In which we see journeys made by motley crews who
travel in hope, wonder, and terror.
OK, kids. I’m guessing that some of you did
the reading last night.
—Thanks for the vote of confidence!
Sorry, Emily; let me try again. Since of
course you all did the reading, I can just quickly
review the highlights. Europe the relative backwater. The desire for trade with
the East, a way to get around the Venetian grip on the Silk Road to Asia. The
Portuguese, sailors extraordinaire, start things off: Bartholomew Diaz rounds
Africa’s Cape of Good Hope; Vasco de Gama sails to India, which has great tea.
China’s got the silks and pottery.
The competition is intense. New entrants try to find another
way, a “Northwest Passage” that goes west instead of east. Seafaring explorers
play for whatever team will take them: the Genoa-native Columbus sails for
Spain; Englishman Henry Hudson sails for the Dutch. Spaniard Ferdinand
Magellan, flying under a Portuguese flag, proves the earth is round by leading
an expedition around it (even if he doesn’t actually survive the trip). They’re
all looking for shortcuts to China. But Columbus is the one who bumps into a
whole new set of real estate. He claims it for Spain, but new European
investors follow quickly in their wake.
—Is all this stuff going to be on the test?
Don’t worry about that now, Kylie. Keep your eyes on the road.
You can circle back later.
The scramble to cross the sea now becomes a scramble for control
of land. Spaniards lead the way: Hernan Cortez flattens the Aztecs, Francisco
Pizarro the Incas. Hernando De Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado slice
their way into the North American interior. Frenchman Robert de la Salle
rappels his way down the Mississippi River in the name of New France. In their
wake come wave after wave of subsequent arrivals, who try to wrest a new life
for themselves in this vast, uncertain galaxy, part of a colossal drama that
transforms the universe that is the earth.
These were the adventurers. They were individuals of fierce
ambition willing to endure tremendous stress in making the journey. Some, like
Columbus, were upwardly mobile strivers who came from middling backgrounds.
Others, like William Berkeley, who dominated colonial Virginia for decades in
the mid-seventeenth century, were younger sons in noble families who would not
inherit estates. They were willing to roll the dice and face the prospect of
disaster, whether in the form of financial ruin, violence at the hands of
enemies (as well as supposed allies) or exposure to elements that ranged from
microbes to roiling storms on the high seas.
—You make it sound like an action movie.
It is an action movie, Ethan. With lots of
heroes and villains. Cortez and Pizarro were legendary for their savagery. But
tyranny was the order of the day on lesser scales as well. Like Captain John
Smith, who helped founded the colony—Jamestown, Virginia—Berkeley would later
fashion into an aristocratic playground. Actually, there had been an English
settlement in Roanoke, in what is now modern-day North Carolina, back in 1585.
But when the people who dropped the settlers returned two years later, they had
disappeared.
—What happened?
Nobody knows. Did they get sick? Move away? Get attacked by
Indians? Get assimilated by Indians? Jamestown was the first permanent English
settlement in North America, though that’s putting it a bit generously. The
people there (mostly men, mostly hoping to make a quick buck) almost starved to
death, and they got involved in some nasty wars with the Powhatan Indians down
there.
—There was also whole John Smith/Pocahontas thing.
Right, Sadie. The whole John Smith/Pocahontas thing.
—Did that really happen?
Well, sort of. John Smith went along with the adventurers of the
Virginia Company. He had a lot of military and organizational experience. But
he was also widely considered a pain in the ass. On the trip over, his
irritated colleagues threw him in the brig—in
effect, they jailed him. Then they opened up their instructions, and discovered
that he was supposed to lead them. Which Smith did—with an iron hand. The going got tough, and he
laid down the line: You don’t work, you don’t eat. Smith’s major frenemy,
though, was the Native American chieftain Powhatan, who eyed the newcomers
warily, not sure whether to consider them a potential ally against his rivals or
a threat against his own rule. At one point, he captured Smith and looked like
he was about to kill him. Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, had befriended Smith
and successfully pleaded for his life. So that part is true. But it was another
Virginian, John Rolfe, who Pocahontas actually married. They had a son, and
went back to England, where Pocahontas was celebrated but also fell ill and
died. John Smith, in the meantime, went back to England and continued his
efforts to develop what was now called “The New World.”
In the aftermath of Smith’s departure following his injury in
gunpowder accident in 1609, the colony teetered on the edge of destruction—about 90% of the settlers
perished. While it’s not hard to imagine that another settlement would have
followed in its wake, it’s intriguing to consider how American history might
have been different if a ship bearing supplies had not arrived on the horizon
in 1610 at the very moment they were heading back home.
Great risk, great reward. You make these trips because you’re
trying to make a huge score. Is it worth it?
—Well, like I said yesterday, no.
Yes, Sadie. I remember. And Jonah said he was game. Have you
reconsidered, Jonah?
—Still sounds pretty exciting to me.
—C’mon, Jonah: you wouldn’t want to make this trip.
—Why not?
—Didn’t you hear what Mr. K just said? Ninety percent died?
—That was just one place.
—Don’t be stupid. It wasn’t just one place. You know that if you
really thought about it you wouldn’t go.
