Brave+New+World+(con't)

Read the following excerpt from Kenneth Davis' book __Don't Know Much About History__. Then, in your own words, answer the following questions:


 * 1) **  What was so important about Jamestown?  **
 * 2) **  What was the Northwest Passage?  **
 * 3) **  What was the lost Colony?  **
 * 4) **  When and how did Jamestown get started?  **
 * 5) **  Did Pocahontas really save John Smith's life?  **
 * 6) **  What was the House of Burgesses?  **
 * 7) **  Who started the slave trade?  **
 * 8) **  Who were the Pilgrims, and what did they want?  **
 * 9) **  What was the Mayflower Compact?  **
 * 10) **  Did the Pilgrims really land at Plymouth Rock?  **

Winners write the history books, so, even though the Spanish dominated the New World for almost a century before the English settlers arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish were eventually supplanted in North America, and the new era of English supremacy began. Just as modern American life is shaped by global happenings, international events had begun to play an increasingly important role at this stage in world history. By the mid-sixteenth century, Spain had grown corrupt and lazy, the Spanish king living off the spoils of the gold mines of the Americas, with a resultant lack of enterprise at home. With gold pouring in, there was little inducement or incentive to push advances in the areas of commerce or invention.
 * If the Spanish were here first, what was so important about Jamestown? **

Perhaps even more significant was the revolution that became known as the Protestant Reformation. A zealous Catholic, Spain's King Philip II saw England's Protestant Queen Elizabeth not only as a political and military rival, but as a heretic as well. His desire to defend Roman Catholicism dictated his policies, including his support of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth. For her part, Elizabeth saw the religious conflict as the excuse to build English power at Spain's expense. And she turned her notorious "sea dogs," or gentlemen pirates, loose on Spanish treasure ships while also aiding the Dutch in their fight with Spain. The Dutch, meanwhile, were building the largest merchant marine fleet in Europe.

When the English sank the Spanish battleships-the Armada-in 1588, with the help of a violent storm that smashed more Spanish warships than the British did, the proverbial handwriting was on the wall. It was a blow from which Spain never fully recovered, and it marked the beginning of England's rise to global sea power, enabling that tiny island nation to embark more aggressively on a course of colonization and empire-building.

If you answer, "A movie by Alfred Hitchcock," Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. (You're thinking of North by Northwest, the classic thriller including the famous scene in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop duster. ) Almost a century after Columbus's first voyage, Europeans remained convinced that a faster route to China was waiting to be found and that the New World was just an annoying roadblock-although Spain was proving it to be a profitable one-that could be detoured. Some tried to go around the top of Russia, the "northeast passage." Sebastian Cabot organized an expedition in search of such a passage in 1553. Cabot had also tried going the other way back in 1509, but the voyage failed when his crew mutinied.
 * What was the Northwest Passage? **

In 1576, Sir Humphrey (or Humfrey) Gilbert first used the phrase "North West passage," to describe a sea route around North America, and he continued to search for such a route to China. An Oxford educated soldier, courtier, and businessman, Gilbert also played a hand in the earliest English attempts at colonization. In 1578, another Englishman, Martin Frobisher, set off for the fabled route and reached the northeast coast of Canada, exploring Baffin Island.

Among the others who searched for the route through the Arctic from Europe to Asia was Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch, who embarked on his voyage aboard the Half Moon to North America in 1609, the voyage on which he discovered the bay and river later named after him. Sailing as far north as present day Albany, Hudson met Delaware and Mohican Indians along the way and apparently threw a memorable party at which the Indian leaders got quite drunk. But Hudson realized that this was not the route to China.

Like many of the famous explorers, Hudson left a name for himself but his fate was far from happy. In 1610, a group of English merchants formed a company that provided Hudson with a ship called the Discovery. When the Discovery reached a body of rough water, later named Hudson Strait, that led into Hudson Bay, Hudson thought he had at last come to the Pacific Ocean. Struggling to sail though massive ice, he headed south into what is now James Bay. But lost, frustrated, and cold, Hudson and his crew failed to find an outlet at the south end of this bay. Forced to haul their ship to ground and spend the winter in the sub-Arctic, Hudson and his crew-who had been promised the balmier South Pacific -suffered severely from cold, hunger, and disease. In the spring of 1611, Hudson's crew could take no more. They mutinied and set Hudson adrift in a small boat with his son, John, and seven loyal crewmen. The mutineers sailed back to England, and their report gave continued hope that a passage existed between Hudson Bay and the Pacific. But it didn't prompt Hudson's employers to send a rescue effort. England based its claim to the vast Hudson Bay region on Hudson's last voyage and the Hudson Bay Company soon began the fur trade that would bring the wealth that a route to Asia was supposed to deliver. Hudson and his boat mates were never seen again, although Indian legends tell of white men being found in a boat.

