History
HIS 131
The Rise of the Atlantic World, 1400-1625
Chapter 2
I. Voyages of Discovery
Life in Europe in the late 14th century was full of complexities, uncertainties, and new opportunities. As a result of the Black Death and wars, the European population had suffered more than 20 million deaths. The legacy of this tragedy was economic depression for some, but it allowed opportunities for others
Many survivors seized the moment to advance their social positions or introduce new ways of thinking about the world.
The voyages of exploration, beginning in the late 15th century, challenged Europeans to expand their worldview beyond their own neighborhoods. This had the effect of opening new markets for European products, and new goods arrived from distant exotic places.
In the half century between 1492, when Columbus accidentally bumped into America, and 1542 when a Portuguese ship first visited Japan, European seafarers filled in many of the blanks that had existed for so long in western Europeans’ knowledge of the geography of the earth.
It took a while for other civilized people to hear of these great discoveries; but within Europe itself the news spread rapidly, even among very humble people. Europeans broke down the old separations between learned tradition and the experience of travelers. News of important voyages got into print within a year or two.
Map makers charted new discoveries and arranged all the newly discovered lands in their proper places according to mathematical methods for projecting the earth’s curved surface onto the flat surface of a map.
New knowledge of the world’s geography was not the only lasting consequence of the European discoveries. For when the habitable seacoasts of all the earth had been linked together more closely than ever before by European shipping, trade began to follow new routes. Exchanges of goods attained greater volume than before in many parts of the globe. New crops and new diseases spread widely. Enlarged food supplies and heavier death rates from hitherto unknown diseases resulted.
New products, new techniques, new ideas, and a new perspective on the world as a whole all swarmed in upon the nations that had initiated the new patterns of contact among the peoples of the earth.
A new era of world history dawned when the Americas entered for the first time into the interacting circle of civilized humanity and when Europe’s restless probing and self-revolution launched a force upon the world with which the rest of humanity, sooner or later, hade to cope.
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Problems of Seafaring
The seas and oceans of the world are by no means uniform. Winds, tides, and currents all make an enormous difference, especially to ships that do not have powerful motors to drive them through the water. Only when seafarers learned how to make their ships sail upwind as well as downwind could they hope to travel safely in the stormy, tidal waters of the North Atlantic.
----------------------(European Shipbuilding and Navigation)
Throughout the Middle Ages, European shipbuilders and sailors made progress in mastering the dangers of the North Atlantic. But not until shortly before 1500 were all the technical and financial problems worked out successfully. The reason was that European mariners decided, from early in the Middle Ages, to try something radically new, building a ship big enough to cut through the waves instead of riding upon them, as smaller and lighter vessels did.
Medieval shipbuilders made three major advances.
First, they made the hulls of their ships stronger and more rigid. Medieval shipbuilders eventually learned how to make a hull strong enough to stand the strain of being picked up by two great waves at the bow and stern, leaving little or no water to sustain the weight of the middle portion of the ship. These were the large ships that could safely cut through the high seas of the North Atlantic.
Second, shipbuilders learned that a much safer and more maneuverable ship could be created by substituting rudders for steering oars. Rudders attached directly to the rear end of the ship, could exert more force to steer the ship in any desired direction.
Third, was the introduction of multiple masts. This was done by placing several masts on the same vessel and dividing the sails on each mast into several different pieces of canvas. If the wind blew very hard, most of the sails could be taken down to prevent the ship from being blown over. With light winds, extra sails could raised to make the most of the slightest breeze.
These superior ships, however, were not much use before sailors learned how to find there way across the trackless sea and get back home again. This called for the skill of navigation.
The beginnings of the real knowledge of navigation is credited to Prince Henry of Portugal (known as Prince Henry the Navigator)….European sailors had long been accustomed to sighting the North Star and measuring its angle above the horizon in order to tell how far north or south they were. But as soon as a ship crossed the equator, this method no longer worked. There was no prominent star that
could be used in the Southern Hemisphere.
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To solve this problem, Prince Henry hired expert astronomers and mathematicians to make table that would show how high the sun stood above the horizon at noon each day in the year at different latitudes. Then a sea captain could estimate how far north or south of the equator he was by sighting the sun at its highest point in the sky and measuring the angle between the sun and the horizon.