Chris is probably right, Jonah. The dangers are too great for
sane people with even a thin cushion of security in their lives.
—Who said Jonah is sane?
Of course not everybody does have that thin cushion. And you didn’t
have to be a swashbuckler to decide to take your chances. Which brings us to a
whole new set of people. Mingled among the ambitious—and far more numerous—were
the desperate. Like convicts given the choice between jail and exile to the far
reaches of the universe. More typical were indentured servants. These were
people who signed years of their life away in exchange for passage across the
ocean and an unpaid job that would provide them sustenance once they arrived.
That passage was typically paid for by rich adventurers who were given
financial incentives to import labor. Typically it was severe poverty on would
lead most people to submit to indentured servitude, especially since it was
often experienced as virtual slavery—if and when you actually made it to the
other side. Occasionally an indentured servant would finish a seven-year term, get
his or her papers, and begin a new life. But it was a difficult thing to count
on. Dreams of freedom were more like fantasies.
Then there were the fanatically committed. These were people who
were not really out for personal gain, or forced by circumstances to leave
their homes. Instead, they were impelled by the force of an idea, almost always
a religious one. Some came from the powerful institutional framework of the
Roman Catholic Church. Spanish clerics affirmed, and sometimes challenged,
imperial authority by ministering to the bodies and souls of native and
immigrant alike. Among the most impressive in this category were French
missionaries, the so-called Black Robes, who ventured deep into the heart of
what is now Canada and lived among Huron and Algonquin peoples—a territory
stretching from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard—enjoying some real
success in converting them even as they assimilated Native ways of life. Though
we today tend to recoil at their ethnocentrism, their sense of devotion could
be genuinely heroic.
North America also became a home for all manner of religious
deviants who were less interested in converting heathens than finding a haven
from persecution. French Protestants, German dissenters, Dutch Jews: the
continent became a veritable melting pot of outcasts and weirdoes. The English
in particular seemed to have a genius for them: Pilgrims, Puritans and Quakers
swarmed all over the strip of coastline that ran from Maine (then part of
Massachusetts) to Virginia, and then later to Georgia. Many of these people
traveled or settled in packs, seeking safety in numbers. To greater or lesser
degrees, they were people of modest means—not rich or desperately poor, but of
an intermediate stratum whose resources were at least as much social and
intellectual as they were financial.
And then there were the people who had no choice at all: the
millions of slaves who were forced to cross the ocean against their will and do
the brutal work that building a new world entailed. The first European arrivals
in the western hemisphere had hoped that they could force the natives to do
their bidding. While this happened to a limited degree—Columbus had pretty much
sized them up and concluded he could use them this way from the moment he met
them—the native labor supply never satisfied European appetites. So they
turned to hearty, disease-resistant Africans, borrowing the logic and methods
of the longstanding Arab slave trade, which, among other things, involved
Africans capturing and selling each other.
—There were
slaves in the Middle East?
Yes, Yin. Actually, slavery has been practiced all over the
world. In Russia, for example, you had serfs, who were workers bound to the
land. They were part of the property. So if the property got sold or transferred,
the serfs came with it. This is in contrast to chattel slavery, where people are property
that the owner could take elsewhere. In some societies, like ancient Rome,
slaves were routinely freed. They also could hold jobs and enjoy a status higher
than that of free people, as when a slave managed property or used writing
skills that might have been acquired earlier (like before they were defeated in
battle).
What made European enslavement of Africans different was that it
was based on race. Skin color became a
means for classifying people. This didn’t happen right away (we have records of
North American slaves sitting on juries, getting legally married, and the
like), but became increasingly pronounced over time. The Portuguese were the
first to get involved in the African slave trade, followed by the Spanish,
French and Dutch. The slave trade peaked under the British, who were the ones
who put it to an end.
—Wby?
That’s a good question, Jonquil. Indeed, given the money
involved, I’m amazed it ever ended. The fact that it did had a lot to do with
some social activism, and the relative lack of power of the slavery industry in
Britain relative to some of the other players in the British government.
Eventually, the British navy became an anti-slavery police force. But we’ll
have to save that story for another day.
Slavery was a complicated and varied institution that played out
in different ways at different times. But the most fundamental facts of the
experience—the terror of capture; the excruciating ordeal being chained and
jammed into the hold of a slave ship as part the so-called middle passage; the
disorientation of arrival in an unfamiliar new environment; the brutality
and/or tedium of labor in house or field; the dangers and frustrations of having
one’s fate bound to the caprices of another—were experienced from top to bottom
in the western hemisphere. Countless souls never survived the trip over;
countless more perished from being worked to death, particularly in gold mines
or sugar plantations of Latin America.
And yet, to a miraculous degree, these African transplants
survived: that mother who somehow managed to be a mother after a crushing day in the
fields; that uncle who mastered the fiddle; that church which provided comfort
to bodies and souls. Even more miraculous, these (often improvised) families
and communities forged a culture—more like a series of linked cultures—that
blended the folkways of their old homes and their new ones. A saga of
liberation and ongoing oppression was woven into the fabric of the American
experience. You can hear it every time you stream the music that courses
through your earbuds.
Next: The
ones who were already here.
