Two half-brothers, Sir Humphrey Gilbert
and Sir Walter Raleigh, were the first Englishmen to undertake serious ventures
in America. Gilbert, one of the more earnest seekers of the Northwest Passage,
went to Newfoundland in 1578 and again in 1583 but failed to colonize the
territory either time and lost his life on the re. mm voyage to England after
the second attempt. Raleigh, in turn, was granted the right to settle in
"Virginia" and to have control of the land within a radius of 200 leagues from
any colonists to the new continent. The first landed on the island of Roanoke
off the coast of what is now North Carolina and stayed less than a year;
anything but enthusiastic about their new home, these first colonists returned
to England with Sir Francis Drake in the summer of 1586. Undaunted, Raleigh
solicited the financial aid of a group of wealthy Londoners and, in the
following year, sent a second contingent of 150 people under the leadership of
Governor John White. Raleigh had given explicit instructions that this colony
was to be planted somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay, but Govemor White disregarded
the order and landed at Roanoke. White went back to England for supplies; when
he returned after much delay in 1590, the settlers had vanished. Not a single
member of the famed "lost colony" was ever found, not even a tooth.
After a long war between England and Spain from 1588 to 1603, England
renewed attempts to colonize North America. In 1606, two charters were
granted—one to a group of Londoners, the other to merchants of Plymouth and
other western port town. The London Company was given the right to settle the
southern part of the English territory in America; the Plymouth Company was
given jurisdiction over the northern part.
So two widely
separated colonies were established in 1607: one at Sagadahoc, near the mouth of
the Kennebec River, in Maine; the other in modern Virginia. Those who survived
the winter in the northern colony gave up and went home, and the colony
established at Jamestown won the hard-earned honor of being the first permanent
English settlement in America.
Hard-earned indeed! When
the London Company landed three tiny vessels at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay
in 1607, 105 people disembarked to found the Jamestown Colony. Easily distracted
by futile "get rich quick" schemes, they actually sent shiploads of mica and
yellow ore back to England in 1607 and 1608. Before the news reached their ears
that their treasure was worthless "fool’s gold," disease, starvation, and
misadventure had taken a heavy toll: 67 of the original 105 Jamestown settlers
died in the first year.
The few remaining survivors (one of whom
was convicted of cannibalism) were joined in 1609 by 800 new arrivals, sent over
by the reorganized and renamed Virginia Company. By the following spring,
frontier hardships had cut the number of settlers from 838 to 60. That summer,
those who remained were round fleeing down river to return home to England by
new settlers with fresh supplies, who encouraged them to reconsider. This was
Virginia’s "starving time”.
Inadequately supplied and untutored
in the art of colonization, the earliest frontier pioneers routinely suffered
and died. In 1623, a royal investigation of the Virginia experience was launched
in the wake of an Indian attack that took the lives of 500 settlers. The
investigation reported that of the 6,000 who had migrated to Virginia since
1607, 4,000 had died. The life expectancy of these hardy settlers upon arriving
was two years.
The heavy human costs of first settlement were
accompanied by substantial capital losses. Without exception, the earliest
colonial ventures were unprofitable. Indeed, they were financial disasters.
Neither the principal nor the interest on the Virginia Company’s accumulated
investment of more than ￡200,000 was ever repaid (approximately $20,000,000 in
today’s values). The investments in New England were less disappointing, but
overall, English capitalists were heavy losers in their quest to tame the
frontier. |
