The Island that Disappeared Page 5
One didn’t have to be a Puritan to see the appeal of this punitive reading of Scripture. The poor rates levied on Braintree’s property owners had soared in the previous two years, and the parish council laid the blame on the multitude of alehouses in the town. These were frequented by ‘journeymen and maids living out of service, [and] idle, loitering people who break hedges and steal wood, playing unlawful games and neglecting their calling.’15 Parish councillors joined the justice of the peace in evicting squatters from the common lands that circled the town, but they also denied alms to paupers who would not go to church.
Unfortunately for the Puritans, the ‘unlawful games’ mentioned above were at the heart of village life. Until the Puritans began preaching against their pernicious effects, days dedicated to sports and games occupied a great deal of the working year. The English were especially fond of ‘making merry,’ and the Christian calendar gave them plenty of ‘holy-days’ to celebrate. Puritans opposed them, firstly because they fostered sinful behavior, and secondly because most holidays were vestiges from the days when England was a Catholic country. However, after they had been barred from playing sports or games, most villagers did not spend their Sunday afternoons reading the Bible. Instead, the Puritans’ ban on Sunday sports ‘set up filthy tippling and drunkenness, and bred a number of idle and discontented speeches in their ale-houses.’16
However, even in the most Protestant county in England, plenty of churchgoers felt antagonized by the hectoring of ‘painful’ Puritan preachers. As George Gifford, the minister of Maldon, complained, ‘If the preacher do pass his hour but a little, your buttocks begin to ache and you wish in your heart that the pulpit would fall.’17 Resistance to the culture of discipline was strongest in ‘the dark parishes’ of Essex, where the county’s drifters, drunkards, and ballad singers held court.18 They were said to love a Puritan ‘as a dog loves a pitchfork.’ ‘Good sir, spare your pains,’ a member of the congregation told the Puritan minister Thomas Hooker after hearing him preach one Sunday. ‘We are sinners, and if we be damned, then every tub must stand upon its own bottom. We will bear it as well as we can.’19
To be a good Christian had always been a simple affair, bound up with good neighborliness and the observance of archaic rituals. But the country had changed, and with it, the church. Battered by a recession the likes of which few could remember, many felt nostalgic for better days. But ‘now is every man for himself, and all are ready to pull one another by the throat.’20 According to Gifford, ‘The simple sort, which cannot skill of doctrine, speak of the merry world when there was less preaching, and when things were so cheap that they might have twenty eggs for a penny.’21
Was the Puritans’ culture of discipline the solution to the country’s problems or its cause? As a fog of anxiety and doubt rolled into England’s towns and villages, there was a real risk that the Puritans’ austere, reproachful outlook would drive many Christians back to the Catholic fold, especially in places like Lancashire, where Protestantism had yet to sink roots. King Charles was concerned that ‘the simple sort’ might look to a Spanish invasion to take England back to the days when all Christians were ruled from Rome. He only needed to listen to his ambassadors’ accounts of the Dutch revolt against their Spanish rulers and the persecution of the Huguenots in France to be reminded of the dangers inherent in religious schisms. The Puritans were a threat to the religious uniformity on which the stability of his kingdom depended.
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Through their connections with local church ministers, the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nathaniel Rich, and Sir Thomas Barrington found several devout yeomen with the money and inclination to rent a plot of land on a faraway island. They told them that they would have to spend seven years working the fields of Essex to make what they could earn in a year on Providence. But they understood that free land, not free religion, was what enticed most migrants to sign up for passage to the Americas. Land was hard to come by in Essex, especially for younger sons, and fathers were quick to seize any opportunity for the ones who did little but play on the tabor and drum. It was the opportunity of a lifetime; all the shareholders asked in return was that the young farmer hand over his harvest to the company, which would retain half of the profits made on its sale in London.