However, this did not solve the problem of knowing how far east or west the ships were. As a result, ships sometimes blundered far off coast. In fact, Brazil was discovered in this way in 1500 when a Portuguese expedition heading for India put further out to sea than was necessary to clear the coast of West Africa and ran into South America.
But for the most part, trial and error, and guesswork adequately took the place of accurate measurement of longitude.
The Portuguese became experts in this kind of rule-of-thumb navigation, before other Europeans new much of anything about navigation.
The idea that the earth was flat and that if a ship sailed too far it might fall off the edge of the world and never come back may have frightened some sailors. But European navigators and scholars knew better.
Therefore, when Columbus came to the Portuguese court with his plan for sailing westward to China and the Indies, the experts in Portugal knew that the Indies were much farther away than Columbus believed. They had their own plan for reaching the Indies by sailing around Africa and quite correctly, decided that Columbus’ route was far longer than the one they proposed to take. They thought Columbus was an idiot, so they turned him down.
------------------------(Problems of Organizing Exploration)
It is clear that by 1480 European seafarers and shipbuilders had solved the problem of navigating the stormy North Atlantic.
The remaining problem was one of money and organization. Who would pay for long voyages to unknown destinations, and how would newfound lands be treated? Spain and Portugal, the two nations that pioneered Europe’s ocean contacts with rest of the world found that borrowing was the solution.
Bankers in Italy and southern Germany were quite willing to finance the rulers of Portugal if proper security for the loans could be found. At first this was difficult because Portugal was not a rich country. But when Prince Henry’s ships reached the southern western coast of Africa, a lively trade with the local peoples began to develop.
This sort of business the Italian bankers understood and they were more than willing to now finance such ventures, making loans against a share in the profits from each voyage.
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Portuguese Trade and Exploration
Trade with the African coast sustained the costs of continued exploration, and new exploration added to the extent of trade. In other words, the process became self-sustaining, and Portuguese discovery picked up tremendously.
In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed south through the mid-Atlantic, rounded the tip of Africa, and sailed to the Indian Ocean landing on the southern tip of India. There the Portuguese were able to load their ships with valuable cargo and returned in triumph to Portugal in 1497.
------------(The Spice Trade)
The Portuguese then set out to energetically develop the Indian Spice Trade. Spices were especially in high demand in Europe.
Spices could be used to flavor food or as medicine. But the favored use was for spices in the kitchen. Spices such as pepper, cinnamon, and cloves were in especially high demand. From medieval times, Europeans had become accustomed to consuming extremely large quantities of these spices because without refrigeration, the meat they at was nearly always spoiled. Used in large enough quantities, pepper and other spices disguised the taste and smell of decaying meat and were therefore valued accordingly.
Growth of Spain’s Overseas Empire
The Spaniards came into the business of overseas empire by the back door. In 1492, with their war against Moslems to drive them off the Spanish peninsula resolved, the Spanish rulers, Isabella and Ferdinand, now had the time and money to turn towards their own exploration. It was actually Queen Isabella, however, that financed Christopher Columbus’ voyage.
The fact that Isabella took Columbus seriously was itself an indication of how little experience the Spaniards had in overseas operations. As we just saw, the Portuguese knew better and had turned him down cold. But Isabella was impressed by Columbus’ religious piety and energy, and now that her war was over she decided that she could afford the cost of outfitting three ships Columbus used on his famous voyage.
Columbus sailed from Spain in August 1492 sighted the Bahaman Islands after only 36 days out of sight of land. From a technical point of view, his famous voyage was not in the least difficult. Its significance lay in the fact that he opened regular contact between Europe and the Americas for the first time.
Ironically, Columbus refused until his dying day to admit that he discovered a new continent. He believed instead that he had found islands lying somewhere off the coast of Asia.
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Before his death in 1506 he made three more voyages discovering Hispaniola, Cuba, and other islands of the Caribbean Sea.
Columbus found small amounts of gold in Hispaniola and rumors of untold riches ran swiftly through the Spanish courts. The area then became wild with disorder as footloose nobles and adventurers began streaming into the Caribbean in search of riches. Columbus was unable to control the situation, and was arrested and sent back to Spain in 1499. He died of syphilis in 1506, still in prison.
