Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  In the same decade, the log and line first came into widespread use to measure a ship’s speed and distance traveled. By way of a knotted rope paid out over the stern, they allowed the master to fix his whereabouts more precisely. In 1623 a friend of Henry Briggs first used the term “knot” to measure nautical velocity. Seven years later, the English invented the slide rule, quite literally placing logarithms in the hands of mariners. Finally, in 1631, another English mathematician published the first practical guide explaining how to follow a “great circle,” the shortest distance between two positions on the globe. As an example, of course he chose the passage back across the Atlantic, from Bermuda to the Lizard.10

  For the sake of bigger ships, as well as better pay, the finest seamen chose the East India service, but knowledge flowed westward too. Richard Norwood, the man who wrote the guide for great-circle sailors, suffered too much from seasickness to captain a ship, and so he trained as a diver. He went to Bermuda in 1613 to fish for pearls, and settled there as a surveyor and schoolmaster. New tools such as his brought the American coast within the reach of many more seamen, adding another layer of support to the new colonies when at last they began to grow.

  Why did so many advances coincide? Pure research accounted for some of the discoveries, and religion played its part too: people of science saw the finding of a theorem as the pathway to the mind of God. But most of all, the momentum came from politics and commerce. For the first two-thirds of the reign of King James, traders and seamen alike had known little but prosperity, in the East India traffic and much nearer home. But England’s expanding trade rested on a narrow and fragile base. Her maritime enterprise had settled into routines that left it vulnerable to competition from the Dutch and to commercial collapse in time of war. Each marine innovation came about in response to the fear of being left behind.

  In the East Indies, the signs of harder times ahead were very clear. On board the Lion, Weddell brought home news of more trouble with the Dutch, and soon afterward it took bloody form. In October 1620, at Bantam off the coast of Java, the Dutch sank two company ships. Because of violent rivalry such as this, and because so many ships from many countries were sailing to the Spice Islands, the next decade was a disaster for the English East India traders. The market price of pepper, indigo, and silk reached a peak in London in 1622 and then sank steadily for the next seven years. Dividends paid by the company fell away. This became another reason for English eyes to swivel toward America.

  For Jones, the long haul to the East Indies had never been an option, since the Mayflower belonged like the Patience to the smaller, second division of the English merchant navy. Ships of their class, based in London but using Plymouth as a port of call, stuck to a less ambitious business. And yet even for men such as Barton and Jones, the sky was growing darker. Two decades of growth were coming to an end, in a fading climate that explains why, after a comfortable career, Jones suddenly took on the unfamiliar task of carrying the Pilgrims.

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHRISTOPHER JONES

  Christopher Jones was born in about 1570 in the port of Harwich, on the eastern coast of England. Queen Elizabeth called Harwich “a pretty town,” and to her it was intensely loyal, sending three ships to join Drake against the Armada.11 Local seamen caught lobsters, fished for cod as far away as Iceland, or carried coal from Newcastle to London. Like Plymouth, Harwich had grown wealthier still by pillaging Spanish ships, though the business it did best was to export English woolen cloth to be dyed and finished in Holland. A boy raised there would also hear stories told by explorers. When Jones was eight or so, Harwich men sailed to Baffin Island.

  Pretty or not, Harwich possessed characteristics that made it ideal for the training of a seafarer. It also had a social environment that helps explain why the early colonies in America took the shape they did. Thanks to the winds and currents of the North Sea, and thanks to the silt that drifted down the coast, the entrance to Harwich contained dangerous sandbanks, with names such as the Pies, the Pole Head, and the Platters. To the north was the long pebble spit of Orford Ness, where on a single night in 1627 a storm wrecked more than thirty ships. In these testing waters Jones served his apprenticeship. His father and his stepfather were both Harwich skippers, and at eighteen Jones inherited his first part share of a ship.

