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THE BERMUDA COMPANY

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history at this time. It illustrates the incompatibility of colonial freedom in economic matters with profit-taking by the investors, whose subscriptions had nevertheless been indispensable to the colony's foundation. It has required the experience of three centuries for this incompatibility to be fully admitted, and for the truth to be realised that empire-building is an altruistic process in which men must give without expecting to receive. A few but not all of the financial founders of the old Empire were aware of it. Many of them risked their savings in colonies under the impression that it was a strictly business transaction, and they deserve sympathy in their subsequent disillusionment; for it generally happened that in the first years there were no profits to take, that then, if the undertaking succeeded, there began a period of dividends, and that almost immediately these rewards were cut short by the cry of the settlers against exploitation and their demand to enjoy the full fruits of the colony's prosperity. In Bermuda, where the second stage lasted longer than was usual, the leading events were as follows. The Somers Islands Company, to give the proprietary body its official name, escaped the fate of its parent organisation, the Virginia Company, and retained its charter for sixty years after that of Virginia had been extinguished. The Earl of Warwick remained its patron and manager until his death in 1658. By that date most of the original members had also dropped out. Many of their shares had been acquired by the inhabitants of the islands, and it was alleged that only a minority were still held in England. Nevertheless the Company's courts continued to sit in London, and under Charles II the colonists expressed indignation against this minority rule. The grievance was material, even if exaggerated, for the Company retained its monopoly of trade between England and the colony and was accused of manipulating prices to make an unjust profit. At length, in 1682, some of the inhabitants instituted a quo warranto process against the charter, the Crown took up their cause, and in 1684 the Company was dissolved. It had not been culpably guilty, but it had outlived its imperial function, and so, with some injustice to individuals, it had to go. The islands became a Crown colony, paying to imperial funds the same 4 per cent. export duty as was levied in the Caribbean Plantations.1 In the American colonies the period under review is one of considerable expansion, which is of a different type from that of the early Stuart period when all the colonists had been emigrants from England. After the Restoration the new acquisitions of the Carolinas, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were peopled more by re-emigration of existing colonists than by newcomers from England, and a foreign European element was present in all of them; for a variety of reasons there was no renewal of the "great emigration" which had founded New England and the tobacco Plantations. Beyond the 1 See Scott, W. R., Joint Stock Companies, 11, 293-7.

coastal belt, with its planting and mercantile occupations, a fringe of pioneers was pushing into the interior, cutting loose from tide water and communication with Europe, and seeking a hazardous living in subsistence-farming, hunting and Indian trade. This frontier element is for the most part silent in the seventeenth century, but nevertheless it existed, as a few scattered hints are sufficient to prove, and it was destined to contribute a vigorous element to the American character and to mould the events of the future in a manner quite out of proportion to the numbers of persons involved. For, to the south and west of Quebec and Montreal, the French were also throwing forward their adventurers, and the necessities of climate and waterways stood ready to thrust them downwards across the path of the English pioneers.1 The climax was in the future, but already the actors were taking the stage, and some far-seeing men had an inkling of what was to come. "The King of England", said a French officer on hearing of the seizure of New York and the Hudson waterway in 1664, "doth grasp at all America"; and for the next twenty years the frontiersmen of New York and New France were contending for influence in the buffer belt of the Six Nations. These things have as great a significance as the domestic politics of the coastline.

The unoccupied region to the southward of Virginia had long appeared a desirable acquisition. Raleigh's colonial ventures had been directed to its outlying islands, Sir Robert Heath had obtained a grant of it in 1629 under the name of Carolana, and some unofficial settlers had made fitful attempts to occupy it in the middle years of the century. Restoration statesmanship under the guidance of Clarendon transformed these aspirations into permanent achievement. Although Clarendon was the political patron, the designers of the new colony were Sir John Colleton, a Barbadian magnate, and Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia. With them were associated Lord Berkeley, brother of the Virginian; Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, an enthusiast for colonisation; Sir George Carteret, another of the same type; Lord Craven; and George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, the organiser of the Restoration. These eight men received in 1663 a grant of the American coastline subsequently defined as covering the region between 29° N. and 361° N., with unlimited extension into the interior. The name of their province was altered to Carolina, and the Bahama Islands were also placed within their jurisdiction. Colonial grants had hitherto been made to jointstock companies or single proprietors. A partnership of eight joint proprietors was a novelty which gave the maximum of political weight to the undertaking, but also caused a loss of clearness in design and of speed in action. It was a device that was not repeated.

