by Raleigh Gilbert. A quiet voyage saw them arrive off Maine by late July, where they navigated their way through offshore islands and encounters with Amerindians, eventually to establish a fort at the mouth of the Sagadahoc (now Kennebec) River in mid-August, where they intended their 100 potential settlers to live. They called it Fort St George, a neat tribute to both their president and their patron saint, but they were not to live beneath their flag for long. Shortage of supplies led to half the colony sailing home in Gifte of God in December. Then, in February 1608 George Popham died, while the March relief vessels brought with them news of the death of his relative and their sponsor, Sir John Popham. Worse news for the settlers came in September when they learned that Raleigh Gilbert, who had taken up the presidency, had succeeded to the Compton Castle estate. The new heir did not hesitate, choosing to return home to a far more certain and comfortable fortune. Deprived of both sponsorship and leadership, the remaining colonists decided to return with him, embarking in Mary and John and Virginia, a pinnace that they had built themselves and which has the lasting glory of being the first English ship to be constructed in the new world.
Annapolis Royal, 1604. Lying on the sheltered side of Nova Scotia, the deep inlet on which Annapolis Royal now lies proved an attractive settlement site for both the French and the English. Champlain’s jolly map shows both the wonderful natural harbour of Port Royal and the young whale that amused the French with its daily performances in the bay.
And there the whole endeavour might have ended had it not been for the decision of a small group of English Puritans, exiled in Leiden, Holland, to seek a life for their community free from persecution in the new world. The first attempt to achieve this failed in 1619, when 180 separatists were crammed into a small ship for a winter voyage to Virginia. By the time they reached America 130 of them, including their leader, had died. Yet, soon afterwards, much perturbed, and after much discussion and some dissembling, the 102 passengers of Mayflower watched the frame of their first house being raised at their Plymouth plantation on the far side of Cape Cod Bay. It was Christmas Day 1620 and, appropriately, it was Christian families seeking a self-sufficient life and freedom to practise a simple faith to whom the success of the English settlement in this part of America was now entrusted. Yet, despite the background and the aims of these Pilgrim Fathers, the fact that they also had arrived intent on seizing land that was not theirs and holding on to it by force made them just another group of invaders launching an amphibious assault on North America.
Plymouth had not been long established when another group of settlers, linked to the Pilgrims through the entrepreneur Thomas Weston, but dissimilar in most other ways, set out for the region. Their arrival was announced when a shallop belonging to the fishing vessel Sparrow sailed into Plymouth harbour in May 1622 to collect supplies before sailing up the coast to explore a new site for settlement. Finding one at Wessagusset (modern Weymouth), they sent a message back to summon a further sixty rough and ready men who had sailed from England in April 1622 onboard Charity and Swan and who, after a brief stop at Plymouth, reached Wessagusset in July 1622. Their background, demeanour, temperament and behaviour augured not well for success, and by 1624 they were no more.
However, Plymouth was not going to be a lonely outpost for long. Charters to settle both Maine and Massachusetts were soon followed up by the dispatch of hopeful settlers, and in 1629 the governors of the Massachusetts Bay Company made the bold decision to travel out with their fellow investors. At last lessons on governance and numbers had been learned. In 1630, first Mary and John with 140 passengers onboard and then, shortly afterwards, Governor Winthrop’s main fleet of eleven vessels sailed into the bay on whose shores would rise their ‘City upon a Hill’. At long last the cavalry had arrived.
Nova Scotia: Alexander’s Pinkie
The smallest finger of all five was inserted at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, on the initiative of the Scottish patriot, Sir William Alexander, who, annoyed that America had a New England, New Spain, New France, New Holland and New Sweden, persuaded his countryman, King James VI, now James I of England, to grant him, in 1621, a Charter to the land now known because of the original Latin text as Nova Scotia. However, it was not until 1629 that Sir William’s son, another William, sailed for this new world in four ships with a party of seventy men and two women. They selected the most beautiful of all the original sites on which to settle, a headland lying between two rivers, where they built the small Fort Charles. Pleasant it may have been but the conditions they experienced in their first winter left thirty of them dead by the spring, with the survivors weak from scurvy and malnutrition. Another Scottish fort had been established at Baleine, named after two whale-like rocks that lie offshore, near present-day Louisburg, but this was surrendered to the French in April 1629, the very same month that England agreed, under the Treaty of Susa, to return lands captured in America to France. The argument that this did not include Nova Scotia lasted until dowry negotiations for his marriage of Queen Henrietta of France persuaded the bankrupt Charles I that he had more to gain from its release than its retention.
On 24 May 1624 the Virginia Company’s Charter was revoked and responsibility for the colony was placed under the direct control of the Crown. Coincident with that decision, the age of coastal conflict ended and the age of continental conquest began. The English would now move out from their beachheads to horizon-challenging frontiers, from their forts to villages and townships, and from sea to shining sea.
Thus, in their early years, none of the five fingers delivered what was expected of it. Their failure to make an impression was due mostly to the fact that expectations were based on mythical views of world geography, geology and botany, and the importance of greed as a motive for investment. Without the strong guiding will of the sovereign to control and coordinate the movement of the fingers, even at arm’s length, the English in America would lack the strength or coordination to grasp the land which their lord had granted to them.
Map 1: The primary routes of the English invasion of North America, 1497–1630.
The sending forth of Colonies (seeming a novelty) is esteemed now to be a strange thing, as not only being above the courage of common men, but altogether alienated from their knowledge, which is no wonder, since that course, though both ancient and usual, hath been by the intermission of so many ages discontinued, yea was impossible to be practised so long as there was no vast ground, howsoever men had been willing, whereupon Plantations might have been made, yet there is none who will doubt but that the world in her infancy, and innocency, was first peopled after this manner.
Sir William Alexander, An Encouragement of Colonies, 1630
When, in 1597, John of Gaunt’s famous soliloquy eulogizing England’s ‘scepter’d isle’ first appeared in print, Ralegh’s Roanoke experiment had finished in failure and his Guiana expedition had ended in ignominy. However, thanks to Howard of Effingham’s navy, the ‘moat defensive’ had kept an envious Spanish army from landing on ‘this blessed plot’. Shakespeare, his Queen, and his fellow countrymen thus had every right to feel proudly and defiantly insular, and John of Gaunt’s word choice seemed to throw down a challenge to those who would seek an ‘other Eden’ across the seas. However, by November 1611, when Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, staged The Tempest in front of Elizabeth’s successor, their patron James I, the Jamestown settlement had been in existence for four years and this play drew its opening imagery from William