While a northwest passage to the East does exist, it requires sailing through far northern waters that are icebound much of the year, although global warming may be changing that, many scientists fear.

In 1578 and again in 1583, Humphrey Gilbert set sail with a group of colonists and Queen Elizabeth's blessings. The first expedition accomplished little, and the second, after landing in Newfoundland, was lost in a storm, and Sir Humphrey with it.
 * What was the lost Colony? **

But Gilbert's half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh, as other historians spell it), the thirty-one-year-old favorite of Queen Elizabeth, inherited Gilbert's royal patent and continued the quest. He dispatched ships to explore North America and named the land there Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth, "the virgin queen." In 1585, he was behind a short-lived attempt to form a colony on Roanoke Island on present-day North Carolina's Outer Banks. In 1586, Sir Francis Drake found the colonists hungry and ready to return to England. In the following year, Raleigh sent another group of 107 men, women, and children to Roanoke. It was an ill-planned and ill-fated expedition. The swampy island was inhospitable, and so were the local Indians. Supply ships, delayed by the attack of the Spanish Armada, failed to reach the colony in 1588, and when ships finally did arrive in 1590, the pioneers left by Raleigh had disappeared without a trace.

All that was found was some rusted debris and the word //croatoan//, the Indian name for the nearby island on which Cape Hatteras is located, carved on a tree. Over the years, there has been much speculation about what happened to the so-called Lost Colony, but its exact fate remains a mystery. Starvation and Indian raids probably killed off most of the unlucky colonists, with any survivors being adopted by the Indians, the descendants of whom still claim Raleigh's colonists as their ancestral kin. In his book Set Fair for Roanoke, the historian David Beers Quinn produces a more interesting bit of historical detection. Quinn suggests that the Lost Colonists weren't lost at all; instead, they made their way north toward Virginia, settled among peaceable Indians, and were surviving at nearly the time Jamestown was planted but were slaughtered in a massacre by Powhatan, an Indian chief whose name becomes prominent in the annals of Jamestown.

It took another fifteen years and a new monarch in England to attempt colonization once again. But this time there would be a big difference: private enterprise had entered the picture. The costs of sponsoring a colony were too high for any individual, even royalty, to take on alone. In 1605, two groups of merchants, who had formed joint stock companies that combined the investments of small shareholders, petitioned King James I for the right to colonize Virginia. The first of these, the Virginia Company of London, was given a grant to southern Virginia; the second, the Plymouth Company, was granted northern Virginia. At this time, however, the name Virginia encompassed the entire North American continent from sea to sea. While these charters spoke loftily of spreading Christianity, the real goal remained the quest for treasure, and the charter spoke of the right to "dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper."
 * When and how did Jamestown get started? **

On December 20, 1606, colonists-men and boys-left port aboard three ships, Susan Constant, Goodspeed, and Discovery, under Captain John Newport. During a miserable voyage, they were stranded and their supplies dwindled, and dozens died. They reached Chesapeake Bay in May 1607, and within a month, had constructed a triangle shaped wooden fort and named it James Fort-only later Jamestown -the first permanent English settlement in the New World. In one of the most significant finds in recent archaeology, the site of James Fort was discovered in 1996.

Jamestown has been long celebrated as the "birthplace of America," an outpost of heroic settlers braving the New World. Here again, rude facts intrude on the neat version of life in Jamestown that the schoolbooks gave us. While the difficulties faced by the first men of Jamestown were real-attacks by Algonquian Indians, rampant disease-many of the problems, including internal political rifts, were self-induced. The choice of location, for instance, was a bad one. Jamestown lay in the midst of a malarial swamp. The settlers had arrived too late to get crops planted. Many in the group were gentlemen unused to work, or their menservants, equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded by the harsh task of carving out a viable colony. In a few months, fifty-one of the party were dead; some of the survivors were deserting to the Indians whose land they had invaded. In the "starving time" of 1609-10, the Jamestown settlers were in even worse straits. Only 60 of the 500 colonists survived the period. Disease, famine brought on by drought, and continuing Indian attacks all took their toll. Crazed for food, some of the settlers were reduced to cannibalism, and one contemporary account tells of men "driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature abhorred," raiding both English and Indian graves. In one extreme case, a man killed his wife as she slept and "fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head."

