Beginnings of the American People Part 2

The silver mines of Mexico were not exploited until many years later, but the conquest gave an immense impetus to further exploration. It was the hope of rivaling the brilliant success of Cortez that inspired those fruitless expeditions through what is now the southern part of the United States. Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, sole survivors of Narvaez's ill-fated expedition to conquer an empire in Florida, wandered for many years over the country between the Mississippi and the Gulf of California. Picked up in 1536 by Spanish slavers, De Vaca's report of the vast country to the north induced Mendoza, the Governor of New Spain, to send out Friar Marcos from Mexico in 1539 to find the famous Seven Cities. The friar found no cities, but during the next three years the search was continued by Coronado, who penetrated as far north as the present State of Kansas. It was also in 1539 that De Soto, who had accompanied Pizarro in the conquest of the Incas cities, set out from Florida in search of another Peru. After three years of untold hardship he died of swamp fever in the region of the great river which he discovered and in which he lies buried. The only result of all these expeditions was to establish the claims of Spain to an immense territory; and it was not until 1565 that the Spaniards founded, at St.

Augustine in Florida, the first permanent European settlement north of the Gulf of Mexico.

"To the south, to the South," cried Peter Martyr, "for the riches of the Aequinoctiall they that seek riches must go, not into the cold and frozen north." It was a judgment justified in the event. Francisco Pizarro, having verified the report of rich kingdoms to the south, received in 1528 from the Emperor Charles V a commission to conquer the country of the Incas in Peru. With reckless daring equaled only by cunning treachery and unspeakable cruelty, the little band of adventurers that followed Pizarro made its way to the city of Cuzaco.

The Incas were more civilized than the Aztecs, their defense less resolute, their wealth more abounding. The ransom of Atahucellpa and the plunder of the capital, when melted down into ingots, measured nearly two million _pesos_ of gold. And to the south of the capital city were the inexhaustible silver deposits of the Andes. In 1545 the Government registered the mines of Potosi, the main source of the treasure which, flowing in ever-increasing volume into Spain, so profoundly influenced the history of Europe and America.

It is said of the Emperor Charles V that his eyes "sparkled with delight" when he gazed upon the vases and ornaments wrought in solid gold which Hernando Pizarro, returning from Peru in 1534 with the royal fifth of the first fruits of plunder, displayed before him. Yet the profit and the burden of the empire which Charles established in America fell mainly to his son, Philip II. And a great revenue was as essential to Philip as to Charles; for, although he did not succeed to the imperial t.i.tle, he aspired no less than his father to the mastery of Europe. Circ.u.mstances seemed not unfavorable. With the close of the Council of Trent in 1563, the policy of conciliation was at an end, the Jesuits were in the ascendant, and the forces of the Counter-Reformation were prepared to do battle with the heresies that disrupted Christendom.

In this death struggle the King of Spain was well suited to be the leader of Catholicism. Crafty in method and persistent in purpose, sincerely devout, unwavering in his loyalty to the true faith, never doubting that G.o.d in his wisdom had singled him out as the champion of the Church, Philip identified his will with truth and saw in the extension of Spanish power the only hope for a restoration of European unity and the preservation of Christian civilization. To set his house in order by extirpating heresy and crushing political opposition was but the prelude to the triumph of Church and State in Europe. Germany and France were rent by dissension and civil war. England was scarcely to be feared; without an effective army or navy, half Catholic still, governed by a frivolous and b.a.s.t.a.r.d queen whose t.i.tle to the throne was denied by half her subjects, the little island kingdom could by skillful diplomacy be restored to the true faith or by force of arms be added to the Empire of Spain.

For an ambition so inclusive, the American revenue was essential indeed.

And in the second half of the century it reached a substantial figure.

The yearly output of the mines rose to about eleven million _pesos_ per annum, and the amount which the king received for his share, between the years 1560 and 1600, was probably on an average not far from one and three quarters millions, while at the same time other sources of revenue from America became of considerable importance. It was a goodly sum for those days, but it was not enough for the king's needs. When Charles abdicated, the imperial treasury was indebted in the sum of ten millions sterling; and much of the bullion which was carried by the treasure fleets that plied regularly between Porto Bello and Cadiz was pledged to German or Genoese bankers before it arrived, while some of it found its way into the pockets of corrupt officials. What remained for the king, together with the last farthing that could be wrung from his Spanish and Italian subjects, was still inadequate, to his far-reaching designs; and Philip II, reputed the richest sovereign in Christendom, was often on the verge of bankruptcy.

