White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (9 page)

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every building looking for anyone not in church. Those caught missing church three times faced execution. Special moral guards

– four per preacher – were to be appointed to spy and report on what went on at other times. Englishmen had probably experienced nothing like it since their ancestors were made serfs by their Norman conquerors five and a half centuries before.

Trading with the Native Americans was a capital crime, as was leaving the colony without permission or selling anything to visiting sailors. Pilfering a few potatoes could get you executed and so, in theory, could the plucking of a rose.

What man or woman shall rob any garden, public or private, being set to weed the same, or wilfully pluck up therein any root, herb, or flower . . . or gather up the grapes, or steal any ears of the corn growing . . . shall be punished with death.

Almost everything was to be communal. Meals were all to be eaten in refectories. There was no private ownership. All work was for the company. Overseers stood over you to ensure that no one was ‘negligent and idle’. Tools and implements, even your own, had to be handed in when a drum or whistle sounded to end the day. The one mitigating factor was that the official working day was considerably shorter than in England, perhaps because of the climate or to allow for military duties.

Not everyone had to labour. ‘The extraordinary men, divines, governors, ministers of state and justice, knights, gentlemen, physicians and such as be men of worth for special purposes’ were not required to work. As ever, England’s class system automatically transferred across the seas.

Dale enforced the laws to the hilt. Though a deeply pious man, he must have struck fear into friends as well as foes. On one occasion, he lost his temper with Christopher Newport, grasped the veteran captain by his beard and shouted that he would execute him. Newport’s mistake, it seems, was to have sounded too wildly positive about Virginia. George Percy was a witness to the exemplary punishments Dale handed out on the capture of half a dozen colonists who deserted after being ordered to help build 63

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a new fort. The fugitives had headed south in an attempt to reach Spanish-held territory 1,000 kilometres away in Florida. The High Marshal employed Native Americans to track down the fugitives and bring them back. Percy reported: ‘Some he appointed to be hanged, some burned, some to be broken upon wheels, others to be staked and some to be shot to death.’

Thieves faced a more protracted death. They were bound to trees and left there to suffer the attentions of a roaming bear or to starve. Similar treatment was meted out to anyone infringing the religious requirements. One blasphemer had a red-hot bodkin plunged through his tongue before he was chained to a tree and left to his fate. Another miscreant was similarly mutilated and then forced through a ‘guard of forty men’ to be butted by each one and then kicked out of the fort, no doubt to perish.

Dale was less than a year into his term in the colony when he took the momentous step of calling on the Crown to provide convict labour. In desperate need of settlers, Virginia’s hard man addressed the matter in his typically blunt way. In a personal letter to King James in August 1611, he vowed that if he could be furnished with 2,000 men by the following April he would overcome the Algonquin tribes and completely settle the colony within two years.

Recognising the impossibility of raising so many men so quickly, he urged the King to ‘banish hither all offenders condemned to die out of common gaols’ for the next three years. ‘It would be a ready way to furnish us with men and not always with the worst of men, either for birth, for spirit, or body.’ Dale added that this was how

‘the Spaniards do people the Indies’.20

Francis Bacon, the future Attorney General, led the opposition to the ‘scum’ of England being allowed to infect the colony. The views of this body of opinion had previously been summed up in one of the broadsides issued in 1609 during the company’s promotional campaign: ‘It would be a scandal and a peril to accept as settlers, idle and wicked persons . . . the weeds of their native country,’ the broadside warned. They ‘would act as poison in the body of a tender, feeble, and yet unformed colony’. What were needed were men who could show ‘a character for religion and considerate conduct in his relations with his neighbours’.21

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Others, not least in the Privy Council, were insistent that some way had to be found to dispose of convicts and the country’s

‘swarms’ of vagrants. They argued that famine and pestilence would only disappear from England if all the unwanted could be shipped abroad.