For a while, news of Columbus’ discovery aroused great excitement all over Europe. In 1493 the pope divided the world equally between Portugal and Spain, along arbitrarily chosen meridians of longitude.
Other European rulers did not like to admit the rights of Spain and Portugal, but only
England tried to do anything about it. Henry VII sent John Cabot in 1497 across the Atlantic to explore more to the north. Cabot reported to Henry VII that he had only found forbidding forests that offered no obvious attraction to Europeans. Therefore, after this single venture, the English gave up western exploration for at least a century. No other country even tried at this time.
The Discoveries of Vespucci, Balboa, and Magellan
As for the Spaniards, it looked for a while as though the whole venture would soon fall through. Expedition after expedition went out to look for the fabled wealth of India, and each discovered only new stretches of the American coast.
By 1507 most experts were ready to admit that what they had discovered was not Asia but a new continent.
In that year a German scholar, Martin Waldseemuller , published a map on which he entered everything he could find out from the reports of explorers. For his information about the most southerly parts of the coast of South America he relied on the reports of sea captain Amerigo Vespucci who had sailed into that area in 1502. In recognition of Vespucci’s discoveries, Waldseemuller named the area America. Of course, the name stuck.
Any remaining doubts as to what Columbus had discovered was removed in 1513 when Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean.
Soon thereafter, Ferdinand Magellan , rounded the tip of South America making his way to the Philippine Islands. Magellan was killed in a battle with locals in the islands, but his surviving crew made it back to Portugal in 1522 after 3 years at sea. This voyage is credited with being the first to circumnavigate the globe.
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The Conquests of Mexico, Peru, and Chile
Spain’s overseas enterprise was saved by the reckless venture of Hernando Cortes against the Aztec Empire of Mexico. Cortes started off from Cuba in 1518 with 600 men and 17 horses under his command.
The Spaniards were helped by Indian tribes who resented the Aztec ruler Montezuma . Montezuma, believing that the Spaniards to be supernatural beings allowed himself to be captured and died while in captivity.
In 1521 Cortes attacked the Aztec capital and destroyed the city. He founded Mexico city nearby as the capital of the new Spanish domain. What made Cortes’ feat so important was that he discovered enormous quantities of gold and silver in the Aztec capital.
Cortes’ brilliant and brutal success was quickly followed by Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru (1531-1536). Only 180 men and 27 horses started out with Pizarro in 1531. Yet the Inca empire he conquered was larger and much better organized than the Aztec Empire had been. Gold and silver were found here in even more abundance.
These adventures led other Spaniards to start of in every direction. Hernando de Soto explored what is now the southern United States and discovered the Mississippi River (1539-1542). Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored what is now New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and part of Kansas.
--------------------------(The Organization of Mining)
By 1545 it had become clear that no more great empires remained to be conquered and no more Indian hoards of gold and silver awaited Spanish discovery.
It was time to turn the plundering of the Americas into a more orderly affair.
The first step was to organize mining The richest mines were silver mines and had been located high in the Andes. The Spaniards brought the best European techniques to the mines of the New World, and the returns were spectacular. To get the riches back to Spain safely, the Spaniards devised an ingenious system of transport, moving the silver by ship from Peru to Panama, then across the Isthmus on mule-back, and then shipped again by armed convoy to Spain.
The Missionary Thrust
Individual priests accompanied nearly every expedition undertaken by the conquistadors. Believing that millions of souls awaited salvation, the Spanish Church undertook an enormous effort, sending missionaries to every part of the territory that came under Spanish rule.
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When the great conquistador expeditions ceased about 1540, established missions became the means by which the Spaniards continued to extend their hold over the native peoples.
Each mission was expected to pay for itself. This meant putting the native Americans to work. Accordingly the Spanish missionaries set out to not only convert the Native Americans to Catholicism but to also teach them new skills. Also when law codes were published in 1542, Indians were classified as legal dependents of the Spanish crown. Therefore, there enslavement and mistreatment were prohibited.
The mission system was important all along the fringes of the Spanish domains in the New World. In the central areas, however, and wherever there were silver mines of any size, the mission pattern broke down, and Native American protection broke down. This was because Indian labor was needed.
