White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (8 page)

The next requirement was to reinstall a belief in the Virginia project in the public mind and raise money. The damage done by the stories of death and disaster filtering across the Atlantic can be gauged from a broadside published in rebuttal a few years later. It attacked the ‘malicious and looser sort . . . who wet their tongues with scornful taunts’ about the colony and asserted: ‘There is no common speech nor public name of anything this day (except it be the name of God) which is more wildly depraved, traduced and derided by such unhallowed lips than the name of Virginia.’11

The company launched a vigorous promotional campaign.

Clerics were commissioned to urge congregations to ‘go forward to assist this noble action’. All the merchants connected with the company went to work on their friends. The little printing shops huddled around St Paul’s churchyard were paid to pump out broadsides and circulars lauding Virginia as ‘an earthly paradise’, a ‘delicious land’ with ‘gentle natives’, and ‘one of the goodliest countries under the sun’.

Smythe played on the patriotism and self-interest of Jacobean England. A broadside dedicated to him read:

The eyes of all Europe are looking upon our endeavours to spread the Gospel among the heathen people of Virginia, to 56

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plant an English nation there, and to settle a trade in those parts, which may be peculiar to our nation, to the end we may thereby be secured from being eaten out of all profits of trade by our more industrious neighbours [the Dutch].12

It became a priority to attract skilled workers rather than another batch of gentlemen adventurers. Every person that ‘hath a trade or a body able to endure days labour’ was promised 100 acres of land at the end of seven years’ service. Smythe, who clearly had no problems mixing with the low as well as the high, had a letter circulated that invited ‘workmen of whatever craft . . . who have any occupation’ to meet him at his house in Philpot Street.

There, in his Cheapside mansion, the richest man in England was waiting to offer sawyers, tile makers, soap-ash men, pearl drillers, ploughmen, carpenters, blacksmiths and sturgeon dressers and all the other craftsmen and tradesmen, housing, food, clothes, a cash payment and land if they would sign up for the New World.

The net was cast wide. Glass makers and wine makers were recruited from France and potash workers from Poland. Ministers of religion were on the recruitment list, too. The company issued instructions for Native American children to be kidnapped so they could be made into good Protestants.

Whether Smythe followed Popham’s lead by recruiting from the gaols at this early stage is not known but efforts were made to persuade the City of London to subsidise the relocation of the surplus poor. Two of those promoting the Virginia Company, Robert Johnson and Robert Gray, put the case for relocation, using the arguments about an England drowning in vagrants. Johnson warned that unless the ‘swarms of idle persons’ were found foreign employment, they would ‘infect one another with vice and villainy worse than the plague itself’.13

The idea of an American solution to the problem of the poor appealed to the burghers of London. The very mention of the ragged masses who packed the tenements of Whitefriars, Aldgate and Southwark prompted shivers of distaste and apprehension. When the Virginia Company offered to transport one poor ‘inmate’ from the metropolis for every new share in the company purchased by 57

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the burghers, the Lord Mayor responded encouragingly. However, little appears to have come of this proposal. Nothing more would be heard of the idea of shipping out the adult poor for more than a decade.

When not interviewing colonists, Sir Thomas trod the cobblestones between the halls of the great livery companies.

He banked on their financial support, making an offer of either a cash dividend from the gold or other valuable commodities the Company was bound to amass, or a dividend in land. Either way, it would be payable after seven years. An investor buying a single

£12 10s share could look forward eventually to a return of at least 500 acres.

It was not an easy task to persuade his fellow merchants. The timing was appalling, for another venture was just being launched.

This was the Ulster plantation and the King let it be known that he regarded support for this Irish project as a patriotic obligation.

Smythe, therefore, had an uphill struggle. His own livery company, the Skinners, bought only £62 of shares. The Fishmongers’ offer was so paltry it ‘was scornfully refused’.14 All told, the livery companies invested only a quarter of what he expected. In the end, more than thirty companies and 650 individuals took Virginia’s

£12 10s shares but that brought in only £18,000. Smythe had hoped for £30,000.

