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SAVAGE KINGDOM
Virginia and the Founding
of English America
BENJAMIN WOOLLEY
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Part One
1 A Feast of Flowers and Blood
2 Machiavelli
3 The Adventurers
4 Departure
Part Two
5 Tsenacomoco
6 Soundings
7 The Spanish Ambassador
8 Bloody Flux
9 True Relations
10 The Virginian Sea
Part Three
11 El Dorado
12 The Mermaid
13 Promised Land
14 The Astrologer
15 Devil’s Island
16 Deliverance
Part Four
17 A Pallid Anonymous Creature
18 Strange Fish
19 The Good Husband
20 Twelfth Night
Part Five
21 Imbangala
22 The Treasurer
23 The ‘Viperous Brood’
24 The Unmasked Face
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Author’s Note
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
ONE A Feast of Flowers and Blood
ON THE MORNING of 20 September 1565, the sixty-year-old carpenter Nicolas le Challeux awoke to the sound of rain pelting down on the palm-leaf thatch overhead. It had not stopped for days, and a muddy morass awaited him outside.
When he had arrived in Florida the previous month, a sunnier prospect had beckoned. He had left the terrors of his native France far behind, and come to a place where he could practise his craft and religion in peace. Its very name suggested renewal, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León calling it Florida after the season in which he first sighted its shores: Easter Week, or Pascua Florida, ‘the feast of flowers’.
Florida could furnish all that a man could wish on earth, Challeux had been told. It had received a particular favour from heaven, suffering neither the snow nor raw frost of the North, nor the drying, burning heat of the South. The soil was so fertile, the forest so full of wild animals, the honest and gentle natives could live off the land without having to cultivate it. There were even reports of unicorns, and of veins of gold in a great mountain range to the north called the ‘Appalatcy’. It was ‘impossible that a man could not find there great pleasure and delight,’ Challeux was assured.1
The contrast with the state of his homeland was stark. Europe was in turmoil. To the south, the Catholic Spanish and Holy Roman empires, offshoots of a single dynasty, domineered. In the north, Queen Elizabeth reigned over Europe’s upstart Protestant monarchy England, while her subjects egged on their co-religionists in the Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium), who were fighting for independence from their Spanish overlords. To the east stretched the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent resting an elbow upon the Balkans, a heel upon Basra. And in the middle lay France, a Catholic country penetrated by a powerful Protestant or ‘Huguenot’ minority. Exposed to so many religious and political tensions, it threatened to disintegrate, and in 1562, a series of civil wars erupted across the kingdom that were so brutal, they gave the word massacre, French for a butcher’s block, its modern meaning.
It was from the midst of this maelstrom that Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, had dispatched a fleet under the command of his kinsman René de Laudonnière to found a Protestant refuge in Florida. To the eyes of Coligny’s Catholic enemies, this was a provocative move. Though its coastline was still only hazily charted, and some even doubted it was a single land mass, all of North America was claimed by the Spanish under a famous ‘bull’ or edict issued by Pope Alexander VI shortly after Christopher Columbus’s historic expedition of 1492. This had donated all the ‘remote and unknown mainlands and islands’ in the Atlantic to the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, so they could bring the native populations ‘to the worship of our Redeemer and profession of the Catholic faith’. By sending his men to Florida, which was within convenient reach of Spanish possessions in Cuba and Mexico, Coligny was clearly challenging not only the Spanish claim, but the religious authority underpinning it.2
However, Coligny’s exiles had found Florida untouched by the Spanish, and settled themselves on the banks of the River of May (now called St John’s River, near modern Jacksonville), on a ‘pleasant open space covered with various kinds of grasses and plants’. They called their new home Fort Caroline, after France’s Catholic King Charles IX, in the hope of forestalling reprisals. Old Challeux had arrived the following year with another consignment of refugees, on a supply ship captained by Jean Ribault, a prominent Huguenot, as well as one of France’s most accomplished seamen.3
Conditions for the newcomers turned out to be less Elysian than advertised. The hundred or so settlers who had been there a year had run out of supplies, and were living off wild fruits, berries, the occasional crocodile, and goods stolen from the local Indians. There were also reports that the Spanish had been tipped off about Coligny’s project, and had sent a fleet which was even now roving the coast.
Over the coming weeks, Challeux joined a team of workmen who, under the direction of John de Hais, master carpenter, tried to reinforce La Caroline’s fragile palisade. The state of the fort’s defences was pitiful. The triangular layout was breached in two places, along the western side, and the long southerly wall facing the river, where the foundations for a ‘grange’ to store the settlement’s artillery and munitions lay partially built.
The weather hampered the workmen’s efforts. Daily deluges washed away the embankment supporting the palisade wall, and intervals of baking sunshine were too fleeting to allow the damage to be repaired. Meanwhile, the surrounding landscape became more and more saturated. Rivers burst their banks, meadows became marshland.
And so, on this September morning, Challeux faced another day of hard labour in the remorseless rain. Nevertheless, he managed to rouse himself, put on a damp and rotting cloak, and gather his tools.
A few hundred yards away, beyond the curtain of incessant rain, Don Pedro de Menéndez de Avilés lay in wait at the head of a column of five hundred soaking, disgruntled but well-armed Spanish troops. Menéndez was a Spanish noble and naval commander. He had arrived in Florida with a fleet of Spanish galleons a few days before Ribault, with orders to exterminate the ‘Lutherans’ and establish himself as Adelantado or governor of Florida, which King Philip II of Spain declared extended all the way from the keys on the southernmost tip of the Florida peninsula to Newfoundland.4
Menéndez had anchored his ships in the River of Dolphins (modern Matanzas River), about thirty-five miles south of Fort Caroline. There, on 28 August, he had set about building a military base, which he called St Augustine, in honour of the feast day upon which construction work had begun. After several weeks gathering intelligence about Fort Caroline from local Indians, and harrying Ribault’s fleet, he decided to mount a land attack on the French settlement.
The journey from St Augustine to Fort Caroline had proved dangerous and tiring. Though led by Francis Jean, a French defector who had lived in Fort Caroline, Menéndez’s troops got lost. They had to make their way through ‘morasses and desert paths never yet trod’, often up to their armpits in water, holding heavy knapsacks, ladders (for scaling the fort’s palisade) and harquebuses (a heavy forerunner to the musket) above their heads. They had finally reached a ‘little rise in the ground’ overlooking Fort Caroline in the early morning of 20 September, ‘the eve of the day of the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist St Matthew’.5
Menéndez commanded his men to stay hidden in the woodland while the camp master, Don Pedro de Valdes, and Francis Jean were sent ahead. They made their way through the thick undergrowth until they found their path blocked by a fallen tree. Turning back, a French sentinel who was patrolling nearby glimpsed them through the thicket. ‘Qui va la? [Who goes there?]’ he called. ‘Un Français [a Frenchman],’ the Spanish captain replied, in a convincing accent. The sentinel approached, and as soon as he was within reach, Valdes drew his sword and slashed him across the face. The sentinel fell backwards, giving a shout.
The cry carried through the thicket of trees, across the waterlogged clearing and turf embankment surrounding the French fort, through the wide gaps of its palisade, reaching the ears of Challeux as he was leaving his quarters. Guards were summoned, and they rushed out to see what had happened, leaving the fort’s gates open behind them.
At the same moment, Menéndez, thinking the cry was from his own camp master, gave the order to attack. Spanish troops burst from the cover of trees and poured through the fort’s still-open gates, firing and slashing at the panicking French settlers, who emerged from their quarters in their nightshirts to see what was going on.
Challeux saw a Spanish pikeman charging at him, and ran to a ladder or scaffold leaning up against one section of the fort’s rampart. ‘Nothing but the grace of God enabled me to double my effort,’ he recalled. ‘Old grey-haired man that I am, I nevertheless jumped over the ramparts, which if I thought about it, I could not have done, for they were eight or nine feet in height.’6
Not until he reached the cover of trees did he dare look back. He beheld ‘the horrible slaughter of our people’. Some managed to reach boats moored along the nearby shore, and row out to Ribault’s fleet, which was anchored in the river. The rest were killed where they stood, the Spanish vying ‘with each other as to who could best cut the throats of our men’. They even attacked the ill, the old, women and children, Challeux claimed, ‘in such a way that it is impossible to conceive of a massacre which could be equal to this one in cruelty and barbarity’.7
Once the savagery had subsided, the corpses were dragged out of the fort and dumped on the river bank. The Spanish soldiers, frustrated that so many had escaped, ‘vented their wrath and bloody cruelty on the dead’, scooping out their victims’ eyeballs, sticking them on the points of their daggers, and hurling them into the river ‘with shrieks of abuse and ribald laughter’.
