Africa. Further south was Trinidad, held by the French until the British won it at the end of the Seven Years War. It too was a slave island of sugar plantations and cocoa. Neighbouring Tobago had a similar history and was used by Daniel Defoe as the island for Robinson Crusoe. What of the natives of these islands? Most of them were slaughtered by the Spaniards. Jamaica, one of the inner Caribbean islands, is typical of the region as it was first occupied by the Spanish, raided by British pirates, fought over and by the 1660s was a well established colony. It has always had a chequered social and political history. One of its early governors, in the 1670s, was the supposedly reformed buccaneer, Captain Henry Morgan.
In 1664 Jamaica was an example of potentially good colonial administration with a form of elective government established. This was no thriving democracy. After all, if there was not much in England why should there have been in the colonies? One answer was the more subjective form of government of the occupied islands. Another was the fear of what the non-white population might do. A third was the realization that no colonial administration, no matter how much the idea of colonial image and code was transplanted, could fully implement the wishes of London political thought in an altogether different colonial community. So there was an uneasy relationship between the governor and the partially elected assembly which was restricted to the white settlers, and certainly not the slaves.
Not all the British occupations in the Caribbean were among the islands. The seas had been lucrative waters for British pirates raiding Spanish ships and settlements. Since the coming of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England, there had been great effort to end the wars between England and Spain. This conflict had nagged away at the British economy, which was in a parlous state. It took quite a time for James to make it clear that a ban on piracy had to form part of the solution to end the wars. Buccaneering had an official status at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was a legitimate part of warfare as well as a lucrative one. Pirates were often better sailors than the King’s own navy and their ships were better kitted out. A sea battle would often find privateers taking part alongside the navy like some maritime militia. However, the pirates
were not in the business of fighting the Spaniards for heroic or loyal reasons: they were in it for the money. They were often royally backed. The expeditions to establish colonies, with the few exceptions of those involving the exploited and persecuted, were all about money. Why not? There was nothing disgraceful in these ambitions. The idea that local populations would be overwhelmed did not raise the same moral questions as they may in the twenty-first century. In today’s global business ways, international corporations and governments sometimes cause terrible wounds on vulnerable societies, so there’s little moral high ground to choose between.
The seventeenth-century pirates who worked the Caribbean would continue to do so as larger than life marine poachers and certainly pull in more than the occasional pheasant. Many of them retired as wealthy men and by the 1640s they could be found in British Honduras and Guiana living in some style. In fact, Honduras was largely found and sustained by these retired corsairs. This coastline in the seventeenth century had a lot in common with some strips of the twenty-first century Spanish coast, populated by gold-medallioned British men, some of whom had been on first-name terms with British justice.
These occupations and purposes of the British interest in the Caribbean were very much part of the first British Empire which was established as a new venture and experience. Apart from Ireland there was no history of colonialism and certainly not colonial administration necessary to consolidate the complex systems needed to rule from a distance. The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century British administrations in northern France cannot be seen in the same context. The ‘overseas’ colonial system, therefore, had its origins in what the last of the Tudors and early Stuarts thought possible and profitable. The need to bring some formality to the settlements of this time was encouraged by the consequences of the continuing British, mainly English, conflict with Catholic France. In the sixteenth century, the French Huguenot admiral, Gaspard de Coligny expounded a tactical doctrine that appealed to the English when he encouraged that the Spanish should be attacked in the West Indies. Coligny’s ambition was more than incursion into the Spanish commercial grounds of the Caribbean. Militarily the Spanish would have to reinforce their garrisons in the West Indies. This in turn would weaken them in Europe. It was a fundamental fact of military life that would survive the centuries, even to the twenty-first century when the British military became overstretched because of too varied commitments abroad.
The English connection to the Huguenots, who they had supported by sending troops to Normandy in 1562, continued to nurture the seeds of colonial expansion. Coligny, then Governor of Le Havre, decided that some of the Huguenots should flee the travails in France and sail for Florida, or Terra Florida as it was then known. The expedition sailed in February 1562 with the ambition to call Florida ‘New France’. The English trusted and knew well the commander of that expedition, Jean Ribault. He landed at what we call South Carolina and set up a stockade in the name of King Charles IX, thus calling it Charlesfort, which is now Charleston. In the summer he sailed for France, but with the debacle of the English effort and the Huguenots’ surrender to the Catholics, Ribault did not stay in France and went to his natural haven, England. He then published in English his account of the setting up of a mini-colony in Florida. Thomas Stukely, fascinated by Ribault’s story, persuaded Elizabeth that all the rumours of Florida being if not paved, then seamed, with gold were true. In turn this led to Martin Frobisher (1535?–94) embarking on the first of his three voyages in search of a north-west passage to the Indies, and gold, in 1576. He failed in both missions, but dignified himself commanding the Triumph, alongside Drake in the Revenge and Hawkins in the Victory, in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The importance of Frobisher is the way that he reflected not so much the sense of exploration – the original reason for his voyages – but the fact that they were all inevitably supported for commercial gain. Who else but entrepreneurs would finance them? No one else had money.