King James certainly took this line. He was a timid man, who wore specially padded doublets to protect against the assassin’s knife. After succeeding to the throne in March 1603, his first appearance in London coincided with a devastating outbreak of plague in the capital. As always, it struck first and worst in the Liberties and other slums where vagrants concentrated. The new monarch arrived to find the merchants and gentry of London escaping en masse to the countryside in search of safety. Their King immediately followed suit and fled the capital. He took with him the lesson that the poor had to go.

Sir Thomas Smythe was not one to argue with the King. A broadside dedicated to Smythe carried exactly the message James wanted to hear. It warned that unless somewhere far away was found for the swarms of the ‘lewd and idle’, more prisons would have to be built. One recurring proposal to rid the land of convicts was to exchange them with Christian galley slaves held by the Turkish or North African corsairs. Four convicts for one galley slave was the suggested exchange rate. Another proposal was to seek a remote unpopulated location somewhere far away where England’s felons could be dumped, provided with seeds to plant and left there to sink or swim. Sir Thomas Smythe led the search for a site and initially considered South Africa rather than America.

A letter written to Smythe in 1609 by one of his agents, Thomas Aldworth, put the case for a site at the Cape of Good Hope.

Aldworth had anchored in Table Bay while he was en route for India and liked what he saw. An earlier European visitor had carved a huge cross on the steep mountain overlooking the bay. The vegetation grew lushly on the narrow peninsula and the natives seemed friendly. Aldworth reported enthusiastically to Smythe that the Cape had ‘courteous and tractable folk’ and was just the place to send convicts. The area could take ‘one hundred English convicts a year’, he estimated.22

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Always cautious, Smythe decided to send just ten convicts to see how they fared. How and where he obtained them, we do not know. However, they included a highwayman called James Crosse, whose name we know because the company listed him as the men’s leader in the Cape. Crosse and the other nine were duly landed at Table Bay and presented with what Smythe’s men deemed sufficient for their survival: ‘half a peck of turnip seeds’, a few other seeds,

‘and a spade to dig the ground’.23 Unsurprisingly, the experiment was a failure.

Crosse and the other convicts had been left with no arms with which to protect themselves and they were terrified when they saw tribesmen from the local Khoi people in the distance. Maybe they had heard how Portuguese traders had once been massacred here after falling out with the Khoi. The convicts hid and managed to evade the natives. Somehow, they reached a rocky island just off Table Bay. It was a refuge that would one day be notorious as Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela and so many other fighters against apartheid were held three centuries later. Here, the ten Englishmen eked out a miserable existence, probably living on shellfish or the seals that basked on the shore. Eventually, a visiting ship took pity on them and took them off. Three of the convicts got back to England. Within hours they had become embroiled in a purse snatch and were arrested. They were later executed.

Smythe tried once more. He ordered another group of convicts to be sent to the Cape aboard one of his India-bound ships. When it reached Table Bay and anchored, the convicts begged the captain to hang them rather than leave them in Africa. He couldn’t oblige.

Following orders, they too were dumped on the shore. However, Lady Luck was with this group. Another passing ship took them off within a couple of days. Nearly two centuries would pass before England would again send convicts to the Cape.

The argument stirred up in 1611 by Sir Thomas Dale’s call for convicts simmered for the next four years. Meanwhile, out of sight over in America, far bloodier contests were taking place as the Virginia Company’s twin martinets, Sir Thomas Dale and Sir Thomas Gates, sent settlers out to build forts beyond the Chesapeake and deeper into Algonquin territory.

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This was the period of Pocahontas. The fairy-tale story of the bewitching Native American princess who saved English colonists from massacre, was kidnapped by one of them and fell in love with another gripped contemporaries just as it gripped later generations.

It also lent a welcome romance to the colonising process. The following, typically lyrical, description of Virginia in these years is from Mary Johnston’s
Pioneers of the Old South
: As the Company sent over more colonists, there began to show, up and down the James though at far intervals, cabins and clearings made by white men, set about with a stockade, and at the river edge a rude landing and a fastened boat. The restless search for mines of gold and silver now slackened.