Challeux fled into the woods, and made his way to the coast. He was picked up by one of Ribault’s ships the next day, and reached France a few weeks later, where he published a sensational account of his experiences. Others, including Jean Ribault, were less fortunate. Caught in a storm, they were shipwrecked back on the Florida coast. Exhausted and starving, they eventually surrendered to the Spanish, who bound them two by two, took them behind a sand dune, and slaughtered them. Only seven were spared, four who claimed to be Catholics, together with a drummer, a fife player and a carpenter, required by Menéndez to supplement his own troops.8
In a report of his actions sent to King Philip, Menéndez boasted, ‘I made war with fire and blood as Governor and Captain General of these Provinces upon all who might have come here to settle and to plant this evil Lutheran sect’. Having ‘come to this coast to burn and hang’ the hated Huguenots, he pledged to continue pursuing them ‘by sea and by land’ until they were annihilated.
To prevent any other adherents of that ‘wicked Lutheran sect’ returning to North America – particularly the English, who he noted had nominated Ribault ‘Captain General of all [their] fleet’ – Menéndez now urged the King to secure the entire eastern coast of North America. In particular, the Spanish should build a fort at the ‘Bahia de Santa Maria’ at thirty-seven degrees of northerly latitude, ‘the key to all the fortifications in this land’. This was the region that would later come to be dubbed by the English ‘Virginia’.9
Even in Spain, Menéndez was denounced for ‘inhumanely condemning so many souls to hell for ever’ at Fort Caroline. But he claimed that such brutality had been necessary. He had prevented the weed of Protestantism which had spread so quickly across the northern parts of Europe, from taking hold in the fertile soil of the New World. The massacre was a godly act, born of ‘divine inspiration, rather than from any dictate of human understanding’. Some even suggested that Menéndez had been merciful, ‘since he nobly and honourably put them to the sword, when by every right he could have burnt them alive’, the preferred punishment for heresy.
King Philip, who saw himself and his mighty empire as custodians of the true faith, reinforced this view. ‘The justice you meted out to the Lutheran corsairs who attempted to occupy and fortify Florida in order to sow the seeds of their wicked sect,’ he informed Menéndez, was ‘fully justified’. In the great battle for the soul of Europe and the future of mankind, North America had become the new front line.10
TWO Machiavelli
ON A COLD JANUARY DAY IN 1606, a messenger walked inconspicuously across the cobbles of London’s Strand, carrying a parcel for delivery to an address opposite the Savoy. It was a journey of only a few hundred yards, but one that crossed from one era of history to another. Just beyond Charing Cross lay York House, where, in 1599, the Earl of Essex, ‘a man of great designs’, had been imprisoned for his attempts to rouse Queen Elizabeth’s hesitant government to a heroic war against the ‘tyranny’ of Catholic Spain. A few yards further on was Durham House, once the home of Sir Walter Raleigh, the swashbuckling adventurer who had tried, and failed, to make North America an English colony, and a beachhead for attacking the Spanish empire. Essex had been executed for his rebellious behaviour in 1601. Raleigh was arrested for treason two years later, and now languished in the Tower of London, his bold schemes mere echoes in the empty halls of his great residence.
Past these mausoleums to old follies and glories lay the messenger’s destination, a brand-new, flat-fronted, perpendicular brick building. At each corner stood a tower, soaring as high as the famous lantern or ‘little turret’ atop Durham House, from which Raleigh had once beheld a ‘prospect which is pleasant perhaps as any in the World’.1 This building was the London residence of Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, the man who had contrived the downfall of these political giants, shaped the emergence of a new regime under a new king, and cemented his astonishing rise by commissioning the turreted edifice soaring overhead.
The messenger knocked on the door, and was admitted to a small antechamber. Being Secretary of State to King James, and the monarch’s most trusted servant, the Earl was daily assailed by crowds of applicants, supplicants, petitioners and messengers competing for his much divided attention, and the antechamber had been especially set aside to receive them.
A clerk entered the room. He approached the messenger, who handed over the parcel. The clerk broke the wax seal and cursorily glanced at a covering letter, addressed to ‘the Right honourable the Earle of Salisbury of his Majestes privie Councell’. It was from Thomas and Edward Hayes, known to Cecil’s staff as ‘projectors’, agents who tipped off the Secretary of State to speculative schemes that might attract a profit or some political advantage. Attached to the letter was a long, formal document. Its title concerned a controversial subject, and marked it for the Secretary of State’s personal attention. It read: ‘Reasons to move the High Court of Parliament to raise a stock for the maintaining of a colony [in] Virginia’.2
The word ‘Machiavellian’ came into currency in England in the early 1600s, and it was Robert Cecil who in the minds of many personified its meaning. One of the Earl of Essex’s servants, defending his master before a commission of inquiry called following the Earl’s fall from grace in 1599, described the Secretary of State as ‘an atheist, a Machiavel’ who literally embodied the warped morality of political opportunism. ‘It was an unwholesome thing to meet a man in the morning which hath a wry neck, a crooked back or a splay foot,’ said the servant, referring to various deformities with which Cecil had suffered from birth.3
Cecil’s cousin and long-time ally Francis Bacon argued that it was these deformities that conferred upon the Secretary of State the callousness and determination a great political operator needs, making him ‘void of natural affection’, and mindful ‘to watch and observe the weakness of others’.4 These were certainly the qualities he had displayed in his dealings with Sir Walter Raleigh.
Raleigh had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s most cherished, if exasperating, favourites, and in 1584, to demonstrate her affections, she had granted him an exclusive licence to colonize North America. His efforts had resulted in establishing a small settlement on the island of Roanoke, on the Carolina Banks. On this basis he claimed the entire region for the English Crown, naming it ‘Virginia’ in honour of the Virgin Queen. But hostilities with Spain had prevented him from sending supply ships to service the fledgling colony, and in 1590, it was found abandoned, the only clue to the inhabitants’ whereabouts being a word carved in one of the fort’s wooden posts: ‘Croatoan’, the name of a local tribe. Attempts to find the missing settlers came to nothing, and the supply ship had returned to England.5
Even after 1591, when his licence officially expired, Raleigh had continued to claim Virginia as his, on the basis that his Roanoke settlers may have survived, and established a permanent base elsewhere in the region. But several follow-up missions sent to find his ‘lost colonists’ had proved fruitless. In 1602, a rival mission was dispatched to ‘Norumbega’, in the area of modern-day New England, to find alternative locations for an English colony. Raleigh knew nothing of it until it returned with a lucrative cargo of cedar wood and sassafras (an aromatic bark used to fumigate bedlinen and treat syphilis). His fury at a flagrant attempt to challenge his monopoly over North America resulted in an attempt to confiscate the goods, and an appeal for help and support from his ‘friend’ Cecil. ‘I shall yet live to see [Virginia] an English nation,’ he had promised. But his letter coincided with the final days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and Raleigh was emerging as an obstacle to Cecil’s complex manoeuvres to ensure the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne.
Elizabeth had died on 24 March 1603, and within days the Scots King took her place as James I of England. Soon after, Cecil confronted Raleigh with accusations that he had attempted to plot against the succession, and had him arrested. Sir Walter was tried for treason, sentenced to death, and thrown in the Tower to await his fate, leaving Virginia conveniently available for the new regime to dispose of as it saw fit.
And now Cecil had in his hands this new proposal for ‘the maintaining of a colony in Virginia’. Thomas and Edward Hayes began in a suitably humble tone: ‘Pardon us (right Honourable), that we presume to move this project presented herewith unto you, so remote from the course of your great affairs as America is from England.’ These ‘great affairs’ were the knock-on effects of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a group of disaffected Catholic gentlemen to blow up the House of Commons on 5 November 1605, the day the King and his entire Privy Council, together with most of the English nobility, had assembled at Westminster for the start of a new session of Parliament. Cecil was leading the official investigation into the plot, which was conveniently sweeping up a great many opponents of the new regime.
