This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  On 20 December 1606 Sir Christopher Newport, commanded three ships (the Discovery, Godspeed and Susan Constant) as they sailed from England to Virginia to test these conditions. The tactical and strategic sense of this new expedition was based on two perceptions: the landing had to be benign and fruitful and, secondly, it had to be out of arm’s reach of the Spanish.

  They arrived in Virginia in May 1607. By then, James VI of Scotland had been James I of England for four years. So the first settlement in Virginia of this new expedition was called James Fort and then James Town. It sat on a peninsula in the mouth of the Chesapeake. It was not a very good place to build a stockade. Diseases, including malaria, wafted across from the swamps as did the local Indians with similar effect. This first settlement was in peril when Newport left about a hundred of the settlers to build up the community and clear the forests while he returned to England for supplies and to try to arrange a regular supply line.

  Once more here is a reminder of the sheer physical difficulty of establishing the basics of a colony. An image of settlers being able to live off the land and give thanks for the first harvests, while vessels docked with the latest luxuries, is far removed from the truth surrounding the early empire builders. Supplies would not magically arrive from England. Time and again, records show that an elder of the settlement had to return to England, raise cash or credit, negotiate contracts and only then, maybe months later, sail for the settlement and find it – navigation was sometimes indifferent. Given these difficulties, supplies often arrived very late or even too late. When Newport returned from England just a few months later, half the settlers were dead.

  We might have thought that the lessons were easily learned. Not so. In August 1607 the Plymouth colony was founded. This was the second of the settlements. Again, the tactical importance of being at the mouth of a river influenced its siting. Fort St George was built on the north bank of the estuary of the Kennebec River. It was called the Plymouth colony because it was named after the Plymouth Company that financed it. Unlike the more famous organizations, the East India Company, the Muscovy Company and the Levant Company, the Plymouth Company was underfunded and dreadfully organized. There seemed to be an impression that it was easy enough to fit out a ship, get would-be settlers to put some money up and hope for the best. There was a desperation behind this and so many of the other earlier schemes to settle America. Often we come back to crew lists and passenger manifests that appear to show that many of the settlers were economic, political or religious refugees. At the start of the seventeenth century, however, there was no national and social security system to ease their way into a new life. Instead, they found themselves in a beautiful but largely unwelcoming society. So it was at Fort St George. The Plymouth Company simply did not have the organization or the money to keep supplies sailing from Devon to North Virginia. The mini-colony collapsed just a year after it was founded.

  James Town, after its earlier setbacks, was better financed and certainly better led. The money and suppliers came through a London stock company and the settlers had now chosen a new leader, Captain John Smith.

  Smith is an example of an early seventeenth-century soldier of fortune who is hardly known beyond the historical footnotes of that period, yet he was a truly remarkable adventurer. Some of those adventures have been questioned and even those proven to be correct still seem far-fetched. Smith was born in Lincolnshire in January 1580 (1579 in the old dating system). At the age of sixteen, following his father’s death, Smith went to Continental Europe as a mercenary soldier. For probably two years he served in the French army in its war against Spain. When that was over he joined the rebels of the Low Countries. By 1600 he had returned home and tried to read as much military history and science as he could. He had seen how well-motivated forces could fail simply because they did not understand enough about warfare. He saw military science as the study of logistics – which he regarded as one of the most essential elements of warfare – and the proper use of reconnaissance and the deployment of forces suitable to the terrain and opponents. This obvious condition of warfare was not always understood by even the highest ranking officers, many of whom had high command through social distinction and little else. Communication was often poor, warfare was not a military science, there were no military academies and often soldiers at even the most senior levels failed to display as much intelligence as they did élan. A good example of this failure to be able to adapt to the environment and differing enemies was to be the initial undoing of British forces in their war against France in Canada in the eighteenth century and against the Patriots in the War of American Independence.

