Chapter 1:
Before the English Came

WHEN the history of English settlement in America begins, the breathless, eager stir of the Elizabethan age is over, and the sober, contentious seventeenth century has come, with its perplexed politics, its schismatic creeds, its scheming rivalries in trade. An age of discovery and bold adventure has given place to an age of commerce and organization. More than one hundred years have elapsed since the discovery of North America. Spain has lost her great place in the politics of Europe, and France and England are pressing forward to take it. While parts changed and the stage was reset, the century through, the great continent lay "a veiled and virgin shore," inflaming desires that could not be gratified, stirring dreams that only enticed brave men to their death, exciting to enterprise and adventure, but never to substantial or lasting achievement. The same mistake that had led to its discovery had prevented its profitable occupation. Columbus had set out to seek, not a new continent, but old Cathay; and died believing that what he had found was in fact the eastern coasts of Asia. The explorers who followed him in the next century had persisted in seeking, as he had sought, not new, but old lands, rich with ancient kingdoms and fabled stores of treasure, lying ready to the hand of conqueror and buccaneer. Such ancient kingdoms Cortez and Pizarro actually found in South America and upon the Isthmus; and such every adventurer promised himself he should find just beyond the coasts of the northern continent also. Or else he should find something that would be quite as valuable, and possibly no less romantic,—a fountain of youth, untouched mines of precious ore, or waters floored with priceless pearls.

The discovery of the New World had drawn Europe when she was most credulous into a realm of dreams. The Revival of Learning had come. Europe had read once more and with freshened eyes, as if for the first time, the frank sentences of the ancient classics, written when men looked heartily, fearlessly, artlessly about them, and her imagination had been quickened and enriched by what she read, her thoughts set free and rejuvenated. What she had seen also, as well as what she had read, had given her new life. For the Middle Ages were now passed, and she had herself become a new world. France had lost her feudal princes in the Hundred Years’ War, and was at last a real kingdom under veritable kings, for Louis XI. had reigned. England had been transformed by the Wars of the Roses from a feudal into a national monarchy, and the first Tudor was on the throne. Spain had cast out the Moor, and was united under Christian sovereigns. Former geographical relations, too, had disappeared. The old Europe had had its heart and centre in the Mediterranean; but the capture of Constantinople by the Turk, and the establishment of the hostile Turkish power upon all the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, now shut her out from the habitual courses of her life by cutting off direct intercourse with the East. She was forced to seek new routes for her commerce, a different life for her nations, new objects of policy, other aims of ambition.

Having felt the keen early airs of the Renaissance, her powers were heartened and stimulated for the task, and she faced it with a glad spontaneity and energy. She was strangely filled with hope and with a romantic ardor for adventure, ready to see and to test every new thing. It was naturally her first thought to find her way again, by new routes, to India and the great East. Portuguese sailors, accordingly, sought and found their way around the southern capes of Africa; and Columbus, more bold and more believing still, pushed straight forth into the unknown Atlantic, that dread and mysterious "Sea of Darkness" which had lain so silent all the centuries, keeping its secrets. He would make directly for the shores of Asia and the kingdom of the Tartars.

In the new delight of giving rein to their imaginations men were ready to believe anything. They could believe even Marco Polo, whom they had hitherto been inclined to deem an impudent impostor. In the latter half of the thirteenth century, Polo, accompanying his father and uncle, had journeyed overland to the farthest kingdoms of Asia, when the great Tartar empire of Kublai Khan stretched from Europe to the Chinese Sea. He had seen throughout nearly twenty years the full splendor of that stupendous realm, its rich provinces, its teeming and ancient cities, its abounding wealth and unexampled power. Some of its authority he had himself wielded; for he had been taken into the intimate counsels of the Great Khan, and had gone up and down his coasts upon weighty errands of state. But the men of his day at home would not credit what he had to tell them of the boundless extent and resplendent glory of lands which no one else among their neighbors had ever seen, or ever heard named even, save by this Venetian adventurer. Who could say what truth there was, or what falsehood, in these tales of the ends of Asia and of a great sea lying beyond? Polo’s story slumbered accordingly, in curious manuscripts, or kept covert with the learned, until revived and brought to day again by the congenial air and the enticing credulity of the fifteenth century. In the view of that hopeful age nothing was impossible. These things and many more Columbus credited and pondered, as he pored upon crude and curious maps, sketched out of travellers’ tales and astronomers’ reckonings; and it was the very Cathay of Marco Polo he put across the new ocean to find.