The first English newspaper had only been published in 1620, but colonial adventurers had been luring would-be settlers to the Americas through advertisements posted around towns and villages since the turn of the century. A bill posted in 1609 gave notice:
to all artificers, smiths and carpenters, coopers, shipwrights, turners, planters, fishermen, metalmen of all sorts, brickmakers, ploughers, weavers, shoemakers, sawyers, spinsters and labouring men and women who are willing to go to the said plantation of Virginia and inhabit there.22
The island’s farmers and craftsmen were going to need apprentices to work for them. The obvious place for an apprentice to find work was the annual hiring fair, where he could size up a range of employers, before signing up with whoever offered the most palatable terms. The law required that any young person whose parents earned less than £40 per year sign a contract with an employer for at least twelve months. As a result, two-thirds of children left home at the age of fifteen to become apprentices, and their employers became surrogate parents.
The Braintree fair of 1630 was crowded with young men driven to leave home by land hunger, the collapse of the wool trade, and their exasperated fathers. Some had already traveled to fairs in neighboring towns in search of work. They had more than hunger to contend with, for a masterless wanderer was akin to an outlaw. If the minister of his local church could vouch for his good character, he might qualify for some relief out of the poor rates, but most vagrants ended up in the workhouse, and persistent offenders were often forced aboard ships bound for the colonies.
A Spaniard who was shipwrecked on the Somers Isles in 1625 was shocked to see that the servants working in the fields were nearly all ‘boys, who are either orphans or have been abandoned.’23 John Dutton, the Earl of Warwick’s agent on the Somers Isles, complained that the last three ships to arrive from England had disgorged ‘ill chosen men, who, it may be feared, will prove unprofitable servants. As for the benefit accruing to me by them, it is rather a burden, for no man will hire them, for they know not how to work.’24
These were just the kind of migrants Sir Thomas could do without. But by wheeling and dealing with his friends among the local yeomanry, he was able to offer indentures to only the most suitable candidates. The indenture was a long-established practice, by which an apprentice contracted himself to a farmer or craftsman for three years. During this time, he received no salary, but his master was obliged to provide him with room, board, and the training he needed to learn his trade. Sir Thomas assured his young recruits that they would have ‘meat, drink and apparel during their term of service.’ After three years, they would each be free from their obligations to their masters, and would be able to buy land of their own.
Naturally, before becoming a free man, an apprentice would have to repay the £6—£530 in today’s money—that it cost his master to secure his passage to Providence. But Sir Thomas told his recruits that when the time came for them to fend for themselves, they would ‘receive all convenient assistance and encouragement from the company.’25 The prospect of becoming a ‘freed man’ was one that no poor, young Englishman could resist, for it was practically unheard of outside the colonies. Capt. John Smith, a Puritan whose writings about New England had already made him one of its best-known planters, asserted that such were the opportunities for freed men in the New World that the day was at hand when ‘the very name of servitude will become odious to God and man.’26 Puritans believed that America was God’s gift to the English, in recognition of their enterprise and devotion. The minister William Crashaw gave a sermon to settlers bound for Virginia in 1610 in which he assured them that the voyage to the new colony ‘is in that true temper so fair, so safe, so secure, so easy, as though God Him
self had built a bridge for men to pass from England to Virginia.’27
By February 1631, the shareholders had one hundred men and boys ready to start new lives in the New World. Most of them were apprentices aged between fourteen and twenty, who had borrowed the cost of their fare from their patron, and boarded the Seaflower with little more than the clothes on their backs. The sister ship of the Mayflower, the Seaflower had made the Atlantic crossing before: in 1621, it had carried settlers to the James River in Virginia. Feeding one hundred passengers, plus the crew, for the two and a half months it would take the Seaflower to reach Providence required careful planning. The shareholders entrusted the job of victualing (supplying food and provisions to) the ship to the company’s husband, John Dyke. Dyke was the only non-Puritan member of the Providence Island Company, and an experienced colonist who also owned shares in the Somers Isles and Virginia companies. He had bought barrels of salt beef and salt pork, which lasted for up to five years, and casks of butter and hard Suffolk cheese, which would keep for the next six months. He also laid in supplies of biscuit, dried peas, currants, rice, oatmeal, and plenty of chewing tobacco.28