**AMERICAN VOICES** JOHN SMITH, January 1608 (from Smith's famed memoir in which he writes of himself in the third person): //Having feasted after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could laid hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death; whereat the emperor was contented he should live .... Two days after, Powhatan having disguised himself in the most fearfulest manner he could, caused Captain Smith to be brought forth to a great house in the woods, and there upon a mat by the fire to be left alone. Not long after, from behind a mat that divided the house, was made the most dolefulest noise he ever heard; then Powhatan, more like a devil than man, with some two hundreds more as black as himself, came unto him and told him now they were friends ....//

A new generation of American children, trotting off to school with Pocahontas lunch boxes, courtesy of Disney, think Pocahontas was an ecologically correct, buxom Indian maiden who fell in love with a hunky John Smith who had a voice just like Mel Gibson.
 * Did Pocahontas really save John Smith's life? **

If you are a little bit older, this is how you may have learned it in school: Captain John Smith, the fearless leader of the Jamestown colony, was captured by Powhatan's Indians. Powhatan's real name was Wahunsonacock. But he was called Powhatan after his favorite village, which was near present-day Richmond, Virginia. Smith's head was on a stone, ready to be bashed by an Indian war ax, when Pocahontas (a nickname loosely translated as "frisky"-her real name was Matowaka), the eleven-year-old daughter of Chief Powhatan, "took his head in her arms" and begged for Smith's life. The basis for that legend is Smith's own version of events, which he related in the third person in his memoirs, and he was not exactly an impartial witness to history. David Beers Quinn speculates that Smith learned of Powhatan's massacre of the Lost Colonists from the chief himself, but kept this news secret in order to keep the peace with the Indians. This "execution" was actually an initiation ceremony in which Smith was received by the Indians.

One of those larger-than-life characters with mythic stature, Captain John Smith was an English adventurer whose life before Jamestown was an extraordinary one. As a soldier of fortune in the wars between the Holy Roman Empire and the Turks, he rose to captain's rank and had supposedly been held prisoner by the Turkish Pasha and sold as a slave to a young, handsome woman. After escaping, he was rewarded for his services in the war and made a "gentleman." He later became a Mediterranean privateer, returning to London in 1605 to join Bartholomew Gosnold in a new venture into Virginia.

While some large questions exist about Smith's colorful past (documented largely in his own somewhat unreliable writings), there is no doubt that he was instrumental in saving Jamestown from an early extinction. When the Jamestown party fell on hard times, Smith became a virtual military dictator, instituting a brand of martial law that helped save the colony. He became an expert forager and was a successful Indian trader. Without the help of Powhatan's Indians, who shared food with the Englishmen, showed them how to plant local corn and yams, and introduced them to the ways of the forest, the Jamestown colonists would have perished. Yet, in a pattern that would be repeated elsewhere, the settlers eventually turned on the Indians, and fighting between the groups was frequent and fierce. Once respected by the Indians, Smith became feared by them. Smith remained in Jamestown for only two years before setting off on a voyage of exploration that provided valuable maps of the American coast as far north as the "over-cold" lands called North Virginia. In 1614, he had sailed north hoping to get rich from whaling or finding gold. Finding neither, he set his crew to catching fish -once again the lowly cod. After exploring the inlets of the Chesapeake Bay, he also charted the coastline from Maine to Cape Cod and gave the land a new name-New England. Smith apparently also made a fortune in the cod he had caught and stored. He had also lured twenty-seven natives on to the ship and took them back to Europe to be sold as slaves in Spain.

But his mark on the colony was indelible. A hero of the American past? Yes, but, like most heroes, not without flaws. After Smith's departure, his supposed savior, Pocahontas, continued to play a role in the life of the colony. During the sporadic battles between settlers and Indians, Pocahontas, now seventeen years old, was kidnapped and held hostage by the colonists. While a prisoner, she caught the attention of the settler John Rolfe, who married the Indian princess, as one account put it, "for the good of the plantation," cementing a temporary peace with the Indians. In 1615, Rolfe took the Indian princess and their son to London, where she was a sensation, even earning a royal audience. She also encountered John Smith, who had let her think that he was dead. Renamed Lady Rebecca after her baptism, she died of smallpox in England.

