White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (10 page)

It was now seven years since the first batch of settlers had been brought by Christopher Newport, which meant that survivors were no longer tied to the company. They could go home or stay on as tenants. Of those who stayed, a favoured group, whom Dale referred to as farmers, were allotted a three-acre ‘garden’ apiece, or twelve acres if they had families, and allowed to cultivate it as they pleased. But the company wanted a rental of two and a half barrels of corn an acre, plus thirty days’ ‘public service’ every year.

The conditions imposed on a second larger group of stayers, the

‘labourers’, were even more onerous. In any year, they would have to work for the company for eleven months, leaving just one month in which to raise corn to feed themselves.

This was a far cry from what had been promised seven years earlier but it was a start. Private ownership of land would begin to spread rapidly. Ralph Hamor, Dale’s secretary, caught the importance of the change in a memorable comment once taught to every American child:

69

WHITE CARGO

When our people were fed out of the common store and laboured jointly together, glad was he who could slip from his labour, or slumber over his task he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true pains in a week, as now they themselves will do in a day.29

This dawning of private enterprise coincided with the discovery that a tobacco agreeable to the English palate could be cultivated in Virginia. In 1613, the planter John Rolfe, who later married Pocahontas, produced the colony’s first commercial crop of ‘tall tobacco’ and it was shipped to England the following year. Gold hadn’t been discovered but here was a cash crop that would prove as valuable as the mines that the settlers had dreamt of. But cultivating it would need masses of labour and would be so arduous that few could bear it for long – the manpower wastage would be enormous.

In London, the variety produced by Rolfe was an instant success.

Very quickly other planters followed Rolfe’s lead. But Virginia’s grim reputation kept immigration low. A new initiative was needed.

In 1614, the Virginia Company lawyer Sir Richard Martin outraged MPs when he was allowed to address the House of Commons on behalf of the company and roared at them to stop wasting time on trivial matters and concentrate on saving Virginia. Martin demanded they set up a committee to consider how to populate the colony. England had lost one chance of an American empire when Henry VII turned down a request for backing from Christopher Columbus. But when Martin urged them not to lose this second chance, he was forced to come back the next day to apologise.

Early in 1615, the Privy Council finally reached a decision on convicts. Francis Bacon’s faction lost: convicts would be transported to the New World. In presenting the decision, the Privy Council trod carefully. It is difficult to picture the rich, hard-nosed advisers of James I being overly concerned about the rights of vagabonds and felons. But this was a period that was especially suspicious of arbitrary acts by the Crown against individuals. There was no law enabling the Crown to exile anyone, including the basest 70

THE MERCHANT PRINCE

convict, into forced labour. According to legal scholars, the Magna Carta itself protected even them. The Privy Councillors therefore dressed up what was to befall the convicts and presented the decree authorising their transportation as an act of royal mercy. The convicts were to be reprieved from death in exchange for accepting transportation.

The Privy Council’s decree read:

Whereas it hath pleased his Majesty out of his singular clemency and mercy to take into his princely consideration the wretched estate of divers of his subjects who by the laws of the realm, are adjudged to die for sundry offences, though heinous of themselves not of the highest nature, so His Majesty, both out of his gracious clemency, as also for divers weighty considerations, could wish they might be rather corrected than destroyed and that in their punishments some of them might live and yield a profitable service to the commonwealth in parts abroad where it shall be found fit to employ them.30

To the extent that it is better to live than die, it was an act of mercy in some degree to send convicts to the colony rather than to the scaffold. Perhaps the ‘scum’ would prove useful members of the colonial community and one day even earn their freedom in Virginia. But that was not the underlying intention. Four years later, in 1619, the Privy Council made the intention clear. It ordered that convicts sent to ‘parts abroad’ were to be ‘constrained to toil in such heavy and painful works as such servitude shall be a greater terror than death itself’.

To some, transportation did appear from the start to be worse than death. The Spanish Ambassador to London reported home that two prisoners destined for transportation to Virginia had – like the convicts left on an African beach – pleaded to be executed instead.