In their proposal, the Hayeses argued that ‘so great a business’ as colonizing America ‘can never ever be duly effected by private means’, as previous experience had shown. So they and certain associates had ‘devised another way, where by the cause may be completely set forward’: a great public scheme performed under the auspices of Parliament.6
Attached to the letter was the motion they intended to be set before the Houses of Parliament. It proposed setting up a large fleet of modern, well-armed and well-equipped ships manned by ‘able Mariners, and worthy chieftains’, which would be sent across the Atlantic to conquer North America in the King’s name. It would be publicly financed, as ‘private purses are cold comfort to adventurers and have ever been found fatal to all enterprises hereunto undertaken by the English, by reason of delays, jealousies and unwillingness to back that project which succeeded not in the first attempt’.
A model for such an undertaking could be found, the Hayeses believed, in the Low Countries. This collection of mostly Protestant city states, dominions of the Spanish Crown fighting for their independence, had created Europe’s most advanced trading region. They had ‘effected marvellous matters in traffic [trade] and navigation in few years’ by financing their expeditions through the issue of ‘main’ or public stock. In contrast, the English strategy of giving a grandee such as Raleigh a monopoly of trade with a particular region had resulted in failure. ‘It is honourable for a state rather to back an exploit by public consent than by private monopoly,’ the Hayeses concluded.
They therefore proposed that the King should give his assent to an Act of Parliament to authorize the setting up of a public company to colonize America. This was a matter of urgency, as ‘the want of our fresh and present supply of our discoveries [in Virginia] hath in manner taken away the title which the law of nations giveth us’ – in other words, use it or lose it.
Cecil was aware of the urgency, as well as the economic advantages, of a colonial venture. Spain’s enormous wealth, after all, rested upon her speculative ventures in South America, which were now profiting the new Spanish King Philip III to the tune of two million ducats a year – more than twice James’s entire annual income.7 Cecil was also aware of the growing success of London’s trading companies – indeed, James to a degree was coming to depend upon it, as the profits generated by these companies were helping to bankroll his overstretched royal exchequer. The newest, the East India Company, had been founded in 1600 by Sir Thomas Smythe, a close friend and generous supporter of the Crown. It had already sent several ships loaded with bullion to the Far East to buy spices and other exotic goods direct from suppliers. The sale of these items back in England was not only proving highly profitable, but suggested a lucrative new stream of customs revenue for the Crown.
However, the Hayeses had badly miscalculated. There was no way Cecil would countenance a public colonization venture, whatever the trade benefits. The very name ‘Virginia’ was a reminder why he considered this impossible. During the 1570s and ’80s, he and his father Lord Burghley had worked strenuously to marry Elizabeth off to one of Europe’s Catholic princes, so she could produce an heir. They had been fought all the way by a group of courtiers who opposed any such match on the grounds that she and therefore her kingdom would come under the sway of Catholic regimes they saw as tyrannical. It was this clique, egged on by Huguenot exiles wanting to avenge the massacre in Florida, that had promoted the cult of Elizabeth’s virginity. It became an emblem of Protestant purity and independence, which Raleigh had reinforced with his choice of name for English America.
Cecil had since managed to repair some of the diplomatic damage caused by these struggles, his efforts culminating with the Somerset House Peace Treaty with Spain, which was signed in 1604, a year after James ascended to the throne. But this had done nothing to diminish Virginia’s political potency. Just a few months before Cecil received the Hayeses’ proposal, a play called Eastward Hoe had been staged at the popular Blackfriars Theatre. It featured a dissolute ‘thirty-pound knight’ (a reference to King James selling off titles to raise ready cash) who had attempted to mount an expedition to the colony. ‘Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead,’ the expedition captain had boasted, in an effort to lure footloose and unemployed mariners into joining the mission. ‘You shall live freely there,’ he added, ‘without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers’, the apparatus of oppressive government.
The play’s authors were arrested for such incendiary lines, and even now, one of them, Ben Jonson, was sending Cecil plaintive letters, begging for his freedom. In such circumstances, the idea of a royally endorsed public venture could not possibly be countenanced.8
A private venture, on the other hand – that was a different matter, and a proposal for one just happened to be at hand. Cecil’s factotum, Sir Walter Cope, had long held an interest in foreign exploration, and around the same time as the Hayeses, had sent Cecil a private note suggesting a very different venture. Judge Sir John Popham, another prominent member of James’s government, ‘foreseeing in the experience of his place’ as King James’s Chief Justice ‘the infinite numbers of cashiered captains and soldiers, or poor artisans that would & cannot work, and of idle vagrants that may & will not work, is affectionately bent to the plantation of Virginia’. Cope proposed that a select group of trusted merchants and nobles be approached to fund a small, secret exploratory mission to America to trade with the Indians and search for valuable commodities. All that was required from Cecil was ‘two lines from your Lordship in particular, or from the Lords’ of the Privy Council in support of the venture, and an expedition would be under way in no time.9
This was far more to Cecil’s liking. For all its negative political associations, there was something about Virginia that not even Cecil could completely resist. Raleigh’s geographer, the cleric and colonial propagandist Richard Hakluyt, had since 1599 adopted Cecil as a patron, and on his new master’s behalf uncovered several convincing reports referring to the existence of gold deposits in the ‘Appalatcy’ or Appalachian Mountains to the west of Roanoke. There were also references to a great salt-water lake lying somewhere to the northwest, which could be reached by river, suggesting there might be a route through the middle of North America to the Pacific – the long-cherished dream of a navigable westerly passage to Cathay and the riches of the Orient. Also, intelligence had revealed that, despite these reports, the Spanish had continued to ignore the areas of America north of Florida.10
Cecil was in desperate need of new sources of revenue, not least to cover the cost of glorifying his London residence, which, he admitted to a friend, had ‘almost undone me’. Furthermore, to secure his throne, James had been forced to spend heavily on securing the necessary political support among England’s anti-Scottish elite, and the royal exchequer was already stretched to breaking point. Any venture that had the potential for private profit and royal revenue could not be ignored.11
Nothing more was heard of the Hayeses’ scheme. But within a few weeks of Cope’s letter arriving at Cecil House, the King had been presented with a royal charter to launch a new Virginia venture as a private enterprise, enveloped in secrecy.
THREE The Adventurers
AS A FOUNDING DOCUMENT, providing the legal basis for what became English America, the Virginia Charter that received the royal seal on 10 April 1606 was no Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. In return for a 20-per-cent share of any precious metal they discovered, the King merely offered certain ‘Knights, Gentlemen, merchants and other Adventurers’ – the so-called ‘patentees’ – permission to ‘make habitation, plantation and to deduce a Colony of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia’.
Lip service was paid to the mission having a higher religious purpose ‘in propagating of Christian Religion to such people as yet live in darkness’, meaning the Indians, but it was clear that the true motive was monetary, the charter focusing heavily on the ‘commodities and hereditaments’ to which the patentees, as well as the Crown, would be entitled.
‘For the more speedy accomplishment of their said intended plantation and habitation,’ the patentees were split into two groups, each given a different region of North America to colonize. The region between 38 and 45 degrees latitude (from modern Philadelphia to the Canadian border) came under the control of a group of merchants from the West Country ports of Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, led by Chief Justice Sir John Popham. ‘Undertakers [i.e. investors], gentlemen, merchants &c’ of London made up the other group, who formed what became known as the Virginia Company. They were to develop the region between 34 and 41 degrees, the 450-mile stretch of coastline running from modern Cape Fear to Philadelphia.1
Most of London’s trading companies were managed by a governor, appointed by investors. The Virginia Company was to be different. Instead of a governor, Cecil set up a ‘Royal Council’ of thirteen grandees to supervise the company’s affairs, which reported directly to him. Its powers were modelled on those of the royal councils long established to deal with strategically sensitive royal possessions, such as Ireland and the North of England.2 Sir Thomas Smythe, the City’s most powerful merchant and one of the royal exchequer’s most generous creditors, was made company treasurer, responsible for day-to-day business.
These arrangements soon caused problems. Within a month, there were complaints that the council’s interference had ‘exceedingly cooled the heat’ of investors.3 Matters were made worse by Cecil insisting that preparations for the expedition be undertaken in complete secrecy, so as not to alert the Spanish.
Even without such impediments, finding backers was difficult. North America had a reputation as a financial slough. Since the 1570s, many a merchant’s fortunes had been sunk in the middle of the Atlantic, or been lost at the hands of the Spanish or Indians on a distant shore. Those missions that had returned a profit had done so by engaging in ‘privateering’, raiding stray Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean, a practice that had been officially sanctioned in Elizabeth’s time, but banned since the signing of the Somerset House Peace Treaty with Spain.