A common practice was to lend goods or money to the Indians, who had no idea what a loan meant and normally could not repay it. Then, as defaulting debtors, they could legally be required to work for their creditors. Low wages and easy credit at the store could keep them forever in debt and forever bound to work for their creditor. This relationship was called peonage and it differed only in legal form from slavery.
In this way Spaniards were able to compel Indians to work for them as cultivators, household servants and as miners.
In theory, the Church continued to make efforts to protect the Indians, and government officials backed the priests. In practice, however, loopholes in the law allowed immigrant Spaniards to compel Indians to do all the menial tasks of the new colonial society.
Indirect Consequences of Explorations
The great European discoveries altered prevailing concepts of the relationships among major branches of humankind in far-reaching ways. But there were three worldwide and fundamentally important consequences that resulted from European contact with the Americas.
-------------------------------(The Price Revolution)
The supply of American silver was so large that the supply of goods that might be bought with coins of silver could not keep up. The result was a rapid rise in prices. More and more silver was needed to buy the same amount of useful goods. In Spain this inflation caused prices to rise over 400%.
The resulting economic upheaval ran through Europe’s history for the next 100 years and changed men’s lives in detail. Nothing could be quite the same when prices changed so
sharply and quickly.
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----------------------------(the Spread of Disease)
A second, no less important change was the result of the circulation of disease. Where populations had previously had little contact with the outside world, new diseases brought by sailors from Europe had truly devastating consequences. In particular, the Indians of the Americas suffered enormous loss of life.
Exposed to diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, Native Americans with no immunity died in extremely large numbers, often wiping out entire tribes. In Mexico and Peru, when Cortes and Pizarro arrived on the scene, there were approximately 20 million Native Americans living in the area. By 1650, disease had claimed all but 1.5 million. That means that disease wiped out over 85% of the native American Population in Central and South America.
----------------------(The Spread of New Crops and Livestock)
A third result of opening the world’s oceans was the rapid spread of some important foods, and animals into new regions
The Americas gave tobacco, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and tomatoes to the rest of the world.
In return came the domesticated animals of Europe, horses, cattle, sheep, and goats.
The horse revolutionized Indian life on the Great Plains of North America, for mounted on horseback the Indians were able to hunt buffalo with much greater success than before.
II. England Looks to the West
A. The Lure of Expansion
As mentioned, England’s first documented contact with the New World came only five year’s after Spain’s.
In 1497, John Cabot, sailing for Henry VII of England, explored the North Eastern coastline of North America still looking for the fabled Northwest passage to Asia.
Failing in his attempt and providing the King with a negative report about the American land, almost a full century passed before England began to show any real desire to begin colonization of America…Sidetracked by seemingly endless European wars and harsh financial conditions, England really had too much on her plate to attempt colonization at this time.
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However, by end of the 1500s England began experiencing a combination of changes in the nation’s economy and its social outlook that produced interest in overseas settlement.
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The population of England had grown steadily in the sixteenth century….from 3 million in 1485 to 4 million by 1603…However, the food supply did not increase in proportion to the population growth.
In addition…in the mid-1500’s the English economic market collapsed, and English merchants found themselves looking for avenues of overseas trade.
Therefore, the establishment of English colonies was beginning to look attractive to many people in England….These colonies could serve two purposes…First, colonies could hopefully alleviate poverty and unemployment by siphoning off the excess population…a population that was growing dramatically, without additional jobs or food supplies.
Second, many merchants in England felt that these colonies would provide a ready-made market for English manufacturers…These merchants could count on the colonies to provide inexpensive raw materials to use in manufacturing, and then these same merchants could turn around and sell the finished products back to the colonies at a substantial profit.
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In addition to these economic motives for colonization, there were political and religious ones as well
In 1529, King Henry VIII, angered by the refusal of the pope to grant him a divorce, broke England’s ties with the Catholic Church and established himself as the head of the Christian faith in England.
Although there was a brief return to Roman Catholicism under the rule of Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, by 1558, when Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, took the throne, England once again severed its ties with the Catholic Church.