It was a disconcerting fact, indeed, that although Spain and Portugal had divided the world between them, the thrifty Dutch seemed to reap the major profits of their discoveries. Within half a century Antwerp had risen to be the chief _entrepot_ and financial clearing-house of western Europe. English wool was marketed there, and there English loans were floated. There Portuguese spice cargoes, purchased while still at sea, were brought to be exchanged at high prices for the gold and silver that found its way into the hands of Spain's creditors in Germany, Italy, and France. A wealthy people were these Dutch subjects of Philip II; subjects, yet half free, escaping his control. It was intolerable that the Netherlands, infested with heresy, drawing their wealth from the enemies of Spain, and from Spain itself, should not contribute their share to the service of the empire.

To control the Netherlands and to divert the profits of Dutch trade into the Spanish treasury was thus an essential part of Philip's policy. When the Duke of Alva left for Brussels in 1567 he promised to make the Netherlands self-supporting and to extort from them an annual revenue of two million ducats. But the methods of Alva were destined to failure. He was a better master of war than of finance, and by ruining Dutch trade he killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The Southern Netherlands were finally conciliated by a more skillful policy than any known to Alva; but the city of Antwerp never recovered from the ruin which Philip's unpaid soldiers inflicted upon it in 1576, and when the war was over, the commercial and industrial activities which had made it prosperous were to be found in Amsterdam in the independent Netherlands, and in London across the Channel.

Yet if the Netherlands escaped the direct control of Philip, their wealth might be appropriated at its source. The Portuguese were still intrenched in the East, and Dutch prosperity was in no small part founded on privileges granted at Lisbon. Philip's opportunity came in 1580 when a disputed succession to the throne opened the way to intervention and the rapid conquest of Portugal. At a stroke the Portuguese dominions in Africa and the East Indies were added to Spain's American possessions. Throughout Europe Philip was thought to have played a winning card; for the most desired sources of the world's wealth were at the disposal of the Catholic king if he could but police the sea. But so complete a monopoly was not to be endured by his rivals; and France, Holland, and England, as a necessary prelude to their colonizing activities in the New World and in the Old, gathered their forces to dispute the maritime supremacy of Spain.

II

It was well understood that the power of Philip II depended upon his American treasure, and his treasure upon his control of the sea. "The Emperor can carry on war against me only by means of the riches which he draws from the West Indies," cried Francis I when Verrazano brought home some treasure taken from Spanish ships in Western waters. And Francis Bacon expressed the belief of the age when he wrote that "money is the princ.i.p.al part of the greatness of Spain; for by that they maintain their veteran army. But in this part, of all others, is most to be considered the ticklish and brittle state of the greatness of Spain.

Their greatness consisteth in their treasure, their treasure in the Indies, and their Indies (if it be well weighed) are indeed but an accession to such as are masters of the sea."

It was not for France to contest the maritime supremacy of Spain in the sixteenth century. The wars of Francis I and Charles V bred a swarm of corsairs who hara.s.sed Spanish trade and penetrated even to the West Indies; but before 1559 the resources of the French Government were mainly devoted to resisting the Hapsburgs in Europe, and after 1563 the country was distracted by civil war. The Mediterranean proved, indeed, an attractive field for French commercial expansion. The common enmity of French and Turk toward the Hapsburg found expression in the commercial treaty of 1536 between Solyman and Francis I, and in the following half-century the "political and commercial influence of France became predominant in the Moslem states." But in Western waters the activity of France was slight. Without the naval strength to resist Spain, she could not afford to offend Portugal, who was her effective ally. Francis I interdicted expeditions to Brazil because the Portuguese King protested, and Coligny's Huguenot colony in Florida was destroyed by the Spaniard Menendez in 1565. Breton fishermen plied their trade off the Grand Banks; but in this century the only French expedition having permanent results for colonization was undertaken in 1534 and 1535 by Jacques Cartier, who sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and in the name of Francis I took possession of the country which was to be known as New France.

The Dutch did yeoman service against the navy of Philip during the war of independence, but the task of breaking the maritime power of Spain fell mainly to England in the age of Elizabeth. Cabot's notable voyage was without immediate result. Neither the frugal Henry VII, who gave "10 to him that found the new isle," nor his extravagant son, who was engaged in separating England from Rome and in enriching the treasury with the spoils of the monasteries, coveted the colonies of Spain or greatly feared her power in Europe. But Elizabeth, seated on the throne by precarious tenure, confronted at home and abroad by the rising fanaticism of the Catholic reaction, found the ambition of Philip a menace to national independence. And she knew well that Spain must be met in the Netherlands and on the sea. Yet the task which confronted her was one for which the naval resources of the state were inadequate, and the politic and popular queen turned to the nation for a.s.sistance in the hour of need.

