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1650-1715] English colonisation in North America

685

exacting ecclesiastical discipline, it remained the nursling of the parent State; and yet it included a most lawless element in the coureurs de bois, who explored, traded, and carried French sovereignty far into the lakes and streams of the interior, as well as formed a nucleus from which French ambition and power began to expand across the continent. The mother country gave freely of her talent to the colony, which seldom wanted for pioneers, soldiers, or visionaries. Indeed, if imperial thinking would have sufficed to win an empire, the French in 1715 were on their way to success in America. But New France suffered from its inability to attract settlers. The decision to exclude the Huguenots destroyed the best chance of remedying this radical defect, and thus left it doubtful whether the French on the St Lawrence possessed or could obtain the necessary material basis for the realisation of their ambitious dreams the great mass of rank and file, peasants, artisans, traders, mechanics, on whose efforts all solid dominion must ultimately rest.

Along the Atlantic shore, where groups of English settlements were clustered, the record of progress had been of a different character. The activity in colonisation which marked the reign of Charles II had resulted in the foundation of the Carolinas and of Pennsylvania, and in the conquest, in 1664, of the Dutch colony on the Hudson River. This last acquisition was of no small importance, as it secured to the English an uninterrupted control of the coast which they had chosen as the principal field of their enterprise. The barrier of the Alleghanies prevented the colonists from penetrating far inland, and narrowed the space upon which they worked out the origins of their history. Hence, perhaps, their lack of the imperial imagination of the French leaders at Quebec, and the concentration of their energies upon internal development, social, political, and economic. Located on the margin of the sea, they were becoming a maritime and commercial people, quick-witted and practical. Close settlement, the growth of towns and townships, fostered intercommunication and a progressive civilisation, besides encouraging an independent political spirit. Many circumstances contributed to their prosperity. They enjoyed a climate congenial and familiar, with a reliable rainfall; they possessed abundance of fertile land with satisfactory land laws; the resources of their country were very great and wanted only the strenuous labourer; dense forests provided the materials of a lumbering industry; there were rich fisheries in the adjoining seas; there were wide opportunities for commerce with each other, the mother country, and her West Indian dependencies. In addition, the religious troubles of Charles II's reign, conducing to a flow of emigration from England, furnished them with many excellent colonists. Hence, though they suffered, as almost every colony at an early stage of development suffers, from an inadequate supply of labour and capital, their progress was sure and continuous, and proceeded from a secure basis. The ideas of colony-building which animated the Governments of

686

English colonial policy

[1650-1715 France and Spain found little counterpart in English policy. With the purely internal affairs of her colonies the mother country seldom interfered. She grew more and more determined during this period so to regulate their commerce and industry as to increase to the greatest extent possible her own strength and that of her dominions as a whole; but, save for this, she made few attempts to fashion their life in a particular mould. In the matter of colonial government she was not less original. Instead of following the example of Spain, England embarked on untravelled seas of political experiment. In America and the West Indies the colonists were permitted to develop their own institutions, and their political ties with the mother country were exceedingly slight. Hence the colonists formed townships and town-meetings, instituted juries, justices of the peace and popular assemblies, enjoyed a free Press, the Habeas Corpus, and the right of self-taxation; and they resisted the interference of Proprietors, Companies and Parliaments, confidently believing that they bore with them in their persons to the colonies the rights and liberties won by their ancestors in many historic struggles. By the commencement of the Hanoverian period the constitutional development of most of the colonies was complete. On the whole they had gravitated to a common type. The normal constitution consisted of a Governor appointed by the Crown, with an advisory council and an elective assembly; and the general tendency, since the British Government did little to give its representatives a position of dignity and strength in their respective colonies, was for the executive to be weak and the popularly elected body to be strong. The organisation of government was usually simple and free, and yet sufficiently complete to ensure order and security. Political conditions were thus eminently favourable to economic growth.

