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Merchants and Bankers
From 1625-1650

Trade - an international perspective

This website, produced by Australian historian Dan Byrnes, is a no-frills, text-based website designed simply to list historical and genealogical information on many notable merchants and traders of what is termed, the Western World.

It is hoped that these webpages will be of assistance to family historians in the UK, the US and Australasia, by way of providing contexts for further research.

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Reference item: Victor von Klarwill, (Ed.), The Fugger News-Letters, Being a Selection of Unpublished Letters from the Correspondents of the House of Fugger during the Years 1568-1605. (Authorized translation by Pauline de Chary) New York/London, GP Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1925.

Reference item:

See: Chris and Carolyn Caldicott, The Spice Routes: Chronicles and Recipes from around the World. Fances Lincoln, 2001.

Reference item: Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956. (On a noted financier of the day))

The Merchant Networks Project

	The history websites on this domain now have a companion website on a new domain, at Merchant Networks Project produced by Dan Byrnes and Ken Cozens (of London). This website (it is hoped) will become a major exercise in economic and maritime history, with some attention to Sydney, Australia.

1625: Charles I had risen to the throne on 27 March, 1625, after the end of the reign of James 1 (1603-1625, (James VI of Scotland). James of course had hardened the penal laws against Catholics. The response was a great Catholic uprising, a plan to blow up James I and the Parliament on November 5, 1605, the plot (involving 36 barrels of gunpowder) being discovered and giving rise to the legend of Guy Fawkes. (Davies, The Early Stuarts, p. 48, p. 337).

1625: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 33, p. 48, accession of Charles I in 27 March, 1625, after end of reign of James 1. Ireland, chronology, see James 1 (1603-1625), as James VI of Scotland, finally became King of England, stiffened the penal laws against Catholics, and a response was a great Catholic uprising, a plan to blow up James I and the Parliament on 5 November, 1605. Plot discovered, hence the legend of Guy Fawkes, and 36 barrels of gunpowder discovered. Attitude of James I: James I personally loved peace, but he misunderstood the situation in Europe, he despised the Dutch because from the point of view of divine right of kings, they were "rebels".

1625: On Martin Noell:

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Martin Noell became influential in West Indies business. He was also a friend of William Courteen, the financier who had done much from 1625 to create the original establishment on Barbados. Noell appears to have been married to a Miss Thurloe as Thurloe was a brother-in-law of Noell. I assume this is the same Sir Martin Noel referred to in Pares, Merchants and Planters. Noell became a well-known financier and he acted as an agent for Shaftesbury, for Barbados. (Shaftesbury's brother George married a daughter of a London sugar baker, Mr. Oldfield - Shaftesbury remained interested in sugar and Barbados from 1646). Fraser, Cromwell, p. 534, suggests Noell was knighted by Charles II, but died bankrupt. There was a Thomas Noell, a planter of Barbados. I have assumed Thomas was a brother with the other Noell names; but this is not a known fact. There was also a John Povey, Virginia Merchant, who worked with Nehemiah Blakiston, 1699-1721 as agents; their banker was Micajah Perry. The planter name John Randolph, resident in Virginia, also arises in that context. Martin Noell, Jnr, active by 1647, is noted in Pares, Merchants and Planters. On Nehemiah Blakiston: Blakiston was a collector of customs duties on the Potomac and a leader of Charles County, Maryland. He was active by 1689. [A useful title would be Bernard C. Steiner, 'The Protestant Revolution in Maryland'. Report, American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1897, Washington, DC 1898., pp. 289ff].

Martin Noell: Sources: (Brenner, pp. 175ff.) Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 386ff, for Noel of Brook. Martin Noell and Povey are noted in Newton, Colonising Puritans. See also, K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968., p. 64; See also, Penson, Colonial Agents; Alison Olson, 'The Virginia merchants of London: a study in eighteenth century interest group politics', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, Vol. 40, July 1983., pp. 363-388., here, p. 373.

The English historian, Brenner, has only recently outlined the career of a conspicuously successful seventeenth century London merchant, an early "expansionist" of the first founding of the British Empire, Maurice Thomson. [K. G. Davies mentions Thomson only briefly in Royal African Company]. Thomson seems almost the business manager of the extraordinarily energetic Puritan noble, Robert Rich (1587-1658), the second Earl of Warwick. In fact, Warwick's business manager was his kinsman, Sir Nathaniel Rich (1585-1636), so it is possible that Thomson answered to Sir Nathaniel Rich. Whatever the organisational details, Thomson and his brothers enjoyed remarkable commercial careers that have been insufficiently acknowledged in the earlier history of English colonisation.

