Empires Apart (7 page)

For the first but certainly not the last time conflicts in Europe had determined the course of history on the other side of the Atlantic. Spanish St Augustine rather than French Fort Caroline thus became the first permanent European settlement in North America.

The monarchs of Europe were determined to control the New World as they controlled the old. They wanted territory and plunder but most of them were racked by debt, caused not least by the conflicts between them. To keep public expenditure low they turned to a supposedly modern economic model to establish their empires: colonisation was privatised. The private sector was called upon to put up the funds and to take the risks.

This was the particular model for the Dutch and British empires. From the middle of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth the English empire was created and maintained by private
enterprise: groups of merchant adventurers were given royal monopolies over trade with the various regions of the world. The most famous was the East India Company, which eventually used its own army to conquer much of India, but there were others covering trade from Turkey to the Pacific. Among the first to be created was the Muscovy Company, which was established in 1555 and handled commerce with Russia; among the last was the Hudson Bay Company, established in 1670 to control the North American fur trade.

Although operating with different corporate structures, the earlier Spanish empire had been built in a similar way. For many of the Spanish adventurers in South and Central America the profits had been worth the risk. That investing in North America was a riskier business was shown by the fate of the first colonists to settle in Chesapeake Bay in Virginia just a few years after the settlements in Florida. Those who survived a native uprising in 1571 decamped the next year. It is fascinating to speculate on what might have happened had they stayed and thrived, for again they were not English Protestants but Spanish Catholics. Perhaps Hispanic Americans would now be turning a blind eye to the illegal immigration of Anglos, brought in to perform the tasks they themselves considered too menial.

In reality it was of course the English who grabbed the long stretch of unattractive shore lying between the French and their furs to the north and the Spanish with their gold to the south. That the shore was already occupied by various native tribes did not bother them. The English developed a justification for their arrival that was to be a feature of American imperial adventures from Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq. The English would bring the joys of civilisation. Thus the promoters of the Virginia Company, incorporated in London in 1606, assured potential emigrants that they would be welcomed as liberators freeing the native people from the brutality of the evil Spanish empire, just as the natives of Iraq would welcome the American troops liberating them from the evil of Saddam Hussein. Clearly the natives were at a much lower level of economic and social development than their natural superiors in England.
The duty of the English was therefore to provide them with all the skills and tools that they needed to play their proper part in the productive process, allowing them to acquire the basic necessities of a civilised life (clothes, for example) while at the same time producing goods for import by the merchants of London and Bristol. Everyone would benefit, but by far the greatest benefit would go to the company's promoters. From the very start there was an enormous social and economic gap between the organisers of the settlements and the mass of settlers, who were drawn from the bottom rungs of English society.

The first English colony in 1585 demonstrated none of the lofty assertions of its promoters. Expecting to be fed by the natives, the colonists were shocked when the initially hospitable locals declined to give up their last remaining stores. The English response followed the Spanish precedent: the native leaders were murdered in an attempt to terrorise the remaining population, but the plan failed. The natives simply left and the starving colonists soon followed.

The next group, which included the first English women and children to attempt to settle in the New World, was unceremoniously dumped in the same place, Roanoke, two years later. (The plan had been to land further north, but the sailors were anxious to be heading south in search of Spanish gold and had no desire to hang around looking for alternative landing sites.) The group's leader headed back to England seeking more support, and when he returned he discovered that the colonists had, for unknown reasons, left for the nearby island of Croatoan. Once again the English mariners showed where their priorities lay and headed south, leaving the settlers to their fate. That fate was to arrive finally near Chesapeake Bay, where the survivors were given refugee status by the natives. However, refugees are rarely popular and a local chief, Powhatan, eventually had them all killed.