Immediately after the Privy Council’s decision, seventeen convicts were assigned to Smythe, followed by a batch of five, then a group of six. It seems that Smythe was allowed to cherry-pick 71

WHITE CARGO

from the condemned and select those he thought would be most useful. One man was saved from death on account of being ‘of the mystery of the carpenters’.

King James had rather different ideas about selection. In the early years of his reign, he built a palace near the village of Newmarket in East Anglia, seventy miles away from London, which he hated. It was the King’s favourite bolt-hole. ‘Away to Newmarket, away to Newmarket!’ was the signal for extravaganzas of drunken feasting, masques, jousting and horse racing. At Newmarket, James paraded his homosexuality for all to see, as he indulged and openly fondled Robert Carr, George Villiers and other male lovers. Anyone disrupting the prolonged roistering invited an outburst of royal fury.

Sometime in 1617, rowdy youths began to make nuisances of themselves at the court. Various explanations have been offered as to the nature of these youths, among them being that they were young jobless men who made a practice of trailing round after the royal retinue, or that they were simply hoodlums or felons, or that they were the bastard sons of royal courtiers. Whatever they were, their crime is not recorded. Perhaps they specialised in baiting some of the ruffed and perfumed young men at court who hoped to catch the King’s fancy? Whatever it was, something prompted James to explode and he had the youths arrested.

In January 1618, Sir Thomas Smythe received a letter from the King saying that 100 youths were being dispatched to him to dispose of in Virginia ‘at the first opportunity’. They were described variously as ‘dissolute’ or convicts, though there is no record of their having been tried in any court of law. The King instructed Smythe to ‘Take sure order that they be set to work’ in the colony.

There were, however, no Virginia Company ships available in London or Bristol or Plymouth. And for all Thomas Smythe’s worldwide trading interests, he had no vessels to spare either, or pretended he did not. But the King would brook no excuses.

Robert Cecil’s successor as Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert, summoned Smythe to Whitehall and banged the table. ‘The King’s desire admitted no delay,’ he was told. Reluctantly, Smythe and his 72

THE MERCHANT PRINCE

fellow merchants in the Virginia Company put aside £1,000 to pay for the miscreants to be held in a London gaol until transportation was arranged. Smythe feared that once they were at sea, the prisoners would break free and take over the ship. As we shall see, when convicts became a major business, with up to 200 shipped at a time, that is what happened again and again.

It was decided that the prisoners should be split into smaller, easily managed groups. At least four vessels were needed. While the company vacillated over their unwanted prisoners, three of the wealthiest stockholders saw an opportunity. The Earl of Warwick, Sir Edwin Sandys and John Ferrar had all acquired land in Virginia’s sister colony, the Somers Islands. It appears they took advantage of the Newmarket affair to secure forced labour to work their plantations. The Virginia Company’s minutes record the three applying for some of ‘the dissolute [to be] sent to the Somers Islands . . . to be servants upon their land’. Their fellow stockholders agreed.

We do not know if all hundred convicts finally went but, given King James’s determination to make an example of them, we can assume that they were dispatched to one or other colony, or perhaps to both, probably never to return. The door was opening for the transportation of Britain’s unwanted to America. The first to come flooding through were street children.

73

CHAPTER FOUR

CHILDREN OF THE CITY

A visitor to London in the early 1600s looking south from St Paul’s Cathedral would have seen a Renaissance palace on the near bank of the river Thames. It stood where Blackfriars Bridge is today, deep red in colour, bordered on the west by the rambling courts of the Temple and on the east by the Fleet ditch gushing the filth of London into the Thames. The onlooker would have noted the three vast courtyards, the sweep of long galleries enclosing them, the terrace facing over the river and the guards on the huge heavy gates.

