The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (88 page)

The most immediately promising exploration of what is now the northeastern
United States was that of
Henry Hudson, an Englishman whom the VOC contracted to search for a
Northeast Passage to the Orient in 1609. An amendment to his contract enjoined Hudson “
To think of discovering no other route or passage, except the route around the north or northeast, above Nova Zembla.” But two weeks after entering the
Barents Sea—named for
Willem Barentsz, a Dutch explorer who had sailed there in search of a Northeast Passage in the 1590s—in May 1609, Hudson put about and sailed west across the Atlantic. After coasting between Maine and the Chesapeake, he entered New York Harbor and sailed 125 miles up the river that bears his name to what is now
Albany. En route back to the Netherlands, Hudson landed at Dartmouth, England, leading some to speculate that he was in English pay. (His next and last expedition, in search of a North
west
Passage, was in an English ship. After a bitter winter in
Hudson Bay, his rebellious crew set him and eight shipmates adrift in the ship’s boat; they were never seen again.) Reports of Hudson’s voyage spurred the Dutch to establish trading posts along the Hudson at Albany (1614) and on
Manhattan Island, which became the colony of Nieuw Amsterdam (1624).

The English never lost interest in northern Virginia, as they called it, especially after
John Smith published
A Description of New England
(1614) to entice prospective settlers. “
And of all the foure parts of the world that I haue yet seene not inhabited,” wrote the veteran of European wars, Mediterranean trade, enslavement in
Turkey, and Jamestown, “could I have but meanes to transport a Colonie, I would rather liue here then any where.” This was one of several English works extolling the virtues of transatlantic settlement and it became a key reference for the Separatists, or Pilgrims, New England’s first permanent English colonists, who settled on
Massachusetts Bay at Plymouth. The Pilgrims’ lone ship, the
Mayflower,
sailed from Plymouth, England, with 102 men, women, and children on a passage that was uneventful by the standards of the time. In almost ten weeks at sea, a child was born and only one of their number died. But once ashore they were inadequately prepared for the brutal winter, which killed half of them. Their prospects would have been worse were it not for the intervention of
Tisquantum (or Squanto), whose résumé offers a New World perspective on the intensifying transatlantic links of the early seventeenth century. Captured by English explorers in 1614, Tisquantum was taken to Spain from which he escaped to England. He sailed on a voyage to Newfoundland and in 1619 made his way back to
Cape Cod,
only to find that disease had wiped out his village. This was a northern version of the pathogenic ravages that afflicted the native populations of Spanish America, and it created a wilderness along the coast that English colonists eagerly exploited. Tisquantum was kept under guard by the leader of a neighboring tribe who sent him to live with the Pilgrims because he spoke English. Even with his help, a decade on the Plymouth Colony had only about three hundred inhabitants.

Privation and hardships notwithstanding, the early North American settlements attracted immigrants from England, France, the
Netherlands, and Sweden. Puritan Boston was founded in 1629, and twenty-three thousand people reached New England before the
English Civil War (1642–46) ended the first wave of settlement. Although this is referred to as the
Great Migration, over the course of the century New England attracted fewer immigrants than the Chesapeake and vastly more people migrated to the Caribbean islands than to all of mainland North America. Yet New England’s population grew steadily thanks to natural increase and an
astonishing safety record. In the 1630s, none of the 198 ships that made the ten-and-a-half-week crossing was lost at sea. The
Puritans attributed their good fortune to divine providence, but it probably owed more to a sense of shared purpose and deliberate organization, and the relatively low incidence of the sorts of disease that plagued the majority of transatlantic immigrants afloat and ashore, especially in the tropics. New England colonists tended to travel as families, shared strong religious bonds, and worked for themselves rather than as indentured servants for exploitive masters.

