NHC+1492+Settlement


 * NHC 1492 (3) SETTLEMENT**


 * SETTLEMENT**

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/settlement/settlement.htm

The items on this wiki page are taken from the following website and are only intended for the use of my students:

National Humanities Center Toolbox Library: Primary Resources in U.S. History and Literature Toolbox: American Beginnings: The European Presence in North America, 1492-1690 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/index.htm


 * 1. First Arrivals**

English: The first months of the Jamestown colony, 1607 English: The first year of the Plymouth colony, 1620-21 http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1650bradford.asp
 * [Read this item about Plymouth]**

When we talk about the European settling of North America, the word "first" creeps into the discussion very soon—the first ever, the first "permanent," the first "permanent" that still exists today, the first with women and children, the first Spanish/French/English, etc. While the discussion may force us to define our terms, a valuable exercise, we will begin this topic, SETTLEMENT, with "first arrivals"—Europeans who cross the Atlantic, disembark on land unsettled by Europeans, find a suitable site, and begin to build with the intention of staying, not merely exploring.

After writing several accounts to justify his actions as governor, Percy left Jamestown for good in 1612. (John Smith, who also felt compelled to defend his leadership, had left for good in 1609.)
 * JAMESTOWN** is justifiably called "the first permanent English settlement" in the New World—a hard-won designation. As historian Alan Taylor recounts, of the first 104 colonists who landed in April 1607, only thirty-eight survived the winter. Of the 10,000 who left England for Jamestown in its first fifteen years, only twenty percent were still alive, and still in Jamestown, in 1622. The first months of the colony were chronicled by John Smith, Edward Wingfield, and in this selection by George Percy, who twice served as the colony's governor.


 * PLYMOUTH**. To American schoolchildren of many generations, the term "colonist" spurs images of stalwart Pilgrims setting sail on the Mayflower to land at Plymouth Rock—an epic tale of adventure and determination. And it's true. Unlike the single men—the courtiers, soldiers, and adventurers—who built Isabella, Jamestown, and many other early European settlements, the Pilgrims were skilled, hardworking, and self-disciplined. In addition, they settled as families for the most part, unique in Atlantic coast settlement at this point. Here we read from the journal of the colony's longtime governor, William Bradford, of the colonists' hard first year after landing in November 1620 to the first harvest in autumn 1621.


 * 2. Hardships**

English: "Starving time" in Jamestown, 1609-10 English: Servitude and hunger in Jamestown, 1623 English: Lean years in Massachusetts Bay, 1630

Food: ultimately this section is about food, or the lack of it. In describing the phenomenon, historians will use words like drought, disaster, hunger, and weakness, i.e., the causes and consequences of the lack of food. But those who experience it are more direct in their memoirs. George Percy tells us that men in Jamestown cried out in the night "we are starved, we are starved." Jesuits list, one by one, their desperate actions "in search of food in time of famine." "Either to find food or die" is the expressed goal of a Spaniard official in Hispaniola. "Through hindsight," writes historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "we can see that settlers and planners defeated themselves by inadequate preparation for the rigors of transplantation, but these lessons were learned very slowly and at great human and monetary cost." How the settlers defeated themselves is poignantly clear in these five accounts of early settlers' hardships—disease, injury, war, mutiny, Indian attacks, severe weather, abandonment, power struggles, and the hardship they stress the most, no food.

JAMESTOWN, 1609-1610. Known as the "starving time," the winter of 1609-1610 brought such "a world of miseries" to the settlers that hunger became the force governing the colonists. They ate their horses, then rats, then shoe leather. Some were driven to murder and digging up corpses. Others stashed food as they planned a secret return to England. Food was begged from the Indians or, if not forthcoming, stolen. The resulting cycle of attacks and counterattacks brought more misery and death. Who was to blame? John Smith? As the colony's previous governor he had compelled the men to work and was soon deposed and sent back to England, later justifying his dictatorial policies in repetitive histories and accounts. Or George Percy? Governor of the colony during the "starving time," he wrote this "true relation" partly as his defense against accusations of failed leadership. That Jamestown wasn't abandoned for good in June 1610 is due to the chance meeting on the James River of the ship carrying the sixty surviving colonists back to England, and the ship bringing provisions and 300 new colonists from England. But it was still many years before Jamestown was anything but "a world of miseries."

JAMESTOWN, 1623. Thirteen years after the "starving time," Jamestown was still a place where barely-holding-on counted as success, but with the introduction of tobacco cultivation the colony had its first lifeline. Tobacco sold for a solid profit in England, enticing more settlers to cultivate more fields, requiring more workers to tend the fields, attracting more impoverished young men to bind themselves in labor contracts for several years as indentured servants (and later, of course, locking captured Africans in the permanent "contract" of slavery). Here we read a letter from a newly arrived indentured servant, Richard Frethorne, to his parents, in which he plaintively lists the daily instances of hunger and deprivation in his life. He pleads with them to buy out his indenture and let him return to England as "there [is] nothing to be gotten here but sickness and death." [Richard Frethorne, Letter to his father and mother, 20 March, 2&3 April 1623]

MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY, 1630s. Roger Clapp arrived in New England in May 1630 at age 21, having overcome his father's opposition to his emigration. In his seventies he began his memoir to tell his children of "God's remarkable providences . . . in bringing me to this land." A devout man, he interprets the lack of food for his body as part of God's providing food for the soul, in this case the souls of the Puritans as they created their religious haven. Not only does he document the settlers' privations, he lists the punishments and fates of those who dared to criticize the Puritan leadership in the hard early days of the settlement.