  He belonged to a clique of mariners and shipwrights who governed the town with harsh discipline. They sentenced five women to hang as witches in 1605, while harlots were dragged through the streets on a cart, and dice games were banned. Harwich resembled other seaports around the English coast, from Hull in the north to Barnstaple in the west, where sea captains and merchants ran local government, levying municipal taxes to pay for street cleaning, jails, and parish constables. They formed part of an international circuit of little marine republics, from the Baltic to the Pyrenees, Calvinist by inclination, from Gdansk in modern Poland to La Rochelle in southwestern France. In America, when New Plymouth and New Boston reached maturity, they formed the western extension of the same network, tossed across the ocean like the end of a coil of rope.

  In his mid-thirties Jones became an oligarch himself, named as a burgess of Harwich in a new charter granted by King James. A rising man, with the help of the five-shilling bounty he built a ship of his own, the Josian, named after his second wife. At 240 tons, the craft was larger than average. She must have cost around a thousand pounds, a sizable sum when a ship’s master hired by a merchant earned no more than fifty pounds a year, and Jones used her for trading voyages as far south as Bordeaux. Then, in 1611, he became one of a group of Harwich men who outgrew the town and moved south to the Thames. Jones made his new home at Rotherhithe, a mile downstream from the Tower of London.

  By that time, he had swapped the Josian for a quarter share in the smaller Mayflower, and narrowly escaped disaster in the North Sea. In 1609, he guided her safely back from Norway through “an extraordinary great storm,” with a cargo of timber, tar, and fish. As a crew member later recalled, in an effort to save the ship Jones dumped over the side a hundred planks of wood. Many weeks late they struggled back home, only to find that the man who owned the tar, wood, and rotting herring was bankrupt, unable to pay for them. When he moved to the capital, Jones found a safer, more regular trade. He also followed the tide of history.12

  Before the 1590s, Rotherhithe and Ratcliff were country retreats, places where Londoners hunted deer and rabbits. Suddenly, as the wealth and the population of London grew, they began to fill with new houses for mariners, with alongside them abattoirs, inns, and England’s first sugar refinery. In the late 1620s, a census counted nearly 120 master mariners in these two parishes alone. Excavations in the year 2000 found traces left behind by these new Jacobean citizens, immense quantities of imported pottery, Venetian glass, and some of the earliest clay tobacco pipes uncovered in England.13 The same archaeology also unearthed some of England’s first glass wine bottles, designed to be packed into crates.

  Wine flowed like the Thames through the commercial veins of London. It made the fortune of the mariners of Rotherhithe. Jones’s most affluent neighbor was another ship’s master, named Anthony Wood, skipper of the Rainbow, who ranked above Jones at the very top of the parish list of taxpayers, owner of shares in three ships and a portfolio of houses on both sides of the river. Wood was another visitor to Plymouth in the autumn of 1620, sailing out of the Sound in October for Alicante, and he owed his wealth to the excellent vintages that the Spanish port supplied.14 Alicante was the favorite drink of King James himself. A pint of it cost sixpence, close to a laborer’s daily wage, and the trade was very lucrative indeed.

  The largest client of Christopher Jones was one William Speight. He lived in Vintry Ward, the wine merchants’ district, opposite the Globe Theatre. After buying his wine wholesale in France, shipping it home, and paying all his costs, Speight could clear six pounds of profit per ton. In May 1620, Jones and the Mayflower sailed back into the Thames on their last trip before carrying Pilgr
ims. He carried fifty tons of wine for Speight, enough to make Speight as much money as ten English clergymen earned in a year. Holding the rank of warden of the Company of Merchant Taylors, Speight owned country estates in Suffolk and tenements, shops, cellars, and warehouses in the City. At his death in 1621 he left a string of bequests to schools and the inmates of prisons, the charities supported most often by London’s mercantile elite.