The success of Columbus solved the mystery of the Atlantic, but it did little to instruct Europe, or even to guide her fancy, concerning the real nature of the lands he had found. No one dreamed that they were the coasts of a new world. Who could believe the globe big enough to have held through all the ages a whole continent of which Christendom had never heard, nor even so much as had poetic vision,—unless, perchance, this were the fabled Atlantis? Slowly, very slowly, exploration brought the facts to light; but even then men were loath to receive the truth. When Vespucius brought home authentic charts of new coasts in the southwest, thrust far out into the Atlantic, so that even mariners who strayed from their course to the Cape under stress of storms from out the east might hit upon them, there was nothing for it but to deem this indeed a New World. No such Asian coasts had ever been heard of in that quarter of the globe. This southern world must, no doubt, lie between Africa and the kingdoms of China. But the northern continent had been found just where the Asian coasts were said to lie. It was passing hard to conceive it a mere wilderness, without civilization or any old order of settled life. Had Polo, after all, been so deep a liar? Men would not so cheat their imaginations and balk their hopes of adventure. Unable to shake off their first infatuation, they went wistfully on, searching for kingdoms, for wonders, for some native perfection, or else some store of accumulated bounty, until at last fancy was wholly baffled and rebuked by utmost discipline of total and disastrous failure. Not until a century had been wasted were confident adventurers sobered: the century of the Reformation and the Elizabethan literature. Then at last they accepted the task of winning America for what it was: a task of first settlement in a wilderness,—hard, unromantic, prodigious,—practicable only by strong-willed labor and dogged perseverance to the end.

While North America waited, South America prodigally afforded the spirit of the age what it craved. There men actually found what they had deemed Asia to contain. Here was, in fact, treasure-trove. The sea filled with mighty Spanish armaments, commanded by masters of conquest like Cortez; and the quaint and cloistered civilization of the New World trembled and fell to pieces under the rude blows of the Spanish soldiers. Then the sea filled again, this time with galleons deepladen with the rich spoils of the romantic adventure. Whereupon daring English seamen like Hawkins and Drake turned buccaneers; and scant thought was given any longer to the forested wilds of North America. England and Spain faced each other on the seas. A few protestant sailors from the stout-hearted Devonshire ports undertook to make proud Spain smart for the iniquities wrought upon Englishmen by the Inquisition, while they lined their pockets, the while, out of Spanish bottoms. By the time the great Armada came, England had found her sea-legs. Spain recognized in the smartly handled craft which beat her clumsy galleons up the Channel the power that would some day drive her from the seas. Her hopes went to pieces with that proud fleet, before English skill and prowess and pitiless sea-weather. It had been a century of preparation, a century of vast schemes but half accomplished, of daring but not steadfast enterprise, of sudden sallies of audacious policy, but not of cautious plans or prudent forecasts. The New World in the north still waited to be used.

And yet much had in fact been accomplished towards the future successful occupation of North America. Some part of the real character of the new continent stood sufficiently revealed. Early in the century

Magellan had found his way to the south, round about the coasts of South America, into the new ocean; and before the middle of the century Spanish vessels had beat their adventurous way along almost the entire Pacific length of both continents. By the time Drake set out on his famous first voyage round the world in 1577, the Spaniards had already established a trade route across the Pacific to India and the Spice Islands.

Their discoveries became very slowly known to the rest of the world; they had no mind to advertise what they found, and so invite rivalry. Each nation that coveted the new lands was left to find out for itself how they lay, with what coasts, upon what seas. It did at last become generally known, however, that America was no part of Asia, but itself a separate continent, backed by an ocean greater even than the Atlantic. What was still hidden was the enormous extent of the New World. It had been found narrow enough from ocean to ocean at the Isthmus; and the voyagers along its farther coasts had not been expert to mark the real spread and trend of its outlines. They imagined it of no great bulk. Throughout the century every explorer who sought to penetrate its interior from the Atlantic along any considerable watercourse confidently hoped to find, near the sources of the stream, similar passage down the western slopes of the continent to the great sea at the west. Adventurer after adventurer, moreover, pushed northward among the ice to find a northwest passage whereby to enter the Pacific

All such mistakes only served to make the real character of the northern continent the more evident. Every discovery contributed to sober discoverers. That the interior was one vast wilderness, grown thick with tangled forests, blocked by mountains which stood old and untouched, or else stretching wide" through mighty plains and sandy heaths, smooth and wearisome, and bare of wood," with only "crook-backed oxen" for inhabitants, the Spaniards had abundantly discovered by many a costly adventure. In 1513, the year of Balboa’s great discovery, and again in 1521, the gallant Ponce de Leon led an expedition into the beautiful peninsula which he named Florida, in search of a fabled spring whose waters, of "sweet savour and reflaire," it was said, "as it were of divers manner of spicery," would impart immortal youth to those who drank of them. But the wilderness baffled him, and he lost both his hope and his life in the enterprise.