The Carolina proprietors no doubt hoped to make an eventual profit, but they were experienced men who knew the colonial history 1 Parkman, F., Count Frontenac and New France, chaps. ii-ix.

COLONIAL MIGRATION

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of their time, and had they been merely seeking a good investment they would not have put their money into a new colony. A weightier motive was undoubtedly that of the public service and of the credit they would gain from its furtherance. They intended Carolina not as a competitor with existing Plantations but as a contribution to the imperial self-sufficiency that was the ideal of the time. It was not to grow sugar or tobacco, but the silks, wines, fruits and oils which England was then purchasing in foreign markets. Economic thought was by this time unfavourable to the emigration of useful English citizens, which it held to be a draining of the mother country's strength. The proprietors therefore sent out few native Englishmen, but looked rather to the older colonies, to Scotland, and to the Huguenots of France for the peopling of their new dominion. The plans for Carolina are thus worth a more detailed study than is here possible.1 They outran their performance, but they are a complete illustration of the imperial ideas of the time.

The actual expansion of the reign of Charles II was almost entirely based upon the circumstance that all the older colonies had, for various reasons, a surplus population ready to migrate elsewhere. New England, particularly Massachusetts, was prolific of men. Its soil and climate were harsh, and many found its social atmosphere harsher still. Before the close of the century wandering New Englanders, toughened by discipline but eager to escape from it, had made their mark all over the world, in English politics, in the adventurous West Indies, and in oceanic trade extending even round the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean. To all the new American colonies. they brought their energy and their independent political ideas; their religious straitness is the only quality they seem to have left behind them. Bermuda was a tiny colony with a high birth rate. Its population early reached the limits its soil could bear, and Bermudians also pervaded the western Atlantic as seamen and settlers even before the first Stuart wave of emigration had spent its force. In Barbados and the Leeward Islands fecundity was not so evident and death rates were high, but there the development of sugar planting displaced much of the white population for reasons already explained. Finally, Virginia was beginning to buy negro labour and had no more surplus land at the water's edge to bestow upon time-expired white servants. Her landless whites formed a class too numerous to find employment between the planter aristocracy and the servile mass. Some became frontiersmen in the higher grounds of the interior, but many were ready to migrate along the coastline outside the colony's limits.

At the date of the grant of the Carolina patent some Virginians were already prospecting in search of fertile land about Albemarle Sound within the northern limit of the province. Sir William Berkeley,

1 See Raper, C. L., North Carolina; M’Crady, E., Hist. of South Carolina; Beer, vol. 11, chap. ix.

as the proprietor nearest to the scene of action, supervised the consolidation of this settlement and sent a Virginian, William Drummond, to be its first governor. These people settled down and became the nucleus of North Carolina. At about the same time, although the exact date is obscure, a party of New Englanders and another of Barbadians established themselves at Cape Fear, further to the southward. They were isolated from the first settlement by a long stretch of unoccupied coast, and in 1667 they abandoned their undertaking, whereupon some of them joined the Albemarle Sound colony. Meanwhile the proprietors sought to plant other regions by their own initiative. Sir John Colleton despatched exploring parties from Barbados in 1665-6, but no settlement was achieved until after the Dutch War. Then, in 1669, an expedition sailed from England with about a hundred emigrants, picked up more at Barbados and Bermuda, and in 1670 disembarked them all at the harbour subsequently called Charleston. Next year some recruits from New York joined them, and in this way the colonisation of South Carolina was begun. In the hope of introducing wine and silk cultivation the proprietors next brought over a body of Huguenots from France. Lastly, after long negotiations, a band of Scottish pioneers sailed from Glasgow and reached Carolina in 1684. They formed a separate settlement at Port Royal, well to the south of Charleston, the motive of the proprietors being that they should serve as an outpost of that colony against Spanish raiders from Florida. The position was perilous and its tenure brief. In 1686 the Spaniards sailed up the coast and destroyed the little settlement, whose survivors fled to Charleston.1 By the close of the century the colonisation of Carolina had thus concentrated round two centres, Albemarle Sound and Charleston, and these were already organised as the two distinct governments of North and South Carolina.