And not in vain! For year by year the national opposition to Spain gathered force. Products seeking markets and capital seeking investment were increasing, while opportunities for profit abroad were diminishing.

Merchant and capitalist were everywhere confronted by the monopoly of Spain and Portugal, and thus the maritime and commercial supremacy of the queen's chief enemy was at once a national menace and a private grievance. English Protestants, driven into exile in the days of "b.l.o.o.d.y Mary," returned in the time of Elizabeth, bringing back the spirit of Geneva, and imbued with an uncompromising hatred of Papists which was fanned to white heat by the Jesuit plots, supposed to be inspired by Philip himself, against the queen's life. The rising opposition to Spain thus took on the character of a crusade: for statesmen it was a question of independence; for merchants a question of profits; for the people a question of religion. And so it happened that in time of peace the ships of Spain were regarded as fair prize. When piracy wore the cloak of virtue there were many to venture; and the queen was ready to reward the buccaneer for the crimes that made him a popular hero. Cautious in her purposes, devious in her methods, too frugal and too poor to embark on great undertakings or open hostility, Elizabeth encouraged every secret enterprise and every private adventure which had for its object the enrichment of her subjects at the expense of the common enemy.

John Hawkins will ever be memorable as the man who first openly contested the double monopoly of Spain and Portugal, and taught English merchants "how arms might signally help the expansion of trade."

Descended from seafaring ancestors, his own apprenticeship was served in voyages to the African coast. Negroes were plentiful there, and laborers scarce in the West Indies. Well considering that the slave trade would insure the salvation of the benighted heathen and redound to the profit of thrifty planters, the devout Hawkins set about serving G.o.d and mammon for the advancement of his own fortunes and the glory of England. With capital supplied by City merchants, three vessels were equipped; and in 1562 Hawkins sailed for Sierra Leone, where he procured by force or purchase three hundred negroes, who were exchanged with no great difficulty at Hispaniola for a rich cargo of merchandise. An enterprise which netted sixty per cent profit was not to be abandoned, and in 1564 a second voyage was made, with greater profit still. But the third voyage, in 1567, came to grief at San Juan de Ulloa, where Hawkins fell in with the Spanish plate fleet. The fleet might have been plundered, but the nave Hawkins, relying in vain upon the pledged word of the Spaniards, was treacherously attacked and his ships mostly destroyed, while he himself barely escaped with his life.

Accompanying Hawkins on this voyage, and escaping with him from San Juan de Ulloa, was "a certain Englishman, called Francis Drake." Reared in a Protestant family which had felt the effects of the reaction under Queen Mary, he had an instinctive hatred of the Roman Church, and his experience at San Juan de Ulloa inspired him at the age of twenty with a lifelong animosity toward all Spaniards. Renouncing the semi-peaceful methods of Hawkins, Drake devoted his life to open privateering, never doubting that in plundering Spanish ships he was discharging a private debt and a public obligation. And of all the gentlemen adventurers who made plunder respectable and raised piracy to the level of a fine art, he was the greatest. He carried himself in the "pirate's profession with a courtesy, magnanimity, and unfailing humanity, that gave to his story the glamour of romance." No other name struck such fear into Spanish hearts, or so raised in English ones the spirit of adventure and of contempt for the queen's enemies. He is known in Spanish annals as "the Dragon," and before he died the maritime power of Spain had pa.s.sed its zenith.

Three years after the disaster at San Juan de Ulloa the trend of events favored the bolder course. In 1570 the Pope's Bull deposing Elizabeth from the English throne was nailed to Lambeth Palace; and in 1572, not without the tacit approval of the Government, and backed by the rising national hostility to Spain, Drake set out for the Indies, where he operated for two years, planning attacks on Cartagena and Nombre de Dios, or rifling the treasure trains as they came overland from Panama.

Henceforth the watchfulness of Spain was redoubled in the West Indies; but the Pacific, which Drake had seen from the Peak of Darien, was still regarded as a safe inland lake. Into the Pacific, with its coasts unprotected and its ships scarcely armed at all, he therefore determined to venture. Authorized by the queen and with Walsingham's approval, he set out in 1577. Quelling a mutiny as his great predecessor had done at St. Julian, he pa.s.sed the Straits of Magellan, and sailed northward along the coast, harming no man, but taking every man's treasure until the ship was full. He would have returned home by some northeast pa.s.sage, but failed to find any, and so at last crossed the Pacific--the second to circ.u.mnavigate the globe. We are told that the queen "received him graciously, and laid up the treasure he brought by way of sequestration, that it might be forthcoming if the Spaniards should demand it."

