The book of Hakluyt's which here most nearly concerns us is the "Discourse of Western Planting," written in 1584, shortly before the return of the ships of Amidas and Barlow from Roanoke Island. It was not published, nor was immediate publication its aim. It was intended to influence the mind of Queen Elizabeth. The manuscript was handed to her about September, 1584, and after a while was lost sight of until after a long period of oblivion it turned up in the library of Sir Peter Thomson, an indefatigable collector of literary treasures, who died in 1770. It was bought from his family by Lord Valentia, after whose death it passed into the hands of the famous bibliophile Henry Stevens, who sold it to Sir Thomas Phillips for his vast collection of archives at Thirlestane House, Cheltenham. In 1869 a copy of it was made for Dr. Leonard Woods, President of Bowdoin College, by whom it was ably edited for the Maine Historical Society; and at length, in 1877, after a sleep of nearly three centuries, it was printed at our New England Cambridge, at the University Press, and published with valuable notes by the late Dr. Charles Deane.
Reasons for planting English colonies in America.
English trade with the Netherlands.
Hakluyt wrote this document at the request of Raleigh, who wished to persuade the queen to invest money in a colonizing expedition to the New World. Such an enterprise, he felt, was too great for any individual purse and needed support from government. No one had studied the subject so thoroughly as Hakluyt, and so Raleigh enlisted his services. In twenty-one brief chapters Hakluyt sets forth the various reasons why England should plant colonies on the coast of North America. The chief reasons are that such colonies will enlarge the occasions and facilities for driving Spanish ships from the Newfoundland fisheries and capturing Spanish treasure on its way from Mexico and the isthmus of Darien; they will be serviceable as stations toward the discovery and use of the northwest passage to Cathay; after a while they will furnish a valuable market for the products of English industry, especially woollen and linen cloths; they will increase the royal revenue by customs duties; they will afford new material for the growth of the navy; and in various ways they will relieve England of its idlers and vagrants by finding occupation for them abroad. In his terse quaint way, the writer emphasizes these points. As for the Spanish king, "if you touche him in the Indies you touche the apple of his eye; for take away his treasure, which is nervus belli, and which he hath almoste [all] out of his West Indies, his olde bandes of souldiers will soone be dissolved, his purposes defeated, ... his pride abated, and his tyranie utterly suppressed." "He shall be left bare as Æsop's proude crowe." With regard to creating a new market he says: "Nowe if her Majestie take these westerne discoveries in hande, and plant there, yt is like that in short time wee shall vente as greate a masse of clothe yn those partes as ever wee did in the Netherlandes, and in tyme moche more." In this connection he gives a striking illustration of the closeness of the commercial ties which had been knit between England and the Low Countries in the course of the long alliance with the House of Burgundy. In 1550, when Charles V. proposed to introduce the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands, it was objected that all English merchants would then quit the country, and the English trade would be grievously diminished. At this suggestion, "search was made what profite there came and comoditie grewe by the haunte of the Englishe marchantes. Then it was founde by searche and enquirie, that within the towne of Antwerpe alone there were 14,000 persons fedde and mayneteyned onlye by the workinge of English commodities, besides the gaines that marchantes and shippers with other in the said towne did gett, which was the greatest part of their lyvinge, which were thoughte to be in nomber halfe as many more; and in all other places of his Netherlandes by the indraping of Englishe woll into clothe, and by the working of other Englishe comodities, there were 30,000 persons more mayneteyned and fedd; which in all amounteth to the nomber of 51,000 persons." When this report was given to Charles V. it led him to pause and consider, as well it might.
An American market.
The change from tillage to pasturage.
Growth of pauperism.
According to Hakluyt an English colony in America would soon afford as good a market for English labour as the Netherlands. He was impressed with the belief that the population of England was fast outrunning its means of subsistence. Now if the surplus of population could be drawn to America it would find occupation in raising the products of that new soil to exchange for commodities from England, and this exchange in its turn would increase the demand for English commodities and for the labour which produced them, so that fewer people in England would be left without employment. Such is Hakluyt's idea, though he nowhere states it quite so formally. It is interesting because there is no doubt that he was not alone in holding such views. There was in many quarters a feeling that, with its population of about 5,000,000, England was getting to be over-peopled. This was probably because for some time past the supply of food and the supply of work had both been diminishing relatively to the number of people. For more than a century the wool trade had been waxing so profitable that great tracts of land which had formerly been subject to tillage were year by year turned into pastures for sheep. This process not only tended to raise the price of food, but it deprived many people of employment, since sheep-farming requires fewer hands than tilling the soil. Since the accession of Henry VIII. there had been many legislative attempts to check the conversion of ploughed land into grassy fields, but the change still continued to go on.[22] The enormous increase in the quantity of precious metals had still further raised the price of food, while as people were thrown out of employment the labour market tended to become overstocked so that wages did not rise. These changes bore with especial severity upon the class of peasants. The condition of the freeholding yeomanry was much improved during the sixteenth century. Stone houses with floors had taken the place of rude cabins with rushes carpeting the ground; meat was oftener eaten, clothes were of better quality. But it was otherwise with the peasants who held by servile tenures. In the abolition of mediæval serfdom which had been going on for two centuries and was completed in England so much earlier than in any other part of Europe, it was not all gain for the lowest grades of labourers. Some through energy and good fortune rose to recruit the ranks of freeholders, but many others became paupers and thieves. The change from tillage to pasturage affected this class more than any other, for it turned many out of house and home; so that, in the words of an old writer, they "prowled about as idle beggars or continued as stark thieves till the gallows did eat them."[23] The sudden destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII. deprived the pauper of such scanty support as he had been wont to get from the vast wealth of the Church, and besides it had let loose upon society a vast number of persons with their old occupations gone and set aside.[24] In Elizabeth's reign, therefore, for the various reasons here mentioned, the growth of pauperism began to attract especial attention as a lamentable if not formidable evil, and the famous "poor law" of 1601 marks a kind of era in the social history of England. Under such circumstances, for men disheartened by poverty and demoralized by idleness, struggling for life in a community that had ceased to need the kind of labour they could perform, the best chance of salvation seemed to lie in emigration to a new colony where the demand for labour was sure to be great, and life might be in a measure begun anew. So thought the good Hakluyt, and the history of the seventeenth century did much to justify his opinion. The prodigious development of the English commercial and naval marine, to which the intercourse with the new and thriving American colonies greatly contributed, went far toward multiplying the opportunities for employment and diminishing the numbers of the needy and idle class. Many of the sons of the men who had been driven from their farms by sheep-raising landlords made their home upon the ocean, and helped to secure England's control of the watery pathways. Many of them found new homes in America, and as independent yeomen became more thrifty than their peasant fathers.
Opposition to Hakluyt.
The queen's penuriousness.