The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (4 page)

The Englishmen were repairing their ships when the flotilla came into view. Aboard the Spanish flagship was the new viceroy of Mexico, Don Martin Enriquez. The viceroy agreed to let the Englishmen finish their repairs and buy what supplies they needed. The Spanish ships laid anchor alongside them. It was, of course, a ruse, one that Hawkins sniffed out—but in the blazing battle, Spanish cannons, arquebuses, pistols, knives, and cutlasses cut down three hundred Englishmen. Five English ships were sunk or captured. Only two ships remained, the
Judith
, under Francis Drake, which made a quick skedaddle for England, and the
Minion
, overloaded with survivors, one of whom was Hawkins. Doomed with so many men and so few provisions aboard, he dropped a hundred men on the shores of Texas,
where most all of them died or were captured. One sailor made it back to England sixteen years later after adventures worthy of an Errol Flynn hero.

Drake later used the Battle of San Juan de Ulúa (1568), part of England's running war of piracy against Spain, to justify his every outrage against the perfidious papists. The Spaniards, however, had good reason to feel put out. They followed the rules, more or less. They established their colonies in the New World and used them to enrich themselves and the treasury of their country. They kept to the true faith, and though not Biblical literalists like the Protestants, they did not see how piracy could be squared with the commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.”

The Englishmen, though pirates, knew right was on their side. The Protestantism of England was a unique thing. It was a state church that tried, even if it failed, to accommodate everyone. It was Calvinist enough to justify an Englishman in thinking that he was one of the elect—certainly over any papist. It was broadminded enough that, whatever persecutions were leveled against Catholics and Dissenters (and against the former in particular, the sanctions were severe), it allowed, up to a point, a man to fill in the details of his creed as he saw fit (every man his own priest). It required on the one hand that one not take religion very seriously—or how could one square the idea that kings made better religious authorities than popes—while on the other hand it imbued the people with an enormous sense of self-righteousness, which however annoying to outsiders is a great strength to a nation: no man is more certain of being on the side of liberalism, reason, and tolerance than the man who has invented his own creed against the presumed bigotry, repression, and superstition of an old one.

The English church had doctrines, but chief among them were (a) not to be a papist and (b) to follow as gospel whatever was approved by the Crown. Anglicanism was really patriotism with a prayer book—and England's
pirates were nothing if not patriotic. They disparaged or destroyed representations of the Virgin Mary, but venerated Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. They would pray in regular, required meetings aboard ship before they plundered and pillaged for profit, for the defense of the realm, and to punish the deluded followers of the Whore of Babylon. Drake and Hawkins and Walter Raleigh and Martin Frobisher were private commercial adventurers and explorers, yes, but they were all present and commanding ships as naval officers of the Crown against the Spanish Armada in 1588 too. They were men of Queen and Country who believed that by serving themselves and serving England they were serving Heaven's Command—self-interest, patriotism, and Providence were one.

One of the chief ideological architects of an English empire
²
in the New World was the geographer and Protestant divine Richard Hakluyt the younger. In his
Discourse Concerning Western Planting
(1584), he urged on Walter Raleigh's adventures in the New World, writing that “No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the realm of reason.”
³
He laid out the commercial, political, and military benefits of such an empire. Among these were trade and the production of new crops, finding useful employment for unemployed soldiers and beggars, but also bringing liberty to lands now dominated by Spanish “pride and tyranny,” where the enslaved “all yell and cry with one voice,
Liberta, liberta
,” and where English valor and naval prowess could provide freedom.

From the beginning, then, the British Empire thought of itself as an empire of liberty.

English sea dogs played Robin Hood in the Caribbean only after England was firmly in the Protestant camp under Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603. As queen of England and Wales and parts of always
turbulent Ireland, with a potentially hostile Scotland north of the border, and hostile France and Spain across the Channel, Elizabeth was perpetually looking for ways to keep her enemies off balance. Her most dangerous enemy was Spain. Spain had become a vast overseas empire. By 1521, Mexico had become New Spain; twenty-one years later, the Incan empire had become the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. Spain was also a continental power. It was trying to crush a Protestant revolt (which England supported) in the Spanish Netherlands and was fighting Muslims in the Mediterranean.

Queen Elizabeth had little interest in bankrolling rival colonies of her own—she couldn't afford it—but she had a great deal of interest in raiding Spain's. Her support went to her daring, patriotic, profitable pirates, some of whom doubled as explorers. Martin Frobisher was one such. In his voyages of 1576 through 1578, he set off to find the Northwest Passage, the presumed nautical shortcut to the riches of the East. While finding neither China nor India nor riches, he leant his name to Frobisher Bay and navigated part of Hudson Bay.

The sea dog Francis Drake, who like Frobisher earned himself a knighthood, not only sailed around the world (1577–80), fighting the Spanish wherever they could be found, but also relieved the Spanish of their gold and silver in Panama and Peru, laid stake to Nova Albion (California, setting the western boundary of what became the “manifest destiny” of America's continental empire), commanded ships against the Spanish Armada, and eventually met his death of dysentery in 1596 off the Spanish Main, with Spanish ships in his sight.