More settlements were launched both on the North American mainland and in the string of West Indian islands known as the Lesser Antilles, away from the Spanish garrisons. An attempt was made to establish a settlement on the island of St Lucia in 1605, but it was
immediately destroyed by the native Caribs. A similar fate met a settlement on Grenada four year later. A small but successful colony was established on Bermuda, and in 1616 it issued its own coins, the first British colony to do so. Meantime in 1607 two more attempts were made on the mainland. A settlement on the coast of Maine faced native hostility and, following a miserable winter, the settlers sailed home in the spring. Further south the story was different, and the first permanent English settlement was established in Jamestown. At last the English had the chance to teach the natives the virtues of toiling in the fields to provide food for the white man.

The English were above all commercial colonists. Their policy towards the natives was to mould them into the commercial way of life of England, to turn hunters into farm labourers. For all the later mystique surrounding the piety of the Pilgrim Fathers, the most distinctive feature of the early English colonies was that, unlike those of Catholic Spain and France, there were no missionaries. In other respects the behaviour of the English varied little from the Spanish, from whom they claimed to be liberating the natives. When the natives failed to appreciate the benefits of civilisation, the English settlers soon lost any vestige of civilisation themselves. Alan Taylor quotes numerous examples, and one in particular shows a degree of barbarism of which Ivan the Terrible would have been proud. When, in 1610, locals refused to provide the Jamestown colonists with any more food, Captain George Perry attacked their village, killing many of the inhabitants and kidnapping the chief's wife and children. On the way back down river Perry and his men amused themselves by throwing the children overboard and shooting them as they struggled in the water. On their arrival in Jamestown the governor was shocked to discover that Perry had brought the children's mother back alive. He immediately had her killed. Terror was the only language some people were thought to understand.

Naturally the ‘savages' fought back. In 1622 over 300 immigrants were killed, nearly a third of the Virginia colony's population, in an uprising led by Powhatan's brother. The English retaliated by inviting
the Indians to a peace conference, and at the feast afterwards poisoning 250 of them.

In fairness the natives really could be savages at times. A century later, for example, a group of Hopi attacked a village whose native inhabitants had converted to Catholicism. They not only massacred nearly eight hundred, but for good measure ate some of them as a warning to others. And colonial leaders were just as brutal to settlers who stepped out of line as they were to natives.

Both natives and settlers lost far more to disease than to each other. The 24,000 Algonquians who lived around Jamestown when it was founded had declined to 2,000 within sixty years. Data from 1616 shows that of the 1,700 settlers sent out by the Virginia Company since the colony was founded in 1607 only 350 were still alive. The health of the colony both literally and metaphorically was in an almost fatal state when, in 1616, a cure was found – tobacco. Despite the attempts of James I to stop the trade, the addictive properties of the new drug made his entreaties ineffective. As with the modern drugs trade, tobacco barons in the Americas were able to find powerful merchants in Europe to push their products, and huge fortunes were made on both sides of the Atlantic.

With the advent of the tobacco trade Virginia took off. Thousands of immigrants were shipped in, and although they continued to perish at an alarming rate the power and wealth of the oligarchy increased dramatically. By 1635, just twenty-eight years after the colony's creation, the Virginia assembly felt strong enough to arrest and ship home a governor appointed by the company in London. From the very start English colonies had a degree of independence quite unknown in their Spanish and French equivalents.

The early days of English colonialism were characterised by two apparently opposing features. The first was the appalling hardship experienced by the settlers, the vast majority of whom died within a few years of arrival. When Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, described life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short', he could have been writing
specifically about the American colonies. The second was the fact that immigrants kept coming in ever increasing numbers. Between 1625 and 1640 a thousand indentured servants a year arrived in Virginia. In 1624 St Christopher (now St Kitts) was established, in 1627 Barbados and in 1628 Nevis. Barbados was a particularly successful colony, not least because a century earlier the Spanish had raided the island and exterminated the native Arawak population. 1632 was a bumper year with settlements in Antigua, Maryland and Montserrat. Maryland was established as a refuge for Catholics, but was soon home to disenchanted Virginians irked by the antics of the ruling elite in Jamestown: just twenty-five years after the first colony was established disgruntled elements were already looking to the frontier to escape the rules of colonial society. Above all, in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Massachusetts, where they were soon to create a society significantly different from that in the other English colonies of the period.