By the summer of 1606, there were few signs of progress, and gloom about the project’s prospects intensified with news that the West Country group had managed to equip and dispatch a ship called the Richard in August, to reconnoitre a suitable place to settle in the region of Sagadahoc, Maine.
By the autumn, the pressure was intense. If an expedition was not dispatched soon, it would arrive in Virginia too late to plant crops to feed the settlement the following winter.
On or soon after 20 November, a meeting of the London Virginia Company was called at Smythe’s offices in Philpot Lane, an inconspicuous alley just north of Billingsgate, London’s fish market. Smythe’s Great Hall, decorated with souvenirs from his other trading ventures, including an Indian canoe suspended from the ceiling, was a hub of his various global trading interests, and was now inaugurated as the headquarters of the London company’s American venture.
There is no record of that meeting. All the relevant paperwork was later seized by order of the Privy Council, and it has not been seen since.4 Nevertheless, it is likely that the motley crew of ‘principal adventurers’ that gathered together for the first time that day would not have inspired confidence, nor the final tally of resources that Smythe had managed to assemble.
Smythe had called the meeting because at last there were signs of progress. Three ships had been hired for the expedition, which were now ‘ready Victualled, rigged and furnished’ for the forthcoming voyage. The government had also decided upon the leadership of the mission, and issued the ‘articles, Instructions and orders’ finalizing the way the colony would be run.
The document specifying these crucial matters was not, according to later complaints, ‘so much as published’ by Smythe, who apparently kept certain key details to himself. However, he must at least have now delineated some of its main points.5
The settlement in Virginia, the government had decided, would be run not by a single governor, but, as one settler later put it, ‘aristocratically’, by a local council. This council was to govern the settlement according to laws set down by the Royal Council for Virginia in England, with powers to adjudicate over ‘the offences of tumults, rebellion, Conspiracies, mutiny and seditions in those parts which may be dangerous to the estates there, together with murther, manslaughter, Incest, rapes, and adulteries’, defendants being given the right to be tried before a jury of ‘twelve honest and indifferent persons’.6
The membership of the local council, Smythe revealed, would not be chosen by the adventurers, or the wider membership of the Virginia Company, but by the Royal Council for Virginia in England, from among those he had invited to the meeting. The identity of those nominated, however, would not be revealed until they had reached America.7
This news must have prompted some speculative glances around the room, as each adventurer sized up those who might soon determine his fortune and fate. Those destined to go on the first mission were ‘strangers to each other’s education, qualities, or disposition,’ one participant noted.8 Many were ‘cashiered captains’ in the afternoon of faltering careers, the average age being forty. Most would have described themselves as gentlemen of the Shires, members of a ‘middling’ class who, relative to their urban counterparts the merchants and lawyers, had not prospered in recent years.
The most senior was a 56-year-old veteran of the Irish and Low Countries campaigns, Edward Maria Wingfield. Of those about to sail, he was the only patentee, the only one whose name appeared on the Virginia Charter as one of the ‘humble suitors’ given permission to colonize North America.
To many, Edward Maria’s distinguishing feature was his middle name, which prompted the impressive explanation that it had originally been given to his father, in recognition of being godson to Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor. Edward was the second of many generations to adopt the affectation, proudly showing off the family’s ancient lineage and royal connections. Some of his forebears had been loyal to Queen Mary, Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter, and were implicated in her suppression of Protestants in the 1550s. This has led to accusations that the family had Papist leanings. But another relation, Sir Edward Wingfield of Kimbolton, had taken part in the Essex Rebellion of 1599, usually considered a distinctly Protestant affair. There is no evidence that Edward Maria veered strongly in either direction. He seems to have adopted the religion of many conservative members of the gentry: pragmatic Protestantism, emphasizing social conformity over religious piety.
His father had died when he was seven, and aged 12 he became the ward of an uncle. When he was in his twenties, he studied law at London’s Inns of Court, but preferred soldiering, and served in the Low Countries. In 1586, he fought with distinction alongside his brother Thomas Maria at Zutphen, hailed by English Protestants as a landmark battle in the fight against Catholic oppression. Later, he was briefly prisoner of the Spanish along with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who would later become a leading promoter of American colonization.
In the 1590s, Edward Maria had served in Ireland, where members of his family were leading English attempts to ‘colonize’ areas under Gaelic control. There he would have met Sir Ralph Lane, who had been governor of Raleigh’s ill-fated Roanoke colony, and it was perhaps from Lane that he developed an interest in colonial adventures further afield.9
By 1604 he was back in England, and soon after became involved in the revived Virginia project, providing not only desperately needed financial support, but helping to secure the royal patent. He had also recruited some of the key personnel, including the mission chaplain, a 38-year-old Sussex vicar called Richard Hunt, and the ‘surgeon general’, Thomas Wotton. How he came to acquire such a prominent role so early on in the venture is unclear, but a decisive factor was likely to have been his family connection with the famous explorer and privateer Bartholomew Gosnold.10
Gosnold had led the 1602 mission to Norumbega which had first challenged Raleigh’s Virginia monopoly. His return to England with profitable supplies of cedar wood and sassafras had also demonstrated the potential of North America as a source of natural commodities.
Since then, he and his shipmate, a silver-tongued lawyer called Gabriel Archer, had toured the taverns and company halls of London agitating tirelessly for a full-scale expedition, brandishing a persuasive tract written by Archer about their experiences of the ‘goodliest continent that ever we saw’.11 Their efforts resulted in Gosnold later being described as the ‘first mover’ of the Virginia venture,12 and attracting the valuable support of at least one prominent member of the Fishmongers’ Company.13
However, Gosnold’s name had been conspicuous by its absence from the Virginia patent, and this seems to have been because it had become politically unacceptable. In 1604, a ‘Captain Gosnell’, probably Bartholomew, had made some intemperate remarks about King James at a dinner party held on the Isle of Wight. One of Cecil’s intelligencers happened to be among the guests, and he reported the remarks to his master, prompting a full-scale investigation by the Privy Council. No record remains of the council’s conclusions, but following such an episode, it was wise for someone bearing the Gosnold name to keep a low profile.14 For this reason, Gosnold might have drafted in Wingfield as his proxy, the two families having connections going back generations.15
By the time of Smythe’s November gathering, Gosnold was able to adopt a more public role in the venture, and had secured a place for Archer in the forthcoming expedition. But as he and Wingfield were now to discover, neither was to be trusted with the role of mission commander. That role was to go to the formidable 46-year-old, one-armed veteran of the Spanish wars who now joined them: Christopher Newport.
Newport had been hired over the heads of the Virginia Company by the Royal Council. He had no previous connection to the Virginia venture, but was certainly qualified for the job. A war hero who had lost his right arm fighting in the West Indies, his reputation reached as far as Spain, where he was known as ‘un caballero muy principal’, a very great knight.16 In 1592, he had helped in the capture of the Portuguese carrack the Madre de Dios, the most magnificent prize of the Spanish war, estimated to be worth £150,000.17 Since the signing of the Somerset House Peace Treaty, he had continued to tour the Spanish Main, but for peaceful purposes, undertaking trade missions on behalf of a number of London merchants. He had returned from one trip with two baby crocodiles, which he presented to the King.
Unlike the other leading members of the venture, Newport was not expected to make any sort of investment in the company, nor to stay in Virginia. He would be responsible for commanding the expeditionary fleet, and leading the initial reconnaissance of the territory. In return, he was to be given sole ownership of any discoveries he made, including deposits of minerals and precious metals.18
Such terms caused widespread resentment, because the other men of rank who had volunteered to go, many at this late stage in the preparations, were far more exposed. They were expected to pay not only their own way, but to recruit from their own estates the servants and labourers who would make up the bulk of the settlement’s workforce. They were also expected to pay the costs of sending these workers to America, and maintaining them while they were there.
In return for this investment, they were not even to take personal possession of the land upon which they settled. Instead, they were to receive a share in the Virginia Company’s overall profits. Their fortunes therefore rested principally on the speedy discovery of some valuable commodity, such as gold, copper, spices or medical ingredients, rather than the long-term development of the colony.