Despite the problems, a fleet was assembled to relieve and resupply Jamestown. It represented one of the largest colonial expeditions so far mounted by a European power. Nine ships with 600 settlers, including a scattering of women, set sail from Plymouth in the early summer of 1609. It was led by Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers and would be known as the ‘Third Supply’. The new Governor of the colony, Lord De La Warr, was to follow on later.

Luck was not with them. Off the Azores, a hurricane scattered the fleet. The flagship
Sea Venture
, carrying Somers, Gates and another 150 passengers, was blown hundreds of miles off course.

The storm was graphically described by one of the passengers, William Strachey. ‘The sea swelled above the clouds,’ said Strachey,

‘and gave battle unto Heaven.’ A huge wave enveloped the vessel 58

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‘like a garment or a vast cloud’. From almost every joint, the ship

‘spewed out her okam’ so that water rose swiftly in the hold. Terror

‘turned the blood’ of even the bravest mariners.15

For three days, Somers was constantly at the helm, with everyone else bailing and plugging and throwing stores overboard to keep the
Sea Venture
afloat. The battered vessel eventually found herself in the Bermuda archipelago, dreaded by mariners as ‘the isles of devils’. Around these reefs, they said, you could hear the howling of the demons who lurked awaiting the sight of a sail to whip up a maelstrom. It was assumed that none caught in their seas could possibly survive. Against all odds, the
Sea Venture
stayed intact until Somers was able to beach her on one of the islands. She ended up in what we know today as Discovery Bay, Bermuda.

The island was uninhabited. But a previous shipwreck had marooned a number of hogs there. The pigs had multiplied enormously and were easy to hunt down. A diet of pork, grapefruit and wild berries kept the survivors going. But they did not confine themselves just to catching food to survive. Somers and Gates were determined men. Amongst the marooned were skilled carpenters and a shipwright. They were put to work to design and build a ship to take the party on their interrupted journey.

Using oak salvaged from the
Sea Venture
and cedar wood from the island, the survivors built not one but two pinnaces to carry them on to Virginia. The
Patience
and the
Deliverance
set sail forty-two weeks after the
Sea Venture
was wrecked. Their voyage took ten weeks.

When the news of their epic story reached London, it caused a sensation. During the time on the island, Gates and Somers had imposed a ruthless regime, executing a group of men who questioned their authority. That was ignored; instead, England celebrated what was seen as something truly miraculous. William Shakespeare immortalised the saga, drawing on it for his last great play,
The Tempest
. In Act I, Shakespeare has his magician king Prospero order up a storm so terrible that ‘not a soul but felt the fever of the mad’, only to relent after the intercession of his daughter Miranda and tell her:

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Wipe thou thine eyes, have comfort

The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch’d The very virtue of compassion in thee,

I have with such provision in mine art

So safely ordered, that there is no soul –

No, not so much perdition as an hair

Betid to any creature in the vessel

Which thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink.

No doubt some of the leading lights in the Virginia Company watched the first performance of
The Tempest
on Hallowmass night in November 1611, in the presence of the King. Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, was a founder member of the Virginia Company and Shakespeare himself was an investor. Were the Earl and his friend Sir Thomas Smythe among the courtiers applauding on that first night in the Palace of Whitehall?

In Jamestown, there was nothing to applaud. When Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers and the other survivors of the
Sea Venture
finally made the Jamestown settlement in 1610, they found that the colony marketed as an earthly paradise by Sir Thomas Smythe was more akin to hell. The ships of the Third Supply were supposed to have brought relief, with adequate supplies and reinforcements. Six of the vessels, though battered by the hurricane, did make port at Jamestown. But they had few supplies and didn’t stay long. Four left inside a month, taking with them the only man who had shown real ability as a leader, John Smith.