Most of the settlers’ food traveled live—as many tethered cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and caged hens and geese as could be squeezed below deck. A healthy diet was considered a largely meat diet, and no provision was made for citrus fruits or green vegetables. Next, the hold was loaded with demijohns of rum and hogsheads of claret and brandy for the officers and gentlemen among the passengers. The common sailor and servant had to make do with beer, which was brewed extra strong in the belief that it kept better. Dyke factored on providing each man with a gallon a day. The Seaflower’s passengers would spend the next two and a half months living between decks, in the dank, airless space that separated the hold from the upper deck. They built a series of thin-walled cabins to give themselves some privacy, creating a dense warren of chests, trunks, furniture, and livestock. By the time they were all aboard, the seventy-five-foot-long and less than five-foot-high space was severely overcrowded. That was only to be expected, for the likelihood of dying en route was high. Midway across the Atlantic, they would pass ‘beyond the line’; if they were captured thereafter they would either be killed or thrown into a Spanish dungeon. Since Capt. John Tanner was also carrying letters of marque, they would also need additional men to overcome the crew of any Spanish vessel they might storm on their way to Providence.
The Seaflower was embarking on a voyage into the unknown. By using the astrolabe, cross-staff, and backstaff, its navigator could determine how far north or south of his home port he had come, but those who navigated by latitude alone were confined to a few well-ploughed sea lanes, where it was easy to fall prey to the enemy. Longitude remained a mystery, and not without reason did the ship’s crew refer to the navigator as a ‘sea artist.’
But not all the hazards of sea travel were inescapable: only after leaving Deptford did Captain Tanner realize that the bread was moldy and the beer sour. John Dyke had victualed the ship with the shoddiest goods he could find, and then billed the company at an inflated rate. Once at sea, Captain Tanner proved as unscrupulous as Dyke: he cut his passengers’ rations by a third, hoping to sell whatever he could hoard when he got to Providence.
[3]
The Seaflower
THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY IN the Americas was founded in Virginia in 1607. In the hundred years that followed, 375,000 Britons and Irish sailed for the New World.1 Given that the population of England in 1630 was about 4.3 million, and that it currently stands at 53 million, that’s the equivalent of 46,000 people leaving modern England for the Americas every year for the next hundred years.
Migration was not a sign of strength, but weakness. England was a small, relatively poor country on the fringes of Europe. Its population was a fifth that of France, which stood at twenty million, and a fraction of India’s, which was over one hundred million.2 When Sir Thomas Roe traveled to Mughal, India, in 1614 as an emissary of King James I, the East India Company was just a start-up, run from the home of its governor by a permanent staff of six.3 The towns and cities of Jahangir’s empire accounted for around a quarter of global manufacturing, while England’s domestic economy accounted for less than 2 percent. Its empire was confined to the Somers Isles and Jamestown, Virginia, which was still struggling to recover from the ‘starving time,’ six fateful months in which 440 of its 500 settlers died of disease.4
London, on the other hand, was already one of the world’s great cities. In 1630, its population was around three hundred fifty thousand—half that of Jahangir’s capital at Agra, but still larger than that of any other European city.5 Though a large city, it was not, according to Frederick, Duke of Wurtemberg, who visited the capital in 1600, a worldly one. ‘The inhabitants are magnificently apparelled and are extremely proud and overbearing,’ he wrote in a letter home. ‘And because the greater part, especially the trades people, seldom go into other countries…they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them.’6