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On the whole, then, the colonial methods of England were in advance of those of other nations. She sought treasure by mercantilist rather than bullionist methods. The strong side of her policy showed itself in the liberty of action which her colonists enjoyed; and, if we except those regulations which closed up for them the avenues of commerce, and which they could not evade, it was a policy well calculated to ensure their progress. Its weak side as seen in the light of later eventsneglect of the problem of attaching the colony to the mother country. A feeling of self-dependence was fostered in the daughter communities, while their relations to the mother country in some important respects were left without being exactly determined. At the same time, under the directing influence of a "national scheme of commercial and industrial policy," a commercial pact, arranged by the mother country and frequently producing much irritation in her dependencies, was gradually elaborated, to form the chief bond between the component parts of the empire. No doubt, the strength of England in her strug gle with France was by this means increased. No doubt, also, that the

1650-1715]

The West Indies

687

loyalty of the Americans remained unshaken while they lacked much sense of unity, and lived in constant need of protection from the designs of their neighbours, the French. But it seems equally true that the English exhibited more genius for establishing colonies than for founding an empire. None the less it was the settlement of this great coast-belt of North America, more than anything else, which during these years raised England so high in the rank of colonising nations, enlarged her commerce, and built up her sea-power.

If, on the mainland, the French, in spite of their wider ambitions, secured less solid results than the English, they shared the honours more equally in the West Indies. Here, too, the Dutch, in the capacity of traders rather than of colonists, played a conspicuous part; and both Danes and Swedes, attracted by the profits of commerce and piracy, obtained a foothold. Since most of the small islands had been abandoned by Spain, and were seldom found to be occupied by hostile tribes of Indians, while the success of sugar and tobacco cultivation had demonstrated their great commercial value, the competition for their possession between the incoming nations, particularly between the French and English, was very keen, and the story of its progress is of great importance. In 1650 the Spaniards still held the inner and greater islands, Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico, and Jamaica; though in Hispaniola French buccaneers were laying the foundations of the prosperous French colony of St Domingo. English, French, and Dutch divided amongst themselves the group of islands afterwards known as the Leeward Islands. The French occupied Guadaloupe and Santa Cruz, claimed Dominica, and shared St Kitts with the English and St Martin with the Dutch. The Dutch owned Saba and Eustatia. Antigua, Nevis, Montserrat, Anguilla had all been colonised by the English from St Kitts. To the Windward Islands the French had already paid considerable attention. They possessed Martinique, claimed St Vincent, and had attempted to settle Grenada and St Lucia. Near by was Barbados, the most flourishing of the English colonies, but not, like St Kitts, the mother of many new settlements. Further to the south Trinidad was still occupied by a few hundred Spanish, and Tobago, abandoned by the English, was in the hands of the Dutch. Such was the case also with Curaçoa, Oruba, and Buen Ayre, which lay same distance to the west, close to the Spanish Main.

The great European Wars waged during the next seventy years were one and all attended by conflicts in the West Indies; and yet on the whole they did not very seriously change the positions of the different Powers in these regions. In 1655 the English captured Jamaica, and entered the inner ring of the Spanish possessions, whence they were soon after enabled to secure a foothold on the Belize River and Campeachy Bay, two districts on either side of the peninsula of Yucatan famous for log-cutting and contraband trading. The Dutch War of 1664-7 was full of incident in the West Indies, as in many parts of the

