THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.*
THE work of the Spaniards in Southern and Central America was taken up by the English in the Northern Continent, with at first very much the same motives, and upon not dissimilar methods. Golden Cathay and Spicy Cipango were still the goal of the hardier navigators, who affronted the storms and fogs and rigorous climate of the Northern Atlantic under the conviction that the great continent before them was a vast archipelago, through which devious channels led to the lands of which Ser Marco Polo had given so glowing an account. More than a hundred years elapsed before the search after gold and spices was altogether abandoned, and emigrants, not adventurers, began to set their faces westwards, in the hope of founding new homes, not of acquiring fresh booty. Even Raleigh and his companions, together with the early colonists of Virginia, were tempted by visions of a Northern Eldorado, and dreamed of a life of easy indolence under clement skies in a land teeming with the precious metals. It was not until 1620 that a band of practical Englishmen sailed westwards, resolute and content to win their livelihood by the sweat of their brow in the exercise of the industries they had followed in the old home. Citing Burke's statement of the derivation of English rights in America "from the discovery of Sebastian Cabot, who first made the Northern Continent in 1497," the learned Vice-Preaident of the Manaohnsetta Histori- cal Society shows that it was John Cabot, the father, and not Sebastian, the son, who landed at Cape Breton, still British territory, within a decade of four centuries ago. Some Bristol look-out man, probably, was the first European to catch eight of continental America; and, so far as the mainland is con- • (L) Narrative and Critical History of America, 1500.1700. Edited by Justin Winsor, Librarian of Harvard University. Vols. III. and IV. London: Sampson Low.—(2.) The English in America.—The Puritan Colonies. By J. A. Doyle, LL, 2 vols. London: Longmans.
cerned, England has the priority in discovery over Spain, whose Admiral only saw South American land, not far from the month of the Orinoco, for the first time a year later—in August, 1498 —during his third voyage. John Cabot, who came from Venice to England in 1495, in May, 1497, sailed from Bristol, under a patent he had obtained from Henry VII. to discover lands North, East, and West, at his own charges, paying 20 per cent. of whatever profits might be made to the thrifty monarch. Eighteen persons accompanied him, chiefly Bristol mariners. Among them, probably, was his son Sebastian. His designs are referred to, and he himself is described as a sort of Columbus, in a letter recently brought to light, addressed by Ferdinand and Isabella to their agent in London, Puebla, who was to see that Spanish rights were not infringed. It was perhaps to avoid any collision with Spain that Cabot's patent was worded so as to authorise discovery East, West, and North only. He imagined Cape Breton to lie within the territories of the Great Cham, and thought, by following the coast, to arrive at Cipango, the supposed land of jewels and spices, for neither of which, it is needless to say, is Dai Nippon famous. On his return, he dressed in silk and dubbed himself the "Great Admiral." From Henry he received a present of £10, the entry of which sum "to him who found the New Isle," may still be seen in the Privy Purse Expenses account of that careful Tudor. In 1498, John Cabot again sailed westwards, this time with six ships and three hundred men. Sebastian no doubt accompanied him. No records of the voyage have been discovered, and with it John Cabot is absolutely lost to history. Sebastian afterwards entered the service of Spain, but even- tually returned to England, superintended the fitting-out of Willoughby's famous expedition, and died in London about 1557.