 * 3. Q&As for Potential Settlers**

English: Reasons to plant a colony in New England, ca. 1628 Dutch: Dialogue on the advantages of New Netherland, 1655 English: Opposing views for prospective settlers, 1624/1670

NEW ENGLAND. John Winthrop, the longtime governor of the Puritan colony at Massachusetts Bay, is the probable author of this widely circulated pamphlet, written just before colony was founded in 1630. In addition to listing nine "reasons to be considered" for founding a new colony, Winthrop rebuts ten frequent objections, four of them theological. His famous justification for taking land "unsubdued" by the Indians is Answer #1 to Objection #1. (Anyway, he adds, there are so few Indians left after the great plague.) Almost 14,000 English Puritans emigrated to New England in the Great Migration of the 1630s. [John Winthrop, General Observations for the Plantation in New England, 1628]

NEW NETHERLAND. Imagine the Atlantic coastal colonies in 1650: French to the north, Spanish to the south, and the English on the interior peripheries of each. In the middle were the small and ill-fated colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden. They would not appear on a 1700 map of the region, having become English by surrender and cession. But in 1655 when this promotional piece was written, the colony of New Netherland was thirty years old, commercially and socially successful, and aggressively recruiting settlers. In nine years New Netherland grew from 2,000 settlers in 1655 to 9,000 in 1664, when it surrendered to the superior military might of the English.

NEW-YORK AND NEW ENGLAND. "Diametrically opposed" describes the messages of these two English settlers to their readers back in the home country. From Edward Winslow in the Plymouth colony (when it was four years old) we are urged to "rest where thou art" if we don't have the mettle and would become like those who "are at their wit's end and would give ten times so much for their return." Then from Daniel Denton we are told to run, not walk, to the heaven that is New-York (then six years old as an English colony, having been New Netherland from 1609 to 1664). "If there be any terrestrial Canaan," he writes, "'tis surely here, where the Land floweth with milk and honey." He enumerates the many blessings beyond milk and honey that await Englishmen, especially the poor, who would settle in this colony.


 * 4. Instructions for Leaders**

English: Investors' instructions for Jamestown, ca. 1607 English: Founder's instructions for Maryland, 1633

European archives are full of written instructions to the founders and governors of New World settlements. Many of the documents are boilerplate and not engrossing reading. But some, amidst the usual orders to survey the area, build towns, and make a lot of money for the home country, reveal the personal visions and political struggles of the founders. As a whole they document the profound challenges of governing colonies in an ungovernable, i.e., unknown environment, and this is what makes them worth dissecting.

JAMESTOWN. Hampered by small royal coffers and by war with Spain and Ireland, England did not pursue an Atlantic coast colony for two decades after the loss of the 1587 Roanoke colony. Then in 1607 a new group of investors (the Virginia Company of London) received a charter from the new king (James I) to make a new attempt at a Virginia colony (Jamestown). This time the venture succeeded, but only after years of financial and human loss. This undated set of instructions was written by a Company member, perhaps Richard Hakluyt (hak-loot), to direct the leaders in their initial arrival, placement, and building of the colony. It also provides strict guidelines for dealing with the Powhatan Indians, who had massacred the Spanish settlers in a nearby settlement, Ajacan, thirty-five years earlier.

MARYLAND. Having received a charter from King Charles I of England to establish a new colony in the northern part of Virginia, Cecil Calvert sent his two brothers with about 150 men to build the first settlements in 1633. Foremost among his concerns in these Instructions is the potential threat from internal enemies and from the settlers of nearby Jamestown and its London backers. He never saw Mary Land himself, feeling bound to stay in England to protect his colonial interests from rivals.


 * 7. Go Ahead?**

English: On saving Jamestown, 1624

In 1592, a century after Columbus's first voyage, the European presence in the western hemisphere could be represented by dividing a map at 30° north latitude (near St. Augustine, Florida). South of the line, the Spanish dominated Central America, the Caribbean, and most of South America, while the Portuguese controlled Brazil. North of the line, however, there was minimal European presence. Attempts by the Spanish, French, and English to place settlements on the Atlantic coast had failed (Fort Caroline, Ajacan, and Roanoke among the failures). The French dominated the northern fur trade and joined in the Grand Banks fishing off Newfoundland, but they had yet to build a significant settlement in the hemisphere. The English, in effect, had no presence on the continent.

In a space of two years, however, in 1607 and 1608, the Spanish, English, and French founded settlements north of the 30th latitude that survived despite the odds against them—Santa Fé in New Mexico (1607), Jamestown on the Atlantic coast (1607), and Quebec on the St. Lawrence River (1608). Earlier, the Spanish had built a small fort named San Agustín on the Atlantic coast of Florida. All foundered in their early years, their continued existence a matter of luck as well as policy. Finally, decisions to nurture or abandon these fledgling colonies had to be made.

JAMESTOWN. It is remarkable that Jamestown survived its first years. Hunger, disease, frigid winters, failed harvests, Indian wars, feuding leaders, ill-chosen settlers, and the prevalence of what would today be called "gross mismanagement" nearly doomed the colony. In 1610 the situation was so dire that Jamestown was abandoned by its sixty surviving settlers who, as fate would have it, sailed only a short distance down the James River before meeting the new governor, arriving with supplies from England, who ordered them back to Jamestown. Still, Jamestown's population could not stabilize and grow until the cultivation of tobacco began after 1613. Even then the colony never returned profits for its investors in the Virginia Company. In 1624 a commission formed by King James to investigate the colony's failure questioned John Smith, one of the colony's early governors, and sought his advice on saving the colony. Although writing with his usual self-serving prose, Smith delivered clear point-by-point recommendations to the commission. The decision: Jamestown was put under the control of the crown and the Virginia Company ceased to exist.