1625: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 337), Sir Charles Courteen noted that an English ship had touched at Barbados, found it uninhabited, and possessed it in the King's name. Courteen soon sent out ships and soon had up to 1800 people on the island, maintained by their employer. Courteen began cotton and tobacco plantations. the proprietorship of the island went into dispute, Davies does not say how or why, and slowness of Courteen's supplies threatened famine. and the island survived, and by 1640 was exporting profitably, tobacco, cotton and indigo. Thomas Warner is establishing Barbados in 1625, (see C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies. Vol. 2, The West Indies, Second Edn, Oxford. 1905, cited in Penson, Colonial Agents, p.8.

1626: In 1626, George Villiers in his essay On Plantations had vainly - and a little surprisingly - emphasised the shame of taking "scum of people" to plantations, which they "only spoiled". (Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47). It appears Charles made an arrangement with the Earl of Carlisle (family name Hay) concerning proprietorship of certain Caribbean Islands including Barbados. The reverberations were to mean many years of political conflict (as to English arrangements that is) in the Caribbean Islands.

1627: More to come

1628: England: Harvey publishes a description of the circulation of the blood.

1628: Sir Thomas Warner, coloniser of Barbados, governor of Antigua (1575-1648-1649).
Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York, Facts on File, c.1992., p. 76.; Richard B. Sheridan, `The Rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua, 1730-1775', Economic History Review, Series 2, Vol. 13, 1960-1961., pp. 342-357., here, p. 346. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 27. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 184. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. Burke's Landed Gentry for Warner formerly of Framlingham.

1628: Sir William Courteen Senior (died 1636). He once devised a plan to settle Australia but failed to act.)
(Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York, Facts on File, c.1992., p. 68. George Mackaness, `Some Proposals for Establishing Colonies in the South Seas', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 24, Part 5, 1943., pp. 261-280 with Sir John Callender's proposal given pp. 271ff. Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously. DNB entries, various. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 125, pp. 171ff. Williamson, Caribee Islands. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984., pp. 278ff, pp. 301ff. On Courteens, see Shafaat Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century (in its Political and Economic Aspects). London, 1923. Ian B. Watson, `The Establishment of English Commerce in North-Western India in the Early Seventeenth Century', Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1976., pp. 375ff. Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff. Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, c. 1976., pp. 39ff. Also, Holden Furber, `The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, 1783-1796', ECHR, 10, (2), November 1940., pp. 138-147. Holden Furber, John Company at Work. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1948. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 183, Note 69. On Courteen's descendants, GEC, Peerage, Kent, p. 176; Hereford, p. 480; Maynard, p. 602; Valentia, p. 207.)

1628: By 1628, Barbados is already a thriving English colony, planting tobacco. In 1628 the Courteen House sent out more settlers, expanding the colony to 1600 people, "to strong for the Spaniards to challenge". Goslinga finds that the obscure history of the colonization of the Lesser Antilles is compounded by the fact that James I made his grants to rights to the Caribbean orally. Charles I later confirmed such grants with written documents, but was confused in designations to the Earl of Carlisle and the Earl of Pembroke. He writes, p. 259, "The Dutch firm of the Courteens also appears to have played a part in the general intrigue that renders inscrutable this entire episode". Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 212ff.

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1628: Earl Warwick takes over governorship of Bermuda Co. to make it a puritan project, in 1629 many of similar view backed the Providence Island Co, to be theirs exclusively, and in 1629 the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nath Rich, Lord Saye and Sele, another puritan the Earl of Lincoln, patronized the Mass Bay Co. so these puritan ports siphoned off religious exiles. large link up, finally, of merchants and puritans, each influencing the other.
(Brenner, p. 273) Unexpectedly, Digges and Morris Abbot and his archbishop brother about the time parliament dissolved in 1629, went to the side of the crown, Abbott as Gov of EICo probably tried to help the Levant Co. top men from further radicalising, and cooled the EICo, so annoying the colonising nobles, so the opposition nobles Lord Saye, earl of Warwick and Lord Brook launched March 1629 an attack on the elite merchant leadership of the EICo, to promote their own alliances, which consisted of some of their own smaller investors. The battle went on for years.