The literature of the first half of the sixteenth century hardly refers to North America. But in 1553, Eden's celebrated Treatyse of the Newe India appeared, translated from the fifth book of Sebastian Munster's Cosntographia. Other books of travel followed, and in 1582 Hakluyt published his Divers Voyages, dedicated to the author of Arcadia, in the preface of which he reproaches the English for not having "the grace to set fast footing in such fertile and temperate places as are left as yet unpossessed," a grace we can hardly be said to have failed of since. Of the voyages of the great English navigators of the latter part of the sixteenth century and the earlier decades of the seventeenth, a. full and interesting account, abundantly illustrated by excellent maps and portraits, will be found in Mr. Winsor's third volume. These men were before all discoverers, and not, like the successors of Columbus, mere booty-hunters ; hence the record of their exploits forma a far more attractive chapter of human history than that of the greedy and ruthless gold-seekers of the Southern Continent. In a previous instalment of his laborious work, Mr. Doyle has sufficiently traced the early history of the first English Colony ; and the story of the settlement of the old Dominion is told again, under Mr. Winsor's auspices, with every light the most recent research has been able to throw upon it. After many struggles, the Colony of Virginia entered upon a period of prosperity with the introduction of the cultivation of tobacco in 1616. In 1620, the Colony had a popula- tion of four thousand souls, and exported 40,000 lb. of tobacco. In 1648, the exportation had increased forty-fold, more than a million and a half pounds being exported in that year. Long before, tobacco had become the currency of the Colony ; and as early as 1621, we hear of women, imported as wives for the settlers, being paid for at the rate of 120 lb. to 140 lb. each. The extraordinary rapidity with which the use of tobacco spread throughout the world is shown by the fact that although the weed did not reach Europe before the middle of the sixteenth century, it was known in Japan in 1570; and the year of King James's Counterblast saw an edict against the use of the " smoke-grass " promulgated by the great Gongen Sama, Iyeyasu, in the remotest East, in the very land the attempt to reach which westwards had led to the discovery of America. While Virginia was preparing for a career of rapid prosperity, various expeditions were made and settlements attempted north of the Chesapeake River by English, French, and Dutch adventurers. Some degree of success attended the efforts of the French and Dutch, of which a full account is given in Mr. Winsor's fourth volume; but Englishmen were less fortunate. The fisheries established by the latter were, however, produc- tive of solid results, and served, besides, to keep the minds of
our ancestors fixed upon the Northern coast. The way was thus prepared for the two great events that are the real beginnings of American history,—the voyage of the May- flower,' and the foundation of the Massachusetts Company.
The latter event was by far the more important of the two, as Mr. Doyle's volumes, which now claim consideration, amply prove. These form, as we have said, a second instalment of the great work Mr. Doyle has undertaken, and both in style and accuracy show a marked advance upon his earlier volume dealing with the history of the Southern Colonies. Two more volumes will complete what promises to rank among the most valuable and important contributions to historical literature the present century has produced. Mr. Doyle's narrative
is always clear, and often interesting to an English reader; to an American, perhaps continuously so. The strife of Colonial
parties he judges with impartiality, and describes with a
minuteness bordering sometimes upon prolixity; but in his account of the intermittent struggle for a sort of quasi- independence maintained from the very outset by Massa- chusetts with the Mother-country, he displays a certain leaning to the weaker cause which is not exactly historical. In a certain sense, the title of the work, The English in America, is a misnomer. From the beginning, the Colonial settlers were dissociated from all interest in English politics. They hardly concerned themselves with the great events of English history during the seventeenth century. They acknowledged the sovereignty of the English monarch, but not that of the English State. At all events, during the con- tinuance of the first Massachusetts Charter, the Common- wealth denied utterly the supremacy of Parliament, which, on the other hand, Parliament itself seemed to regard as a matter of small importance. In 1646, the Assistants and Elders declared, through Winthrop, that "by our charter we have absolute power of government : for thereby we have power to make laws, to elect all sorts of magistracy, to correct, punish, pardon, govern, and rule the people absolutely." The assertion was true, but there can be no doubt that the original patent viewed the government of the Company as fixed in England, and so subordinate to English authority. Mr. Doyle thinks otherwise, upon the strength of a statement by Win- throp that such a condition was inserted in the draft of the patent, but was got rid of by the patentees. Of this state- ment, made many years after the grant of the charter to sup- port the contention of a party in the midst of a bitter political controversy—so bitter that the more powerful faction resorted to the argument of heavy fines by utterly illegal condemnations, to silence their opponents—there is not a shadow of corrobora- tive proof; and it is inconceivable that the Government of Charles I. should have made so complete a surrender of supremacy as was involved in the pretension upon which Win- throp based the Home-rule rights of Massachusetts. Never- theless, in 1646 the Colony, in reference to its claim of virtual independence, was assured by the English Commissioners for Plantations that the intention of Parliament was "to leave you with all that freedom and latitude that may in any respect be duly claimed by you." It must be observed, however, that the year 1646 was that of the triumph of the Independent party, in which the Colony was certain to find influential support ; while the whole sentence is controlled by the little word "duly," of which Mr. Doyle takes no notice. It is one thing to be justified in fact, another to be so technically. The contention of Massachusetts, viewed impartially, must be pro- nounced illegal, and, indeed, preposterous, upon any reasonable construction of the patent and charter; but what the Colony claimed was in substance just and necessary under the circumstances of the times.