Instead eyes turned for wealth to the kingdom of the plant and tree, and to fur trade and fisheries.24

The reality was bloody guerrilla warfare between white and red and between white and white. The Algonquin retreated before the superior firepower of the war parties dispatched by Dale and Gates. French settlements were also harried by the English. In 1613, Gates sent a 100-ton vessel called the
Treasurer
to the north to remove the French from Mount Desert Island. Its commander was Sam Argall, the man who had kidnapped Pocahontas. At Mount Desert Island, Captain Argall is said to have fired ‘the first shots in the 150 years’ war in America between France and England’.25 He looted and burnt the settlement and set half the surviving Frenchmen adrift in an open boat. The rest were taken to Jamestown, where their reception must have made them long to be adrift with their comrades. ‘As soon as Dale saw them he spoke of nothing but ropes and of gallows and of hanging “every one of them”.’

For the English behind the palisades along the James River, life continued to be grim. An unflattering but not necessarily wholly inaccurate picture of life in Jamestown was drawn by a Spaniard who was held prisoner there between 1613 and 1614. Don Diego de Molina had been captured after his ship was driven into Chesapeake Bay. He wrote a letter that was sewn into the sole of 67

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a shoe and somehow smuggled out to Madrid. Referring to the Virginia Company, he wrote:

The merchants have not been able to maintain this colony with as much liberality as was needed and so the people have suffered much want, living on miserable rations of oats or maize and dressing poorly . . . There is not a year when half do not die. Last year there were seven hundred people and not three hundred and fifty remain, because little food and much labour on public works kills them and, more than all, the discontent in which they live seeing themselves treated as slaves with cruelty.26

Recruitment and investment were not helped by a drip, drip, drip of complaints filtering back to England. Those who had pledged to invest now began to renege on their commitments. Gondomar, the Spanish minister, wrote to Philip III: ‘Here in London this colony Virginia is in such bad repute that not a human being can be found to go there in any way whatever.’27

What made the days still darker for the colony was the emergence of the Bermudas as a rival. In 1612, a royal charter authorised a settlement and a party of sixty settlers landed. In honour of Sir George Somers, who had been so memorably marooned on the archipelago, it was renamed the Somers Islands and, like Virginia, promoted as a paradise but with no Native Americans to combat and a healthy climate, to boot. The numbers of settlers tumbled in Virginia but soared in Bermuda. By 1614, there were 600 colonists there, nearly twice as many as in the senior colony. The discovery of a gigantic piece of amber on a beach seemed to confirm that the islands rather than the mainland were the future.

A rumour circulated that the company was to close down all operations in Virginia and relocate everyone to the new colony. Sir Thomas Dale was so concerned that he wrote a personal appeal to Sir Thomas Smythe. Typically it pulled no punches: Let me tell you all at home this one thing, and I pray remember it; if you give over this country and loose [
sic
]

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it, you, with your wisdoms, will leap such a gudgeon as our state hath not done the like since they lost the Kingdom of France . . . I protest to you, by the faith of an honest man, the more I range the country the more I admire it. I have seen the best countries in Europe; I protest to you, before the Living God, put them all together, this country will be equivalent unto them if it be inhabited with good people.28

Dale need not have worried. Smythe found the money to keep the Virginia Company going. He staved off one crisis by persuading the King to give him the go-ahead to do what the great Italian merchants in Venice and Genoa did and raise money by ‘lotto’, a lottery. It was the first lottery in fifty years and only the second in England’s history, netting a staggering £8,000, the equivalent of

£1 million today. But even that was not enough. In another crisis, Smythe asked investors to forgo their first dividend and accept the promise of a tract of forest somewhere in Virginia. Somehow, he persuaded them. Meanwhile, he was constantly going to court to pursue those who had reneged on investment pledges.