It is not recorded that the treasure was ever restored, but it is known that Drake was knighted by the queen on the deck of the Golden Hind. And it is recorded that in 1588 Philip prepared the Invincible Armada, which appeared in the English Channel to demand the submission of England. It was a decisive moment in the history of America; and it is doubtful what the issue might have been had the queen been dependent upon the royal navy alone. But round the twenty-nine ships of the royal navy there gathered more than twice as many of those privateers who in a generation of conflict had become past masters in dealing with the ships of Spain. Manned by sailors seasoned to every hardship, equipped with the best cannon of the day, rapid and dexterous in movement, the English ships, outnumbered though they were, sailed round and round the unwieldy galleons of the Armada, crippling them by broadsides and destroying them with fire-ships, without ever being brought to close quarters. And so the "Invincible navy neither took any one barque of ours, neither yet once offered to land but after they had been well beaten and chased, made a long and sorry perambulation about the northern seas, enn.o.bling many coasts with wrecks of n.o.ble ships; and so returned home with greater derision than they set forth with expectation."

The defeat of the Armada was followed by a carnival of conquest. Within three years eight hundred Spanish ships were taken; and in 1596, shortly after the deaths of Drake and Hawkins, Sir Thomas Howard of Effingham captured the city of Cadiz and returned home with ships full of plunder.

It was the last great operation of the war, and the beginning of the end of the Spanish Empire; for the way was now clear for the maritime and colonial expansion of her rivals. The Dutch, with independence a.s.sured, organized those India companies through which they ousted the Portuguese from the spice islands, and established, at the mouth of the river discovered by Henry Hudson in 1608, the colony of New Netherland in America. With the civil wars of religion happily closed, France was free to complete the work of Cartier. In 1603 Champlain, in the service of a St. Malo merchant, sailed up the St. Lawrence to Montreal; and five years later he established a post on the Heights of Quebec, destined to be the capital of the great inland empire of New France. And England, whose ships now sailed the sea unchallenged, began to build a more lasting empire in America and the Orient. It was in 1607 that Virginia was planted; and three years later Captain Hippon, in the service of the East India Company, established an English factory at Masulipatam in the Bay of Bengal.

III

A notable result of the struggle with Spain was the growth of an active interest in colonization. Knowledge of the wide world, which Richard Eden had freshly revealed to Englishmen in the reign of Mary, was greatly enriched by the voyages of the Elizabethan seamen. John Davis, returning from the Far East, made known "as well the King of Portugal his places of Trade and Strength, as of the interchangeable trades of the eastern Nations among themselves"; and Cavendish, who was the third to "circompa.s.se the whole globe of the world," brought to the queen "certain intelligence of all the rich places that ever were known or discovered by any Christian." By the side of Drake and his followers, whose ambition it was to destroy the power of Spain in the New World, stand the brilliant Gentlemen Adventurers, who labored to plant there the power of England: Frobisher and Davis, the gentle and heroic Gilbert, and Raleigh, poet and statesman, the very perfect knight-errant of his age, whose faith in America survived many failures and is registered in words as prophetic as they are pathetic--"I shall yet live to see it an English nation." The adventurous and pioneering spirit of the time is forever preserved in that true epic of the Elizabethan age, the incomparable _Voyages_ of Richard Hakluyt; and in the _Discourse on Western Plantinge_, which he wrote at the request of Raleigh for the enlightenment of the queen, as well as in the general literature of the next fifty years, are revealed to us the ideas, mostly mistaken and often nave, which gave to America the glamour of a promised land.

Of the motives which inspired the colonizing activity of England at the close of the sixteenth century, the desire to spread the Protestant religion was no unreal one. The war for independence, having taken on the character of a crusade, had touched with emotional fervor the Englishman's loyalty to the national faith. Religion became a national a.s.set when it was thought to be served by an extension of the queen's domain. The pride of patriotism, as well as the sense of duty, was stirred by the fact that whereas Spanish Papists had been "the converters of many millions of infidells," English Protestants had done nothing for "thinlargement of the Gospell of Christe." It was felt to be the duty of Englishmen to take on this "white man's burden," and for the sake of the true faith plant "one or two colonies upon that fyrme, learn the language of the people, and so with discretion and myldeness Instill into their purged myndes the swete and lively liquor of the Gospell."