  Men like Speight, Wood, and Jones prospered because of a surge in the intake of alcohol as the income of the landowning classes grew. At the peak of the wine trade, in 1615, London imported nearly three times as much wine as it had in a typical year twenty years previously. English customers were not only drinking more but also paying more for what they drank: during the same two decades, at La Rochelle the price of white wine doubled. Taste became more subtle too, as the English widened their horizons from claret to Sauternes, Spanish sweet wines, and brandy. The first hard liquor from Cognac arrived in London in about 1560, most likely rough stuff, like an Italian grappa, but during the reign of King James the Dutch refined it and made it an item of choice. A typical Jones voyage in 1615 saw the Mayflower bring back from France eighty tons of the new spirit. She carried to New England at least one keg of French or Dutch eau-de-vie.15

  When wine ships sailed back and forth, they did more than simply fill the wallet of a William Speight. Their voyages made the Protestant maritime network deeper and tighter, binding it together with exchanges of men, women, and ideas. By the 1620s, each leading French haven along the Atlantic coast had a solid community of English and Scottish traders and brokers, with Dutchmen in still larger numbers. At the center of the web lay the city of La Rochelle, the Huguenot bastion that tied together the long loops of commerce from north to south, and from the Levant to Newfoundland.

  Down from the Baltic came grain, hemp, and tar, to be sold to the French or shipped on to Spain. Back up from the Mediterranean and Gascony came currants from Greece and Turkey, iron from Galicia, and Spanish colonial goods, tobacco, or raw sugar. Along the coast to the south of La Rochelle lay immense salt marshes and the fortified port of Brouage. English ships bound back from the Grand Banks could sell their cod to fish-eating Catholics and then fill their empty holds with French salt for packing their next consignment. Or they, and the Dutch, would simply carry it back home: overcast northern nations had no salt pans to rival those of the sunnier Charente. In an age of sail, the French made the best canvas, and this too could be purchased at La Rochelle. There the English also found allies. The Huguenots had their own armée navale, fifteen warships ready to fight the French king.

  Jones and the Mayflower found a place within this pattern of trade, but like the commerce with the East Indies it carried no guarantee of success. Everything, including the fortune made by William Speight, depended on finding ready takers for the only currency that London’s merchants possessed. England had no gold or silver mines, and it was strictly illegal to export coin or precious metals without a license from the Privy Council. The country’s meager stocks of bullion were mostly earmarked to pay for the silk and spices returning from Asia. So when the Mayflower left London for France, her hold was crammed with English woolens, the nation’s only substantial export. Instead of cash, Speight and his rivals used thousands of yards of raw cloth to pay for French or Spanish wine.16

  Woolen textiles were England’s strength, but also a source of vulnerability. If anything happened to deter the buyers in Europe and cloth failed to sell, the way of life of mariners such as Jones would swiftly disintegrate. A family man, Jones had to fill his ship and keep her busy. In 1620 that was rapidly becoming far more difficult than in the past.

  Everything was about to go very wrong. In June, as Jones was hired to cross the Atlantic, expert observers in London could already see the warning signs of a dangerous decline in the economy. In Devon too, life was becoming more complicated, at sea and on land alike, for merchants, for fishermen, and for the soldiers in the fort at Plymouth. New problems had to be solved. As yet, very few men and women believed that North America provided the answers.

  DIVERSE FRIENDS THERE DWELLING

  On September 6, as the ridge of Dartmoor vanished below the horizon, the Mayflower must have passed a fishing boat called the Covenant. In September, listed in the port book, the fishing fleet from Newfoundland came hurrying home to Plymouth, sixty-five vessels in all, traveling in convoy eight at a time. In 1620 the Covenant made it back first to Cawsand Bay or the Cattewater, on the very day on which the Mayflower left.

  At thirty tons, the Covenant was small, from the lowest, third tier of English merchant ships. In this, she was typical of the craft that sailed to Newfoundland: the tiniest that year was a twenty-five-tonner, the Trinitie, a brave little vessel that took two months more to straggle back into Plymouth. Only seven of the town’s Newfoundland vessels had a volume of a hundred tons or above, and none came anywhere near the Mayflower’s size. For this reason, cod fishing alone could never form the basis of permanent English colonies on the American mainland. The ships employed simply did not have the capacity required. Few of the Newfoundland boats could carry more livestock than a few goats or pigs.