Yet England was opening up to the world. By 1642, the year James Howell wrote Instructions for Forreine Travell, English travelers with ‘a custom to be always relating strange things and wonders’ from abroad were common enough to have become figures of fun. ‘Such a traveller was he, that reported the Indian fly to be as big as a fox, China birds to be as big as some horses, and their mice to be as big as monkeys,’ Howell wrote.7
Passing through foreign lands was all very well, but living in them was fraught with danger. Living in a hot climate was likely to throw an Englishman’s humors out of kilter.8 At the very least, it would make him quick-tempered and lazy; at worst, it would kill him. Climate was of immense importance to the English, for it was commonly believed that English culture—its ‘mechanical and politic arts’—was the product of the country’s temperate climate. Thomas Morton was a Devon man who became a champion of those ‘whose economic straits filled new tent-cities, furnished prisons and gallows, and pushed Devon men to the Bristol sea-trades.’ After spending a summer in New England, Morton wrote home warning would-be migrants of the risks they ran in journeying to the ‘burning zones,’ where the sun was ‘unto our complexions intemperate and contagious…Nature has framed the Spaniards, who prosper in dry and burning habitations, apt to such places,’ he wrote, ‘but in us she abhors such…this torrid zone is good for grasshoppers, and the temperate zone for the ant and bee.’9
The yeomen and husbandmen crowded below the Seaflower‘s deck doubtless saw them themselves as the world’s ants and bees: practical, hardworking and cooperative. But for how long would they remain so? Foreign cultures were no less risk-laden than foreign climes, for they were capable of undermining the very foundations of an Englishman’s character. England’s first colony was Ireland, where William Camden observed the changes that overcame Englishmen once the strictures of the domestic hierarchy were loosened. ‘One would not believe in how short a time some English among them degenerate and grow out of kind,’ he wrote in Brittania, a survey of Great Britain and Ireland published in 1577.10 Many Englishmen new to Ireland had abandoned the civility of living in towns and villages, and chosen instead to live as seminomads. Some, it was said, had even lost their language and ‘turned native.’
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Ten weeks after their last sight of England, the Seaflower’s one hundred passengers waded through warm, crystal-clear water onto the white sand of Providence’s harbor. The new arrivals came bearing gifts for the governor and his council: a staff inscribed with the company’s seal, and a silver plate bearing the island’s ensign of government. The plate was inscribed with a quotation from Job 22:30. Innocens liberabit insulam—‘the innocent shall deliver the island,’ it read. A second quotation, from Isaiah 42:4, read legem ejus insulæ, expectabunt—‘the islands shall wait for his law.’11
The passengers were also carrying a letter for Philip Bell, in which the shareholders instructed the island’s governor to ‘distribute all the inhab
itants into several families whereof one shall be chief.’12 The seven tenant farmers among them, most of whom had come with their wives and children, became the ‘fathers’ of the island’s servants, who had come alone. Bell apportioned each ‘father’ a plot of land, situated at a distance from his neighbor sufficient to avoid disputes, but close enough to hear the sound of the conch shell that signaled a Spanish attack. The settlers moved their belongings into their new quarters, and herded their cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, hens, and geese from the hold of the ship into their pens.
If they were to avoid repeating the mistakes made by the Somers Isles’ colonists, they would have to become self-sufficient in food. The advance party had made a good start, but there remained a great deal of land to clear before the company would consider sending out more settlers. Each ‘father’ put his ‘children’ to work, using the axes, shovels, ploughs, and hoes he received from Thomas Fitch, the ensign responsible for the distribution of goods from the company’s magazine.
In addition to the crops they would need to sustain themselves, the shareholders expected the new arrivals to plant the cash crops that would pay for the materials and manpower they were going to need in the years to come. As the explorer Richard Hakluyt pointed out, the Spanish and Portuguese had taken grapevines to Madeira, sugarcane to Brazil, and ginger to Hispaniola, and now had a thriving trade in all three commodities. With care and attention, the English could grow the tropical crops they needed on Providence, and thereby break their dependence on ‘vile Portingal’ and the ‘perfidious Spaniard.’