Yet the religious motive was b.u.t.tressed by others more material and less disinterested. Until well into the seventeenth century, when much bitter experience had proved the contrary, America was still thought to be a land of wealth easily acquired--"as great a profit to the Realme of England as the Indies to the King of Spain." Many credible persons, said Hakluyt, had found in that country "golde, silver, copper, leade, and pearles in aboundaunce; precious stones, as turquoises and emaurldes; spices and drugges; silke worms fairer than ours of Europe; white and red cotton; infinite mult.i.tude of all kindes of fowles; excellent vines in many places for wines; the soyle apte to beare olyves for oyle; all kinds of fruites; all kindes of oderiferous trees and date trees, cypresses, and cedars; and in New founde lande aboundaunce of pines and firr trees to make mastes and deale boards, pitch, tar, rosen; hempe for cables and cordage; and upp within the Graunde Baye, excedinge quant.i.tie of all kinde of precious furres." So that one may "well and truly conclude with reason and authoritie, that all the commodities of our olde decayed and daungerous trades in all Europe, Africa, and Asia haunted by us, may in short s.p.a.ce and for little or nothinge, in a manner be had in that part of America which lieth betweene 30 and 60 degrees of northerly lat.i.tude."

Little wonder that the New World of America, thus portrayed in heightened colors, proved attractive to gentlemen adventurers dreaming of personal dominion, to merchants intent upon profit, or to kings seeking revenue and prestige. The colonizing activities of the time were but incidental to the larger movement of commercial expansion and the extension of political power. The founding of the East India Company in 1600 and of the Virginia Company in 1609 were but two expressions of the same purpose: America was but one of the two Indies whose exploitation would redound at once to private advantage and to national welfare. That the individual and the state had a common and inseparable interest in the expansion of commerce and the settlement of colonies is, indeed, one of the most characteristic and significant ideas of the time: characteristic, since it pervades the literature of the period; significant, because it is an index of those profound political and economic influences that were transforming the old into the new Europe.

For at the opening of the seventeenth century the old order was fast disappearing. The ideal of a single Christian community, so long symbolized by the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Catholic Church, was losing its hold upon the minds of men as the result of the differentiation of European culture on lines of racial or national distinction. In politics this movement was embodied in the rise of the centralized national state; and the sixteenth century ushered in the era of international wars, of which the struggle between Elizabeth and Philip II was one, and one of the most important. When such conflicts were always impending, it was essential that the resources of the nation should be at the disposal of the Government. The national state could, therefore, neither share authority with the Pope at Rome, nor endure independent feudal or munic.i.p.al jurisdictions within the realm; and in its military and administrative organization, feudal officers, since the thirteenth century in France and England, had been steadily replaced by paid agents appointed by the king, whose hostility to the Pope was chiefly inspired by the desire to secure from the Church the money necessary to maintain them. A well-filled treasury was thus the first need of the sixteenth-century state, and so it fell out that in western Europe the middle cla.s.s--the merchant and the capitalist and the money-lender--was the chief resource of kings in conflict with feudal or ecclesiastical privilege. The prosperity of the trading cla.s.s and the efficiency of the Government were thought to be inseparable; and that commerce should be regulated in the interest of the state was, therefore, the unquestioned maxim of the age.

Two things above all the interest of the state demanded: that the supply of precious metals should not diminish; and that the nation should not be dependent upon rival countries for staple commodities. The supply of gold and silver actually present in the king's coffers, or within the radius of his tax-gatherers, was of far greater moment then than now.

The issues of war, in an age when credit was relatively undeveloped, were likely to depend upon it. Scarcely less important was the question of staples. To be dependent upon rivals for necessities was thought to threaten at once the prosperity of the trading cla.s.s and the strength of the Government: giving hostages to the enemy in time of war and a diplomatic advantage in time of peace; carrying off the supply of gold and silver; and likely, therefore, by raising the value of money, to disorganize industry and deplete the sources of the state's revenue. To be economically self-sufficing in order to be politically independent was the cardinal doctrine. "That Realme is most compleat and wealthie which either hath sufficient to serve itselfe or can finde means to exporte of the naturall comodities [more] than it hath occasion necessarily to import," said an English writer, expressing in a phrase the essential principle of mercantilism, which, indeed, was only the old feudal or munic.i.p.al ideal adapted to the needs of the national state.

A theory which crystallized the practice of two centuries must have been more than "an economic fallacy." And, indeed, in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts it was a condition and not a theory that confronted England. Many essential commodities had long been imported from countries which, toward the close of the sixteenth century, were disposed to place obstacles in the way of English trade. From Baltic lands came naval stores, and potash so necessary to the woolen industry.

Mediterranean countries furnished salt, dried fruits, sugar, and the staple luxuries wine and silk. Dyes, saltpeter, and spices from the Far East were sold to English merchants by the Portuguese or the Dutch; and at exorbitant prices, for the thrifty Hollanders no sooner got control of the spice islands than they raised the price of pepper from three to eight shillings per pound. And it was the Dutch, intrenched in the European fisheries partly through favors granted by Elizabeth, who imported into England two thirds of the fish so extensively consumed by the nation.