In other respects besides area the results were disappointing. The projected new forms of cultivation never took root; even the French recruits proved as incapable of producing wine and silk in America as did the English pioneers. Subsistence-farming and the export of foodstuffs to the West Indies became the chief legitimate occupations, whilst the intricacy of the coastline made it an entrepôt for the many forms of illicit trade. The proprietors tried hard to make their colony respectable, but found themselves politically powerless. Their subjects were not law-abiding Englishmen from the homeland but colonial-bred adventurers, contemptuous of authority, and many of them debtors and bad characters who had made their places of origin too hot for them. John Locke, Shaftesbury's secretary, devised a form of government called the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina". Although embodying the most approved political theories of the day, it never came into operation, and the Carolinas evolved 1 Insh, G. P., Scottish Colonial Schemes, 1620-86, pp. 186-211.

NEW ENGLAND AND NEW NETHERLAND

25I institutions of the ordinary colonial type, with governor, council and elected Assembly. The Assemblies reflected the character of their constituents, passed easy-going laws for the protection of local debtors and insurgents, and declined to enforce the proprietors' claims for quit-rents. Nevertheless, in spite of all drawbacks, the Carolina colonies were a permanent achievement and the seed of greater things. But they were hardly an expansion of England; in origin and character they were more truly the firstfruit of the expansion of colonial America. The difference may be realised on comparing the impotence of their proprietors with the stern discipline maintained by the Earl of Carlisle in Barbados at an earlier date.

The conquest of the Dutch New Netherland, renamed by its captors New York and New Jersey, was the second undertaking of constructive imperialism in the America of the Restoration. Viewed in isolation it may appear an act of unprovoked piracy; examined in its setting it may still be described as unscrupulous, but certainly not as unwarranted. The watchword of the Restoration was the coordination of imperial activities on the basis of the laws of trade. The two chief obstacles were the particular interests of colonists and the desire of foreigners to intrude into the Empire's commerce. These obstacles appeared most serious in New England and New Netherland respectively. Massachusetts, the strongest State of New England, had already developed through its port of Boston an all-round trade by which it supplied the Plantations with foodstuffs, took their sugar and other produce in return, exchanged them with continental Europe for manufactured goods, to be distributed throughout the colonies. Boston was in fact aspiring to the position of a metropolis of the Atlantic Empire, with a firm grasp of the business designed by home statesmen to be the monopoly of London and the English capitalist. Clarendon understood the ambition and realised that the political weight of Massachusetts made it formidable.1 He sought for a counterpoise and found it in Connecticut, a colony which lacked a good seaport, was more largely agricultural in its interests, and disliked the air of superiority affected by Massachusetts. Connecticut men were expanding westwards along the stretch of coast between their river and the Hudson, and were also establishing themselves in the eastern half of Long Island; and both these regions were claimed by the Dutch. The latter had their headquarters at New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hudson, their posts extended up that river to Rensselaerswyk on the border of the Six Nations, and along the coast they claimed ownership southwards to the estuary of the Delaware, which they had conquered from Sweden in 1655. The Dutch were traders rather than colonists, and at New Amsterdam they welcomed illicit cargoes from the English colonies and forwarded 1 See Kaye, P. L., Colonial Administration under Lord Clarendon, and Beer, Old Colonial System.

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