The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (87 page)

The Dutch effort to undermine Portugal’s monopolistic claims in Asia had a parallel in their infiltration of Spanish and Portuguese America, especially
the underdeveloped islands of the Caribbean and the Wild Coast of South America, between the Orinoco and Amazon deltas—Guyana,
Suriname, and
French
Guiana. In defiance of Philip III’s embargo of 1598, more than a hundred Dutch ships annually sailed to the salt
lagoons of
Venezuela, which provided a springboard for further ventures in the Caribbean, Guiana, and
Brazil. Spanish authorities ruthlessly executed unauthorized traders, destroyed crops, and forcibly relocated settlements away from the coasts to remove any incentive or potential source of supply for interlopers. But the Dutch ignored these penalties and became major carriers of sugar from Brazil (where they often sailed under the Portuguese flag) and Venezuelan salt and tobacco. Just as independent merchants trading in Asia came together as the VOC, in 1621 the Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie (Chartered West India Company, or WIC) amalgamated competing interests in the Netherlands and three years later its fleet captured
Bahia, Brazil. A Spanish force retook the city, but in 1626
Piet Heyn sank twenty-six Iberian ships, “
by which happy result [the WIC]—by so many preceding disasters and damages so much weakened—began to recover her breath and bounded back on her feet.” Heyn returned to the northern Caribbean, and in early September 1628 his thirty-one ships chased the Spanish
flota
under
Don Juan de Benavides into the Bay of Matanzas, fifty miles east of
Havana. The Dutch looted the twenty-two ships of forty-six tons of silver, gold, and merchandise valued at more than eleven million guilders, a net profit of some seven million guilders for the WIC. Imprisoned in Spain, Benavides was tried and executed “
for his lack of care in the loss of the
New Spain fleet.” That
Heyn predeceased him in action against the
armada of Flanders was probably small consolation.

Although the Dutch occupied coastal Brazil only from 1630 to 1654, the consequences were significant. Introduced from Madeira,
sugar was more valuable to Portugal than its Asian trade, and the profits now accrued to the Dutch. Failing to attract sufficient numbers of Dutch and German settlers to work the land, the West India Company began importing slaves—twenty-four thousand by 1654, and another hundred thousand in the next seventy-five years—not only for themselves but for the new colonies that had been planted in the Caribbean since the 1620s, English on St. Christopher (St. Kitts), Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, and the previously uninhabited
Barbados; French also on St. Christopher, as well as
Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Barthélemy. The first settlers’ cultivation of diverse crops for subsistence and trade soon gave way to a plantation-based sugar monoculture worked by slaves. Ousted from Brazil, the Dutch settled six islands in the Lesser Antilles. Of these,
Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, would become one of the busiest—and most corrupt—trading centers in the Caribbean.

Even as the Dutch were being forced out of Brazil, England’s
Oliver Cromwell was endorsing an ambitious plan to sweep the Spanish from the Caribbean. The Spanish repulsed two assaults on Santo Domingo in early 1655, but rather than return with nothing to show for their efforts, General
Robert Venables and Admiral
William Penn pressed on to Santiago de la Vela in Kingston Harbor, Jamaica. Significantly outnumbered in a place of almost no consequence, the Spanish formally ceded Jamaica to England. The renamed
Port Royal became the fastest-growing English settlement in the Americas, rivaling Boston in size (about six thousand people) though with a vastly more diverse population of Europeans, Africans, and
Native Americans. A major redistribution center for slaves and goods, for about two decades Port Royal was also the undisputed center of English
piracy in the Caribbean, much of it endorsed by colonial governors eager for a share of the takings and heedless of the consequences for Anglo-Spanish diplomacy.

