The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Tales of these alternative societies in America were carried back to Europe by sailors—the hundreds, and soon thousands, of real-life equivalents of Thomas More’s Raphael Hythloday, the seafarer who returned from the New World to tell the story of Utopia. Members of cultures high and low depended on sailors and their “strange reports” for news of alterae terrae. Michel de Montaigne’s personal servant was a former seaman who had lived twelve years among the Indians of Brazil; this “plain ignorant fellow” was undoubtedly a “true witness” whose stories influenced his master’s conception of human possibility.26 Through these and other tales that circulated through port cities such as London, Shakespeare had read and heard of the “golden world without toyle,” of the places “without lawes, without bookes, and without judges,” to be found in America. Centuries later, Rudyard Kipling would visit Bermuda and assert that Shakespeare had gotten many of his ideas for The Tempest from “a drunken seaman.”27 Sailors in this way brought together the primitive communism of the New World and the plebeian commonism of the Old, suggesting—at least in part—why they played such a leading and subversive role in the events surrounding the shipwreck of the Sea-Venture on Bermuda in 1609.

  Commoning was not a single agrarian practice, nor were the commons a uniform ecological place with a fixed human tenure. Both varied from time to time and from place to place, as William Strachey and many others well knew. Strachey explained that “whatsoever God by the ministration of nature hath created on earth, was at the begynning common among men,” and that the Native Americans he encountered—whom he called “the naturalls”—were much like his own ancestors, the ancient Picts and Britons who had been subdued by the Romans. There existed a particular English open-field system of agriculture, including provision for common fields, which seems to have been replicated successfully in Sudbury, Massachusetts, until it, too, was overcome by the onslaught of private accumulation.28 Yet the commons were more than a specific English agrarian practice or its American variants; the same concept underlay the clachan, the sept, the rundale, the West African village, and the indigenous tradition of long-fallow agriculture of Native Americans—in other words, it encompassed all those parts of the Earth that remained unprivatized, unenclosed, a noncommodity, a support for the manifold human values of mutuality. Shakespeare knew the truth of the struggle for an alternative way of life on Bermuda, but he chose to turn a real place into a dreamy, literary “no-place,” a utopia. His fellow investors in the Virginia Company did something similar: against those who tried to seize a life of “plenty, peace, and ease,” they brutally pursued a utopia of their own.

  A southern Algonquian village, 1588. Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.

  COOPERATION AND RESISTANCE

  The history of the Sea-Venture can be recounted as a microcosm of various forms of human cooperation. The first of these was the cooperation among the sailors, and eventually among everyone on the ship, during the hurricane, as they steered the vessel, struck sails, cleared the decks, and pumped out the water that was seeping into the hull. After the shipwreck, cooperative labor was extended and reorganized among the “hands” ashore, in part by the leaders of the Virginia Company, in part in opposition to them. This work consisted of building huts out of palmetto fronds for shelter and commoning for subsistence—hunting and gathering, fishing and scavenging. Beginning with the challenge to authority aboard ship, the commoners, led by the sailors, cooperated on the island in the planning of five distinct conspiracies, including a strike and marronage. Alongside and against that oppositional cooperation, the Virginia Company officials organized their own project of cooperative labor: the hewing of cedar trees and the building of vessels to carry the shipwrecked on to Virginia. The tensions between the subversive and official forms of cooperation constituted the drama of William Strachey’s account of life on Bermuda in 1609–1610.

  Cooperation bound together many different kinds of people, with many different kinds of work experience: sailors, laborers, craftsmen, and commoners of several sorts, including two Native Americans, Namuntack and Matchumps, who were returning to the Powhatans in the Chesapeake after a voyage to England.29 Such cooperative resistance shaped Shakespeare’s conception of the conspiracy waged in The Tempest by Caliban the slave, Trinculo the jester, and Stephano the sailor, who combine in a plan to kill Prospero and seize control of the island (Bermuda). Caliban himself embodies African, Native American, Irish, and English cultural elements, while Trinculo and Stephano represent two of the main types of the dispossessed in Judge Popham’s England. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows,” muses Trinculo as he joins Caliban beneath a gaberdine mantle, seeking shelter from a thunderstorm—but not before asking himself, “What have we here? a man or a fish?” When Stephano arrives on the scene, he surveys what he thinks is a many-legged creature and wonders if a new kind of being has been created: “This is some monster of the isle with four legs.” It is not a fish, of course, nor is it a monster, nor a hybrid (a word originally used to describe the breeding of pigs and first applied to humans in 1620, when Ben Jonson referred to young Irishwomen); it is, rather, the beginning of cooperation among a motley crew of workers. Caliban promises to use his commoning skills (i.e., hunting and gathering) to show Trinculo and Stephano how to survive in a strange land, how and where to find food, fresh water, salt, and wood. Their cooperation eventually evolves into conspiracy and rebellion of the kind promoted on the island of Bermuda by the commoners of the Sea-Venture before they, too, were defeated.30

  We have said that the meeting of Caliban and Trinculo under the gaberdine is the beginning of the motley crew. We should explain the significance of the term. In the habits of royal authority in Renaissance England, the “motley” was a multicolored garment, often a cap, worn by a jester who was permitted by the king to make jokes, even to tell the truth, to power. As an insignium, the motley brought carnivalesque expectations of disorder and subversion, a little letting-off of steam. By extension, motley could also refer to a colorful assemblage, such as a crowd of people whose tatterdemalion dress made it interesting. A motley crowd might very likely be one in rags, or a “lumpen”-proletariat (from the German word for “rags”). Although we write about and emphasize the interracial character of the motley crew, we wish that readers would keep these other meanings—the subversion of power and the poverty in appearance—in mind.