The apparent paradox of increasing numbers of emigrants heading like lemmings towards their probable death is explained by the economics of colonisation. Many of the promoters were making enormous sums of money; they had every reason to keep sending people out. Those going probably had little idea of what they would find on the other side of the Atlantic, as glowing stories of welcoming natives and abundance continued to pour from the promoters' pens. In any event many emigrants had no choice. They were vagrants scoured from the streets of the main cities and shipped out. All that was needed when they arrived was ever more land to exploit.

The colonists soon developed an argument that would sound strangely familiar to Palestinians expelled from their land centuries later. Looking around at the acres of bush and forest used only for hunting and a few fields producing maize and vegetables, the English declared that it was clear the natives were unwilling or unable to exploit the land themselves. In fact scientists have now shown that the natives' agricultural practices, which involved mixing crops in small patches and selective burning of undergrowth, produced larger harvests, a more balanced diet and a more
sustainable environment. But the resulting landscape did not resemble England, and to the English settlers this could only mean that the natives were not managing it as God had intended. God could not have meant his resources to be wasted in this way, and therefore it was obvious that He would approve of the newcomers exploiting the land properly.

The natives did not see it that way, and continued to resist attempts to seize their land. The ideological underpinning of colonisation then moved on to its final stage. Having started with a commitment to the introduction of civilisation, English colonialism in Virginia ended with an explicit commitment to ethnic cleansing. A typical proponent was Sir Francis Wyatt, Governor of Virginia from 1621 to 1626 and again from 1639 to 1642. His first priority, he made clear in 1622, was the ‘expulsion of the Savages', declaring that ‘it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thornes in our sides, than to be at peace and at league with them'.

Most of the immigrants were desperately poor, and were brought out to backbreaking toil as indentured servants, virtually slaves for the colonial elite. The reward for the minority who survived their period of indenture was to be free to settle their own land. The problem was that the land was already occupied, and the inhabitants fought to keep it. The solution was genocide. Settlers went hunting for natives. Most often the natives killed were women and children, usually from the more settled agricultural tribes, who were easier to catch than the warriors who presented the real threat.

Within half a century the philosophy of colonialism had moved from liberation through exploitation to genocide.

Not everyone supported ethnic cleansing. In particular the oligarchy who ruled the colony came to have a quite different agenda. They had their estates already, with hundreds of indentured servants on whom their fortunes depended. They traded happily with the natives on the frontier, swapping metal tools, weapons and trinkets for valuable beaver and deerskins. The scene was set for class war, and in 1676 it broke out. The leader of the populist revolt, Nathaniel Bacon, was a young demagogue
whose father had sent him out from England in an attempt to make him grow up. Bacon led a number of raids on largely peaceable natives and demanded a free hand to wipe out the ‘Indian' population. Bacon was actually a cousin by marriage of the governor, William Berkeley, but his rabble-rousing skills put him at the head of a rebel force that forced the governor to flee from Jamestown.

The first American Revolution was not just about ethnic cleansing, although that was Bacon's overwhelming objective, but was also a true class war. Some modern scholars have even held up Bacon as some kind of progressive populist because he offered freedom to any slaves who supported him. Bacon's rebellion is claimed to be the first example of poor whites and blacks joining together to fight an oppressive oligarchy. Bacon himself produced a ‘Declaration', which spelt out various grievances against a colonial elite that was undoubtedly thoroughly corrupt. The legislative councillors paid themselves enormous salaries derived largely from taxes on the less well-off. Berkeley, who had been appointed in 1641 and ruled Virginia with his cronies for thirty-five years, paid himself a salary of £1,000 a year. Small planters were lucky to make £5 profit in that time, and indentured servants were charged £6 for their passage from England. The collapse of the tobacco market only made the position of the small planters worse.