In 1528 Panfilo de Narvaez sought to take the land by storm, in true Spanish fashion, landing a force of three hundred men at Apalache Bay, with horses and trappings and stores, to march in quest of kingdoms and treasures. And march they did, thrusting their way through the forests and swamps very manfully towards the vast unknown interior of the continent. Their ships, meanwhile, they sent away, to bring still others to the enterprise, but with plans of rendezvous so vague and ill-conceived that they never beheld them again. After three fruitless months spent with keen suffering of want and disappointment in the wild forests, where there was neither kingdom nor treasure, they found themselves thrown back upon the coast again, dismayed, and in search of their craft. Finding that they must help themselves, they built such boats as they could, and tried to pick their way by sea to the westward. Caught in a rush of waters at the mouth of the Mississippi, two of their five boats were overwhelmed, and all who were in them were lost. The rest drifted on till cast ashore far to the west. Four men, and four only, of all the company survived to tell the story to the world. After a marvellous and pitiful pilgrimage of almost two thousand miles, full of every perilous and strange adventure, they actually reached the Spanish settlements on the Pacific, eight years after that gallant landing at Apalache.

In 1539 Hernando de Soto repeated the folly. He brought to the Bay of Espiritu Santo nine vessels, with near six hundred men and more than two hundred horses. Leaving a small part of his force with the fleet, he set out with a great force for the interior of the continent. It was childish folly; but it was gallantly done, with all the audacity and hardness of purpose that distinguished Spanish conquest in that day. With contempt of danger, meting out bitter scorn and cruelty to every human foe, and facing even pitiless nature itself without blanching or turning back, proud and stubborn to the last through every tormenting trial of the desperate march, they forced their way onward to the great waters of the Mississippi. From the mouth of that river, in boats of their own construction, some three hundred survivors reached Spanish posts on the Gulf. But without their leader. De Soto had sickened and died as they beat up and down the wilderness which lay along the great stream of the Mississippi, whose inland courses he had discovered, and they had buried his body beneath its sluggish waters.

Meanwhile a like expedition was wasting its strength in the wilds which stretched back from the Pacific. In 1540 Coronado, Spanish Governor of New Galicia, had led an army of three hundred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians northward from his Pacific province in search of seven fabled cities of "Cibola." These "cities" proved to be only humble pueblos such as those whose ruins still so curiously mark the river cliffs of Arizona and New Mexico. Having put out parties to explore the courses of the Colorado and the Rio Grande, only to find the stately canons of the one, at the west, and the spreading valley of the other, at the south, without the notable peoples and provinces he looked for, he himself pressed doggedly onward for weary hundreds of miles, eastward and northeastward, to the far Missouri, to find at last nothing but vast deserts, without a trace of population or any slightest promise of treasure. It was a hard lesson thoroughly learned, bitten in by sufferings which corroded like deadly acids.

By such means was the real nature of the North American continent painfully disclosed, each maritime nation acting for itself. Spanish, English, and French seamen beat, time and again, up and down its coasts, viewing harbors, trying inlets, tracing the coast lines, carrying away rumors of the interior. The Spaniards explored and partially settled the coasts of the Gulf. In 1534-35 Jacques Cartier penetrated the St. Lawrence, in the name of his French master, as far as the present site of Montreal; and in 1541 planted a rude fort upon the heights of Quebec. In 1562-64 settlements of French Huguenots were effected in Florida, only to be destroyed, with savage ruthlessness, by the Spaniards, who in 1565 in their turn established St. Augustine, from which the French found it impossible permanently to dislodge them. In the opening years of the seventeenth century French colonies were planted on the St. Lawrence at Montreal and Quebec, and in Acadia, in the region which was afterwards to be known as Nova Scotia. English settlements also were attempted. All signs combined to indicate the coming in of a new age of organized enterprise, when, with one accord, the nations which coveted the virgin continent should cease to

and should compete, instead, to build communities and erect states over sea, and so possess themselves of a vast treasure of their own making.