As most of these gentlemen well knew, the odds were unfavourable. The pages of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations were filled with horror stories of foreign ventures ending in slaughter or ruin. Just this month, Hakluyt had received reports of yet another disaster. A base set up in Guyana by the English captain Charles Leigh had been deserted following a series of mutinies, and a supply ship sent to relieve him had been forced to abandon sixty-seven passengers on the island of St Lucia, where they had all died of starvation or at the hands of the natives.19 Such were the risks faced by these planters. But then, in most cases, they were going not because of how much they had to gain, but how little they had to lose.
Despite his elevated status, George Percy was typical. Born on 4 September 1580, he was the sickly, epileptic runt of a litter of eight children fathered by Henry Percy, the eighth Earl of Northumberland. George’s family was renowned for its rebellions, which were being replayed every night on the London stage in Shakespeare’s history plays. Henry IV featured that ‘mad fellow of the north’ Henry Percy (the first Earl of Northumberland), and his son Harry Hotspur. ‘Zounds! I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy,’ says one character – a line written before the Gunpowder Plot, so acquiring uncomfortably prophetic force since the revelation that one of George’s kinsmen, Thomas Percy, was a ringleader.20 George was no Hotspur. In fact, he was a disappointment to his family and peers. Someone whispered into King James’s ear just before he succeeded to the English throne that George was hated ‘damnably’ by his brother the Earl, and one official in the Earl’s household was moved to describe George’s infirmities as ‘grievous and tedious’.21
George had received the conventional education for a man of his class: Eton College, Oxford University, and the Middle Temple, for legal training. When he was sixteen, his mother had died, leaving him an annuity of around £60 a year, paid by the Earl’s staff. This was enough for a comfortable though not lavish standard of living for those who could keep within their means. However, George insisted on extravagance. He had a compulsion for keeping an impressively aristocratic wardrobe and table, having no title or property of his own to demonstrate his elevated rank.
Then came the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. George was not implicated, but his elder brother and patron Henry, the current Earl of Northumberland, was found guilty of conspiracy, and committed to the Tower. Fined £30,000, Henry no longer felt in a position to support his aimless younger brother, so decided to send him to Virginia. As well as keeping him a safe distance from the political fray, the expedition also promised some alleviation of George’s epilepsy, for, as he would later write, ‘my fits here in England are more often, more long and more grievous, than I have felt them in other parts nearer the line [equator]’.
He had to pay a high price for a place in the venture. He was apparently forced to hand over his annuity to his brother, and to borrow £8 16s from another adventurer to help cover his costs – a debt which he had still to repay years later. Meanwhile, his expenses were far from modest. He subsequently sent home requests to his brother for ‘diverse suits’ (£32 14s 7d), knives (3s), books, paper, ink and wax (£1 14s 9d), biscuits (£3 5s), cheese (8s 2d), butter (£1 17s), soap, lights and starch (13s 6d), storage chests (12s), assorted boxes (10d) and casks (6s 2d). He even asked for a feather bed, complete with bolster, blankets and a covering of tapestry.22
Percy was a name of French origin going back to the Norman invasion of England, breathed in the rarefied atmosphere of royal courts. In contrast, the name that was to become most closely associated with the Virginia story, and intimately linked to the legend of the Indian princess Pocahontas, carried a whiff of the Anglo-Saxon village forge: John Smith.
A wide, barely navigable ocean divided Smith’s world from Percy’s. Percy was the product of generations of aristocratic breeding and refinement; the stout, bearded Smith prided himself on being a self-made man. ‘Who can desire more content that hath small means, or but only his merit to advance his fortunes, than to tread and plant that ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life,’ Smith wrote.23 Nevertheless, Smith had one thing in common with Percy: a feeling of social exclusion, of otherness, that made the prospect of starting afresh in the New World irresistible.
According to Smith’s vivid, if sometimes incoherent and unreliable autobiography, True Travels, he was ‘born in Willoughby in Lincolnshire’. His father was ‘anciently descended from the ancient Smiths of Crudley in Lancashire; his mother from the Rickards at Great Heck in Yorkshire’. He was christened with that most ordinary of names at Willoughby by Alford on 9 January 1580. The ceremony took place in the local parish church, which, like many others in a region of reclaimed marshland that could be treacherous to travel, was dedicated to St Helen, patron saint of travellers.
He described these as ‘poor beginnings’, so poor as to earn the scorn of his high-born adversaries. But he was not quite as humble as he sometimes claimed. His father, George, was among the better-off farmers in the region, owning the freehold of several acres of pasture in Great Carlton and property in the market town of Louth. He also leased fields off the local lord, Peregrine Bertie, Baron Willoughby of Eresby. Young John was brought up in a substantial farmhouse comprising a hall, three chambers, a ‘milkhouse’ and a ‘beasthouse’, and with several servants.24
The next stage in John’s life, according to his autobiography, was ‘his parents dying when he was about thirteen years of age’. They left him with ‘a competent means, which he not being capable to manage, little regarded’.25 This is a curious passage, as both parents were very much alive when he was ‘about thirteen’: his father died when Smith was sixteen, and his mother many years later, having remarried.
His mind being ‘even then set upon brave adventures’, he was apprenticed to a merchant in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Bondage to a master did not suit his restless spirit, and soon afterwards he tore up his seven-year indenture and headed off to find new adventures. This probably happened around the time his father died, and produced a rift with his mother, which would explain his decision to write both of them prematurely out of his life.
The elective orphan, free of family ties and the responsibilities of having to manage his father’s farm, went to the Low Countries. Unfortunately for Smith, his arrival coincided with a lull in hostilities, a side effect of Cecil’s peace treaty with Spain. This forced an early return to England. Smith then embarked on a tour of France in the company of Peregrine Bertie, the son of his father’s patron. Returning again to the Low Countries, and finding the opportunities for military glory still limited, he ended up in Eastern Europe, where war between the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires raged more reliably. Though the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was Catholic, this was of no consequence to an English Protestant with military ambitions.
He enlisted with the battalion of a Slovenian warlord, and marched to Transylvania, on the front line of the war. There, during a siege, he claimed to have beheaded three ‘Turks’ single-handedly before the massed ranks of the opposing Christian and Muslim armies. For this act of bravery, the King of Poland granted him a coat of arms, the title of Captain and the status of ‘an English gentleman’.
He was soon after wounded during a skirmish with Tartars and taken prisoner. He and his fellow captives were sent to Axiopolis (modern Cernavoda), a market town on the banks of the Danube, and ‘sold for slaves, like beasts in a market-place; where every merchant, viewing their limbs and wounds, caused other slaves to struggle with them, to try their strength’.
A dealer bought the young soldier for a client in Constantinople, who turned out to be the beautiful daughter of a Greek noblewoman whom Smith called Charatza Trabigzanda (probably mistaking the Greek description of her as a girl from Trebizond).26 She soon ‘took (as it seemed) much compassion on him’, but not yet being of age, and fearful that he would be sold on, sent him to her brother, a military official working near the Black Sea, ‘till time made her Master of her self’. But ‘within an hour after his arrival’, the brother commanded his servant to strip Smith naked, ‘and shave his head and beard so bare as his hand’ and place ‘a great ring of iron, with a long stalk bowed like a sickle, riveted about his neck’. After enduring several months of this treatment, Smith ‘beat out [his master’s] brains with his threshing bat’, stole his victim’s clothes, and made his escape along an ancient caravan route to Astrakhan. He vividly recalled a journey along this intersection of Asiatic trade, each crossroads being marked with a signpost showing the way to the Crimea with a crescent moon, to Moscow with a cross, and to China with a sun. Ending up in Prague, the capital of the Holy Roman empire, he embarked on another epic trek through Germany, France and Spain to the Barbary coast of North Africa, where he hitched a lift with French pirates. Narrowly escaping Spanish capture and being blown up by an on-board explosion, he returned to England.27
It is not clear how Smith was introduced to the Virginia venture. At the time Gosnold was promoting the idea in London, he appears to have been staying with or near Robert Bertie at the Willoughby London residence in the Barbican. Robert’s father had shown an interest in the Roanoke venture, and he had family connections to both the Wingfields and Gosnolds, so Robert may have effected an introduction.28
Whatever Smith’s credentials, he, like Newport and Gosnold, had at least made a name for himself in the world of military and maritime affairs. The same could not be said of two mysterious figures mingling among the assembled adventurers and planters on that November day. Smythe introduced them as John Ratcliffe and George Kendall. They were to take a prominent though as yet unspecified role in the forthcoming expedition, the assembly was informed. Nothing further was revealed about these men, other than perhaps the merest hint that their participation was non-negotiable, as they had been appointed at the personal behest of Robert Cecil himself.