This added an additional motive for colonization….Now that England was firmly anti-Catholic, colonization in the New World offered the nation an opportunity to establish bases from which England could attack the pro-Catholic Spanish Empire…an empire with which England was now engaged in a bitter commercial and naval rivalry.
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However, there was yet another reason for English interest in colonization.
The Church of England…in the form it took under Queen Elizabeth…by no means satisfied all of her subjects.
Oftentimes, it was too Protestant to suit those Englishmen who continued to follow the Roman Catholic faith, and it seemed to Catholic to those who most bitterly opposed the influence of Rome.
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In other words the Church of England…or the Anglican Church , had the appearance of being only a watered-downed version of Roman Catholicism…somewhere in between Catholic and Protestant.
Therefore, there was a growing trend among many in England that the New World might offer a refuge for those individuals that wished to religiously worship differently than what was allowed under the Anglican Church.
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So, what we see are a variety of factors…that combined…spurred English interest in colonization in the late 16th century.
1) There was the mercantile system, which depended on overseas trade and found itself suddenly without sufficient markets.
2) There was a population explosion which left many surplus laborers, who served as a potential source of settlers for new colonies.
3) There was new Protestant monarch (Queen Elizabeth I) which spurred a new rivalry with Spain, creating an interest in challenging the Spanish monopoly in America.
4) And finally, there was a growing number of religious dissenters…unhappy with the Church of England (the Anglican Church)…and growing interested in escaping its grip.
Therefore, by the turn of the 1500s, all of these factors were turning England’s gaze to the West.
III. The First English Settlements
The first English attempts to colonize the New World were sporadic, private efforts…There was little planning or direction from the government…instead the early colonies resulted from the array of economic and social pressures that had been building in England through much of the late 16th century.
Those pressures not only encouraged the development of colonies…they helped determine what those colonies would be like.
Three conditions in particular shaped the character of the first English settlements.
First, the colonies were first and foremost business enterprises…They were financed and directed by private companies, to which the colonists were directly responsible…No matter how much the early settlers might have dreamed of a better life in the New World…their first obligation was to produce a profit for their corporate sponsors.
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Second, because the Crown chartered the private companies backing colonization but took little interest in them afterward…the colonies were tied only indirectly to the Crown…which meant that from the very start the colonies began to develop their own political and social institutions.
And third, the English colonies…unlike those of the Spanish to the south…would actually be “ transplantations ” of societies from the Old World to the New (Hence the term “plantation” which was used to describe most of the first settlements.
There would therefore be no effort to blend European society with the societies of native America, as there had been in many of the Spanish colonies….The English would attempt to isolate themselves from the Indians and create enclosed societies that would be entirely their own.
A. Early Attempts
The pioneers of English colonization were Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh …though neither of them actually succeeded in founding a permanent colony in America.
Both men were friends of Queen Elizabeth…having the ability of “having her ear” in court.
Humphrey Gilbert began insisting to the Queen that English bases in America would provide England with the opportunity to stop Spanish power.
Therefore, in 1578, Gilbert obtained from the Queen a charter granting him, for six years, the exclusive right to “inhabit and possess at his choice all remote and heathen lands not in the actual possession of any Christian prince.”
That same year, Gilbert and Raleigh, with seven ships and nearly 400 men, set out to establish a base in the New World…However, storms turned them back before they had crossed the ocean.
Gilbert waited five years while he attempted to raise enough money to try again.
In 1583, he sailed with a second and smaller expedition, reaching Newfoundland and claiming possession of this territory in the name of Queen Elizabeth.
After this point, he proceeded southward looking for a more suitable place to build a military outpost that might eventually grow into a profitable colony, of which he would control…Once more, a storm stopped him…and this time his ship sank, and he was lost at sea.
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The next year, Gilbert’s half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, secured from the Queen a similar grant as Gilbert’s….He then sent out men to look over the American coast to try to find a suitable location to establish a permanent colony.
This expedition returned to England with two Indians and with glowing reports of an island the natives called Roanoke located in the outer banks of modern-day North Carolina.
Raleigh…in an attempt to receive royal favor and hopefully financial aid from the Crown to finance future American expeditions…named this territory Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth who was known as the “Virgin Queen.”
However, the Queen refused to finance Raleigh…(the English government was in dire financial straits at this time)…so Raleigh was forced to raise money from private investors to finance another voyage to America.
