The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Who shoots you down like ducks in the swamps.

  Even if an army of ten thousand men were gathered, with

  The courage and strategy of Caesar and Eugene,

  They’d find their work cut out for them, destroying a Hydra’s growth

  Which even Alcides [Hercules] would try to avoid.

  Writing to and for other Europeans assumed to be sympathetic with the project of conquest, Mauricius cast himself and other colonizers as Hercules, and the fugitive bondspeople who challenged slavery as the hydra.3

  Andrew Ure, the Oxford philosopher of manufactures, found the myth to be useful as he surveyed the struggles of industrial England in 1835. After a strike among spinners in Stayleybridge, Lancashire, he employed Hercules and his rescue of Prometheus, with his delivery of fire and technology to mankind, to argue for the implementation of the self-acting mule, a new machine “with the thought, feeling, and tact of the experienced workman.” This new “Herculean prodigy” had “strangled the Hydra of misrule”; it was a “creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes, and to confirm to Great Britain the empire of art.” Here again, Ure saw himself and other manufacturers as Hercules, and the industrial workers who challenged their authority as the hydra.4

  Dutch soldiers and guide in a Suriname swamp, c. 1775, by William Blake. John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).

  When the Puritan prelate Cotton Mather published his history of Christianity in America in 1702, he entitled his second chapter, on the antinomian controversy of 1638, “Hydra Decapita.” “The church of God had not long been in this wilderness, before the dragon cast forth several floods to devour it,” he wrote. The theological struggle of “works” against “grace” subverted “all peaceable order.” The controversy raised suspicions against religious and political officials, prevented an expedition against the Pequot Indians, confused the drawing of town lots, and made particular appeals to women. For Mather, the Puritan elders were Hercules, while the hydra consisted of the antinomians who questioned the authority of minister and magistrate, the expansion of empire, the definition of private property and the subordination of women.5

  It would be a mistake to see the myth of Hercules and the hydra as merely an ornament of state, a classical trope in speeches, a decoration of ceremonial dress, or a mark of classical learning. Francis Bacon, for example, used it to lay the intellectual basis for the biological doctrine of monstrosity and for the justifications of murder, which themselves have a semantics of Latin euphemism—debellation, extirpation, trucidation, extermination, liquidation, annihilation, extinction. To cite the myth was not simply to employ a figure of speech or even a concept of analytic understanding; it was to impose a curse and a death sentence, as we will show.

  If the hydra myth expressed the fear and justified the violence of the ruling classes, helping them to build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executioners, of plantations, ships, and factories, it suggested something quite different to us as historians—namely, a hypothesis. The hydra became a means of exploring multiplicity, movement, and connection, the long waves and planetary currents of humanity. The multiplicity was indicated, as it were, in silhouette in the multitudes who gathered at the market, in the fields, on the piers and the ships, on the plantations, upon the battlefields. The power of numbers was expanded by movement, as the hydra journeyed and voyaged or was banished or dispersed in diaspora, carried by the winds and the waves beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of all kinds made new and unexpected connections, which variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous.

  Our book looks from below. We have attempted to recover some of the lost history of the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy. The historic invisibility of many of the book’s subjects owes much to the repression originally visited upon them: the violence of the stake, the chopping block, the gallows, and the shackles of a ship’s dark hold. It also owes much to the violence of abstraction in the writing of history, the severity of history that has long been the captive of the nation-state, which remains in most studies the largely unquestioned framework of analysis. This is a book about connections that have, over the centuries, usually been denied, ignored, or simply not seen, but that nonetheless profoundly shaped the history of the world in which we all of us live and die.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Wreck of the Sea-Venture

  ON JULY 25, 1609, the sailors of the Sea-Venture scanned the horizon and spotted danger. Separated from their convoy of eight other vessels sailing from Plymouth westward to Virginia, England’s first New World colony, they spied a tempest—or what the Carib Indians called a hurricane—scudding swiftly toward them. With “the clouds gathering thick upon us and the winds singing and whistling most unusually,” wrote passenger William Strachey,

  a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from the northeast, which, swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from Heaven; which like an hell of darkness, turned black upon us, so much the fuller of horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all, which taken up with amazement, the ears lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the winds and distraction of our company as who was most armed and best prepared was not a little shaken.

  The approaching fury “startled and turned the blood and took down the braves of the most hardy mariner of them all.” The less hardy passengers aboard the ninety-eight-foot, three-hundred-ton vessel cried out in fear, but their words were “drowned in the winds and the winds in the thunder.” The shaken seamen recovered and went to work as the ship’s timbers began to groan. Six to eight men together struggled to steer the vessel. Others cut down the rigging and sails to lessen resistance to the wind; they threw luggage and ordnance overboard to lighten the load and reduce the risk of capsizing. They crept, candles in hand, along the ribs of the ship, searching and listening for weeping leaks, stoppering as many as they could, using beef when they ran out of oakum. Water nonetheless gushed into the ship, rising several feet, above two tiers of hogsheads, in the hold. The crew and passengers pumped continuously during “an Egyptian night of three daies perpetuall horror,” with the common sort “stripped naked as men in Galleys.” Even gentlemen who had never worked took turns pumping, while those who could not pump bailed with kettles and buckets. They had no food and no rest as they pumped an estimated two thousand tons of water out of the leaky vessel.1

