that ‘Sir Humphrey Gilbert granted me my request to him made by letter, for the royalties of discovery all to the north above the parallel of fifty degrees of latitude’ – that is present-day Canada, stretching upward from a line drawn between the mouth of the St Lawrence River and Vancouver Island. Further south Gilbert assigned some 8.5 million acres of his potential holdings on the mainland of America to Sir George Peckham and a further 3 million acres to Philip Sidney, who promptly offloaded 30,000 of them onto Sir George. Nor were poorer potential planters to be left disappointed. The Virginia Company, for example, ensured reasonable tracts of land would be made available to those who purchased shares in their enterprise or who were prepared to sail to the new world to work for themselves or to serve a period, usually seven years, as indentured labour. Even convicted criminals and the indigent were to be offered the chance to start afresh in pastures new. A new world and a new life beckoned and yet the gap between the size of the area granted in the Charters and the land which was actually grabbed was enormous for, by 1630, at the end of all this gracious royal distribution, the English occupied the banks of one river, the James, and a number of bays. So, with only effort or ambition providing a boundary for their acres, the questions that have to be asked are: why did the newcomers take so long to establish their domains, and why did they so frequently fail in their endeavours so to do?
Spain, the other nation with major American interests, moved with far greater rapidity than did England. In September 1498 Christopher Columbus, on his third voyage, became the first European to set foot on the mainland of South America when he stepped ashore on what is now the coast of Venezuela. A year previously, on 24 June 1497, John Cabot, a Venetian in the service of Henry VII of England, became the first European since the Vikings five centuries earlier to set foot in North America, when he was rowed ashore, probably somewhere in Newfoundland.
Although those dates are so very close to each other, what happened in Spanish and English colonies in the next ninety years differed greatly. In that time Spain conquered three American empires and each year ferried back a fortune that easily exceeded the total annual income of the English Crown. The English did not return to the land until the very end of the period, for just two years, merely as sojourners who failed to make any private profit for the small group of investors who had placed their funds and their faith in the venture. Thus, while New Spain became the financial salvation of Old Spain, the English settlements on the western Atlantic littoral were never more than an eccentric sideshow for the Tudor and Stuart court.
The phrase ‘British Empire’, coined in 1577 by John Dee, gives the impression that Britannia wished to set her bounds wider still and wider for the glory of Queen, country and the Protestant creed. The actuality is far removed from the vision. The early argument for overseas settlement was based around: finding a passage to Cathay; discomforting Spain; settling indigent or criminal elements; monopolizing the distant fishing grounds; searching for precious metals and resettling loyal but non-Protestant groups. All of these could claim to be endeavours in the national interest, but the overweening desire of those masterminding the venture to Virginia was self-aggrandizement. This was the age of avarice, when lesser gentry, who were loath to besmirch themselves with trade, sought other ways to enrich themselves, preferably through the hard work of others. Henry VIII had answered this craving for some, through the dissolution of the monasteries, which freed great estates for his courtiers to grab. By Elizabeth’s reign this source had dried up but, fortunately, three new founts of both wealth and land arose to fill the gap. The first was being carried in the holds of Spanish and Portuguese ships returning deep-laden from the Indies. The second was the great estates of Ireland, which were being made available to ‘planters’ once the rebellious previous owners had been evicted. Thus, those who wished to encourage the third – the settlement of America – had to compete with the more rapid and richer returns from piracy and the closer proximity of Irish estates. Added to this was the fact that the distant unknown land area available for the English to experiment with settlement in America had been selected for them by the Pope and the Spanish.
In 1494, to settle a dispute between Spain and Portugal over global hegemony, Pope Alexander VI brokered the Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew an imaginary line through the Atlantic Ocean 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, granting lands discovered to the west of this line to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. This separation of interests between two potentially conflicting nations rendered both of them an added service, for it encouraged them to develop only their own hemispherical rights: Portugal, trading in the east and Spain exploiting and extracting in the west. The English, with no legal area to call their own, tried to spread themselves thinly over both regions, incorporating both an East India and a Virginia Company, with not enough funds available to ensure that both could thrive.
No sooner was the papal curtain drawn than the English began to consider ways of getting around it to reach the markets of Cathay, but it was not until eighty years later that Francis Drake, passing through the Straits of Magellan in the far south of America, showed how it was possible both to prey on the Spaniards and to reach the eastern markets. Others considered similar outcomes could be achieved by a much shorter journey through a northwest passage over the ‘top’ of America. This mythical passage would occupy many English minds and cost the lives of several English mariners while those who thought of America as an obstruction and not an opportunity refused to be convinced by the evidence of the survivors. In this the English differed from the Spanish for, although Columbus had sailed west to discover a new route to the Indies, when he failed, the Spanish were, understandably, content to concentrate on the serendipity of wealth their new discoveries could bring them and which they were determined to protect from any intruders, which was their second contribution to the English choice of settlement site.
Both the English and the French knew that for any of their plantations in North America to survive they needed to be both distant and hidden from Spanish forces. The French ignored this and paid the price when, in 1565, the Spanish exterminated their colonists at Fort Caroline in Florida. News of this massacre created a quandary for those planning the first English settlement which, while needing to be accessible to the sea for succour, would also need to be secure from assault from that quarter as well. Yet, when it happened, that assault would be launched by the native people whose objections to the arrival of the English none took into account.
It is a strange paradox that the Spanish wiped out three developed civilizations – Inca, Maya and Aztec – with brutal ease, whereas the English, confronting a native population which they regarded as ‘savage’, took far longer to overthrow their opposition. The obvious answer is a simple one: the nations with a developed infrastructure collapsed when their social fabric was ripped apart and their buildings razed; those who could live off the land as hunters and gatherers could abandon their settlements and move on with greater ease, while still being able to assault the fixed dwellings of the interlopers who had no such native skills. In America this led to a war in the woods, a type of warfare which the English, throughout their long sojourn on American soil, were neither comfortable with nor prepared for. By not acknowledging that they were invading a foreign land and planning accordingly, the English guaranteed failure for five major reasons: lack of original numbers; unreliable reinforcement and resupply; failure of local self-sufficiency; the inability to overawe the enemy and a lack of leadership. In the end they overcame these, but it would take a long while before they were confident enough to move on from the beachhead and wrestle control of a continent from a group who were less numerous, less united and less industrialized than were the invaders. The final conquest would take several hundred years to achieve, with victory coming, not through conversion, persuasion, integration or inter-marriage, nor from any form of superiority, apart from the gun, weight of numbers and grim and implacable hate. When the numbers and weaponry were better matched, the outcome was often far different. The war was finally won because the English tribe outbred its opponents. For, whereas disease, one of the invaders’ allies, was capable of devastating an Amerindian village or confederacy beyond the stage where it was capable of recovery, when it decimated English colonies they survived because reinforcements were ferried out to them from the unlimited English pool of labour, although these seldom included sufficient soldiery for the immediate task in hand.