On June 7, 1692, a massive earthquake submerged two-thirds of the town and killed an estimated five thousand people. Even before this, increasingly vested as they were in the fruits of legitimate trade, European governments, supported by the growing class of Caribbean plantation owners, had begun to clamp down on piracy. The
Treaty of Madrid (1670) between England and Spain outlawed privateering: “
No private offense shall in any way weaken this friendship and alliance, nor stir up ill-will or dissensions … not by reprisals or other such odious proceedings shall one man compensate for the transgression of another, unless justice be denied or unjustly delayed.” An English law of 1677 made it a felony for a ship to sail under a flag not its own, and Parliament passed An Act for the Restraining and Punishing of
Privateers and Pirates in 1683. The Anglo-French
Treaty of Whitehall (1686) similarly outlawed privateering, and the
Treaty of Ryswyck (1697) rendered letters of marque and reprisal null and void. It was against this background of law and order that more enterprising pirates like
Henry Avery began turning to the low-lying fruit of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific coast of Spanish America. North America, though closer, held little interest for most self-respecting outlaws.

The French and English had tested Spanish claims in North America in the sixteenth century, but there was little incentive for governments or others to underwrite more than the occasional exploratory expedition. The real trailblazers on the North Atlantic were fishermen, for the simple reason that so far as anyone knew the only reason to sail for North America was to fish.
The first documented crossing of the North Atlantic other than by Scandinavian
Vikings was by
John Cabot in 1497. A Venetian veteran of the Mediterranean spice trade, Cabot sought sponsors for his undertaking within a few years of Columbus’s first voyage. Rebuffed by Spain and Portugal, he turned to England’s Henry VII, who granted him letters patent “
to seeke out, discover, and finde, whatsoever iles, countreyes, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidelis, whatsoever they bee, and in what part of the world soever they be, whiche before this time have beene unbeknowen to all Christians.” Cabot sailed from
Bristol, then one of England’s premier ports. His course is unknown, but one theory holds that his
navicula
(little ship)
Mathew
sailed due west from Ireland to a landfall in northern Newfoundland. From there he turned south and followed the coast possibly as far as Placentia Bay. Cabot returned to Bristol the same summer with no trade goods, but Henry VII granted him additional patents and he sailed the next year with five ships. One put back to Bristol; the other four disappeared without trace.

Though Cabot left little to show for his efforts, reports of rich
fishing grounds spread quickly among the fishermen of Bristol, who already were sailing at least as far as Iceland and who would play a leading role in the development of Europe’s North American colonies for at least a century. According to a dispatch filed by Milan’s ambassador to England shortly after Cabot’s return in 1497, his crew claimed

The attraction of the long-distance
fisheries was due to the importance of fish in the European diet.
Dried, salted, or pickled fish was a less expensive source of protein than meat, and Church prohibitions against eating meat on fast days—including Fridays and during Lent—increased demand across Christian Europe. The most important food fish in northern Europe was
herring (also called pilchards or sardines), which by the eleventh century were being netted in enormous quantities in the Baltic and North Seas. Because of their high oil content, herring spoil quickly unless they are brined or pickled in a salt solution; in optimal conditions they can be kept in pickling barrels for up to ten months. The Hanse’s monopolistic control coupled with a partial collapse of the herring fishery in the early fourteenth century drove English fishermen to seek
cod around Iceland. Large, cold-water bottom feeders, cod were
traditionally caught by jigging with a hook and line. Although more labor intensive to fish, a good-sized cod weighs about thirty kilograms and they can grow to three times that. Unlike herring, cod have almost no fat and in a dry, cool
climate can be air-dried without salt, which made them an ideal food source in northern latitudes where the weather is favorable and salt relatively scarce.

Exploitation of the North American fisheries from the sixteenth century was by no means limited to the English. In 1500, the brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real sailed from
Lisbon to
Greenland,
Labrador, and Newfoundland, and they reached
Nova Scotia on a second voyage. Unnamed fishermen from Portugal, France, and England also made their way west, and a report of 1527 noted fourteen
fishing ships at St. John’s, Newfoundland, from
Brittany, Normandy, and Portugal, and it was against this backdrop that
Francis I sponsored Cartier’s voyages of the 1530s and 1540s. The tensions that arose from such crowding led to a steady search for new fishing grounds that drew Europeans westward from the Grand Banks south of Newfoundland to Nova Scotia and the
Gulf of Maine. By the early 1600s, there were an estimated four hundred fishing vessels of various nationalities on the coast of northern New England.