After raising the necessary funds Raleigh sent another expedition to America in 1585….This expedition of 100 men returned to England a year later reporting to Raleigh that they had located a better site for a colony north of Roanoke…They felt that areas around the Chesapeake Bay were more suitable for colonization.
In 1587, Raleigh sponsored still another expedition to America, instructing them to establish a settlement in the Chesapeake Bay region….However, the ship, carrying 91 men, 17 women (two of them pregnant) and nine children, did not proceed to the Chesapeake, they stopped at Roanoke Island and erected a settlement there.
It was there at Roanoke that one of the pregnant women gave birth to Virginia Dare , who is considered the first American-born child of English parents.
About this time in late 1587, a relief ship was sent back to England for much needed supplies for the new colony.
After this relief ship arrived in England, the Queen refused to allow it to return to Roanoke because she needed every available ship at this time to fight the Spanish…Hostilities between England and Spain at escalated tremendously since the settlers had first arrived in the America.
Because of this delay, the relief ship did not return to Roanoke until 1590…three years later.
Upon their return, they found the island utterly deserted, and what had become of this “ lost colony ,” is still a mystery.
So…from this we must ask ourselves…were the efforts of Gilbert and Raleigh a failure?
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Actually, the colonizing efforts of Gilbert and Raleigh taught lessons and set examples for later and more successful promoters of colonization.
After sending out his ill-fated settlers, Raleigh again sought financial aid from merchants, to whom he sold exclusive rights of trading with his proposed colony….Raleigh now realized that this colonial undertaking was too large financially for one man alone.
Soon after…with the accession of King James I as king of England after Elizabeth’s death…Raleigh fell out of favor with the Crown…he was arrested and executed.
But…a group of London merchants…taking up where Raleigh left off…began planning to renew attempts at colonization in Virginia, which still consisted of an undefined stretch along the Atlantic seaboard.
A rival group of merchants, who lived in Plymouth, England were also interested in American ventures, but perhaps farther north in the Newfoundland area.
In 1606, King James I, issued a new charter, which divided America between the two groups….The London Company got the exclusive right to colonize in the south, and the Plymouth Company was granted exclusive rights to the north.
Through the efforts of the London Company…(also called the Virginia Company of London)…the first enduring English colony was about to be planted in America…And the merchants that formed the London Company, intended from the beginning to establish…not an agricultural settlement…but a trading post which was intended to make a profit for the London Company’s investors.
B. Jamestown
The first group of English settlers sponsored by the London Company arrived in the spring of 1607…This group of 100 men sailed into the Chesapeake Bay and up the James River, on whose banks they established their colony.
They chose their site poorly.
Under instructions to avoid the mistakes made by the Roanoke colony…(whose residents were assumed to have been massacred by hostile Indians)…they chose an inland location that they believed would offer them greater security.
But the site was low and swampy…intolerably hot and humid in the summer with frequent outbreaks of malaria.
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The settlement was surrounded by thick woods, which were hard to clear for farming…and the settlement was soon threatened by hostile Indians who were led by Chief Powhatan.
The result could hardly have been more disastrous.
For seventeen years, one group of settlers after another attempted to make Jamestown a habitable and profitable colony…but every effort failed….Instead, Jamestown became a place of misery and death…and the London Company, which had sponsored the colony in the hopes of great profits, found itself drained of funds and facing endless losses.
In the end…all that can really be said of Jamestown…is that it survived.
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The first Jamestown colonists ran into serious trouble from the moment they landed.
They faced an overwhelming task in trying to sustain themselves…and their sponsors, the London Company merchants… complicated the task by demanding a quick return on their investment.
Therefore, when the men in Jamestown should have been growing food…they were required instead to gather raw materials such as lumber, tar, pitch, and iron ore to be exported back to England.
By January 1608, when ships arrived with additional men and supplies…they found only 38 survivors of the original 100 that had started the colony only 7-8 months prior.
Jamestown, already facing extinction, was carried through the crisis mainly by the efforts of 27-year-old Captain John Smith ….Previously, leadership in the colony had been divided among several members of a general council that quarreled continually until Smith, acting as council president began to assert his will.