688 The West Indies and the European Wars [1650-1715

world. By the treaty with which it closed the English agreed, amongst other things, to hand over to the Dutch the colony on the Surinam River, on which Lord Willoughby, Governor of Barbados, had lavished his private fortune, and whence he afterwards transferred many of the settlers to Jamaica. The War, terminated by the Peace of Nymegen, brought seasons of great anxiety to the English islands. In 1677 Comte d'Estrées appeared in the Caribbean Sea with twenty splendid vessels, but after taking Tobago he was lured by the Dutch into a dangerous channel, where part of his fine squadron perished miserably. A few years of comparative peace followed. English and French disputed over the sovereignty of the Windward Islands, and at times talked of arranging a treaty of neutrality to apply to the West Indies. In 1689 a powerful French fleet again appeared and inflicted severe losses on both English and Dutch. During this first war of William III's, the English planned several great expeditions to America, hoping by a successful offensive stroke to destroy the French sugar-trade and to drive the French from Martinique, Hispaniola, and Canada. Yet all failed, owing to quarrels between the services and the gross mismanagement of the departments at home. In the Peace of Ryswyk Spain recognised the French occupation of the west of Hispaniola, as, in 1670, she had recog nised the English conquest of Jamaica; and at the Peace of Utrecht the French surrendered to the English their part of St Kitts. The net result of these struggles may be summed up thus: the English consolidated their position in the Leeward Islands and almost expelled the French; neither English nor French made much progress in the Windward Islands; both made one serious inroad into the Spanish possessions; save that they had abandoned Tobago, which became for a time "a kind of No Man's-land," the Dutch remained much as they had been in 1650; Spain was induced to recognise some of the losses she had suffered at the hands of other Powers.

A noble record of progress in colonisation and of commercial development supplements this story of military vicissitudes. Neither the Spanish nor the Dutch concerned themselves much with the settlement of the islands under their control. The attention of the Spanish was too deeply engrossed by the mineral resources of Mexico and Peru. As for the Dutch, they seem never to have intended to colonise the West Indies their aim was to establish factories; they therefore occupied only small islands conveniently situated for purposes trade, whence they plied an active business with Caracas and Cumana, with the great Spanish islands, with English and French in the Lesser Antilles, in short wherever sure profits were to be made. Similarly the Danes, who had taken St Thomas in 1671, sought for the most part only a share in the carrying-trade to and from the plantations. It was the English and French who planted colonies. In some respects the French were the more successful, partly because they were more dexterous

1650-1715]

Progress of settlement

689 in conciliating the natives where they were warlike and in handling the negro, and partly because-so Adam Smith believed-they were less hampered by the commercial regulations of the mother country. But both nations made considerable progress. Before the end of the century the French islands began to display signs of their later greatness and wealth. Their story is told elsewhere in this History and need not here occupy us further. Meanwhile, in the English islands the planters were forming communities which, though they differed somewhat in social structure from those that flourished on the mainland, on account of the important place which the negro filled in their economic life, nevertheless resembled them in their self-reliant spirit, their sense of local interests, and their strong political vitality. They drove a big trade with the mother country which was much valued by her, as it furnished produce that she would otherwise have purchased from foreigners. But they complained continually of the commercial regulations to which they were subjectedfor they desired to trade freely with all nations of the monopoly granted to the Royal African Company, of the duty on sugars imported into England, and very loudly when apprehensive of its increase; and they declared frequently, and not without truth, that their interests were subordinated to those of merchants at home.

However real these grievances were, perhaps the worst evils from which the islands suffered may be attributed to the general insecurity of their life. From a military point of view many of them were almost defenceless. In the West Indies, whoever commanded the sea might soon. command the land also; for in few places could large enough garrisons be maintained to resist a strong invading force. In addition, there was a natural insecurity in the liability to devastating hurricanes and earthquakes, which might sweep away in a few hours the results of years of toil. Economic conditions also were in some ways precarious and unsound. The supply of negroes, on which the prosperity of the plantations came to depend, might be interrupted by war or limited by the action of a privileged company; and as the black population every where largely outnumbered the white, few of the colonies lived quite at peace while haunted by the hideous fear of a slave rebellion. A life full of the chances of gain or loss, made men restless and in a hurry to get rich; but so fertile was the soil of the islands, so genial their climate, so profitable the opportunities of the sugar-trade, that its uncertainties did not seriously affect the progress of settlement. In the early years of Charles II's reign the spirit of enterprise amongst the English was still strong, and they made rapid headway. Amongst their possessions Barbados, "that rare pearl in the King's Crown," stood out conspicuously; and already Jamaica was described as "one of the most hopeful of all the Plantations in the West Indies." The prosperity of Barbados soon suffered decline; but Jamaica more than fulfilled expectations. Enriched. at first by piracy and contraband trade, it prospered not less when the

C. M. H. V.

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