  Expropriation occurred not only in England but also in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The proletarians thus created worked as skilled navigators and sailors on early transatlantic ships, as slaves on American plantations, and as entertainers, sex workers, and servants in London. English participation in the slave trade, essential to the rise of capitalism, began in 1563, the year before Shakespeare was born. In 1555 John Lok brought the first Ghanaian slaves to England, where they learned English in order to return to Ghana and act as interpreters for slave traders. John Hawkyns made huge profits selling three hundred slaves in Haiti to the Spanish in 1562–1563. Queen Elizabeth loaned him a ship and crew for his second slave expedition. In Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blacknesse (1605), Oceanus could innocently ask of the African Niger, “But, what’s the end of thy Herculean labors,/ Extended to these calme, and blessed shores [?]” Shakespeare, who himself admired Hercules, among other mythic figures, would help to answer that question: in 1607, the crews of the slave ships the Dragon and the Hector performed Hamlet and Richard II while anchored off Sierra Leone. Lucas Fernandez, “a converted negro, brother-in-law of the local King Borea,” translated the plays for the visiting African merchants.31 In 1618, soon after the first performance of The Tempest, English slave traders, chartered as the Company of Adventurers of London Trading to Gynney and Bynney by James I, built the first permanent English factory in West Africa.32

  Shakespeare presented the conspiracy of Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano as a comedy of low characters, but their alliance was far from laughable: Drake had dep
ended on the superior knowledge of the cimarrons, escaped Afro-Indian slaves, in his raids on the Spanish Main.33 And as we have seen, the actual mutinies on Bermuda, which threw up democratic, antinomian, and communist ideas from below, were more varied, complex, sustained, intelligent, and dangerous than Shakespeare allowed. Perhaps he had no choice. A recent law prohibited any mention of divinity on stage and therefore made it difficult to consider the arguments of dissenters such as Stephan Hopkins, who derived their notion of freedom from precisely such a source. The canons of 1604 also required that every English church acknowledge that each of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England was agreeable to the Word of God. The thirty-seventh article stated that “the Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death,” while the thirty-eighth asserted that “the Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.”

  Like the rebels of the Sea-Venture, the cooperation and combination of “strange bed-fellows” who rose up in insurrection in The Tempest were represented as monstrous. Here Shakespeare contributed to an evolving ruling-class view of popular rebellion that would be summarized by the anonymous author of The Rebel’s Doom, a later-seventeenth-century history of uprisings in England. Early tumults in the realm, the writer claimed, had resulted almost entirely from the “Disloyalty and Disobedience of the most Eminent Personages of the Nation,” but after the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, “the rabble”—as Prospero called Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo—“like a Monstrous Hydra, erecting their shapeless heads, began to hiss against their Soveraigns Regal Power and Authority.” The strikes, mutinies, separations, and defiances against the power and authority of the sovereign Virginia Company after the shipwreck on Bermuda would play a major, even determining part in the course of colonization, as the subsequent histories of Bermuda and Virginia would show.

  CLASS DISCIPLINE

  Even though the Sea-Venture “caried in one bottome all the principall Commissioners who should successiuelie have gouerned the Colonie” of Virginia, all of whom were wrecked on Bermuda, and even though Sir Thomas Gates was invested by the Virginia Company with the power to declare martial law at his discretion, the gentlemen had a terrible time establishing their authority, for the hurricane and the shipwreck had leveled class distinctions. Confronted with resistance that proposed an alternative way of life, the officials of the Virginia Company responded by destroying the communing option and by reasserting class discipline through labor and terror, new ways of life and death. They reorganized work and inflicted capital punishment.34

  The Hydra, supposed to be killed by Hercules. Edward Topsell, Historie of Serpents (1608).

  Ever sensitive to the problems faced by his fellow investors in the Virginia Company, Shakespeare considered the issues of authority and class discipline in The Tempest. Aboard the ship, Gonzalo faces an uppity sailor who dares to order the aristocrats around during the leveling storm. He observes of the plain-spoken tar:

  I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable.

  Gonzalo, of course, can do nothing about the verbal mutiny as long as the ship remains in danger, so he recalls the plebeian proverb “He that’s born to be hanged need fear no drowning” and takes comfort in the prospect of a hanging. Shakespeare thus suggests the importance of deep-sea sailing ships (“the Jewels of our land,” as they were called by a Virginia Company official) and sailors. Both, he advises, have to be firmly controlled by the rulers overseeing the process of colonization. The ship and the sailor were necessary to the international accumulation of capital through the transport of commodities, which included, as we have seen, the expropriated workers who would create that new capital. One critical instrument of control was the public hanging.