In the great enterprise of discovery and exploration Spain had held the first place throughout a century; but for the task of colonization the parts were to be differently cast. The century had witnessed many profound changes in European politics. In the year 1519 Charles V., King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, King of Naples and Sicily, heir of the House of Burgundy, and therefore lord of the Netherlands, had become also Emperor of Germany, and had begun to threaten all Europe with his greatness. But the vast circle of his realm had not held together. It was not a single power, but naturally diverse and disintegrate, and had speedily fallen asunder. In 1568 began that determined revolt of the Netherlands which was eventually to sap and destroy the Spanish power. By scattering her force too ambitiously, and staking her supremacy on too many issues, Spain began steadily to lose the great advantage she had held upon the continent. For England the end of Spain’s power was marked by the destruction of the Armada, and the consequent dashing of all the ambitious schemes that had been put aboard the imposing fleet at Lisbon. There had meanwhile been reckonings between England and France also. Henry VIII. and Francis I. had kept restlessly at work to adjust the balance of European power to their own liking and advantage. Wars, brief and inconclusive, but ceaseless, swept Europe in every direction; and then radical changes set in, both national and international. In 1562 the great Huguenot civil wars broke out, to rage for more than twenty years; and France stained her annals with St. Bartholomew’s day, 1572. In driving the Huguenots forth to England and America, she lost the flower of her industrial population. She thwarted her European enemies, nevertheless, and solidly compacted her national power. The German countries all the century through were torn and distracted by the struggle of the Reformation, and remained self-absorbed, forming the parties and defining the passions which were to bring upon them the terrible Thirty Years’ War of the next century.

When the new century opened, France and England alone stood ready to compete for North America. And, for all France was as keen to seek her interest in the New World as in the Old, the signal advantage, as the event abundantly proved, was to lie with England in this new rivalry in the wilderness. The reason is now plain enough. England had obtained from the sixteenth century just the training she needed for winning America in the seventeenth, while France had unfitted herself for the race by the new life she had learned. England had become a commercial nation, quickened in every seaport by a bold spirit of individual enterprise that would dare anything for a success. The Tudor monarchs had, it is true, established a political absolutism; but they had, nevertheless, somehow deeply stirred individual initiative in their subjects in the process. In France, meanwhile, individual initiative had been stamped out, and the authority of church and state consolidated, to command and control every undertaking. France sent official fleets to America and established government posts; while England licensed trading companies, and left the colonists, who went to America in their own interest, to serve that interest by succeeding in their own way. The French colonies pined under careful official nursing; the English colonies throve under "a wise and salutary neglect." A churchly and official race could not win America. The task called for hard-headed business sense, patient, practical sagacity, and men free to follow their own interest by their own means.

The Reformation had performed a peculiar service—for England. It had filled her, not with intense religious feeling, but with intense national feeling. It meant that England had thrown off all slavish political connection with Rome, and was to be henceforth national in her church as well as in her politics. It meant, too, that she was to have less church than formerly. When Henry VIII. destroyed the monasteries and appropriated their means and revenues, he secularized the government of England, and in part English society too, almost at a stroke. The wealth of the church went to make new men rich who had won the favor of the crown, and a new nobility of wealth began to eclipse the old nobility of blood. Such a change met the spirit of the age half-way. The quickened curiosity and nimble thought of the Renaissance had no courteous care as to what it exposed or upset. The discovery of new lands, moreover, stimulated all sorts of trade and sea-traffic. A general movement to learn and acquire new things had begun among masses of comfortable people who had never cared to disturb their minds before. The literature of the "spacious times of great Elizabeth" was the spontaneous speaking out, with unexampled freedom of heart, with unmatched boldness of fancy and amplitude of power, of the finer spirits of a nation excited by every new prospect of thought and enterprise. Fortunately the Tudor monarchs were stingy how they helped their subjects with money, even to defend their wealth and commerce against the foreigner. Henry VIII. interested himself in improved methods of ship-building; and when he had time to think of it he encouraged instruction in seamanship and navigation; but he built no navy. He even left the English coasts without adequate police, and suffered his subjects to defend themselves as best they might against the pirates who infested the seas not only, but came once and again to cut vessels out of port in England’s own waters. Many public ships, it is true, had been built before the Armada came, and fine craft they were; but they were not enough. There was no real navy in the modern sense. The fleet which chased the Spaniards up the Channel was a volunteer fleet. Merchants had learned to defend their own cargoes. They built fighting craft of their own to keep their coasts and harbors free of pirates, and to carry their goods over sea. They sought their fortunes as they pleased abroad, the crown annoying them with no inquiry to embarrass their search for Spanish treasure ships, or their trade in pirated linens and silks.