We should not get the idea that the commercial interests of this period were based only on grandiose schemes. When, as early as the fourteenth century, sailors had returned from the Newfoundland Banks with stories of enormous shoals of fish, the consistent and largely unsung group of voyagers were the fishermen.
Certainly by the second half of the sixteenth century a large West Country investment was going into the provisioning and fitting out of fishing vessels heading for the north-west Atlantic. The Newfoundland Banks and the areas beyond presented problem and opportunity. The dilemma was the distance involved. It certainly meant that the British fishermen had to dry and salt their catch. The English preferred to do this ashore whereas the French and Portuguese tended to fish in the grounds and stayed at sea by loading and barrelling the catch with salt. The French and Portuguese therefore stayed at sea longer than the British.
The British established drying bases on shore, which they fitted out with salt stages. Unlike the French, the British did not fish from the large vessels that had brought them across the Atlantic. Instead they put out from the shore in smaller vessels, often single-masted, with a very basic dipping lug sail and perhaps a small steadying sail on a mizzen mast towards the stern. These small but sturdy boats were called shallops. The importance in this distinction in fishing styles is obvious; the English by having their drying sheds and stages ashore were establishing small colonies. By doing this they were building important bases for the expansion of empire. Again we see the economic rather than the constitutional widening of British influence.
French vessels would come into the same harbours, particularly St John’s, but the British made greater efforts to establish their lordship over these fishing havens. The French in the meantime went where the British were not: the estuary of the St Lawrence Seaway.
Uneasily perhaps, but commercially sensible, the French and the British tried to coexist with a minimum amount of conflict. It was the same sort of relationship that we would see between the two nations in India, when French and British commercial instincts and expediency all but ignored the fact that in another part of the world their two nations were at war. This ‘peace’ was not to last, but it showed that it was not only the British who were in the business of empire strictly for profits. This economic reasoning was not seen as a cynical motive even though today all those who do not run major businesses might curl a lip or two. Our twenty-first-century view that imperialism is a sour word and a euphemism for the British asset-stripping poorer peoples is rather different than the perspective in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Times were different and commercial motives unexceptional. Moreover, a nation the size of Britain would have been bankrupt without its colonies.
G. L. Beer, in Origins of the British Colonial System 1578 – 1660, emphasizes the fact that Britain’s colonial exploration during this period was built very much on the social and economic advantages. It was even thought that in spite of England having a population of no more than four million, colonization would alleviate England of what was seen as a surplus population. Certainly by 1600 there was little evidence that English agriculture could develop further to feed even so few people. The population was growing or, more accurately, was recovering from the devastation of the fourteenth-century Black Death. It must seem amazing today to hear that there was a strong view in Elizabeth’s and James I’s England that the country was overpopulated.
In 1600, London had about 200,000 people living in it, yet it wasn’t much bigger in area than the present City of London. Other cities were by today’s standards extremely small in area. Big cities outside of London were few. Norwich and Bristol are the most noticeable. Manchester, for example, was then not much more than a village or a hamlet. The difficulty was the way people lived in cramped and dirty conditions and the increasing numbers of very able-bodied men out of work. One result was a growing tendency to vagrancy and certainly to violence, while overcrowding, in 1603, was largely responsible for the death of more than 37,000 Londoners from a recurring epidemic of plag
ue. It was not surprising that in the 1580s we find Richard Hakluyt, George Peckham and Christopher Carleill promoting the idea that a good reason for England to become a colonial entrepreneur was so that the vagrants, wastrels, unemployed and convicts could be sent off as settlers to North America, particularly to the growing colony of Newfoundland.
These were not casual observations and suggestions. They were hypotheses richly promoted not just at the end of the sixteenth century; as we know, transportation of convicts to Australia continued well into the nineteenth century. Sending convicted men, women and children to America only finished in 1788 because the British lost the colony.
Mercantilism in England was not dissimilar to what centuries later we would call protectionism. The principle was to export as much as possible and at the same time restrict foreign imports. That was all right for national commodities or easily manufactured goods. Basic food stuffs and anything that prospered in an English climate could be controlled. This is why we should not get so caught up in the glamour of believing that the likes of Hawkins, Ralegh and Drake were doing so well for England by plundering the silver, gold and jewels of Spanish galleons. Even more than these sparkling treasures, England really needed those things that it wanted every day right across the country and which could not be obtained in a temperate climate. So the real treasures to be brought back were commodities such as salt, sugar, peppers, sub-tropical fruits and spices. Peppers, for example, were first used as medicines. When, in the sixteenth century, the merchants in the East put up the price of spices on the Antwerp market, the English were prompted to sail East to establish their own trade, thus peppers were the origins of the Raj. The British Empire would be built on these needs and not territorial and constitutional aggrandizement and certainly not Spanish precious metals. For the British, El Dorado would be on the commodity markets, not the bullion exchanges.
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