As food supplies again ran out in Jamestown, the ‘starving time’

had set in. Just how bad it was will always be unclear. A rush of self-serving and contradictory reports muddied the waters then and for ever. What is certain is that when the survivors of the
Sea Venture
finally arrived at Jamestown from Bermuda, they found a ghost town. Behind the palisades there were broken-down dwellings, a ruined church and filthy, rubble-strewn streets. Sir Thomas Gates, the senior commander, decided that it was pointless to start again and decided to abandon the settlement, taking the remaining colonists, numbering between forty and sixty. Gates was preparing 60

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to make for Newfoundland when De La Warr appeared with a relief fleet and turned him back.

The new Governor no doubt heard many explanations as to what had happened to the settlers. One eyewitness account was from George Percy, the last president of the colonial council, who later wrote up his recollections. He had seen near-constant fighting with the Native Americans, who made it impossible to stray much beyond the palisades, and then mass starvation set in, the prelude to a grim descent into cannibalism. After supplies of fish and corn ran out, ‘horses and other beasts’ were eaten by colonists. Next they caught ‘vermin . . . dogs and cats and rats and mice’, then they ate ‘boots, shoes or any other leather’. There were frantic forays into the woods, which netted a few snakes and some ‘wild and unknown roots’. Finally, they dug up corpses. ‘Famine began to look so ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to preserve life,’ Percy recalled. One man murdered his wife and

‘chopped her in pieces and salted her for his food’.16 The man was discovered with her partly eaten corpse and, on Percy’s orders, hung up by his thumbs till he confessed and then was executed.

The colonists themselves were blamed for their troubles and blamed each other. Stories of theft, murder and mutiny emerged and of astonishing lassitude and torpor. Too many of the settlers were ‘drunken, gluttonous loiterers’. Too many were ‘of the vulgar and viler sort who went thither for ease and idleness, profit and pleasure and found contrawise . . . that they must labour or not eat’.17

Before the Governor could do anything much to put the colony to rights, he himself apparently became a victim of Jamestown. Six months after landing, he reportedly collapsed. What was wrong with him was never satisfactorily explained. The suspicion lingers that it might have been as much the daunting task he faced in rescuing the colony rather than the bite of an insect that disabled him. Whatever the truth, he ordered a ship to take him away from the Chesapeake to the healthier climes of the Caribbean. From there, he eventually went back to England. In an age when people firmly believed in auguries, this was not a good one.

His Lordship was never officially replaced as Governor. In his 61

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place, Sir Thomas Dale, followed by Sir Thomas Gates, then Sir Thomas Dale again, served as acting Governor. They would be credited with rescuing the colony and setting it on the path to prosperity. The most indelible mark was left by Dale. The High Marshal has been described as ‘a sturdy watch-dog tearing and rending with a cruelty equal to his zeal every offender against the common-weal’.18 He began to acquire that reputation from day one. On arrival in Jamestown after Lord De La Warr’s departure, he announced a new legal code for the colony, of which the Taliban would have approved.

The ‘Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial’ were most probably drawn up by De La Warr, Gates and Dale in consultation with Smythe. They would become known as Dale’s Code because it was he who implemented them.19 They were based on a code designed by a Dutch prince to keep his troops in order and required unquestioning obedience in everything:

No manner of Person whatsoever, contrary to the word of God . . . shall detract, slander, calumniate, murmur, mutiny, resist, disobey, or neglect the commandments, either of the Lord Governor, and Captain General, the Lieutenant General, the Martial, the Council, or any authorised Captain, Commander or public Officer upon pain for the first time so offending to be whipped thirty times, and upon his knees to acknowledge his offence, asking forgiveness upon the Sabbath day in the assembly of the congregation, and for the second time so offending to be condemned to the Galley for three years: and for the third time so offending to be punished with death.

Even ‘intemperate railings’ against authority was a capital offence carrying the same punishment as murder or sodomy.

Along with murder, sodomy, rape and lese-majesty, the code made blasphemy and irregular attendance at church capital crimes. Everyone had to attend church twice a day. On Sundays, a bell sounded half an hour before the first service. The gates of Jamestown were barred and guarded while search parties went into 62