Mr. Doyle adopts as the motto of his work, a sentence from Bagehot's Physics and Politics :—" The ages of monotony had their use, for they trained men for ages when they need not be monotonous." The quotation aptly, but perhaps somewhat dangerously, illustrates the nature of his
subject. In fact, it is the history of the United States that lends its main interest to the history of New England in the seventeenth century. A record of boundary squabbles and petty Indian wars, interspersed with the unpicturesque tyrannies of a sour and narrow-minded theologic oligarchy, can hardly of itself be considered attractive reading. Never- theless, a certain vein of greatness runs through these annals that entitles them to the designation of history. And from another point of view, the story of Massachusetts
under its first charter has a unique interest and value. The 'Mayflower' voyage was in very truth a pilgrimage, mainly a search by weary souls after a haven of religious rest. But it had little historical importance, and had it never taken place, the course of American history would hardly have been other than it has been. The expedition led by the English country gentleman, John Winthrop, in 1630, was of a very different character. It carried with it westwards a new England, as the Greek colonies, with which Mr. Doyle aptly compares the expedition, carried with them their IDI).37 raspic. It was the first definite attempt at colonisation made by the English race upon a scale and plan commensurate with its rank and dignity. It was neither a search after gold nor a flight from tyranny, nor the outcome of longings for a life of ease and indulgence, but a well-planned and deliberate scheme, aiming at the foundation of a self-governing State upon the principles of industry and order. "The founders of Massa- chusetts," writes Mr. Doyle, "were many of them rich men, furnished with ability, dwelling peaceably in their habitations." But it may be doubted whether Mr. Doyle is accurate in adding that they "forsook the good things of the world to win for themselves and for their children a home free from its corruptions." Under Charles I., many men found life irksome in many ways, and likely to become more so. It was to win happiness in their own way, and as they under- stood it, that nine hundred Englishmen set their faces west- wards in 1630. They were neither stoics nor visionaries, but plain, practical men, willing to face hardships under a strange sky, to attain comfort, and amass wealth. That they were Puritans was a historical accident, but an inseparable one.. The temperament that gave them the courage of the ad- venturer in worldly affairs could not, in that age, but give them the spirit of the Independent in religious matters. And this spirit, narrow as it was, was to them a source of strength, for it drew them together in a close union that carried the Commonwealth through difficulties it could hardly otherwise have surmounted, and has left its mark upon the polity under which fifty millions of men now dwell together in unexampled peace and amity. In these days, when politicians and populace vie with each other in depreciating England, it is well to remember that the grandest and most successful of human enterprises was planned, accomplished, and developed by Englishmen,—by Englishmen of the purest water, men. of the Midland shires, of the Southern and Western Saxon counties, of the great Anglian tract where the speech still recalls to the American traveller his New England home. The United States is practically the work of Massa- chusetts; and to this day, Massachusetts, in her people, polity, and culture, is essentially a Transatlantic evolution of seventeenth-century England, in the narrowest sense of the expression. The task of New England, like that of the Mother- country, became the task of evolving a democracy out of an oligarchy. They are the only human societies that have attempted such a work, for in the ancient world the very con- ception of a true democracy was impossible in the presence of slavery, which degraded labour, and in the absence of the means of education, which kept the masses, even of free men, in a. state of inarticulateness. But the task of New England, or at least of Massachusetts, though of the same genus with that of England, was specifically distinct, and, indeed, unique. The Colony had to get rid of a theologic polity which nevertheless. was as necessary a condition of her early existence as feudalism had been of the evolution of England. It was not a polity based so much upon doctrine as upon a fusion, or rather an identity, of Church and State, that rendered it more intolerant than the system from which its founders had sought relief in exile, the most exclusive, indeed, the world has seen since the age of the Maccabees. The change involved nothing less than a revolution ; but the revolution was slowly accom- plished, and was not complete at the birth of the United States.. The story is too crowded with petty incidents and too poor in dramatic elements to be a picturesque or exciting one; but to. the political student it is both interesting and—though within. somewhat narrow limits—instructive, especially that portion of it which is told in the present volumes, for by the close of the seventeenth century New England had already overcome most of her domestic difficulties, and the struggle with France in the eighteenth century rather belongs to European than to- Colonial history.
Mr. Doyle does not neglect the social side of his subject, and draws more than one lively picture of Colonial life and manners. We wish he could have told us something more about the kind of intercourse that must have existed between the Colonists and their cousins in the old home ; and, above all, we wish that he had printed the charters in full, and elucidated his narrative by more complete and accurate maps.
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