FOUR Departure
BY LATE NOVEMBER 1606, preparations for the Virginia Company’s first expedition were well advanced. Edward Maria Wingfield had packed a trunk with reading material, together with ‘diverse fruit, conserves and preserves’, and dispatched it to Richard Crofts, probably a relative of the Herefordshire landowner and MP Sir Herbert Crofts.
Crofts lived at Ratcliffe, a hamlet on the north bank of the Thames. The stretch of river overlooked by his house was used to moor ships, and on 23 November the Susan Constant, the 170-ton flagship for the Virginia fleet, arrived, heavily laden with supplies for her forthcoming voyage. She was tied up alongside the Philip and Frances, and Crofts dutifully ensured that Wingfield’s precious trunk was safely stowed in one of the cabins. A consignment of clucking hens and a cockerel was also delivered, from which Wingfield hoped to breed a flock to provide himself, and possibly his associates, with fresh eggs and an occasional chicken for the pot once in America.
That night, the Susan Constant began to shift with the ebb tide. Being so heavily laden, she was difficult to control, and crashed against the neighbouring ship, damaging the Philip and Frances’s bowsprit, sheet anchor and beak-head (defined by Captain John Smith as the part of the ship ‘before the forecastle, and of great use, as well for the grace and countenance of the ship, as a place for men to ease themselves in’).1 When the master of the Philip and Frances boarded the Susan Constant to remonstrate with the crew, he claimed to find them ‘tippling and drinking’.2
The Susan Constant suffered minor damage to two of her portholes, but she was soon patched up, and a few days later moved further downstream to Blackwall, where she was to rendezvous with her two companion vessels: the 40-ton Godspeed and the 20-ton Discovery. Of the three ships, only the Discovery, a small bark or ‘pinnace’, was actually owned by the Virginia Company. She was to remain in Virginia for use by the settlers, while the other two hired vessels would return to England, laden, it was hoped, with valuable commodities.
On 10 December, ten days before the ships were due to sail, the mission’s leaders were once again summoned to Philpot Lane, this time to receive their final ‘Orders and Directions’ from the Royal Council.
Newport was confirmed as admiral, having ‘sole charge’ of the venture while he was in Virginia. He was also given the box containing the list of names for the local council, which he was under orders to ensure remained sealed until the fleet arrived in America. Meanwhile, he was left to appoint the ‘captains, soldiers and mariners’ for the voyage. Reflecting his experience and prominent role in getting the venture off the ground, Gosnold was put in charge of the Godspeed while, to everyone’s surprise, the mysterious Ratcliffe was given command of the Discovery.
The expedition leaders were then handed a set of ‘Instructions given by way of Advice’, drawn up by Richard Hakluyt. These distilled the collective wisdom of the adventurers’ forerunners, and showed that a great deal had been learned from their abundant mistakes.
Hakluyt insisted that, on arrival in America, their first job was to anchor the fleet in a ‘safe port’ at the mouth of a navigable river. The river was to be the one that ‘runneth furthest into the Land’ and ‘bendeth most towards the Northwest’, in the hope that it might be that mentioned by the Indians at Roanoke, leading to the Appalachian Mountains and even the Pacific.3
As for deciding the location of the settlement, Hakluyt recalled the experience of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline. The settlers must find ‘the Strongest most Fertile and wholesome place’ far enough upriver ‘to the end that you be not surprised as the French were in Florida’. They should also ‘in no Case Suffer any of the natural people of the Country to inhabit between You and the Sea Coast’, which might cut off their means of escape in the event of hostilities.
The settlement should be located away from heavily wooded areas, because the trees would provide cover for enemies, and they did not have the resources to clear large swathes of land (‘You shall not be able to Cleanse twenty acres in a Year’). They should also avoid a ‘low and moist place because it will prove unhealthful’. It was suggested that the best way of finding a suitably wholesome site was to look at the people who lived nearby. If they were ‘blear Eyed and with Swollen bellies and Legs’, then it was best to steer clear; if ‘Strong and Clean’ it would be a ‘true sign of a wholesome Soil’.
Once a base had been found, they were to erect a ‘little sconce’ or lookout post at the mouth of the river. The one hundred and twenty settlers were then to be split up into four groups: forty to build a fortified settlement, thirty to prepare the ground for growing ‘corn and roots’, ten to man the sconce. The remaining forty were to make up exploration parties. Gosnold was to take half of them into the interior, equipped with a compass and ‘half a Dozen pickaxes to try if they can find any mineral’. The others were to explore the river to its source, scoring the bark of trees on the river side as they went, to help search parties retrace their route should they go missing. The instructions did not specify who was to lead this mission.
Those left to construct the settlement were advised to lay out streets of ‘good breadth’ which converged on a central square or marketplace. A cannon was then to be placed in the centre, which could ‘command’ any street in the event of attack. Before setting up housing, the carpenters and ‘other suchlike workmen’ were to work on the public amenities, such as a secure storehouse and assembly room.
As for the Indians, they were recognized to be vital to the settlement’s success. ‘You must have great care not to offend the naturals if you can eschew it and employ some few of your company to trade with them for corn and all other lasting victuals.’ ‘Above all things, do not advertise the killing of any of your men’, and avoid revealing signs of sickness, in case the ‘country people’ realize the settlers are ‘but Common men’.
Trade was both crucial to survival and fraught with difficulties. The settlers should first ensure that the crews of the ships that brought them (which would soon be sailing back to England) should be prevented from having contact with local tribes, ‘for, those that mind not to inhabit [the colony], for a Little Gain will Debase the Estimation of Exchange and hinder the trade’. Before the Indians realize that the settlers mean to stay, special representatives should be appointed to barter with them for sufficient ‘Corn and all Other lasting Victuals’ to last through the first year, the settlers’ own crop to be put in store ‘to avoid the Danger of famine’.
‘The way to prosper and to Obtain Good Success’, Hakluyt concluded, ‘is to make yourselves all of one mind for the Good of your Country & your own’. Every one of them must ‘Serve & fear God the Giver of all Goodness’. They must shun corrupt or antisocial behaviour, as ‘every Plantation which our heavenly father hath not planted shall be rooted out’. Finally, they were ordered to keep all matters relating to Virginia secret, and prevent the publication of any material which did not have the Royal Council’s prior approval.4
Having given their solemn oaths to abide by these orders and instructions, the three leaders of the expedition went to Blackwall to inspect the company that was to be carried across the Atlantic, and settled in the New World.
Instead of the one hundred and twenty envisaged by Hakluyt, they found around one hundred men and boys, plus a few dogs, brought for hunting and as pets.5
Thirty-six of the company were identified as ‘gentlemen’, many of them the footloose younger sons of distinguished families. Anthony Gosnold was Bartholomew’s younger brother. Thomas Sandys was the younger brother of the prominent MP Edwin Sandys.6 Thomas Studley, the man selected to act as ‘cape merchant’ (in charge of supplies) and an enthusiastic chronicler of the coming adventure, may have come from a line of prolific writers.7 Kellam or Kenelm Throgmorton was probably related to Bess, the wife of Sir Walter Raleigh.
Other gentleman members of the expedition were from more obscure and modest backgrounds. Nothing is known about the origins of Robert Tyndall, the expedition navigator, beyond the fact that he was the gunner of Prince Henry, James I’s son and heir. He may have been the son of John Tyndall, who wrote in 1602 to his ‘kinsman’ Michael Hicks, Cecil’s close friend, ‘recommending him to his favour,’ but this cannot be verified.8
The remainder of the company was made up of an assortment of tradesmen, labourers and young boys. While most of these ‘common sort’ were being shipped out by their masters, those with a trade or skill were contracted directly by the Virginia Company, to work for a specified period without charge, in return for their transport, tools and maintenance. The surly blacksmith James Read, and a professional mariner, Jonas Profit, probably signed up on such terms, as did Thomas Couper, a barber, Edward Brinto the stonemason, William Love the tailor, and Nicholas Skot, a drummer.
All that is known about the boys is their names: Samuel Collier, Nathaniel Pecock, James Brumfield and Richard Mutton.9 Some of the labourers and boys were likely to have been ‘pressed’ into service, an order from the Royal Council providing Newport with the authority to round up suitable candidates from taverns and playhouses, or buy them off gang-masters.
