Special Histories.—West Indies: Lucas, Historical Geography, II., secs. i., ii.; C. Eden, West Indies; J. Froude, English in West Indies (answered by J. Thomas, Froudacity); A. Kennedy, Story of West Indies; J. Rodway, West Indies and Spanish Main; J. Lefroy, Discovery and Early Settlement of Bermudas; J. Esquemeling, Buccaneers of America (and similar books by Archenholtz, Burney, and Pyle); J. Masefield, On the Spanish Main.—Newfoundland: D. Prowse, Newfoundland; also histories of the island by Hatton and Harvey, Smith, and Pedley; S. Dawson, Canada and Newfoundland; W. Greswell, Geography of Canada and Newfoundland.—Nova Scotia: J. Bourinot, Builders of Nova Scotia; T. Haliburton, Nova Scotia; B. Murdoch, Nova Scotia; E. Richard, Acadia.—Canada: see § 107.—Hudson's Bay Company: G. Bryce, Remarkable History of Hudson's Bay Company; L. Burpee, Search for the Western Sea; A. Laut, Conquest of Great Northwest; B. Willson, Great Company. Consult also publications of Royal Society of Canada, and provincial historical and antiquarian societies.
Contemporary Accounts.—Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland (1620); Mason, Brief Discourse of Newfoundland (1620); Du Tertre, Histoire Générale des Antilles (1654); Denys, Description and Natural History of Arcadia (1672); Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux Isles d'Amérique (1724); Oldmixon, British Empire in America (1741); Dobbs, Countries adjoining to Hudson's Bay (1744); Ellis, Voyage to Hudson Bay (1748); Hakluyt, Voyages. Reprints in publications of historical and antiquarian societies.
99. Outlying English Colonies.
Differences between the thirteen colonies and their English neighbors to the south and north.
It is usual to think and speak of the English colonies in North America as though they included only the thirteen which, in 1775, revolted against the mother-country. In the eyes of the home government, however, and of the colonists themselves, the relations between the mother-land and the English West India Islands, the Bermudas, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Hudson's Bay, and, after 1763, Canada, were much the same as between it and Virginia or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania. The chief differences between the colonies were of race and occupation. Nova Scotia had, before the Revolution, but a few thousand English inhabitants; the West Indies were almost exclusively sugar-producing colonies. Both on the north and on the southeast the English colonies touched elbows with the French in active commercial and territorial competition. The West Indies were the emporium for sugar and slaves, and an extensive traffic was had in both commodities with the continental colonies. This important commerce has already been frequently referred to, particularly in the treatment of New England (page [185]), whose vessels did the bulk of the colonial carrying trade.
Why those neighbors did not revolt against England.
Various causes conspired to prevent Englishmen in these outlying plantations from joining their brethren of New England, the middle colonies, and the South, in the movement for independence. The West India planters were largely aided by English capital, and in England, where many of them had summer residences, they enjoyed a profitable and exclusive market for sugar, cotton, and other tropical products. It was considered good policy by English statesmen to favor the island colonies as against the continental, for the products of the former did not compete with those of Great Britain; so that while the Navigation Acts (page [104]), restricting all colonial trade to British ports, at first bore heavily on the island planters, they were compensated in part by numerous discriminations in their favor. Many of these planters were the sons of Cavaliers who had fled to the islands of the Caribbean Sea to escape from the rule of the Commonwealth; or wealthy men who had, in times of popular disturbance, been made to feel uncomfortable in their old homes on the American mainland. In Nova Scotia and Newfoundland the ports were filled with English traders and officers; and a great belt of untraversed forest separated them from the New Englanders, with whom they had little in common. But perhaps above all was the fact that His Majesty's fleet easily commanded these outlying colonies, and revolt was not to be thought of within the reach of the guns of ships.
It is worth our while briefly to review the history of these British American dependencies which for one reason or another did not enter the struggle that was soon to rend the empire in twain at the moment it had reached its greatest extent.
100. Windward and Leeward Islands (1605-1814).
Settlement of Barbados.