  When Gonzalo prays to fate that the rope of the boatswain’s destiny may become the cable of life for the ruling class, he is making explicit a real relationship. Sir Walter Raleigh had a similar experience when exploring the waters of Venezuela: “At the last we determined to hang the Pilot, and if we had well known the way back again by night, he had surely gone, but our own necessities pleaded sufficiently for his safety.” Hanging was destiny for part of the proletariat because it was necessary to the organization and functioning of transatlantic labor markets, maritime and otherwise, and to the suppression of radical ideas, as on Bermuda. In 1611, the year The Tempest was first performed, in Middlesex alone (which county already contained the most populous parishes of London) roughly 130 people were sentenced to the gallows and ninety-eight were actually hanged, considerably more than the annual average of about seventy. The following year Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wrightman, both followers of the Puritan separatist Robert Browne and brethren of Stephan Hopkins, were burned at the stake for heresy. Even grislier punishments were enacted at sea, where any sailor caught sleeping on watch a third time would be bound to the mainmast with a basket of bullets tied to his arms; after a fourth offense he would be hanged with a biscuit and knife from the bowsprit, forced eventually to decide whether to starve or to cut himself down to drown. A man designing to steal a ship would be hanged by his heels overboard until his brains were beaten out against the ship’s sides. Shakespeare evaded such realities in his play, but he and his friends in the Virginia Company knew well that capitalist colonization depended on them.35

  Gruesome kinds of capital punishment were not the only notions of class discipline aboard the Sea-Venture, and one of these would have long-term implications for the colony of Virginia and indeed for all of England’s Atlantic empire. The source of it lay in the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century, in the new forms of military discipline developed by Maurice of Orange for Dutch soldiers. In what would prove to be a centerpiece of the “military revolution,” Maurice redesigned military work processes, breaking soldiers’ movements into component parts and recombining them to create new cooperation, efficiency, and collective power.36 These ideas and practices were carried by Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale to Virginia in 1610 and 1611, and from there by future Governor Daniel Tucker to Bermuda. This new way of organizing military cooperation relied ultimately on the terror of the gallows and the whipping post (on one occasion Tucker personally whipped forty men before breakfast). Its reality and its necessity can be seen in the social and political dynamics of early Virginia, almost all of whose early leaders—Gates, De La Warr, Dale, Yeardley, and others—were officers “truly bred in that university of warre, the Lowe Countries.”37

  The resistance that first appeared on Bermuda persisted in Virginia as colonists refused to work, mutinied, and often deserted to the Powhatan Indians. Here continued the “tempest of dissention: euery man ouervaluing his own worth, would be a Commander; euery man vnderprising an others value, denied to be commanded.” Here were the “license, sedition, and furie [which] are the fruits of a headie, daring, and vnruly multitude.” Soldiers, sailors, and Indians conspired to smuggle guns and tools from the Virginia Company’s stores and held “night marts” to sell the appropriated goods. Many of Virginia’s leaders had faced the same problems in Ireland, where English soldiers and settlers had deserted the plantations to join the Irish. As an anonymous observer wrote of the year 1609 in Virginia, “To eate many our men this starveing Tyme did Runn Away unto the Salvages [sic] whom we never heard of after.” Some desertions thus began with an urgent question in the native tongue: “Mowchick woyawgh tawgh noeragh kaquere mecher?” (“I am very hungry, what shall I eat?”). One in every seven settlers at Jamestown deserted during the winter of 1609–10. Henry Spelman, a youth who had lived among the Powhatans in order to learn their language, returned to the tribe in 1609 “by Reason that vitals [i.e., victuals] were scarse with us.” Yet hunger was not the only issue, for English
colonists regularly fled to the Native Americans, “from the moment of settlement in 1607 until the all but total breakdown in relations between English and natives following the 1622 massacre.” Captain John Smith knew that the principal attraction for the deserters was the opportunity “to live idle among the savages.” Some of those who had lived like savages on Bermuda apparently would not be denied.38

  This situation helped to call forth the Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial, sanctioned by the Second Charter of the Virginia Company (1609) with the advice of Francis Bacon, who was, according to Strachey, a “most noble fautor [favorer] of the Virginian Plantation, being from the beginning (with other lords and earles) of the principall counsell applyed to propagate and guide yt.” The charter, as suggested above, empowered Sir Thomas Gates to declare martial law in order to bring the colony to discipline and thereby to make money for the new stockholders. The first nineteen articles of the new law, imposed by Gates the day after he arrived in Virginia, had likely been drawn up amid the conspiracies that challenged his rule on Bermuda and against that island’s backdrop of liberty, plenty, and ease. These mostly martial laws established military discipline for labor and dispensed harsh punishments, including execution, for resistance. In all, the laws contained thirty-seven articles, promising whippings, galley service, and death galore: twenty-five of them prescribed capital punishment. Thomas Dale adapted the latter sections of the Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial “from a Dutch army book of ordinances which he had brought with him.” One of the main purposes of the laws was to keep English settlers and Native Americans apart.39