Besides this notable marriage, Rolfe's other distinction was his role in the event that truly saved Jamestown and changed the course of American history. In 1612, he crossed native Virginia tobacco with seed from a milder Jamaican leaf, and Virginia had its first viable cash crop. London soon went tobacco mad, and in a very short space of time, tobacco was sown on every available square foot of plantable land in Virginia. **AMERICAN VOICES** POWHATAN to John Smith, 1607: //Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? ... In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig breaks, they all cry out "Here comes Captain Smith!" So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner.//

Despite the tobacco profits, controlled in London by a monopoly, Jamestown limped along near extinction. Survival remained a day-today affair while political intrigues back in London reshaped the colony's destiny. Virginia Company shareholders were angry that their investment was turning out to be a bust, and believed that the "Magazine," a small group of Virginia Company members who exclusively supplied the colony's provisions, were draining off profits. A series of reforms was instituted, the most important of which meant settlers could own their land, rather than just working for the company. And the arbitrary rule of the governor was replaced by English common law.
 * What was the House of Burgesses? **

In 1619, new management was brought to the Virginia Company, and Governor Yeardley of Virginia summoned an elected legislative assembly-the House of Burgesses-which met in Jamestown that year. (A burgess is a person invested with all the privileges of a citizen, and comes from the same root as the French bourgeois.) Besides the governor, there were six councilors appointed by the governor, and two elected representatives from each private estate and two from each of the company's four estates or tracts. (Landowning males over seventeen years old were eligible to vote.) Their first meeting was cut short by an onslaught of malaria and July heat. While any decisions they made required approval of the company in London, this was clearly the seed from which American representative government would grow. The little assembly had a shaky beginning, from its initial malarial summer. In the first place, the House of Burgesses was not an instant solution to the serious problems still faced by the Jamestown settlers. Despite years of immigration to the new colony, Jamestown's rate of attrition during those first years was horrific. Lured by the prospect of owning land, some 6,000 settlers had been transported to Virginia by 1624. However, a census that year showed only 1,277 colonists alive. A Royal Council asked, "What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?"

Many of them had starved. Others had died in fierce Indian fighting, including some 350 colonists who were killed in a 1622 massacre when the Indians, fearful at the disappearance of their lands, nearly pushed the colony back into the Chesapeake Bay. Responding to the troubles at Jamestown and the mismanagement of the colony, the king revoked the Virginia Company's charter in 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony. Under the new royal governor, Thomas Wyatt, however, the House of Burgesses survived on an extralegal basis and would have much influence in the years ahead.

Exactly how representative that house was in those days is another question. Certainly women didn't vote. Before 1619, there were few women in Jamestown, and in that year a shipload of "ninety maidens" arrived to be presented as wives to the settlers. The going price for one of the brides: 120 pounds of tobacco as payment for her transport from England.

Ironically, in the same year that representative government took root in America, an ominous cargo of people arrived in the port of Jamestown. Like the women, these new arrivals couldn't vote, and also like the women, they brought a price. These were the first African slaves to be sold in the American colonies.

While everyone wants a piece of the claim to the discovery of America, no one wants to be known for having started the slave trade. The unhappy distinction probably belongs to Portugal, where ten black Africans were taken about fifty years before Columbus sailed. But by no means did the Portuguese enjoy a monopoly. The Spanish quickly began to import this cheap human labor to its American lands. In 1562, the English seaman John Hawkins began a direct slave trade between Guinea and the West Indies. By 1600, the Dutch and French were also caught up in the "traffick in men," and by the time those first twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown aboard a Dutch slaver, a million or more black slaves had already been brought to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America.
 * Who started the slave trade? **

The year after the House of Burgesses met for the first time, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower founded the second permanent English settlement in America. Their arrival in 1620 has always been presented as another of history's lucky accidents. But was it?
 * Who were the Pilgrims, and what did they want? **

Had Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, turned the ship when he was supposed to, the little band would have gone to its intended destination, the mouth of the Hudson, future site of New York, and a settlement within the bounds of the Virginia Company's charter and authority. Instead, the ship kept a westerly route-the result of a bribe to the captain, as London gossip had it-and in November 1620, the band of pioneers found safe harbor in Cape Cod Bay, coming ashore at the site of present-day Provincetown. Of the 102 men, women, and children aboard the small ship, fifty were so-called Pilgrims, who called themselves "Saints" or "First Comers."

Here again, as it had in Queen Elizabeth's time, the Protestant Reformation played a crucial role in events. After the great split from Roman Catholicism that created the Church of England, the question of religious reform continued heatedly in England. Many English remained Catholic. Others felt that the Church of England was too "popish" and wished to push it further away from Rome -to "purify" it-so they were called Puritans. But even among Puritans strong differences existed, and there were those who thought the Church of England too corrupt. They wanted autonomy for their congregations, and wished to separate from the Anglican church. This sect of Separatists viewed in its day the same way extremist religious cults are thought of in our time-went too far for the taste of the authorities, and they were forced either underground or out of England.