  It was not enough. The waterline did not recede, and the people at the pumps had reached the limits of their strength, endurance, and hope. Now that the exhausted sailors had done all that was humanly possible to resist the apocalyptic force of the hurricane, they took comfort in a ritual of the sea, turning the maritime world upside down as they faced certain death. Defying the strictures of private property and the authority of Captain Christopher Newport, as well as the Virginia Company gentlemen such as Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, they broke open the ship’s liquors and in one last expression of solidarity “drunk one to the other, taking their last leave one of the other until their more joyful and happy meeting in a more blessed world.”2

  The Sea-Venture was wrecked—miraculously, without loss of life—between two great rocks in the islands of Bermuda on July 28. The 150 wet and terrified crew and passengers, men and women originally intended by the Virginia Company of London as reinforcements for the company’s new plantation, straggled onto a strange shore, a place long considered by sailors to be an enchanted “Isle of Devils” infested with demons and monsters, and a ghoulish graveyard for European ships. Charted in 1511 but shunned by seafarers for a century afterward, Bermuda was known mostly through the accounts of a few mariners, renegades, and castaways, such as Job Hortop, who had escaped galley slavery
in the Spanish West Indies, passed by the island, and made it to London to tell his tale. Silvester Jourdain, a passenger on the Sea-Venture, would later write that Bermuda afforded “nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather, which made every navigator and mariner to avoid them as Scylla and Charybdis, or as they would shun the Devil himself.” The eeriness of the place owed much to the harsh, hollow howling of nocturnal birds called cahows, whose shrieks haunted the crews of passing ships.3

  The reality of Bermuda, as the shipwrecked soon discovered, was entirely different from its reputation. The island, in their view, turned out to be an Edenic land of perpetual spring and abundant food, “the richest, healthfullest and pleasantest [place] they ever saw.” The would-be colonists feasted on black hogs that had swum ashore and multiplied after a Spanish shipwreck years earlier, on fish (grouper, parrot fish, red snapper) that could be caught by hand or with a stick with a bent nail, on fowl that would land on a man’s or woman’s arms or shoulders, on massive tortoises that would feed fifty, and on an array of delicious fruit. Much to the chagrin of the officers of the Virginia Company, Bermuda “caused many of them vtterly to forget or desire euer to returne from thence, they liued in such plenty, peace and ease.” Once the common people found the land of plenty, they began “to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there.” Theirs was “a more joyful and happy meeting in a more blessed world” after all.4

  It is not surprising that the shipwrecked commoners responded as they did, for they had been told to expect paradise at the end of their journey. In his “Ode to the Virginian Voyage” (1606), Michael Drayton had insisted that Virginia was

  Earth’s only Paradise

  Where nature hath in store

  Fowle, venison, and Fish;

  And the fruitfull’st Soyle,

  Without your toyle,

  Three harvests more,

  All greater than you wish.5

  In 1610 Robert Rich would conveniently confuse the Bermuda and Virginia experiences in his poetic propaganda for the Virginia Company:

  There is no feare of hunger here,

  for Corne much store here growes,

  Much fish the Gallant Rivers yeild [sic]

  ’tis truth, without suppose.

  He concluded that in Virginia, “there is indeed no want at all.” Another Virginia Company advocate knew that such reports were false, that some in England had dismissed them as utopian, but he nevertheless maintained the lie, promising prospective laborers a six-hour workday in which the “sappe of their bodies” would not “be spent for other mens profite.”6 Many colonists had headed toward Virginia, on the Sea-Venture and other vessels, with the “heate and zeale” of a “romain year of Iubile.” The biblical jubilee (Leviticus) authorized the call for an end to bondage and for the return of the commons to the dispossessed. Bermuda seemed the perfect place to enact this biblical prophecy.7

  The New World as paradise, by Theodore de Bry, 1588. Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590).

  Strachey, a shareholder in and secretary of the Virginia Company, noted that among the shipwrecked there quickly arose “dangerous and secret discontents” that began among the sailors and spread to others. A “disunion of hearts and hands” soon followed: those who wanted to go on with the money-making adventure in Virginia were at odds with those whose hands were supposed to get them there. The chief complaint of the seamen and the other “hands” was that “in Virginia nothing but wretchedness and labor must be expected, with many wants and a churlish entreaty [i.e., poor provision], there being neither that fish, flesh, nor fowl which here . . . at ease and pleasure might be enjoyed.” They somehow knew whereof they spoke, for colonists in Virginia were at that moment eating leather boots and serpents, looking “lyke Anotamies [skeletons] Cryinge owtt we are starved We are starved.” One man killed his wife, chopped her up, and salted her for food; others dug up corpses from graves and ate them. The Bermuda castaways wanted, meanwhile, “to repose and seat where they should have the least outward wants the while.” The comparative demographic facts support their claim. The other eight ships and 350 people originally in convoy with the Sea-Venture arrived in Virginia only to encounter a catastrophic mortality rate that over two years reduced 535 settlers to about sixty. The Bermuda settlers, by contrast, experienced over ten months a net loss of three people out of 150: five died—only one of these apparently of natural causes; two others were murdered and two more executed—while two were born. Strachey wondered, “What hath a more adamantine power to draw unto it the consent and attraction of the idle, untoward, and wretched number of the many than liberty and fullness of sensuality?”8

