Was Virginia Destined To Be English?
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In the 1580's, Walter Ralegh (often spelled "Raleigh" as well) triggered the creation of the Roanoke Colony. He was not able to see the future; he was not trying to pave the way for John Smith and others to sail into the Chesapeake Bay in 1607. Ralegh thought that an English settlement in the New World had a reasonable chance to make him a profit and enhance his reputation. He knew the risks were high, but he was venturing his capital in an effort to succeed in his own time, and at his own chosen place. The Roanoke Colony was not intended to be "lost," or just a prelude to Jamestown.
Beware the temptation to believe in Manifest Destiny, where:
- the initial English failures to settle on the North Carolina coast was just a prelude to the inevitable success at Jamestown, 20 years later
- the Native Americans would inevitably hand over the land to the English colonists
- the Spanish, French, Swedes, and Dutch were destined by some higher power to lose the competition for North American domination and accept the English authority
- the European-Americans were programmed to create a new form of democratic government, and ultimately become the dominant superpower in the world
Yes, that's what happened over 400 years of history, but in many situations the story could have taken a different turn.
The diseases of the New World could have overwhelmed the natural resistance in European bodies; colonial settlement might have been limited to just fishing support facilities on the coastline. The French could have maintained their initial hold on 16th Century colonies establisheed in South Carolina, resisting attacks by the Spanish in Florida and forcing the English to focus on colonial settlement in further away in New York/Maine. Powhatan could have exterminated the Jameestown colonists and burned their wooden structures before the English tried to withdraw in 1610, and Lord de la Warre's reinforcements could have chosen to stay in the newly-discovered Bahamas rather than rebuild James Fort.
Don't assume the English explorations and settlements in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries would lead, in some predestined journey, to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the status of the United States today in the world. Such an assumption dimimishes the very real dangers and economic risks that were taken by the early explorers and colonists, as well as the personal gambles and intellectual productivity of the leaders of the American Revolution.
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accidental burning of James Fort, January 1608 -
one of many failures that led to Sir Thomas Gates to abandon Jamestown (briefly...) in 1610
Source: National Park Service, Jamestown - Sidney King Paintings Gallery
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Today, we know the first Europeans to settle permanently in Virginia were English. Listen carefully, and you may hear Jamestown described as the oldest settlement in North America. WRONG - that is far from correct.
Hampton, Virginia, is the oldest continuously settled English city in North America, dating back to 1620. Jamestown was settled 13 years before Hampton, but has been abandoned and is just a historic site now. However, Spanish settlements in Florida had been in place for over 40 years before the Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed arrived in the Chesapeake Bay and sailed upstream to initiate Jamestown.
In fact, the Spanish tried to settle Virginia over 40 years before Jamestown was started. Virginia could have become a non-English colony, filled with settlers who spoke a different language. Lots of people came to North America and Virginia before John Smith unpacked his suitcase...
The very first discoverers arrived 15,000 years (or more) ago, long before Columbus and the Europeans who sailed to Virginia from the east. In addition, Viking sagas and archeologic evidence suggests that Scandinavian explorers settled Greenland and built a village at L'Anse Aux Meadows in modern-day Newfoundland 1,000 years ago. Those Scandinavians were attracted not by a desire for gold, religious freedom, or conquest, but by... fish. Yes, fish, especially the Atlantic cod that provided protein for the Scandinavian diet.
The value of the protein was obvious to the Vikings, and later to other Europeans. The fastest European response to Columbus' discoveries was not to send people to occupy the new land, but to send fishing boats to the North Atlantic. The European fishing fleets built huts on the coast of Labrador, staying just long enough each fishing season to dry and salt their catch so the fish would not spoil in transit back to Europe.
When Europeans expanded their economic and political systems to the New World, inevitably the European conflicts came along with the settlement, technolgy, and other cultural patterns. North America was never "neutral territory," somehow exempt from the disputes in Europe. The fish in particular were valuable enough to fight over.
Gaining control over the fishing grounds was an early priority for the European nations, and establishing colonies was a secondary concern. The English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, after the English had sent ships to destroy the Spanish fishing fleet in the North Atlantic. The earliest English attemps to establish a colony in what today is North Carolina was interrupted by the Spanish Armada. Sir Walter Ralegh's "Lost Colony" was established in 1587, but resupply was blocked because England needed all ships to defend against the Spanish invasion. By the time help arrived in 1590, the colony was gone.
- (Think an attempt to establish a settlement on the moon or Mars might be interrupted by war between nations on earth? Why should we assume the modern voyages of discovery won't repeat the patterns of past explorations?)