  Shortly after about 1600, Smith is said to have fallen overboard during a voyage to Italy, but was rescued by a pirate for whom he worked out his gratitude. Eventually he got to Italy and then headed north and east, becoming a mercenary for the Archduke of Austria. He claimed a further series of startling adventures (many of which are partially supported from other sources) including killing three Turkish gladiators while in the service of Sigismund Bathori, the Prince of Transylvania. His young luck seems to have run out shortly after this; Smith was captured and sold as a slave. He next appeared in England in 1605 telling the story of how two years earlier he had killed his slavemaster to escape home via Morocco – in itself an extraordinary story.

  The next stage of his career brought him into the colonial rather than the mercenary history of Britain. Smith was among the 105 people who on 19 December 1606 sailed from the Thames near Deptford to be the founding settlers of Virginia. In many ways Smith, who was listed in the original manifest as a planter, was exactly what the early colonists needed. He was an adventurer, a soldier, an organizer and, with a history that must have hardened him to most conditions and circumstances, an uncompromising and determined fortune hunter.

  Remembering that the motives of the settlers were mixed and that many of them were vagabonds, it was hardly a surprise that Smith should emerge as leader. He was never a dull administrator and the most unlikely adventures continued to involve him. It was Smith who was famously captured by Indians and supposedly released because of the personal intervention of Pocahontas. Whether or not the story is true is of no consequence other than it is typical of the tales that surrounded this remarkable man. In 1608 Smith proved he had another talent. He charted most of the Chesapeake coastline and bay, travelling, or so he said, 3,000 miles to provide himself with detailed charts, outlines and soundings. Smith attracted as much controversy and animosity as he did adventure. Therefore, it was inevitable that he would fall out with or be chased out by the cabal that ran the colony. He moved his attentions to New England and to produce the first coastal chart of the area. It seems inevitable that Smith was captured by the French and, as he had done a decade or so earlier, found himself serving as a mercenary for his captors until he was set free, probably in 1617. That was really the end of his colonial career. When he returned to London he occupied most of his time as a chart- and map-maker, something of a tame ending to the life of an extraordinary adventurer. He died in 1631.

  We can see from Smith’s story much of the uncertainties of early colonization, especially in Virginia. He was no Robert Walpole or William Pitt the Younger. He did not have to be. Smith’s wild experience together with his grasp of leadership made him exactly the person needed to attempt to mould whatever talents were to be found in the motley of settlers in James Town. They were gradually producing a system of proper settlement rather than finding themselves under siege from the elements and the indigenous population.

  Because of Smith’s leadership the settlers were split into groups and each group had a responsibility. Some provided subsistence crops. This meant they had to clear the ground and learn from what was already planted. Here was some cooperation between the newcomers and the people who already lived there. The Indians showed them how to cultivate what was for the colonists a completely new crop, maize, or at least sometimes they did. We should avoid the impression
of innocent natives kindly tutoring ignorant colonists. Often, animosities were cruelly expressed, not least of all because of the latent fears of settlers with instincts to cuff, or worse, their authority over the people whose land they took. Smith was the lynchpin in this founding colony. He had learned that resourcefulness and survival could only be accomplished by living off the land about him and wherever possible with the local people. In that way, reliance on supplies that might never come was minimized. Undoubtedly he was a despot. Equally surely he was a successful despot and it was probably his energies and uncompromising nature that saw the James Town settlement to its feet when it might easily have perished during the dreadful winter months of 1608 and 1609. Smith’s success and the failure at Fort St George provided a high and low point of that exploration of Virginia. The success and failure demonstrated to the financiers in the West Country and London that in spite of earlier promises there were no quick fortunes to be made in this business of colonizing Virginia.

  Those people who supported with money and political clout the great colonial adventure were becoming very critical of the 1606 Royal Charter – the authority by which men and women could go out and claim land in the name of the King and thus protect themselves in that same name. However, the Charter did not provide an authority with the power to recruit colonists and finance and establish the supply lines that were, as we have seen, at the beginnings of any settlement. James I had been badly advised. It was a time of political in-fighting at his court, which was just three years old.