This was Bridewell, the palace built nearly a century earlier by the young Henry VIII to house visiting rulers and ambassadors and sometimes the King himself. It was here at Bridewell that the Papal envoy stayed during the futile negotiations over Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and here that Catherine learned that she was being replaced as Queen by Anne Boleyn. It was here that the greatest foreign monarch ever entertained in England, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was invited to lodge.

But by 1618 it was utterly changed. The boy king Edward VI had donated Bridewell to the City of London as a hospital and it subsequently transmogrified into an infamous house of correction.

‘Strumpets, night-walkers, pick-pockets, vagrant and idle persons’

were brought here for exemplary punishment – a whipping and then a year or two in the prison workshop picking oakum or beating 75

WHITE CARGO

hemp.1 Innocent and guilty, hundreds at a time were packed in to undergo the Jacobean equivalent of tough love.

Bridewell was the chosen holding pen when Thomas Smythe, his assistant Sir Edwin Sandys and the Lord Mayor of London agreed a plan to sweep London clear of street children and ship them to the colonies in the New World. It would later hold many others also destined for the colonies.

The round-ups began on 8 August when constables seized three boys and a girl and lodged them in Bridewell. They were told that they had been judged ‘vagrants’ and by court order were being

‘held for Virginia’. Over the next six months, another 108 boys and twenty-eight girls, aged between eight and sixteen years old, were brought in to join them.2 The following February, they were lined up in Bridewell so that representatives from the Virginia Company could take their pick and the shipments began. The first 100

children arrived in America around Easter time 1619, four months before the arrival of a shipment of black slaves that has attracted more attention than any other and which will be examined at the end of this chapter. Another 100 followed, then another shipment and another. Most of the children would die before they reached adulthood.

The idea of transporting vagrant children had been floated in the early days of Virginia when the company first came under pressure to provide a faraway dump for the unwanted. Hugh Lee, the English Consul in Lisbon, mooted it in 1609 in a letter to Thomas Wilson, secretary to the King’s chief minister, Robert Cecil. Lee’s reports usually concerned the suspected plotting of English Catholic refugees in Portugal. Child labour was a novel theme. Lee had been watching a fleet of carracks manoeuvre into the Tagus estuary one morning when he realised that they were packed with children. He started asking questions and discovered that boys and girls as young as ten were being transported to the East Indies to work on the plantations. The theory was that young bodies would acclimatise better than adult bodies to the searing heat of the tropics.

Considerable numbers were being shipped out: 1,500 on board the five carracks that had attracted Lee’s attention. In his report 76

CHILDREN OF THE CITY

to London, the Consul suggested that England take a leaf from the Portuguese book and try child labour in its own colony: ‘It were no evil course to be followed in England for the planting of inhabitants in Virginia,’ he told Wilson.3

In the event, the Portuguese stopped shipping children to the east because their outposts there fell to the all-conquering fleets of the Dutch. However, the idea was not forgotten in England.

After 1615, when the door was opened for convict transportation, English eyes turned to street children and the possibility of getting rid of them, especially from overcrowded, plague-ridden, crime-ridden, booming London.

Street children were not, of course, unique to London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Venetians bewailed the

‘enormous increase in the number of child rogues and beggars who wander around the squares of San Marco and the Rialto’, while the Swedes were so concerned about child thieves that several hundred children were interned in Stockholm during Queen Christina’s coronation. Frenchmen complained in Lyons about the noise of

‘the great number of children crying and hooting with hunger day and night through the town’. They were ‘making a marvellous racket’ in the churches.4

Londoners would have heard the same sounds and seen similar scenes and on a larger scale. The city was teeming with homeless urchins and teenage runaways. A petition asking for action over them referred to the ‘great number of vagrant boys and girls [who]

lie in the streets . . . having no place of abode nor friends to relieve them’.5 There is no knowing exactly how many street children there were. But in a city of 200,000 they must have totalled many, many thousands. Most of them would have survived hand to mouth through petty theft, begging and selling their bodies. One imagines them ragged, half-starved and impudent, lineal ancestors of the cockney urchins Dickens depicted two centuries later.