A small band of Separatists, now called Pilgrims, went to Leyden, Holland, where their reformist ideas were accepted. But cut off from their English traditions, the group decided on another course, a fresh start in the English lands in America. With the permission of the Virginia Company and the backing of London merchants who charged handsome interest on the loans they made, the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth in 1620. Among their number were the Pilgrim families of William Brewster, John Carver, Edward Winslow, and William Bradford. The "strangers," or non-Pilgrim voyagers (men faithful to the Church of England, but who had signed on for the passage in the hope of owning property in the New World), included ship's cooper John Alden and army captain Miles Standish.

When the rough seas around Nantucket forced the ship back to Cape Cod and the group decided to land outside the bounds of the Virginia Company, the "strangers" declared that they would be free from any commands. Responding quickly to this threat of mutiny, the Pilgrim leaders composed a short statement of self-government, signed by almost all the adult men.
 * What was the Mayflower Compact? **

This agreement, the Mayflower Compact, is rightly considered the first written constitution in North America. Cynicism about its creation, or for that matter about the House of Burgesses, is easy in hindsight. Yes, these noble-minded pioneers slaughtered Indians with little remorse, kept servants and slaves, and treated women no differently from cattle. They were imperfect men whose failings must be regarded alongside their astonishing attempt to create in America a place like none in Europe. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it in The Oxford History of the American People, "This compact is an almost startling revelation of the capacity of Englishmen in that era for self-government. Moreover, it was a second instance of the Englishmen's determination to live in the colonies under a rule of law."

Despite their flaws, the early colonists taking their toddling steps toward self-rule must be contrasted with other colonies, including English colonies, in various parts of the world where the law was simply the will of the king or the church.

**AMERICAN VOICES** From the Mayflower Compact (signed December 1620): //We whose names are under-written ... doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves togeather into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equal lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete for the generall good of the Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience ....//

After a brief exploration of Cape Cod, the Mayflower group sailed on and found a broad, round harbor that they recognized from Captain John Smith's maps as Plimoth (Plymouth). The Indians called it Patuxet. On December 16, the Mayflower's passengers reached their new home. There is no mention in any historical account of Plymouth Rock, the large stone that can be seen in Plymouth today, into which the year 1620 is carved. The notion that the Pilgrims landed near the rock and carved the date is a tradition that was created at least a hundred years later, probably by some smart member of the first Plymouth Chamber of Commerce. Like the first arrivals at Jamestown, the Pilgrims and "strangers" had come to Plymouth at a bad time to start planting a colony. By spring, pneumonia and the privations of a hard winter had cost the lives of fifty-two of the 102 immigrants. But in March, salvation came, much as it had in Virginia, in the form of Indians, including one named Squanto, who could speak English. Who Squanto was and how he came to speak English are among history's unsolved mysteries. One claim is made for an Indian named Tisquantum who had been captured by an English slaver in 1615. A second is made for an Indian named Tasquantum, brought to England in 1605.
 * Did the Pilgrims really land at Plymouth Rock? **

Whichever he was, he moved into the house of William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, and was t he means of survival for the Pilgrims until his death from fever in 1622. Another Indian of great value to the Pilgrim Fathers was Samoset, a local chief who also spoke English and introduced the settlers to the grand chief of the Wampanoags, Wasamegin, better known by his title Massasoit. Under the rule of Massasoit, the Indians became loyal friends to the Pilgrims, and it was Massasoit's braves who were the invited guests to the October feast at which the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest. For three days the colonists and their Indian allies feasted on turkey and venison, pumpkin and corn. It was the first Thanksgiving. (Thanksgiving was first officially celebrated during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1864. It became a national holiday and was moved to its November date by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

While life did not magically improve after that first year, the Pilgrims carved out a decent existence and, through trade with the Indians, were able to repay their debts to the London backers and even to buyout the shares that these London merchants held. Their success helped inspire an entire wave of immigration to New England that came to be known as the Great Puritan migration. From 1629 to 1642, between 14,000 and 20,000 settlers left England for the West Indies and New England, and most of these were Anglican Puritans brought over by a new joint stock company called the Massachusetts Bay Company. They came because life in England under King Charles I had grown intolerable for Puritans. Though the newcomers demonstrated a startling capacity for fighting among themselves, usually over church matters, these squabbles led to the settlement and development of early New England.

Davis, Kenneth C. //Don't Know Much about History: Everything You Need to Know about American History but Never Learned//. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 20-31