oftentimes with fear and trembling, I have ended my private controversy with this: surely these are wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in man’s destruction; and so with fervent prayers to be ever preserved from such diabolical assaults (as I took those to be) I have taken some rest.
When the twice-widowed Rolfe penned his letter to Dale he must have worded it in a way that he knew his stern boss would both appreciate and understand. The whole purpose of the plea was to ask for special exemption from the strict moral biblical code that both men must have known well.
Even more sickening was the attempt, a little later, by the married Dale to procure Pocahontas’s younger sister, a child of eleven, for his own bed. So upright was Dale himself that he dispatched Ralph Hamor to Powhatan, her father, to act as his pimp. Centuries later it is difficult to find any part of the following extract in the procuring bid that does not stick in the throat. Hamor told Chief Powhatan that Dale had sent him there as his suitor for the girl:
for this purpose . . . to entreat you by that brotherly friendship you make profession of to permit her to return with me unto him, partly for the desire which himself hath, and partly for the desire her sister [Pocahontas] hath to see her, of whom, if fame hath not been prodigal, as likely enough it hath not, your brother by your favour would gladly make his nearest companion, wife, and bedfellow . . .
The most famous of the kidnapped natives, Pocahontas suffered the fate of many of her countrymen, dying in England without seeing her native land again. (National Maritime Museum)
Waterfalls cut short every expedition up the rivers of the Chesapeake aimed at seeking a passage from sea to sea. Only Henry Hudson, in reaching Albany high up the river that bears his name, made a significant voyage into the interior.
Mourts Relation, 1622. Even the separatists, convinced of the rightness of their actions in moving to their New Jerusalem, felt it necessary to include in their account a defence of the lawfulness of their actions.
That Powhatan did not drive Hamor away, or worse, says much for his composure. What he did do was report that his daughter was already engaged, that no additional dowry would affect that arrangement and that he loved his daughter too much to let her go, saying, ‘I hold it not a brotherly part of your King to desire to bereave me of two of my children at once.’ Thus was the possibility of marriage alliances between two people, who could have intermingled and lived together, prevented by biblical law and one man’s lust.
The propagandists have long been regarded as successful encouragers of western planting, yet these dreamers and schemers never convinced sufficient of their countrymen to ensure that the invasion gained the support essential for its success. In neither the plays, prose, poetry, parliamentary, nor Privy Council reports that have survived from the period is there sufficient reference to the new world to indicate that England, as a nation, was ready to embark on what would one day be its voyage to a global empire.
After more than a century of propaganda the outcome was close to failure. Following the 1622 massacre on the James River, Nathaniel Butler, homeward bound, via Jamestown, from his three-year governorship of Bermuda, berated the maladministration of the Virginia Company and the appalling casualty rate sustained during the invasion. Butler was of the opinion that, of the ‘not fewer than ten thousand souls transported thither, there are not, through aforementioned abuses and neglects, above two thousand of them at present to be found alive . . . instead of a Plantation, it will shortly get the name of a slaughter house.’ Against this loss of life Butler thought that the 347 killed in the massacre represented an insignificant number. The Company issued a refutation that damned itself in its defence, and it was left to writers such as Smith and Purchas to continue the ultimately correct propaganda, ‘shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdom from American English Plantations and especially those of Virginia and Summer Islands’.
John White’s all-round technical skill as a draftsman is clearly indicated in this excellent 1585 map of the Carribean and Carolinas, which he had little time to record in detail. The sketches of flying fish, dolphins and whales shows his love of recording flora and fauna, for which he had an excellent eye. (British Museum)
The propagandists were far more successful in wooing the Court than the rest of the country. Royal letters patent did get issued to the supplicants, giving them very much what their petitions requested. However, finding sufficient volunteers to travel to these gifted domains was not so easy. Frobisher’s first settlement group was selected from convicted criminals; Ralegh was licensed to impress seamen for the Roanoke voyage and dispatched with White fewer settlers than he intended; in 1618 it was planned to send 100 ‘superfluous . . . young boys and girls that lay starving in the streets’ of London to Virginia; in 1623 a memorandum suggested that encouraging emigration to New England would ‘offer employment to the starving unemployed and so rid England of the expense of maintaining them’, as well as giving bankrupt gentlemen an opportunity to recover their fortune. Thus, although individual ships might have been crowded, voyages were not oversubscribed. Even the Pilgrims were reduced in numbers by last-minute withdrawals.
The comparison with Spain is informative: in the sixteenth century that nation sent 240,000 of its citizens to America, with a further 450,000 joining them in the next century. To replace the lost handful that the English dispatched in the 1580s, just 150,000 souls emigrated from England in the seventeenth century, and all but a few thousand of them departed after 1630. The enthusiastic efforts of the Scot, Sir William Alexander to encourage his fellow countrymen to sail to Nova Scotia were eclipsed by the numbers of them who were prepared to be ferried over to Ireland. This would be a continuing imbalance. Between 1650 and 1700 just 7,000 Scots crossed the Atlantic to the new world, while 70,000 emigrated to Ulster. The trickle of emigrants is all the more surprising because the land from which they came was subject to dearth: the real earnings of a labourer between 1585 and 1630 never matched those of his great-grandfather during his short working life (his life expectancy was under thirty-five years). To such as these the new world should have exerted an irresistible pull; it did not.
The propaganda failed. What did succeed in the years to come and turned the invasion into a conquest was religious persecution. The Bible, or conflicting interpretations of the same, recruited far more families than did the promotional tracts. The word of the Lord, or its limited exclusive interpretation by Archbishop Laud, persuaded tens of thousands to sail west, far more than all the propagandists combined.
The Charters: Come Over and Help Yourselves
There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.
Acts 16: 9, King James Bible, 1611
Come over and help us.
Motto of Massachusetts Bay Company, 1629
In an age of centralized authority, few Englishmen dared venture abroad without royal approval. This meant that each of the fingers thrust towards America wore upon them a signet ring in the form of a royal letters patent, or Charter