While England was dependent upon rivals for many necessities, the foreign markets for her own products were now becoming inadequate. Apart from wool, England exported little; but the confiscation of the monasteries, the ruin of Antwerp, the rising prices resulting from the influx of silver from New Spain, contributed to stimulate English industry and to increase in some measure the volume of commodities seeking markets abroad. Yet the markets were closing in some places and becoming less accessible in others. "It is publically knowne that traffique with our neighbor countries begins to be of small request, the game seldom answering the merchant's adventure, and foraigne states either are already or at the present are preparing to inriche themselves with wool and cloth of their own which heretofore they borrowed of us."

English traders were persecuted in Spain; English exports were checked by tariffs in France and by Sound dues in Denmark; privileges formerly enjoyed in German towns were being withdrawn in retaliation for the exclusion of Hanse merchants from advantages long enjoyed in London; and as for Flanders, heretofore the great mart for English wool, the civil wars had, as Hakluyt says, "spoiled the traffique there."

The desire to change this untoward condition of things was what inspired the unwarranted enthusiasm of the time for American and Indian colonization. The voyages of Willoughby and Frobisher, seeking some northeast or northwest pa.s.sage, were but the prelude to the later voyages by way of the Cape of Good Hope and to the foundation of the East India Company, the specific purpose of which was to procure the products of the Orient independently of the Dutch and at lower cost. The colonization of America it was supposed would serve a similar purpose.

It was still thought to be rich in precious metals; its soil well adapted to commodities now purchased in the Levant. Its waters would furnish England with the herring now purchased of the Dutch, and its forests would make her independent of the Baltic countries for naval supplies. Once gain a footing in India and America, and the commerce of England, now so largely foreign, would be diverted into national channels to the benefit of all concerned: "Our monies and wares that nowe run into the hands of our adversaries or cowld frendes shall pa.s.s into our frendes and naturall kinsmen and from them likewise we shall receive such things as shall be most available to our necessities, which intercourse of trade maye rather be called a home bread traffique than a forraigne exchange."

The identification of the industrial and political interests of the nation with the fortunes of the centralized state was necessarily accompanied by a marked change in the character of international trade.

The national king, whose power rested so largely upon the industrial cla.s.s, could not leave in the hands of munic.i.p.al councils the control which they had formerly exercised; while long ocean voyages, and traffic with countries inhabited by alien and often hostile people, required the combined capital of many men and a more powerful backing than any munic.i.p.al council could furnish. Individual trading, therefore, gave way to corporate trading; the joint-stock company, a.s.sisted or controlled by the state, replaced the individual merchant operating under munic.i.p.al encouragement and protection. It was accordingly in the age of Elizabeth, when English merchants were lamenting the want of markets, and when English ships were pushing into every part of the world, that such chartered trading companies made their appearance in rapid succession, taking their names from the distant regions in which they obtained a monopoly--Cathay, the Baltic, Turkey, Morocco, Africa. Of these, and of all subsequent organizations of a similar character, the most famous in England was the East India Company. By the charter, which bears date December 31, 1600, two hundred and fifteen knights and merchants were incorporated into a self-governing a.s.sociation competent to acquire property in land, and enjoying a monopoly of English trade with all countries lying east of the Cape of Good Hope as far as the Straits of Magellan. The laws of the company were required to conform to those of England, and its officers to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown. Encountering many obstacles and some serious reverses, the Company soon established a thriving trade in the Indian Ocean; its great East Indiamen acquired a fame unique in the annals of commerce; and the corporation itself, with privileges confirmed and extended by Charles II, was destined in the eighteenth century to be the chief instrument in the establishment of England's Indian Empire.

IV

When English knights and merchants set out to establish colonies in the New World, two familiar inst.i.tutions were convenient to the purpose--the proprietary feudal grant, and the chartered trading company; n.o.blemen ambitious for personal dominion turned naturally to the former, while merchants intent upon profits turned as naturally to the latter. The first hapless ventures in American planting, dominated by the idealistic and militant temper of the Elizabethan age, were initiated and directed in the spirit of the gentleman adventurer: in the spirit of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who identified America with the fabled Atlantis and lost his life in a pathetic attempt to establish an English colony in Newfoundland; in the spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose famous lost colony, settled in the year 1587, exhausted his fortune and disappeared at last, leaving no trace. These men were less interested in profit than in reputation; less intent upon commercial expansion than on the extension of the queen's dominions. But their resources were too limited, their ideals too little practical for the realization of their dreams. The patents to Gilbert and Raleigh took the form of a grant of lordship by feudal tenure; and from the papers left by the former we can create again, even to details, his vision of a transformed wilderness, America's future state: an America of extensive proprietary domains; an America reproducing, in its lords and landed gentry surrounded by freeholder and tenant, in its counties and boroughs and parishes, the social and political aristocracy of old England.