Smith imposed work, order, and discipline on the community…and, through his leadership, many more settlers survived the next winter…By the summer of 1609, when Smith was relieved of his service and returned to England, Jamestown was starting to show some promise of survival.
However, in fact, its worst troubles were yet to come.
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In the Spring of 1609, the London Company to Virginia a large fleet of nine ships with about 600 men, women, and children….Disaster followed.
One of the ships sank in a hurricane before arriving in Jamestown….and many of the survivors, still weak from their long journey and stormy voyage, died of fevers and illness before winter had passed.
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That winter of 1609-1610 became known as the “starving time.”
While hostile Indians killed off the settlers livestock, and forced the settlers to remain inside Jamestown’s walls…these unfortunate settlers were forced to eat dogs, cats, rats, snakes, and even the corpses of dead men and women.
When the next small group of settlers arrived in Jamestown in May 1610, of the 500 that had arrived in 1609, the new group found only 60 remaining settlers and they were just barely alive (walking skeletons).
At this point, no one could see much use in staying any longer.
Therefore, they were all soon on their way down the James River…leaving Jamestown behind…However, these refugees encountered a relief ship from England coming up the river at the same time as they were leaving….and these refugees were finally persuaded to return to Jamestown and try again.
This relief ship was part of a fleet bringing supplies and the colony’s first governor, Lord De La Warr …He reestablished the settlement and imposed strict discipline.
The colony continued to grow as new settlers arrived, and after De La Warr was replaced by other governors… Thomas Dale and Thomas Gates …their utilization of harsh discipline continued to keep settlers working and began to make Jamestown prosperous.
Under Governors Dale and Gates, the colony began to expand…with new settlements being established up and down the river outside of the confines of Jamestown.
It was at this time that Virginia planters were discovering that tobacco grew well in the local soil.
Tobacco had come into use in Europe soon after Columbus’s first return from the West Indies…and Sir Walter Raleigh had popularized the smoking habit, and the demand for tobacco had begun to soar.
In 1612, the Jamestown planter John Rolfe began to experiment with the tobacco plant, and found as mentioned, that the plant did very well in the Virginia soil….Soon, ready buyers were found for the Virginia tobacco in England….and tobacco cultivation began to spread up and down the James River.
Finally, after years of struggles, the London Company began to feel that perhaps their business venture might pay off…In 1618, the London Company launched a last great campaign to attract settlers and to try to make their colony profitable
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They offered fifty acres to anyone who paid their own way or someone else’s passage to Virginia, and an additional 50 acres for each additional migrant whose way he paid…..Therefore, a wealthy man could send or take servants to work for him and receive, in return, a sizable plantation.
The London Company, in return, would receive a fee from the landowners based on each segment of 50 acres that they controlled.
Old investors and settlers were given grants of 100 acres apiece…and to make life in the colony more attractive, the London Company promised the colonists the basic rights of Englishmen, an end to the strict and harsh rule, and even a share in self-government.
On July 30, 1619, in the Jamestown church, elected delegates from the various Virginia communities met as the House of Burgesses (Virginia’s and America’s first elected legislative body) to consider, along with the governor and his council, the enactment of laws for the Virginia colony.
This was a significant occurrence for our nation.
The first meeting of an elected legislature…a representative assembly…within what was to become the United States.
For several years, as the Virginia colony had become more established, the local Indians had given the colonists little trouble.
A kind of truce had resulted from the fact that the tobacco farmer John Rolfe had married chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas in 1614….However, Pocahontas died while on a trip to England with her new husband….Shortly afterward Powhatan died as well.
Powhatan’s brother… Opechancanough …replaced him as chief and then began to make plans to eliminate the English intruders.
On a March morning in 1622, the local Native Americans came to the English settlement pretending to be offering goods for sale…then suddenly they turned to killing, and they were not stopped until 347 settlers ( including men, women, and children) lay dead or dying.
The surviving Englishmen struck back without mercy, reestablishing control…but the massacre at the hands of Opechancanough and his followers was the final blow to the London Company.
The Company had poured virtually all of its funds into the almost profitless business venture, and now faced almost certain bankruptcy.
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King James I, frustrated by what he saw as the London Company’s inept leadership...revoked the company’s charter…and the colony became under the direct control of the Crown…Now Virginia was a royal colony and would remain so until 1776.