  To defend their liberty, some of shipwrecked “promised each unto the other not to set their hands to any travail or endeavor” that would take them off the island, and with this vow they withdrew into the woods to form their own settlement. They later planned to settle another island by themselves. A strike and marronage thus stood at the beginning of English colonization. Among the leaders of these actions were sailors and religious radicals, probably antinomians who believed that God’s grace had placed them above the law. The effort to establish an autonomous community failed, but the struggle between heart and hand continued. Stephan Hopkins was a learned Puritan and follower of Robert Browne, who advocated the creation of separate, congregational churches in which governance was based on mutual consent rather than on deference to elder, king, or nation. Hopkins extended the logic of the sailors’ ritual in the storm as he argued that the magistrate’s authority had ended the moment the Sea-Venture was wrecked. He affirmed the importance of “abundance by God’s providence of all manner of good food” on the island, and he resisted proceeding to Virginia, where the common people would only slave for the adventurers. Hopkins’s mutiny, too, was defeated, but he himself was not, as he survived to make another mutinous speech aboard the Mayflower as it approached America in 1620.9 Other conspirators on Bermuda were likewise unvanquished, for no sooner had the manacles been slapped on Hopkins’s wrists than a third plot was afoot, as another band of mutineers plotted to seize the supplies saved from the shipwreck and to attack the governor, Thomas Gates. Although their plan was disclosed to the authorities, resistance continued. Another rebel was soon executed for verbal mutiny against the governor and his authority, in response to which several others took again to the woods as maroons, where they lived, grumbled Gates, like savages.

  Eventually the authorities prevailed. They built two vessels, pinnaces named the Deliverance and the Patience, to continue the voyage to Virginia, and launched them on May 10, 1610. Yet during their forty-two weeks on the island, sailors and others among the “idle, untoward, and wretched” had organized five different conspiracies against the Virginia Company and their leaders, who had responded with two of the earliest capital punishments in English America, hanging one man and executing another by firing squad to quell the resistance and carry on with the task of colonization. As the others sailed off to Virginia, two men, one a seaman, decided to stay and “end their daies” in Bermuda. Joined by another man, they “began to erect their little common wealth . . . with brotherly regency.”10 One sure sign of the wisdom of those who stayed behind came less than a month after the ships’ arrival in Virginia, when Sir George Somers was dispatched by Sir Thomas Gates to Bermuda to get food, a six-month provision of meat and fish, for the struggling mainland colony. Sir George himself, however, never made it back to Virginia: having rediscovered the joys of Bermuda, he expired from “a surfeit in eating a pig.” Although we do not know what individual fates befell the sailors and passengers who sailed from Bermuda to Virginia, it is likely that many of them shared in the frightful mortality of the mainland settlement and died soon after they arrived. Collectively, however, they made up what Virginia’s swashbuckling leader, John Smith, called the third supply, an infusion of humanity that helped the young plantation to survive.11

  The wreck of the Sea-Venture and the dramas
of rebellion that played out among the shipwrecked suggest the major themes of early Atlantic history. These events do not make for a story of English maritime greatness and glory, nor for a tale of the heroic struggle for religious freedom, though sailors and religious radicals both had essential roles. This is, rather, a story about the origins of capitalism and colonization, about world trade and the building of empires. It is also, necessarily, a story about the uprooting and movement of peoples, the making and the transatlantic deployment of “hands.” It is a story about exploitation and resistance to exploitation, about how the “sappe of bodies” would be spent. It is a story about cooperation among different kinds of people for contrasting purposes of profit and survival. And it is a story about alternative ways of living, and about the official use of violence and terror to deter or destroy them, to overcome popular attachments to “liberty and the fullness of sensuality.”

  We are by no means the first to find historic significance in the story of the Sea-Venture. One of the first—and certainly the most influential—was William Shakespeare, who drew upon firsthand accounts of the wreck in 1610–11 as he wrote his play The Tempest. Shakespeare had long studied the accounts of explorers, traders, and colonizers who were aggressively linking the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through world trade. Moreover, he knew such men personally, and even depended on them for his livelihood. Like many of his patrons and benefactors, such as the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare himself invested in the Virginia Company, the spearhead of English colonization.12 His play both described and promoted the rising interest of England’s ruling class in the settlement and exploitation of the New World. In the pages that follow we will use the wreck of the Sea-Venture to set out four major themes in the origins and development of English Atlantic capitalism in the early seventeenth century: expropriation, the struggle for alternative ways of life, patterns of cooperation and resistance, and the imposition of class discipline. Within the story of the Sea-Venture and its people lies a larger story about the rise of capitalism and the beginning of a new epoch in human history.13