The proprietary feudal grant was destined to play its part in the colonization of America, but the resplendent vision of Gilbert did not survive the reign of Elizabeth. Raleigh was the last of the great Elizabethan adventurers, and with the accession of the pedantic James I the New World was beginning to be regarded in the dry light of a commercial opportunity. To the knights and merchants who had witnessed the vain efforts of Gilbert and Raleigh, the chartered company seemed better adapted to their purposes than the proprietary grant. The methods that had proved fortunate in the Old World would doubtless prove equally so in the New; and in the year 1609, men who were already netting one hundred per cent profit from their investments in the India Company were prepared to venture something in a solid business scheme to exploit the resources of America.

A tentative scheme, failing for want of efficient organization, had already been set on foot. Three years earlier, in 1606, James had been induced to license sundry of his loving subjects "to deduce and conduct two several colonies or plantations in America." Among those active in the undertaking were Bartholomew Gosnold, recently returned from a Western voyage, Richard Hakluyt, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Edward Maria Wingfield, a London merchant. Though not incorporated, the patentees were formed into two companies, the London Company, so called because its members were mainly London merchants, and the Plymouth Company, consisting mainly of merchants from Plymouth and the west of England. Each company was permitted to establish one colony having a jurisdiction one hundred miles along the coast and one hundred miles inland; the London Company anywhere between 34 and 41, the Plymouth Company anywhere between 38 and 45, north lat.i.tude; provided only that no colony should be located within one hundred miles of one already established. The patent provided that there should be in each colony, for managing its affairs, a resident council of thirteen members which was to take instructions from the Royal Council for Virginia, a body of fourteen men--afterwards enlarged--residing in England and appointed and controlled by the king. The patentees were permitted to trade freely within the limits designated by the grant, and to enjoy the customs dues exacted from other Englishmen and from foreigners who might wish to compete with them.

After a single vain attempt to establish a colony at Sagadahoc, the Plymouth Company confined its activities to trade and exploration within the region to which John Smith in 1614 gave the name of New England. Sir Fernando Gorges was one of the patentees actively interested in these ventures; and in 1620 he procured, for himself and a.s.sociates to the number of forty, a charter which transformed the old company into a close corporation under the t.i.tle of the New England Council or Corporation for New England. Upon the patentees the charter conferred the sole right to trade, to grant t.i.tle to land, and to establish and govern colonies within the region between 40 and 48, north lat.i.tude, in America. The New England Council possessed neither the capital nor the popular support necessary for engaging in colonizing ventures; and during the fifteen years of its existence it did little but sublet to others the rights which it possessed. Of the council's land grants, of which there were many both to individuals and to corporations, and which, often conflicting, furnished the grounds for innumerable future disputes, four only are important as the basis of permanent colonies in New England. The territory at Plymouth was granted to the Pilgrims in 1621; in 1628 the territory between the Merrimac and the Charles Rivers was conveyed to the Company of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay; and two grants made in 1629, of territory between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua to John Mason, of territory between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec to Fernando Gorges, mark the beginnings of the colonies of New Hampshire and Maine.

All its ventures profited the New England Council nothing. February 3, 1635, the territory within its jurisdiction was parceled out among the patentees, and on June 7, its charter of fruitless privileges was surrendered.

It was reserved for the London Company to begin the planting of the first American commonwealth; but it was by happy chances rather than by wise foresight in the promoters that the colony outlived the company.

The first comers, who were set down at Jamestown in 1607, would soon have perished but for the harsh good sense of the redoubtable Captain John Smith; and two years' experience with the wilderness and the Indian, with dissensions among settlers and councillors, demonstrated that the patent was unsuited to the purposes for which it had been granted. More colonists were needed in the colony, more capital required to transport and maintain them, more authority to direct and control them. To meet these needs, a charter was obtained in 1609 which created an incorporated joint-stock company under the t.i.tle of "The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia." Shares were offered for subscription, to be paid for in money by the adventurers who remained in England, and in personal service by the planters who went to the colony. Each shareholder, whether adventurer or planter, was a member of the company, and was to receive such dividends as his shares might earn. The undertaking was widely advertised; and when the charter pa.s.sed the seals, shares had been subscribed by 659 individuals, including 21 peers, 96 knights, 58 gentlemen, 110 merchants, and 282 citizens, and by 56 of the companies of the City of London.