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The worst of Virginia’s troubles were now over.
The colony had weathered a series of disasters and had established itself as a permanent settlement….It had developed a cash crop that promised at least modest profits…And, it had established the beginnings of a representative government.
And, it could now realistically hope for future growth and prosperity.
But these successes had come at a high cost.
By 1624, the English population of Virginia stood at 1,300…Over the 17 year period of this colonial attempt, more than 8,500 English settlers had arrived in the colony…In other words, more than 80% of the new arrivals had perished before the first permanent English settlement was determined to be a success.
C. Plymouth Plantation
While the London Company was starting the colonization of Jamestown, the Plymouth Company attempted to create a colony far to the north…on the coast of what is now Maine….However, within a year, the surviving colonists had all returned to England.
The Plymouth Company made no further attempt to establish colonies.
The most it did was to send Captain John Smith, after his return from Jamestown, to look over the Plymouth Company’s territory….He drew a map of the area, wrote an enthusiastic pamphlet about it, and named it “New England.”
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The first enduring settlement in New England resulted from the discontent of a congregation of Puritans that called themselves Puritan Separatists .
From time to time, these Puritan Separatists had been imprisoned and even executed for persisting in their defiance of the government and the Church of England (the Anglican Church).
A group of these Puritans decided to move to Holland where they hoped that they might be allowed to worship as they pleased.
Because it was against English law for English citizens to leave the country without the king’s permission, this group slipped away a few at a time to begin new lives in Holland….And there, they were allowed to worship as they pleased.
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However, as foreigners, they were not allowed to join the Dutch trade guilds so those English Puritans that had skilled trades were not able to work in their chosen profession and had to accept only menial work to support their families.
In addition, the Puritans began to become concerned because in time their children began to speak only Dutch, marry into Dutch families, and therefore began losing their English culture.
So, the Puritan Separatists decided to move again…and this time across the Atlantic Ocean to America.
Leaders of this group got permission from the London Company to settle as an independent community with land of its own in Virginia…They also tried, and failed, to get King James I to guarantee them religious freedom….However, he did promise not to force the issue as long as they did not cause any problems and behave peaceably in America.
This was an historically significant concession on the King’s part because it set a precedent that America could be a place for settlement by dissenting Protestants.
The next step was to arrange financing for their journey….Several English businessmen agreed to loan them the necessary funds on the condition that repayment would be in the form of them sharing in the profits of the colony within seven years of the colony’s establishment.
So, sailing aboard their ship, the Mayflower from Plymouth, England , in September, 1620, were 35 Puritan Separatists (also known as Pilgrims), and 67 others (or non-Puritan Separatists).
Their destination was the mouth of the Hudson River, in the northeast corner of the London Company’s Virginia grant, but when they sighted Cape Cod in November (in modern-day Massachusetts) it was too late in the year to go on.
After rethinking their plans, they chose instead a site in an area that John Smith had labeled as Plymouth on his map.
Since this position lay outside the London Company’s territory, this meant that the Pilgrims would be setting up their colony in an area that fell outside of the London Company’s jurisdiction and would therefore leave them without an established governmental assembly.
To protect themselves and to make sure they established an organized colony, the leaders, while still on board their ship, drew up an agreement called the Mayflower Compact ….This agreement, signed by a majority of the passengers, established a civil government professing allegiance to the King of England.
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Afterwards, on December 21, 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
During this first winter, half of the colonists died from disease and exposure to the cold weather…but the rest managed to put the colony on its feet.
Among the neighboring Indians, the Pilgrims discovered friends who showed them how to obtain seafood and how to cultivate corn….and later in the year, after their first harvest, the Pilgrims invited the Indians to join them in their harvest festival…the original Thanksgiving.
Although they did aspire to great wealth, a profitable trade in fish and furs began to develop, and within a decade the Pilgrim population had grown to about 300.
The people of Plymouth, under their provisions of the Mayflower Compact, were able to elect their own governor…and they selected their much-loved leader William Bradford.
Under Bradford’s leadership, and the lucrative fish and fur trade, the colony was able to pay back the money they had borrowed making their colony self-supportive.