Sailing for a French royal monopoly, in 1605
Samuel de Champlain established a colony at
Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia), from which he led the settlement of the
St. Lawrence River valley, where the land was fertile, the Gulf of St. Lawrence fishing grounds were accessible, and the potential for fur trading was apparently limitless. New France was plagued by a chronic lack of settlers, partly due to the climate and scarce opportunities but also because the
Company of New France charter (1627) prohibited
Huguenots, who were persecuted at home, from sailing to
Canada. As a result, it took half a century for the population to reach ten thousand. New France also failed to secure the fur trade of
Hudson Bay, which
Pierre-Esprit Radisson and
Médard des Groseilliers were the first Europeans to exploit directly. Finding their own government unresponsive, the brothers-in-law appealed to England’s Charles II, who chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company with rights to the watershed of Hudson Bay—an area of nearly four million square kilometers comprising parts of Quebec, Ontario, Nunavut, and Alberta, and all of Manitoba.

Perhaps chastened by this reverse, the French turned their sights to the south. In 1679, René-Robert Cavalier,
Sieur de La Salle, determined to find a water route to Asia through the middle of the continent. Having sailed in the first ship built on the
Great Lakes to Green Bay, on Lake Michigan, La Salle, the Jesuit diarist Father
Louis Hennepin, and a few others proceeded down the Illinois and
Mississippi Rivers. Reaching the delta in 1682, La Salle claimed for France
“the land of
Louisiana, near the three mouths of the Colbert [Mississippi] river, in the
Gulf of Mexico.”
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur
de Bienville, founded Biloxi, Mississippi, and
Mobile, Alabama, before moving the capital of the Louisiana territory to New Orleans, about ninety miles up the Mississippi from the gulf. Trade between the new port and the Illinois territory was arduous. Initially the French depended on native craft like birchbark
canoes,
dugouts, and buffalo-hide skin boats known as “bullboats,” but they soon developed
bateaux plats,
flatboats with a tapered bow and stern, and
radeaux,
flatboats with squared ends, propelled by paddling,
rowing, poling (when the river was low), and towing.
A northbound flatboat took three or four months to go the twelve hundred miles from New Orleans to Illinois, depending on the size of the crew; a vessel of forty to fifty tons generally required about two dozen men. Downstream the same distance could be covered in two or three weeks. These passage times re
mained the norm until the steam age in the nineteenth century.

Transportation between the watersheds of the upper Mississippi and the St. Lawrence was relatively easy, and France’s North American colonies could be reached by way of either
Montreal or New Orleans. Unfortunately, these two access points were three thousand miles apart. Between them lay Spanish
Florida and England’s rapidly growing North American colonies. The English view of the function of overseas colonies differed markedly from that of the French. Far from prohibiting the departure of undesirables, the English encouraged the migration of religious dissidents, the poor, malcontents, and criminals. Speculating on the opportunities afforded by the colonies in 1576, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert wrote that “
Also we might inhabite some parte of those Countreys, and settle there suche needie people of our Countrie, which now trouble the common welth, and through want here at home, are inforced to commit outragious offences, whereby they are dayly consumed with the Gallowes.” In short North America would make an excellent penal colony.

Gilbert’s half brother Sir
Walter Raleigh made two attempts to establish colonies in
North Carolina, but both failed. Twenty years later, in 1607, the
Virginia Company sent two groups of colonists west. One wintered on the Kennebec River in Maine but abandoned their settlement because there were “
no mynes discouered, nor hope thereof” and for “feare that all other winters would proue like this first.” A few months earlier, three ships of colonists had founded the first permanent English settlement in North America, at
Jamestown on the James River above
Chesapeake Bay. The colony’s early years were plagued by disorganization and
disease as the dismal Chesapeake climate devoured settlers faster than they could be landed. Between 1618 and 1622, more than thirty-five hundred colonists reached Jamestown, but in the latter year the population was barely half that. Jamestown’s survival was due only to the desperate persistence of the company’s investors and the willingness of young men (mostly) to
indent themselves in exchange for such
opportunities as America might afford.
The first slaves were landed in 1619 by an English ship that had seized them from a Portuguese slaver. Virginia’s population finally began to grow in the 1620s, and the settlers developed a brisk coastal trade with Dutch
Nieuw Amsterdam, and English Plymouth and Boston.