  Cod fishing yielded a good return even if the ships were small, and that was the problem. Dried and salted, the fish conveyed in the Covenant would fetch three hundred pounds on a Spanish quayside. And train oil, squeezed from cod, walruses, or whales, added another stream of profit. Used to make soap for washing newly woven cloth, it sold for only two pence a pint, but it came back in batches of more than a thousand gallons per boat. Plymouth men had begun to sail to Newfoundland as long ago as the 1540s, but the cod voyages were closed circuits that did not lead elsewhere. As long as the Newfoundland trade continued to thrive, and while woolens could be bartered for wine, merchants had no need to think about mainland America. Five years before, Captain John Smith had returned to Devon from Monhegan Island, nine miles off the coast of Maine, bouncing with enthusiasm for the country he named New England. He did not find an eager reception.

  Written up in a book published in 1616, his chart and his tales of Cape Cod, fish, fur, and timber failed to arouse excitement. Dashing and eloquent, John Smith did his best, touring the western ports to promote the opportunities that he had seen. Few wished to follow him, and no colonists willingly did. Later, Smith listed twenty-two voyages to New England between 1614 and 1618, from London or from Devon. They included landings on the Cape, but no one tried to found a settlement.

  Three days’ sail from Boston, Monhegan remained the favored destination, as a fishing or a trading post, but it could not host a colony: the rocky island measured little more than a mile long. Smith had also visited a place to the south called Accomack. He named it New Plymouth on his chart, speaking of its “excellent good harbor” and “good land,” but nobody took much notice. After reading his narrative, the Mayflower Pilgrims aimed elsewhere, for New York Harbor, recently visited by an old shipmate of Smith’s. He had sailed around Long Island and sent a report home, suggesting like Henry Briggs that the Hudson offered a route to the Pacific.

  Nevertheless, although few people had grasped the point, times were changing and gradually making New England more compelling. Sometimes, cod became scarce off the Grand Banks, or disappeared entirely for a season. This happened in 1621, encouraging some adventurous traders to think again about Maine and Massachusetts. The cod voyages also became more dangerous, thanks to the pirates from North Africa.

  They ambushed the fishing boats on the way home, because they were too small and lightly armed to put up a fight. In the next quarter century, the pirates took at least seven thousand English sailors captive, about half of them from Devon, and, as we shall see, in due course this helped to feed Puritan discontent with the Crown. And, once again, we find the Dutch closing in to undermine England’s business. Dominating the herring grounds of the North Sea, the Dutch had mostly left Newfoundland alone. Until, that is, the year of the comet, when they began to sail
to “Terra Nova,” as they called it, challenging the English in their old domain.

  Jones and the Pilgrims would have heard talk about matters such as these at Plymouth. Later, when the Pilgrims came to narrate their adventures, they included a typically cryptic allusion to the place. At Plymouth, they said, they were kindly entertained “by divers friends there dwelling.” Who were the friends in question? The Pilgrims do not say, but two likely candidates present themselves. In their different ways, both men were looking for alternatives across the ocean. Their careers add another layer of explanation for the leap across the Atlantic that would soon occur.

  The first man was the postmaster, Abraham Jennings. He was in his early forties, and he owned a quay in the center of the waterfront. As a young man, Jennings had supplied iron pots, locks, and other bits and pieces to the first Englishmen who tried to settle in New England, the failed Popham Colony of 1607, at Fort St. George in Maine. Then he apparently forgot about the New World, until the new circumstances of the 1620s aroused his interest once more.

  Until then, Jennings stuck to the familiar. Dealing in cod, figs, and raisins, he bought wine from the Canaries, or shipped merchandise back from Alicante on the Patience. Then suddenly, in 1622, he begins to reappear in records relating to North America. A little later, Jennings bought control of Monhegan. He started to bring back beaver pelts, nine hundred in 1626, a type of cargo new to Plymouth. For some reason, he soon tired of the venture and sold the island, but his involvement was a landmark. For the first time since the Popham debacle, a substantial Devon merchant, rooted in the older European trades, had invested capital in the territory north of the Potomac. He did so in alliance with a second man, who had other reasons to look westward.17