It was this self-helping race of Englishmen that matched their wits against French official schemes in America. We may see the stuff they were made of in the Devonshire seamen who first attempted the permanent settlement of the new continent. For a time all that was most characteristic of adventurous and sea-loving England was centred in Devonshire. Devonshire lies in the midst of that group of counties in the southwest of England in which Saxon mastery did least to destroy or drive out the old Celtic population. There is, accordingly, a strong strain of Celtic blood among its people to this day; and the land suits with the strain. Its abrupt and broken headlands, its free heaths and ancient growths of forests, its pure and genial air, freshened on either hand by the breath of the sea, its bold and sunny coasts, mark it a place made by nature to indulge that sense of mystery and that ardor of imagination with which the Celt has enriched the sober Saxon mind. Next it lay Somersetshire, with its sea outlet at sturdy Bristol port, where trade boasted itself free from feudal masters, pointing to the ruined castle on the hill, and whence the Cabots had sailed, so close upon the heels of Columbus. For itself Devonshire had the great harbor and roads of Plymouth, and innumerable fishing ports, where a whole race of venturesome and hardy fishermen were nurtured. All the great sea names of the Elizabethan age belong to it. Drake, Hawkins, Ralegh, and the Gilberts were all Devonshire men; and it was from Plymouth that the fleet went out which beat the great Armada on its way to shipwreck in the north. The men who first undertook to colonize the New World for England were bred to adventure, both by books and by the sea air in which they lived. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Walter Ralegh, were gentlemen, trained to books at Oxford, and men of fortune besides, who could put forth into the world to look into what they had read of. Their books were full of travellers’ tales; their neighbors were seamen who had met the Spaniard at close quarters on the high seas, and lightened him of his treasure. Wealth and adventure alike seemed to call them abroad into the new regions of the West. Ardently, and yet soberly too, with a steady business sagacity as well as with high, imaginative hope, they obtained license of the crown and led the way towards new ports and new homes in America. They did all with unstinted energy and devotion, embarking their fortunes in the venture. In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself went out to Newfoundland, and lost his life seeking a harbor to the southward where to plant a colony. He had made his own quarters in the smallest vessel of his little fleet, and calmly "sat abaft with a book in his hand," even when the violent sea and the unknown coast threatened most sharply, cheering his companions the while with the stout-hearted assurance, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land." On Monday night, the 9th of September, about twelve o’clock, his lights went out and he found a haven he had not sought. The next year, 1584, Ralegh sent out two ships to take the southern course to America and find a coast suitable for settlement. They hit upon Roanoke Island. It was, their captains reported, an exceeding pleasant land, its people "most gentle, loving, and faithful, and such as live after the manner of the golden age." Within the next three years, therefore, until the coming of the Armada called his attention imperatively off from the business, Ralegh made two distinct efforts to establish a permanent colony on the island. But both attempts failed. The right temper and purpose had not come yet. The first colony contained men only, and these devoted themselves to exploration instead of to tillage and building. Ralegh and his agents alike were still dreaming of El Dorado. The second colony contained women and families; but they made small progress in learning to deal with the Indians, now no longer gentle and faithful; and they continued to rely on England for supplies, which did not come. When finally search was made for them they were not to be found. Their fate has remained a mystery to this day.

And so the century ended, with only a promise of what might some day be done. But, though the new continent still remained wild, strange, and inhospitable, the approaches to it at least were at length known. The Atlantic was cleared of its terrifying mystery, and the common sun shone everywhere upon it. Both the northern and the southern routes across it had become familiar to seafarers. The merchants of Southampton regularly sent ships upon the "commodious and gainful voyage to Brazil" so early as 1540; and Newfoundland had been a well-known fishing and trading post ever since 1504. In 1570 at least forty ships went annually from English ports to take part in the fisheries there; and in 1578 no fewer than a hundred and fifty were sent from France alone. Hundreds of crews were to be found in St. John’s Harbor in the season, drying their catch and sunning their nets. Europe could not have been sure of fish on Fridays otherwise. The ocean ways were well known; the coast of North America was partly charted; its forests were no longer deemed the frontier barriers of kingdoms; the romantic age of mere adventure was past; and the more commonplace and sober age which succeeded was beginning to appreciate the unideal economic uses to which North America was to be put, if Europe was to use it at all. It only remained to find proper men and proper means for the purpose.

Note on the Authorities.—The general history of the discovery, exploration, and early settlement of the coasts of North America, before the English came, may best be read in the various chapters of the first two volumes of Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America (where full lists of authorities are given), in the two volumes of Mr. John Fiske’s Discovery of America, in the first volume of Mr. J. A. Doyle’s English Colonies in America, and in the first volume of Bryant and Gay’s excellent Popular History of the United States. Mr. Francis Parkman has given a characteristically lucid, accurate, and engaging account of the French settlements in Florida and at the north in his Pioneers of France in the New World.

Those who wish to read of the early voyages and explorations at first hand, in the contemporary accounts, will find almost everything that they want in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (edited by Edmund Goldsmid. Edinburgh, 16 vols., 1885-1890), in the invaluable Publications of the Hakluyt Society, and in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.