The founders of Massachusetts sought to create a Calvinist sanctuary for landed gentry and their servants, but New England’s rocky soil forced them to take to the sea as fishermen and traders. The disruptions caused by the English Civil War “
set our people on work to provide fish, clapboards, plank, etc., and to sow hemp and flax … and to look out to the
West Indies for a trade,” exporting wood and fish to the Caribbean sugar plantations. Bostonians captured a considerable share of the intercolonial and transatlantic trades. To England itself, North America supplied naval stores and shipbuilding timber. Although wood was plentiful in England, the
cost of transporting it to the coast was prohibitive, and England’s access to naval stores from the Baltic was at the mercy of European politics. A late-sixteenth-century treatise “
containing important inducements” for settlement in North America stressed that “It may also be a matter of great consequence for the good and securitie of England; that out of these Northerly regions we shall be able to furnish this realme of all manner of prouisions for our nauies; namely, Pitch, Rosen, Cables, Ropes, Masts and such like.” A cargo of masts reached England in the 1630s, but the trade got its real start during the First Anglo-Dutch War, when the Danes, who were allied with the Dutch, closed the Baltic to English shipping.

The importance of New England masts, the tallest of which measured thirty-five meters, has been likened to that of oil today, an apt comparison as is suggested in the relieved diary entry of naval administrator
Samuel Pepys during the Second Anglo-Dutch War:

New England was not the only source of naval stores, but for most of the seventeenth century, southern
oak,
pine, pitch, and tar
from the Carolinas were invariably carried by New Englanders.

New merchant centers arose after the Restoration. Located at the junction of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers,
Charleston,
South Carolina, was established in 1670 and attracted settlers from the northern colonies as well as Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, and, especially during the 1680s, French
Huguenots fleeing the persecution unleashed by
Louis XIV. Shortly thereafter, the Carolinas became a
place of refuge for Caribbean pirates and buccaneers whom the great powers had run out of the Caribbean. Charleston was the most important city in British North America south of
Philadelphia, which
William Penn (whose father had taken Jamaica) founded in 1691 on a spit of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The
Quaker proprietor of
Pennsylvania welcomed the thousand
Scandinavian and Dutch immigrants who had settled around the mouth of the
Delaware River over the previous forty years, as well as German
Mennonites and other immigrants. Within five years the population of Pennsylvania stood at five thousand.
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Though its merchant fleet was somewhat smaller than those of either Boston or New York, Philadelphia rivaled—if it did not exceed—those cities thanks to its promise of religious tolerance, its agricultural productivity and manufacturing, and its more central location on the
colonial seaboard.

The lack of more hands-on involvement in the Americas by European governments was not entirely due to apathy about the fate of their colonies. They lacked the wherewithal to exercise their will across the ocean. In spite of
careful attention to the minutiae of administration and vast expenditures on ships, weaponry, and ports, European navies rarely operated far from home, and almost never beyond European waters; until the eighteenth century, most battles were identified by a coastal place name, within a day’s sail of where the engagement took place. The exceptions were the Spanish, whose ships escorted the treasure fleets to and from the Americas, and the Portuguese, who maintained units in Brazilian and Asian waters. Armed merchantmen of the Dutch East India and West India Companies also sailed overseas, but these were not naval squadrons operating on state business. More than half a century of warfare among the maritime states of Atlantic Europe had forced them all to adopt more sophisticated approaches to naval affairs, but long-distance operations were few.

For the first two decades of the seventeenth century, there was little for navies to do. Spain concluded a peace with England’s James I in 1604 and hammered out a truce with the Dutch five years later. This period of relative peace was interrupted by the
Thirty Years’ War, which began as a contest between the
Holy Roman Emperor and the Protestant king of Bohemia in 1618, and three years later by the renewal of hostilities between Spain and the Dutch Republic. The resumption of war signaled the start of a European naval competition that would continue almost unchecked in peace and war into the twentieth century. Although the Thirty Years’ War and the Dutch rebellion were distinct conflicts, Philip IV’s chief minister,
Count-Duke Olivares, sought to link them, chiefly to wrest Spain’s Baltic trade back from the Dutch. Maintaining access to the region’s naval stores and grain was crucial to the Spanish war effort generally, while usurping the trade was intended to deny its profits to the Dutch.