The fleet set sail on Saturday 20 December 1606.10 It was by design a low-key event. None of the government figures concerned with the venture was apparently in attendance, and whereas Elizabeth had waved off previous missions with a salute of cannon, James did not lift a hand for this departure, nor even seek to be informed.
A few days later, the ships reached the ‘Downs’, a well-known anchorage off the forelands north-east of Dover, where they awaited a favourable wind.
For weeks the fleet bobbed on the waves, while a relentless westerly whipped up the Channel, spitting sea spray and rain into the faces of the impatient captains. Every so often, a violent winter storm would throw up waves that threatened to overwhelm the ships, or drag their anchors, but, as George Percy, who was aboard the Susan Constant, loyally noted, ‘by the skilfulness of the captain [Newport] we suffered no great loss or danger’.11
The ships might have been unscathed, but passengers, strangers to each other’s company and many to the sea, were proving to be less resilient. Boredom and frustration soon crept into the makeshift cabins and cramped quarters. The Susan Constant, under 100 foot long and 20 foot wide, was built as a merchantman to carry cargo, not people, so her fifty or so passengers were forced either to bide their time on the freezing, gale-swept decks, or endure the claustrophobia of the airless holds below. The Godspeed, about 70 foot long and 16 foot wide, and the Discovery, 50 or so foot long and 11 foot wide, were marginally more accommodating, as both had fewer crew and proportionately more space for the passengers, but being smaller, their hulls were jolted even more violently by the churning seas.12
For a month the fleet was held in this state of agitated immobility, and boredom began to breed division and distrust among the restless passengers. In particular, Edward Maria Wingfield and George Percy, who found themselves much in each other’s company, began to detect in those around them the suggestion of a religious plot, to which Robert Hunt, the mission’s chaplain, was somehow connected.
When recruiting for the voyage, Wingfield had visited the Archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of Hunt, to vouch that the cleric suited the role of vicar of Virginia as he was neither ‘touched with the rebellious humours of a popish spirit’ – a Catholic, in other words, who might be acting for the Spanish – ‘nor blemished with the least suspicion of a factious schismatic’, a religious independent, who might be tempted so far from his homeland to flout the authority of the Church of England, the bishops and the King.13 Now, Wingfield began to doubt his own words. Something someone had said, some slight or chance remark, suggested to him and Percy that the vicar might be blemished with a suspicion of factious schismatism after all, which threatened to defile the entire venture.
Meanwhile, another of the passengers, Captain John Smith, had formed an attachment to Hunt, nursing him through a bout of seasickness so severe that, according to Smith, ‘few expected his recovery’. During this time, the captain and the cleric fell into conversation about religious matters, and Smith found himself in close accord with Hunt’s evangelical leanings, judging him to be ‘an honest, religious, and courageous divine’.14
It was at this point that Wingfield and Percy decided to confront Hunt with their suspicions. Smith, whose choleric temperament made him as quick to argue as to judge, sprang violently to his new friend’s defence, accusing these two ‘Tuftaffaty humourists’ of trying to hide their own irreligiousness.15
During the ensuing row, certain rumours about Hunt’s past began to surface, like corpses from the deep. Hunt was by no means the Puritan in his own behaviour as he was now suspected of being in his religious beliefs. Three years before, he had been brought before the court of the archdeaconry of Lewes, the regional administrative body for Heathfield, to answer charges of ‘immorality’ with his servant, Thomasina Plumber. He was at the same time proceeded against for absenteeism, and there were accusations that he had neglected his congregation, leaving his friend Noah Taylor, ‘aquaebajulus’ (water bailiff or customs collector), to perform his duties.16
Smith refused to believe such allegations. How could these men, ‘of the greatest rank amongst us’, circulate such ‘scandalous imputations,’ he wanted to know. They were ‘little better than Atheists’.17
Other passengers joined the fray, with at least three gentlemen lining up behind Smith.18 The argument escalated between these nascent factions until, on 12 February, it was interrupted by a change in the weather. That night, several passengers, Percy among them, clambered up to the deck to gaze into a sky that for the first time in weeks was cloudless. Percy spotted in the glistening firmament a ‘blazing star’ or comet.
The appearance of such a spectacle over the ship’s swinging mast, above a fleet trapped between deliverance into a new world and damnation in the old, was auspicious. The wind turned, and in a flurry of activity, anchors were raised, tillers spun and sails unfurled to catch it. Released from their cyclonic trap, the ships raced across the freezing waters towards the Atlantic. Within a day or so they had reached the Bay of Biscay, and soon after closed on the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco.
The six-week delay in the Downs had meant their provisions for the voyage had already been used up, forcing them to break into supplies set aside for their first months in America. So they decided to stop at the Canaries and spend what money they could to make up the deficit.
As soon as the ships dropped anchor, the rows resumed. According to one report, some of the passengers, including one Stephen Calthorp, a gentleman from a prominent Norfolk family, now joined Smith in threatening mutiny.19 At this point, Newport lost patience, and ordered the ringleader Smith to be ‘committed a prisoner’ in the belly of the Susan Constant, Smith’s furious indignation muffled by the heaps of bulging sacks that furnished his cell, and the layers of sturdy oak decking that would wall him in for the coming weeks.20
Picking up the trade winds, the fleet headed off into the Atlantic, covering over 3,000 miles in six weeks. The freezing temperatures of a European winter melted into the sultry warmth of the tropics, providing Percy with some hope of respite from his attacks of epilepsy.
On 23 March, they had their first sight of the West Indies, passing Martinique before reaching Dominica, ‘a very fair island, the trees full of sweet and good smells’. The island was inhabited by ‘many savage Indians’, who at first kept their distance. As soon as they realized that the European visitors were not Spanish, the mood changed, and ‘there came many to our ships with their canoes, bringing us many kinds of sundry fruits, as pines [pineapples], potatoes, plantains, tobacco, and other fruits’. After weeks of dried biscuits and salted meat, the men consumed the gifts greedily. They also happily accepted an ‘abundance’ of fine French linen, which the Indians had salvaged from Spanish ships that had been wrecked on the island.
The English gave the Indians knives and hatchets, ‘which they much esteemed’, and beads, copper and jewels, ‘which they hang through their nostrils, ears, and lips – very strange to behold’. During the transactions, the English learned that the natives had suffered a ‘great overthrow’ at the hands of the Spanish, which explained their initial wariness and subsequent generosity.21
The encounter provided a useful introduction to developing relations with locals, and confirmed English assumptions of Spanish barbarism – the infamous ‘Black Legend’ or leyenda negra. The legend had its origins in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a furious indictment of Spanish imperialism written by a Spanish bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas. It had been translated into English in 1583 ‘to serve as a precedent and warning to the twelve provinces of the Low Countries’.22 Casas wrote of conquistadors eviscerating seventy or eighty women and young girls, of little native boys being fed to hunting dogs, even of Indian coolies being decapitated after they had performed their duties, to save the bother of having to unlock the clasps around their necks. Such reports had been enthusiastically picked up by Protestant propagandists in France, Holland and England as evidence of the Catholic brutality that had produced the Florida Massacre and now threatened to overwhelm the Low Countries. Hakluyt referred to them on several occasions, quoting Casas’s estimate that Spanish actions in the Americas had ‘rooted out above fifteen million of reasonable creatures’.23
Reassured by the rewards of exercising their higher moral standards, the English continued their tour of the Caribbean. As they pulled away from Dominica, Percy was transfixed by the sight of a whale being chased by a swordfish and a thresher, a kind of shark identifiable by the enormously extended upper lobe of its tail, which it uses to thrash its prey. ‘We might see the thresher with his flail lay on the monstrous blows, which was strange to behold. In the end these two fishes brought the whale to her end,’ he observed.24
On the morning of 27 March, they arrived at Guadeloupe. A landing party explored up to the foot of the 5,000-foot-high active volcano La Grande Soufrière (the big, sulphurous one), and found a pool of scalding hot water. Newport used it to boil up a joint of salted pork, which was ready to eat after half an hour. They returned to their ships and sailed on for a further 90 miles, in the afternoon reaching the island of Nevis. Here, Newport decided to allow the entire company ashore to make a concerted effort to gather supplies, as the ships’ stores were still disturbingly low.
