Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

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 passed 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 passage, but failed to find any, and so at last crossed the Pacific—the second to circumnavigate 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, ennobling many coasts with wrecks of noble 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 assured, 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 "circompasse 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 naïve, 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 asset 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 buttressed 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 multitude 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 quantitie 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 space and for little or nothinge, in a manner be had in that part of America which lieth betweene 30 and 60 degrees of northerly latitude."

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 municipal 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 class—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 class 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 class 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 municipal ideal adapted to the needs of the national state.