Queen Elizabeth was the first British Sovereign who built up that maritime power of England which has converted her magnificent Island—dot as it is, in the waste of the sea—into the wharf of the world. She was no friend of the Spaniards, and she had men in her service who admired Spanish galeons. Wealth, realized in coin, and gold or silver, in bulk, were tempting merchandize in frail vessels, which sailors, half pirate, half privateer, might easily deliver of their burden. It was easier to rob than to mine; and, while Spain performed the labor in the bowels of the earth, England took the profit as a prize on the sea! Such were some of the elements of maritime success, which weakened Spain by draining her colonial wealth, while it enriched her rival and injured the Catholic sovereign.
Yet, in the ranks of these adventurers, there were men of honest purpose; and, among the first whose designs of colonization on this continent were unquestionably conceived in a spirit of discovery and speculation, was the half brother of Sir Walter Raleigh—Sir Humphrey Gilbert. But Sir Humphrey, while pursuing his northern adventures, was unluckily lost at sea, and Sir Walter took up the thread where his relative dropped it. I regret that I have not time to pursue this subject, and can only say that his enterprises were, doubtless, the germ of that colonization, which, by degrees, has filled up and formed our Union.
You will remember the striking difference between colonization from England, and the colonization from other nations of ancient and modern times. The short, imperfect navigation of the Greeks, along the shores and among the islands of their inland sea, made colonization rather a diffusive overflow, than an adventurous transplanting of their people. They were urged to this oozing emigration either by personal want, by the command of law, or by the oracles of their gods, who doubtless spoke under the authority of law. Where the national religion was a unit in faith, there was no persecution to drive men off, nor had the spirit of adventure seized those primitive classics with the zeal of "annexation" that animated after ages.
The Roman colonies were massive, military progresses of population, seeking to spread national power by conquest and permanent encampment.
Portugal and Spain, mingled avarice and dominion in their conquests or occupation of new lands.
The French Protestants were, to a great extent, prevented by the bigotry of their home government, as well as by foreign jealousy, from obtaining a sanctuary in America. France drove the refugees chiefly into other European countries, where they established their manufacturing industry; and thus, fanaticism kept out of America laborious multitudes who would have pressed hard on the British settlements. In the islands, a small trade and the investment of money, rather than the desire to acquire fortune by personal industry, were the motives of the early and regular emigration of Frenchmen.
The Dutch, devoted to trade, generally located themselves where they "have just room enough to manifest the miracles of frugality and diligence."[3]
Thus, wherever we trace mankind abandoning its home, in ancient or modern days, we find a selfish motive, a superstitious command, a love of wealth, a lust of power, or a spirit of robbery, controlling the movement. The first adventurous effort towards the realization of actual settlement on this continent, was, as we have seen, made by the persecuted Huguenots, and was, probably, an attempt rather to fly from oppression, than to establish religious freedom. The first English settlement, also, was founded more upon speculation than on any novel or exalted principle. There was a quest of gold, a desire for land, and an honest hope of improving personal fortunes.
Virginia had been a charter government, but, in 1624, it was merged in the Royal Government. The crown reassumed the dominion it had granted to others. Virginia, in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, although exhibiting some prosperous phases, was nothing more than a delicate off-shoot from the British stock, somewhat vigorous for its change to virgin soil, but likely to bear the same fruit as its parent tree. Virginia was a limb timidly transplanted,—not a branch torn off, and flung to wither or to fertilize new realms by its decay. This continent, with all that a century and a half of maritime coasting had done for it, was but thinly sprinkled with settlements, which bore the same proportion to the vast continental wilderness that single ships or small squadrons bear to the illimitable sea. But the spirit of adventure, the desire for refuge, the dream of liberty, were soon to plant the seeds of a new civilization in the Western World.