The Scandinavians who initially settled at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland 1,000 years ago did not maintain their trans-Atlantic settlements. In the "Little Ice Age," icebergs that could crush their wooden ships drifted further south, and colder weather limited their ability to graze cattle and grow food in the high northern latitudes. The Scandinavian explorations were not followed by other European discoveries or settlement, and only recently have researchers concluded that the Vikings were familiar with the New World long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
In contrast to the Scandinavians, the journeys of Columbus were critical in the development of Virginia because his discoveries triggered extensive exploration and then massive settlement by the Europeans. In 1497, only 5 years after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, John Cabot explored the North American coast at the direction of Henry VII. The French commissioned Giovanni da Verrazzano to explore the coastline and search for the Northwest Passage in 1524. Verrazzano sailed from the North Carolina to Newfoundland, missing the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay but finding the location in New York where the Verrazzano Bridge is now located. A second explorer working for the French, Jacques Cartier, discovered the St. Lawrence River in 1535.
Being the first to discover lands in the New World (ignoring the obvious presence of Native Americans) had legal significance to the Europeans. The Europeans claimed ownership of land based on a "right of discovery" as well as a "right of conquest." Early explorations enabled countries other than Spain to establish legal title to various places in the New World.
- Knowledge is power. The different European nations often treated the details of their discoveries as state secrets. Maps about the New World were often hoarded rather than published. However, the Spanish knew most of what the English discovered, about as fast as that information was transmitted to the English royal court. Spanish spies copied the dispatches to London, and were successful in infiltrating many English expeditions as well. Dissent in early Jamestown included suspicion that some colonists were Spanish spies, and George Kendall was executed in 1608 for that reason.
After the Spanish discovered the gold that had already been mined by the Native Americans, many explorers had a "get rich quick" attitude towards their initial searches in the New World. It's possible that Spaniards from the Hernando de Soto expedition reached Lee County in 1540, and Juan Pardo may have reached Saltville in the mid-1560's.1
Besides gold and fish, another stimulus for exploring North America - from the Atlantic Coast of Virginia all the way to the Pacific Ocean shoreline - was the hope of controlling the spice trade with Asia through discovery of a Northwest Passage ("northwest" being relative to Europe) between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. (The Spanish referred to the idealized passage as the Strait of Anian.)
Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage compared with currently used shipping routes
Source: Hugo Ahlenius,
UNEP/GRID-Arendal
Various options for the Northwest Passage/Strait of Anian, were explored in the colonial era. John Cabot explored the Labrador coastline as early as 1497, but found no passage to China. In 1610, over a century later and after Jamestown had been founded, Henry Hudson would still be looking for that passage - with such intensity that his crew mutinied and abandoned him to die in what we now call Hudson Bay.
If our history of world exploration had been written by the Chinese rather than the Europeans, the names of the passages might have been different - just as the Prime Meridian might have been defined as the line of longitude through modern-day Beijing rather than London. If the North Americans had sailed first to Europe, the Prime Meridian might have been defined as the line that ran through Werowocomoco...
Perhaps some ship captains and sailors who traveled along the North American coast were excited by the joy of discovery, but the individuals who financed their initial explorations were capitalists seeking wealth through trade with Asia. The search for better transportation routes has never stopped. In 1969, a commercial ship actually navigated the Northwest Passage. It was the SS Manhattan, an oil tanker testing the feasibility of transporting crude oil from the oil fields on the North Slope of Alaska to the East Coast. Due to the amount of ice, it was quickly evident that an oil pipeline, from Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez on the Pacific Coast, was a better alternative.
The only vessels that routinely travel the Northwest Passage today are nuclear submarines sailing under the Arctic ice sheet, and transcontinental air flights following the "great circle" routes between Asia and Europe. As the temperatures rise in the Arctic, however, there are plans for regular commercial shipping. Commercial ships sailed through the Northwest Passage above Canada in 20082, and above Russia in 2009.3
Links
References
1. Glanville, Jim, "Unknown Holstonia: Southwest Virginia Before the Settling of Jamestown," talk presented to Second Virginia Forum on History, April 14, 2007 http://www.holstonia.com/files/Richmond2007.pdf (last checked August 2, 2009)
2. "1st commercial ship sails through Northwest Passage," CBC News, November 28, 2008, http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/11/28/nwest-vessel.html (last checked September 28, 2009)
3. "2 German cargo ships pass through 'Arctic Passage,' " AP News, September 11, 2009, http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ibGHSvFxr9kgRVuSSMuSsk5CfQAwD9AL9GKO2 (last checked September 28, 2009)
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