In Olivares’s calculation, a united front of Habsburg Spain and Austria, and
Poland-Lithuania (an enemy of
Sweden, which backed the Dutch), would envelop France, which though Catholic had allied with the Dutch Republic. Olivares was encouraged by the success of Spain’s
armada of Flanders, which in 1621 included a dozen
frigates stationed at
Dunkirk and could call upon privateers who preyed on French, Dutch, and English shipping. Developed by shipwrights in the
Spanish Netherlands, these frigates were relatively small and fast three-masted warships ideally suited to commerce raiding, convoy protection, and scouting. The Spanish navy achieved an impressive record in the first half of the decade and in 1625 Philip IV wrote the governor of the Spanish Netherlands “
from now on the land-war will be reduced to the purely defensive.… In Mardyck [by Dunkirk], we will build up a fleet of fifty warships.” This proved impossible, but royal frigates and privateers sank scores of Dutch fishing vessels and their escorts as far afield as the Shetlands and
Iceland. On the administrative side, in 1623 the Spanish created the
Admiralty of the North to control trade between
Spain and Flanders; forced neutral ships into Dunkirk to be inspected for contraband; and imposed a host of
sweeping protectionist measures, including charging duties of 40 percent on French trade with Spain. (Spaniards trading in France paid 2.5 percent.) In the end, however, Olivares had to abandon his Baltic ambitions to focus on hostilities with France and the fallout from
Piet Heyn’s capture of the silver fleet in Cuba.

Olivares’s French counterpart and rival,
Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to
Louis XIII, was likewise concerned about Dutch and English dominance of the French carrying trades, as well as Muslim and Christian
corsairs in the Mediterranean, Spain’s great and growing naval ambition, and the naval threat posed by the Huguenot rebels of
La Rochelle, one of the country’s most flourishing ports. These problems came to the fore with the renewal of hostilities between Spain and the Netherlands—which threatened French commerce even as it offered French merchants the opportunity to capitalize on the Spanish embargo on Dutch shipping—and the threat of a naval war with the
Huguenots and England. In 1621, the Huguenots established their own admiralty and over the next four years attacked a number of French ports. Hoping to diminish English support for the Huguenots, Louis XIII arranged the marriage of his daughter
Henriette Marie to Charles I. Yet the English feared the prospect of a French naval revival, and despite the personal alliance of Stuarts and Bourbons they occupied the Ile de Ré off La Rochelle in 1627. The French repelled them and though they returned the following year, their appearance was inconsequential and
La Rochelle fell after a fourteen-month siege that effectively ended the French Wars of Religion.

Huguenot resistance was facilitated by the fact that although reforms had been under way since the sixteenth century,
France had no national navy. Rather, the
grand admiral of France had authority in Picardy and Normandy on the English Channel and Poitou and Saintonge on the
Bay of Biscay; but
Brittany,
Provence, and Guyenne each had its own navy and distinct approaches to maritime
law. This made it impossible for the French crown to raise revenues adequate for the creation of a state fleet or even to move fleets between provinces. A year before the siege of La Rochelle, Richelieu abolished the office of the grand admiral of France and called for the construction of a navy virtually from scratch: forty warships, thirty galleys, and ten
galleons, “
true citadels of the sea.” He also attempted to improve French seaports for the benefit of the navy, but his efforts were thwarted by nature, indifference, and outright opposition. Nonetheless, the navy was ready when France formally allied with the Dutch against Spain in 1635, and at the
battle of Guetaría in the Bay of Biscay the next year divested the Spanish of seventeen galleys and ships, and four thousand sailors.

Peter Pett and the
Sovereign of the Seas, by Sir Peter Lely, circa 1645–50. Pett holds a pair of dividers, symbols of his expertise as a ship designer and builder. At left is a stern view of his heavily decorated Sovereign of the Seas (1637). Like the Hellenistic super-galleys of antiquity, the Sovereign of the Seas was intended partly “to make appearance for display.” Such pretension is a nearly universal tendency. An early Chinese work recommended ships so large that they were unmanageable in bad weather—“But the fleet cannot fail to be furnished with such ships, in order that its overawing might may be perfected.” Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.