A company of men armed with muskets marched into the densely wooded interior, catching glimpses as they went of the cloud-capped central peak, over 3,000 foot high. Not far inland they found another hot spring, much cooler than the one on Guadeloupe. For the first time in nearly two months, they enjoyed a relaxing soak, as the sun set in a calm Caribbean sea.
‘Finding this place to be so convenient for our men to avoid diseases, which will breed in so long a voyage, we encamped ourselves on this isle six days, and spent none of our ship’s victual,’ wrote Percy. Instead, they lived off rabbits, birds, fish and fruit plucked from the trees, their peace barely disturbed by an occasional glimpse of the locals, who as soon as they were spotted ‘ran swiftly through the woods to the mountain tops’. They lost themselves in the forests, slashing through the undergrowth with hatchets and swords, until they came among ‘the goodliest tall trees growing so thick about the garden as though they had been set by art, which made us marvel very much to see it’. They saw shrubs with huge tufts of cotton wool bursting from their seed pods, gum trees, and a sort of wild fig, the sap of which made the men ‘near mad with pain’, forcing them to rush back to the hot spring for relief. They also found the source of a stream at the foot of the mountain. After drinking its sweet, clear water, ‘distilling from many rocks’, the men ‘were well cured in two or three days’ of all their ship-borne ailments.
However, even this idyll could not cure every sickness. There was another outbreak of faction fighting, perhaps prompted by Newport’s decision to release Smith from the ship’s brig and allow him to fraternize with the other men. It seems that he now fell out with some of his former associates, who reported him to Newport. The upshot was, according to Smith, that Newport, fearing a loss of authority, ordered the construction of a ‘pair of gallows’ on the beach. But ‘Captain Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them’, so he was returned to the ship. No other reference to this curious incident survives, and whatever the details, the result was a hasty departure. The ships cast off on 3 April, with water and food supplies still depleted, despite the plenitude that the island had offered.25
The fleet sailed past the neighbouring islands of St Kitts, St Eustatius and Saba before anchoring among the Virgin Isles, ‘in an excellent bay able to harbour a hundred ships’. A landing party managed to catch enough fish and turtles to feed the fleet for a further three days, but there was no fresh water to be found anywhere on the island.
Passing Puerto Rico, they reached the tiny island of Mona on 7 April. By now, the drinking water in the ships’ tanks ‘did smell so vilely that none of our men was able to endure it’. A group of sailors managed to find a fresh water supply on the island, and set about filling up barrels to transport back to the ships. Meanwhile, a landing party marched for 6 miles in search of food. They managed to kill two wild boar and an iguana, ‘in fashion of a serpent and speckled like a toad under the belly’, but the path proved ‘so troublesome and vile, going upon the sharp rocks’, and the tropical heat so intense, that several men fainted. According to Percy, the adipose fat of Edward Brookes ‘melted within him by the great heat and drought of the country. We were not able to relieve him nor ourselves, so he died in that great extremity’, the first casualty of the expedition.
The fleet remained at anchor for two days, while a group took a launch to a nearby rocky islet called Monito, some 3 leagues (9 or so miles) away. They had difficulty finding a landing point along the island’s cliff-lined coast, and even more trouble climbing up the ‘terrible sharp stones’ to open land. However, they were rewarded with the discovery of a fertile plain, ‘full of goodly grass and abundance of fowls of all kinds’. White seabirds dived overhead ‘as drops of hail’ and made such a noise ‘we were not able to hear one another speak’. ‘Furthermore, we were not able to set our feet on the ground but either on fowls or eggs, which lay so thick in the grass,’ and within three hours they had filled their boat, ‘to our great refreshing’.
With new supplies of water and food safely loaded, the fleet set off, and on 10 April left the West Indies, heading north for Florida. Four days later, they crossed the Tropic of Cancer, the northerly limit of the tropics.
The following morning, Newport started to take soundings, in the hope of finding the North American continental shelf.
The use of soundings was the old-fashioned method of navigation. A lead weight smeared in tallow and attached to a line knotted at intervals of a fathom was dropped overboard to measure the depth of the sea. When it was hauled up, particles embedded in the tallow were used to tell what sort of seabed lay beneath.
In familiar waters, such as the English Channel, soundings were effective, as a combination of depth measurement and seabed material (‘small shingles’, ‘white stones like broken awls’, ‘big stones rugged and black’) helped to build up a profile of the sea floor that could locate the ship to within a few nautical miles of its position, even when the shore was over the horizon. However, the ocean beneath the fleet’s current position was too deep to sound, leaving Newport with no option but to keep sailing.
They continued north-west for ten days, carried over 1,000 miles by the Gulf Stream. Further soundings were taken, but to no avail. By 21 April, Newport had to accept that he was lost. This was probably the moment that Robert Tyndall suggested he try the mathematically based ‘new navigation’ techniques to plot their position. English mariners, apparently including the crew of the Susan Constant, were suspicious of such methods, considering them hocus-pocus. The prevailing attitude was summed up in Eastward Hoe, when Sir Petronel Flash uses ‘the elevation of the pole’ and ‘the altitude and latitude of the climate’ (garbled descriptions of the relevant techniques) to mistake the Isle of Dogs on the Thames for France.
Nevertheless, traditional methods had failed, so it was time for Tyndall to bring out his cross-staff or astrolabe, and plot a position. Measuring the angle between the horizon and the midday sun, he announced that they had reached 37 degrees north of the Equator, believed to be the latitude of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. All they now had to do was to use the ship’s compass to head due west, and they would eventually reach their destination. The guffaws of sceptical deck-hands probably filled the ships’ sails.
That evening, the fleet was hit by a ‘vehement tempest, which lasted all the night with winds, rain, and thunders in a terrible manner’. Concerned that the coast was nearby, and the ships might be driven on to the shore, Newport ordered the passengers into the hulls, where they were told they would be safest if the ships collided with rocks or the seabed. They emerged the following morning into the calm, and gazed upon an unbroken horizon. A lead was dropped, to see whether they had yet reached the coastal shallows, but the ocean floor was still beyond the line’s 100-fathom reach. Food and water supplies were once again running low. The unpredictable weather threatened another battering. The need to find a safe harbour intensified.
For three days, they aimlessly sounded the seas, doubtful of Tyndall’s assurances that their destination lay just beyond the western horizon. Unease developed into panic, and on 25 April, John Ratcliffe, captain of the pinnace, proposed that the fleet head back to England, in the hope that the Westerlies would get them there before supplies gave out.
Then, at four in the morning of 26 April 1607, as the faintest gleam of dawn crept across the placid ocean, the night watch of the Susan Constant picked out a disturbance on the western horizon. As the sun lifted behind them, crew and passengers began to gather on deck and squint over the ship’s bowsprit. Gradually, the low contours of a coastal plain became distinct, a dark line of trees sitting on the horizon like the pile of a carpet. A few hours later, Tyndall’s navigational methods were vindicated. Not only had they reached America, but they were facing ‘the very mouth of the Bay of Chesapeake’.26
In London, reports reached Robert Cecil that the secret of the Virginia venture was out. The Richard, the ship sent by the West Country group to reconnoitre northern Virginia, had been taken off the coast of Florida by a Spanish fleet. A storm had forced one of the Spanish ships to put in at Bordeaux, where its English captives were released on the orders of the French authorities. It was one of these men who had managed to make his way to London and break the bad news. Other members of the expedition, including the mission’s pilot John Stoneman, were less fortunate. They had been taken to Spain, where ‘rough’ interrogation awaited them.27
The Spanish at this time had only a hazy understanding of English plans. Around the time the Royal Charter had been issued, King Philip III’s ambassador to London, Don Pedro de Zuñiga, had heard of a plan to send ‘500 or 600 men, private individuals of this kingdom to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida’. He had also discovered that ten Indians were being kept in London, who were ‘teaching and training’ prospective settlers of ‘how good that country is for people to go there and inhabit it’.28
By 24 January, 1607, Zuñiga was still unaware of the Newport expedition, but had received garbled information that some sort of venture was under way. He wrote an urgent dispatch to Philip III reporting that the English ‘have made an agreement, in great secrecy, for two ships to go [to Virginia] every month until they land two thousand men’. He also noted that Dutch rebels were to be sent. There followed a brief but mostly accurate summary of James’s charter of the previous April, including a list of those appointed to the Royal Council. The charter itself was a public document, but the order appointing the Royal Council was not, indicating that Zuñiga had found a source close to the Privy Council.29
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