Sir Walter Raleigh, another worthy pirate, tried to establish settlements that would provide England with gold and silver mines to rival Spain's. He tried twice (1585 and 1587) to found a colony at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, but failed. The second failure left the mystery of “the lost colony”—Roanoke abandoned, the only clue being the word CROATAN carved into a tree.

North Carolina's shores don't seem so forbidding to us, but in the sixteenth century they seemed rather more so. When Raleigh next attempted to found a colony, it was on the far wilder shores of Guiana, where he expected to find the lost golden city of El Dorado. His adventures met with ridicule back home and no permanent settlement in the jungle.

The colonies came when enterprising men like Raleigh gave way to enterprising companies, like the Virginia Company, which bankrolled the first lasting English settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. It was followed by the establishment of the Plymouth Bay Colony in 1620, in what is now Massachusetts. The settlers' motives were various: some were religious dissenters; most, however, were fortune-seekers. What they found, or developed, was humbler fare than the gold and silver raided from New Spain, but it made for a hard-working people. They cultivated tobacco and sugar. They trapped and traded for furs. They fished the rich coastlines or brought timber from the forests. Unlike the Spanish conquistadors, priests, and hidalgos, or the French Jesuits and voyageurs, the English settled the land with their families, staking out farms or establishing towns and shops.

The landowners who dominated trade in the sugar islands became very wealthy indeed, and there was an American aristocratic class that held enormous landed estates along the Atlantic seaboard, but the vast majority of British immigrants to the New World came as indentured servants. In some cases their condition was not much different from that of a slave, though with freedom promised after four to ten years of service. They were a varied lot: farmers attracted by cheap land, tradesmen looking for better prospects, the poor and idle swept off Britain's streets, felons and rebels sentenced to labor in the colonies, and, especially after 1700, the Scotch
⁴
and the Irish, who soon made up the majority of indentured servants.

Until the eighteenth century, most British immigrants came to the British Caribbean. It had a far higher mortality rate for Britons than the North American mainland, but also offered a greater prospect for riches—sugar plantations were the gold mines of the English colonies. The British colonized St. Kitts (1623), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua and Montserrat (1632), and the Bahamas (1646) and seized Jamaica from Spain (1655). Britain's empire continued to spread, including attempts to establish mainland plantations in Surinam (which eventually went to the Dutch), British Guiana (Guyana), and British Honduras (Belize). Britain's Caribbean possessions were pirate's lairs, sugar plantations, and rum distilleries; they were also battlegrounds, contested territory well into the eighteenth century; and in due course, they became the employers of slaves.

Slavery was not an original part of Britain's colonial system, but the colonists needed workers. The native Indians (those who survived European diseases) were considered unsuitable: shiftless, untrustworthy, and lacking the Protestant work ethic. European indentured servants died in astonishing numbers, victims of malaria, yellow fever, and other calamities. So the
colonists adopted the Spanish Caribbean custom of importing slaves from Africa.

Spain accepted slavery in its colonies even though the Catholic Church had abolished slavery in Europe during the Middle Ages;
⁵
the colonists pleaded necessity, though the Church was dubious. Outside of Christendom, the situation was different. Slavery had never disappeared in the Islamic world—indeed, between 1530 and 1780, roughly concurrent with the Atlantic slave trade, the Muslim Barbary pirates enslaved more than a million white Christian Europeans.
⁶
In Africa, slavery was a long-standing domestic industry, and European slavers tapped into it. The black slaves crossing the Atlantic were usually taken by African warriors and traded by native chiefs for a variety of goods. The slaves were then packed aboard ships where one in ten might die (more in the early years of the trade), eating into the profits, if not the consciences, of the slave traders. It was a dangerous and ugly business. The slave traders' crews suffered even higher mortality rates than the slaves, mostly from fevers contracted on the West Africa coast: “
Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, for few come out though many go in
,” went the famous rhyme.

The African slaves might have been judged hardier and better workers than the native Indians and European indentured servants (the Irish, needless to say, were regarded as particularly incorrigible), but in the Caribbean they too died young, and were often worked to death. Caribbean masters found they could not breed slaves fast enough to replace the loss, so the slave trade grew. Perhaps three million black slaves were brought to British possessions in the New World, and in some of them, especially in the Caribbean, they became the majority.

The British Empire banned the slave trade in 1807 (enforcing the ban with the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron) and prohibited slavery in nearly every part of the empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which established a process of gradual emancipation that liberated all slaves by 1840 and compensated their owners with cash payments that amounted to twenty million pounds. Nothing in Britain's involvement in slavery and the slave trade so became the Empire as its leaving of it.

The Caribbean dominated British strategic thinking, but it was in the Ohio Territory that, in the famous words of Horace Walpole, a “volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods . . . set the world on fire.”
⁷

The Seven Years' War extended from the Caribbean to Africa, from the North American continent (as the French and Indian War) to the Indian subcontinent, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Winston Churchill in his
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
calls it “The First World War,” and it all began with the action of a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant-colonel named George Washington.
⁸