2 we can well comprehend. 18. But to found a colony in those days was harder than The mere outlay of money was enormous for that time. Ships had little storage room; so freights were high, and the best accommodations were poorer than modern steerage. To carry a man from England to America cost from £10 to £12, or about $300 in our values.1 To provide his outfit and to support him until he could raise a crop, cost as much more. Thus to establish a family in America took some thousands of dollars. Moreover, there were no ships ready for the business, and no supplies. The directors of the early colonizing movements met all sorts of costly delays and vexations. They had to buy ships, or build them; and, in Channing's phrase, they had to buy food for the voyages "on the hoof or in the shock," and clothing" on the sheep's back." They had also to provide government, medicines, fortifications, military supplies, and food to meet a possible crop failure. Much money, too, was sure to be lost in experimenting with unfit industries under untried conditions—as in the futile attempts to produce silk and make glass in Virginia. 19. The English crown founded no colonies, nor did it give money toward founding any. It did give charters to those men who were willing to risk their fortunes in the attempt. These charters were grants of territory and of authority over future settlers. Thus the English colonies (with a few accidental exceptions, which will be noticed) were at first proprietary. The proprietor might be an individual or an English corporation. In either case, the proprietor owned the land and ruled the settlers. 20. The first colonial charter was granted by Elizabeth, in 1578, to Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Gilbert made two attempts at a colony, starting out the first time with eleven ships and nearly 600 colonists, and the second time with 260 picked settlers. Spanish hostility kept the first expedition from reaching America. The second, in the spring of 1583, entered St. John's Harbor on the New Foundland coast. Gilbert's 1 In 1600, money was worth five or six times as much as now. § 22] SIR WALTER RALEIGH 17 claims were recognized readily by the captains of the "thirtysix ships of all nations" present there for the fisheries; but desertion and disaster weakened the colonists, and in August the survivors sailed for England. Gilbert had sunk his fortune, and he himself perished on the return. Song and story dwell fondly on the Christian knight's last words, shouted cheerily through the storm-wrack from his sinking little ship to comfort friends on the larger consort, "The way to heaven is as near by sea as by land." Gilbert's enterprise was taken up at once by his half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, the most gallant figure of that daring age. In 1584, Raleigh received a charter copied from Gilbert's. In the next three years he sent three expeditions to Roanoke Island on the Carolina coast, each time in considerable fleets. His first explorers declared the new land "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful, and wholesome of all the world," and the natives were affirmed to be "such as live after the manner of the golden age." But supplies and reinforcements were delayed by the struggle with the Spanish Armada; and when the next supply ships did arrive, the colonists had vanished without trace. 21. Raleigh had spent a vast fortune (a million dollars in our values); and, though he sent ships from time to time to search for the lost colonists, he could make no further attempt at settlement. Still, despite their failures, Gilbert and Raleigh are the fathers of American colonization. The tremendous and unforeseen difficulties of the enterprise overmatched even the indomitable will of these Elizabethan heroes; but their efforts had aroused their countrymen and made success certain in the near future. With pathetic courage, when in prison and near his death, Raleigh wrote, "I shall yet see it [America] an English nation." 22. For twenty-five years, attempts at colonization had failed, largely because the life-and-death struggle with Spain in Europe drained England's energies. Worse was to come. James I (1603) sought Spanish friendship; and then indeed Englishmen began to feel their chance for empire slipping through their fingers. SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH MAP OF THE NEW WORLD. But splendid memories of the great Elizabethan days still stirred men's hearts; and, as a protest against James' dastard policy in Europe, the fever for colonization awoke again in the heart of the nation. Men said a terrible mistake had been § 23] MOTIVES OF THE COLONISTS 19 made when Henry VII refused to adopt the enterprise of Columbus; and they insisted vehemently that England should not now abandon Virginia" this one enterprise left unto these days." Raleigh had found part of his money by forming a partnership with some London merchants. In 1606, some of these same merchants organized a large stock company to build a colony, and secured from King James a grant known as the Charter of 1606, or the First Virginia Charter. 23. This company was of course a commercial enterprise. No doubt some of its members cared only for financial gain. Even its great leaders cared for this end; but, like Raleigh and Gilbert (§ 17), they cared more to build up the power of England. They wished also to Christianize the savages. This purpose faded soon for actual colonists, but it long continued powerful in England. The great clergymen who guided the Church of England (then recently cut off from Rome) could not rest content with "this little English paddock" while Rome was winning new continents to herself by her devoted missionaries; nor could these good churchmen help squirming under the taunt of the Romanists "shewinge that they are the true Catholicke churche because they have bene the onelie converters of many millions of infidells." "Yea," confesses the chagrined Hakluyt (note, page 15), "I myself have bene demaunded of them TITLE PAGE OF HAKLUYT'S VOYAGES. Such Eng how many infidells have bene by us converted." lishmen cared for the London Company mainly in its aspect as a foreign missionary society- the first in the Protestant world; and this missionary character brought the Company many gifts of money from outsiders (Source Book, No. 26 c). For many years, even this great Company had to struggle with discouragement and distress. But its pamphlets, urging people to buy stock, did not place emphasis on any hope of large dividends as we expect a prospectus of a commercial company to do- but rather on the meanness and "avarice" of the man who would "save" his money instead of using it to extend English freedom and the kingdom of God (Source Book, Nos. 5-7). It was these high enthusiasms, far more than it was greed, that brought hundreds of the noblest of Englishmen to the rescue of the enterprise. 24. So far we have looked only at the motives of Englishmen who stayed at home and there helped to promote American colonization. Now let us look at the motives of the colonists. In 1600, England needed room. True, the island had still only a tenth as many people as to-day; but, as industry was carried on in that day, its four millions were more crowded than its forty millions are now. For the small farmers, especially, life had become very hard (Modern World, § 415); and these yeomen furnished most of the manual labor in the early colonies. Few of this class could pay the cost of transporting themselves and their families to America; and so commonly they were glad to bind themselves by written "indentures" to become "servants" to some wealthy proprietor. That is, these indentured servants mortgaged their labor for four years, or seven years, in return for transportation and subsistence, and perhaps for a tract of wild land at the end of their term of service. Captains and capitalists came from the English gentry class. Until the peace with Spain in 1604, many high-spirited youth had been fighting Spain in the Netherlands, for Dutch independence; and others had made the "gentlemen-adventurers" who, under leaders like Drake, had paralyzed the far-flung domains of New Spain with fear. To these men, and to many |