  The magnates who wanted the Charter either scrapped or revised were men of wealth and experience. They were nominally led by Sir Thomas Smythe. He and his friends could show that commercial nous, with a seal of government approval, could make almost all things commercially possible. Here was the forerunner of the late twentieth-century idea of PPP – public private partnership. Government gives authority for something it wants done to perhaps a conglomerate which then takes the profits. In 1609, the merchants petitioned the Crown for a new partnership and charter. James agreed and the Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia was established. It is generally called the London Company.

  Just as John Smith had taken over and steadied the trembling James Town settlement with absolute authority, Smythe became treasurer of the London Company and in a similar manner ran it for the next eight years. Here we have a reminder that it was the Smythes and Smiths, with their harsh discipline and, above all, their commercial instincts and ambitions, who were building the Empire, not the more familiar names surrounding the King and his court.

  Smith was a hard man at the coal face of Empire. Smythe was equally hard, but no frontiersman. Smythe insisted upon hard leaders to be sent to the colonies. Equally, these men were not allowed to do what Smith had done – to make his own rules as he went along. Accordingly, in the spring of 1609 when the experienced soldier, Sir Thomas Gates, was appointed to be the London Company’s man in the colony, he was given explicit instructions on how he should, within an advisory council, maintain discipline together with commercial and constitutional law. However, the explicit planning and prudence of Smythe and Gates had not catered for an unpredictable enemy – the weather.

  They got as far as the Bermuda islands which were called, with good reason, the Isles of Storms by the Spanish. Gates had sailed in an expedition led by Sir George Somers aboard his ship, Sea Venture. They had left England on 15 May 1609 and two months later were wrecked off Bermuda. Here was the origin of the opening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, written in 1611 (although not published for a decade), and the line, ‘still vex’d Bermoothes’. Somers, Gates and the few survivors, including William Strachey who wrote an account of the wreck, spent the winter months building two vessels, which they launched the following spring. They sailed into James Town on 23 May 1610. The following month they were followed in by supplies brought by Thomas West, Lord De La Warr.

  When Somers and his rather bedraggled and far from imperial group arrived, it was to no rapturous welcome. The colony was starving to death. West’s arrival was prompted by Smythe who feared for his investment. West was given absolute authority to declare martial law over the colony. He had, as a soldier, learned all about bringing into line recalcitrant civilians as well as soldiers during his successful campaigns in the Netherlands. He now put them to great effect. No one was allowed to desert. Every man had to work for the benefit of the whole community. Each who obeyed these rules would be looked after by that community. Thus none would starve. The laws had hardly been put into place when West died in 1611. Another soldier, Sir Thomas Dale, who was equally austere and uncompromising, took over. The system of rigorous, even brutal, communal regulation had worked well in a small community. The logic that escaped Smythe and the London Company was that in a larger, expanding and increasingly healthy plantation there was less hope of everyone sticking to the rules. Of necessity, a frontiersman was a hardened individual. He and, less often, she were either scurrilously or moralistically single-minded. These sorts of people rarely took kindly to authority that did not suit them and, often, no authority at all.

  The independence seemingly bred into the sort of people that wanted a new start in life, and their immediate descendants, would time and again confound the thinking and ambitions of those comfortable in London. The reasons behind the War of American Independence a century-and-a-half later lay in that very sense of independence and the distance of London from the Americas – both geographically and temperamentally.