The affairs of the new company were to be managed by a treasurer and council, resident in England, and appointed and controlled by the freemen a.s.sembled in general court. The little colony in Virginia was but an adjunct to the company, and its management was left, without other than conventional and perfunctory restrictions, to the treasurer and council, subject to the approval of the freemen. The first treasurer was Sir Thomas Smythe, who was also the first president of the East India Company, a great merchant in his day, whose influence in Virginia was a predominant one until he was succeeded as treasurer by Edwin Sandys in 1618. Smythe and his a.s.sociates were little interested in the transmission of English inst.i.tutions to the New World. They did not regard Virginia, as the historian is apt to do, in the interesting light of an experiment in const.i.tutional liberalism, or conceive of the company as the mother of nations. Their object was to pay dividends to the shareholders, and the colonist was expected to exploit the resources of Virginia for the benefit of the company of which he was a member.

Virginia was in fact a plantation owned by the company; its settlers were the company's servants, freely transported in its vessels, fed and housed at its expense, the product of their labor at its disposal for the benefit of all concerned.

With these ideas in mind, and enlightened by past experience, the company appointed Sir Thomas Gates to be "sole and absolute Governor,"

and sent him out in 1609, together with five hundred settlers in nine ships. Two vessels were wrecked, and what with plague and fever less than half the new colonists ever reached Virginia. The governor was himself stranded on the Bermudas; and when he finally arrived after nine months, sixty starving settlers were found scattered along the James River. Men who had been reduced to eating their dead comrades or the putrid flesh of buried Indians were scarcely good material for regenerating a feeble plantation. Sir Thomas Gates, therefore, decided to abandon the colony. But by a happy chance, as he was sailing with the survivors down the river, he met Lord de la Warr come from England with fresh supplies and new recruits; whereupon he turned back, still hoping to retrieve the desperate fortunes of Virginia.

The decision proved wise in the event. But it was doubtless due to the drastic measures of the company that the misfortunes of previous years were not repeated. The governor returned to England, leaving the colony in the hands of De la Warr, who governed in the spirit of the instructions issued to Gates at the time of his appointment. Popularly known as "Dale's Laws," the regulations under which Virginia was finally made self-supporting were published by Gates after his return in 1611, under the t.i.tle of "Articles, Laws and Orders, Divine, Politique, and Martial for the Government of Virginia." The new code was based upon the military laws of the Netherlands, and was enforced in the spirit with which the experience of Gates and Dale had made them familiar. From blasphemy to disrespect, from murder to idleness or embezzlement of the common store, the company's servants were liable to meet the knife, the lash, or the gallows at every turn. Until 1618 the regime of martial law was maintained; and the settlers stood guard or marched to the fields at the word of command, scarcely aware, doubtless, that they had been granted all the liberties enjoyed by men "born within this our realm of England."

The military regime which made Virginia self-supporting did not make it prosperous, or profitable to the company. In December, 1618, after an expenditure of 80,000 sterling, there were in the colony "600 persons, men, women and children, and cattle three hundred att the most. And the Company was then lefte in debt neer five thousand pounds." The hard-headed Smythe saw little prospect of the dividends which the shareholders were demanding; and he was ready to give way to any one who still had faith to sink yet more money in the enterprise that for a dozen years had disappointed every expectation. Such an idealist was Sir Edwin Sandys. Son of a Puritan Archbishop of York, he had studied at Oxford under Richard Hooker, whose famous book he had read in ma.n.u.script. The _Ecclesiastical Polity_ had perhaps confirmed Sandys in a republican way of thinking; and in the year 1618 he was probably a nonconformist--a "religious gentleman," as Edward Winslow called him: at all events, a man of humanitarian and anti-prerogative instincts; a friend of the Earl of Southampton, and leader of those in the company who were in sympathy with the rising tide of liberal sentiment in English politics.

The liberal policy which Sandys favored in England, he was now prepared to adopt for the management of Virginia. Convinced that the military and joint-stock regime, even if it had ever served a useful purpose, was r.e.t.a.r.ding the development of the colony, Sandys and Southampton determined to reverse the policy of their predecessors by inst.i.tuting private property in land and conceding a measure of self-government. A popular a.s.sembly was accordingly established in 1619; restrictions on conduct and religious opinion were relaxed; and land grants, both to individuals and to corporations, in small and large tracts, were made on easy terms. It was hoped that an appeal to self-respect and to self-interest would encourage immigration and foster thrift and industry. When Sandys became treasurer in 1618 the time seemed propitious; for it had already been discovered that Virginia tobacco could be sold at a profit in London; and it was the expectation of Sandys, by obtaining for the company its fair share of the profit arising from the importation of tobacco into England, to repay to the shareholders the long-delayed interest on their investments.