  For the moment, however, Dale successfully drew the settlers together. He was in command of a colonial triptych. The military policing sought to guarantee the security of the settlers as well as protecting the London Company’s interests including the stores which contained the lifeblood of the colony. The second group was that of the indentured colonists. These were mostly craftsmen and labourers who had been given free passage by the Company to Virginia. In return they had to work for everyone just as an indentured apprentice would work for a craftsman. They would not be free men. In their spare time these indentured workers would be allowed to build up a private holding until eventually it was possible for them to join the third group, the free men. These were the free farmers. They had paid to take passage on the immigrant ships. When the free farmers arrived they were given twelve acres each to cultivate as tenants for one year. After that, still as tenants, they had to pay rent. So they had twelve months to turn virgin soil to upturned profit. Here was the basis of the future of Virginia as a colony: a careful and profitable cultivation by colonialists who had a direct interest in the future of the colony.

  By 1617 Dale had gone from Virginia to put his experience to good use with the East India Company, which was still a fledgling concern. His successor, Sir George Yeardley, continued his work on the basis that by now the supply system was working. The legal, military and constitutional divisions were properly exploited to the local good and not just to the theoreticians’ demands. Yet both in the colony and in the holding company in London expectations had to be adjusted.

  The British long believed that Virginia would supply many, if not all, the goods that came from southern Europe. Given the political uncertainties within Continental Europe, the British rightly believed that secondary sources should be found for everything from potash and wine to naval stores. Also, by maintaining a navy in the western Atlantic, Virginia could be a good storing point for the ships and men. However, Virginian settlers and the London Company needed more than this. The West Indies possessions had lucrative sugar crops. What might there be in Virginia? There was one possibility to make Virginia a commercial success – tobacco.

  Regarding tobacco as a noxious drug is not a recent development. It was considered a terrible narcotic even in the early seventeenth century, so much so that James I issued a proclamation condemning smoking. He hated it. For twenty years or so, tobacco had been in England classed as an illicit drug in the way that 400 yea
rs later cannabis was rated. There was then a high customs and excise duty put on tobacco import (which has never been removed). Most of the tobacco came from Spanish plantations in the West Indies. In the early days of the colony, tobacco was certainly not envisaged as a staple crop for Virginia, but very soon it was realized that the climate was perfect and tobacco plantations were created. By 1617, tobacco had become Virginia’s biggest export. Because of the craving of British smokers and the limited amount of imports, the Virginian planters were able to charge high prices. They could then use the money to buy, from England, the manufactured goods they needed and regarded as luxuries, thus creating a good market for British manufacturers. The importance of this use of tobacco profits was that the stockholders of the London Company did not always have to pay for the manufactured goods the planters needed and therefore the Company was more profitable and so attracted more investment. Also, the planters were gaining financial independence. Economic independence was an essential prerequisite for self-determination.

  Colonial expansion was now unstoppable. The spreading of the fledgling empire was not confined to the hinterland and littoral states of America. The shipwrecked colonists who had taken refuge on Bermuda had, if nothing else, excited the idea that the fertility and easy access to wildlife made it an obvious target for colonists.

  This was an important aspect of expansion because, as we have seen, it was about this time under James I that the experiment to plant the confiscated acres of Ulster with Scots and English was taking place. The immediate consequence was that the capital, manpower and enthusiasms necessary to expand the Virginia and island colonies were diverted to the Ulster experiment, it being closer and seemingly less risky. After all, why risk crossing an ocean to the relative unknown?

  As mentioned, when Gates had been forced to take refuge among the Isles of Storms, his second-in-command, but leader of the voyage, was Sir George Somers (1554–1610). Somers was a celebrated and respected sea-dog adventurer who had sailed with Ralegh. Now the shipwrecked Somers, claimed Bermuda for England, although the Spanish had already found the islands. In fact, before they were renamed Bermuda, they were known as the Somers Islands. He was already dead when, in 1615, members of the Virginia Company running the American colony set up a new venture called the Company of the Plantation of the Somers Islands. Once more Sir Thomas Smythe was its leading member. Navigators were sent to survey the many islands and atolls that made up Bermuda. As an incentive for investment, the members of the company would each have an island named after them. The biggest stockholders were also given the tenancies of large tracts of land.