1628: North America: On 9 March 1628 the Earl of Warwick makes a grant of land in Massachusetts to establish the New England Company (first governor is Matthew Craddock of Levant Co., and operator of Mystic River), an unincorporated predecessor of the Massachusetts Bay Co. Warwick had got the land in 1623 from the Council for New England, of which he was president in 1628, and he gave it to Dorchester Company people, and East Anglian gentlemen. (Brenner, p. 276.)

21 June, 1628: England: Digges and Rich again put forward idea for an English West India company; Rich had a bill pre-written. Part of an idea is to "breed up mariners". Similar plans in late January 1629. In August 1628 the Dutchman Piet Heyn (sic) reportedly took a Spanish treasure fleet for £1,200,000. (Brenner, p. 267).

1629: The Dutch form a West India Company. See W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti: From the earliest times to the commencement of the Twentieth Century. London, John Murray, 1915., p. 89.

1629: The English East India Company in London checks its books and is horrified to find it is more than £300,000 in the red. Clerical cost-cutting results.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1629: Colony of Massachusetts founded. In 1629, a new settlement at Salem includes six master shipbuilders.

1629: England: As early as 1629, a grant is made re the Carolinas, but no serious attempt to colonize till 1663, with eight proprietors, being Earl of Clarendon, Duke of Albemarle, Sir John Berkeley, Sir George Carteret, Earl of Craven, John Colleton, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (later Earl of Shaftesbury), and Sir William Berkeley. King only gave the Carolinas as this coalition was too strong to deny. most of these proprietors had other colonial interests, Colleton with Barbados, Sir Wm Berkeley as Gov. of Virginia, Carteret and John Berkeley involved with New Jersey. Carolina suitable for baronial estates. The Carolina system once the disgruntled Barbadians came provided a specialized plantation agriculture, promoted slave labour, reduced the flexibility of the existing local social system, articles of Carolina government drawn up by Ashley Cooper with help of John Locke, based on political ideas already outmoded in England itself. (Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 119-121.)

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1629: On 4 June, 1629 the Dutch ship Batavia goes down off the coast of Western Australia, leaving her legacy of bizarre tales of shipwreck followed by mutiny, murder, rape and retribution. (Also leaving today's Aboriginals of the area with a rare genetic anomaly originating in Holland which was being examined by scientists in 1991-1992).

1629: In 1629, Britain abandoned her pretensions on Nova Scotia, when Charles I made peace with France. (See Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660. The Oxford History of England. OUP. 1959).

1629: Nova Scotia had been given attention by Scots colonists in 1620, but in 1629, Britain has abandoned her efforts on Nova Scotia as part of Charles I' peace plan with France. (Otherwise, Englishmen regularly entertain fantasies of sending convicts to Nova Scotia until after 1788). (Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 326.)

1630 and earlier: Follows a list of earliest EICo names, to about 1630: Sir John Banks (1627-1699) (no relation to the later botanist Sir Joseph Banks), Edward Christian (see Glynn Christian, p. 23 on family of Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian, Thomas Cordell (died 1612, linked to William Garraway and William Holiday plus privateer George Clifford, Earl3 Cumberland in 1594; see Brenner, p. 18), William Methwold, mariner James Lancaster, Richard Bateman, London Lord Mayor Ralph Freeman (also Russia Co., and from 1624 he was linked to the Rich faction in control of the VA Co.), Robert Bowyer active by 1620, Thomas Mustard active by 1634, John Williams active by 1634, Capt. Weddell active by 1610, Sir Francis Cherry, Edward Sherburn a secretary to Earl of Salisbury and also to Lord Keeper Bacon, William Parker Lord Monteagle (also Va. Co.), Capt. Richard Swanley, Paul Bayning Visc1 Bayning of Sudbury.

By 1630 the Spanish government agreed to market its American silver in London instead of Genoa, gold otherwise got from the Netherlands, so in all the EICo tended to be dependent on Spain as a silver supplier.
(K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600-1640. London, Frank Cass, 1965., p. 136. From about 1630 the East India Company in India was deeply reliant on Indian financiers, the shroffs, e.g., Tapi Das, just as a new joint-stock Company formed. Griffiths, Licence to Trade, p. 84; in 1631, a new joint-stock company being formed.)

1630: Indian port Surat: Famine strikes. And in other parts of India.

date?: 1630+?: (Morse, p. 228), First English ships to carry on trade with China were those of the Courteen Association, Byrnes notes that Courteen had links with Dutch VOC which have never been specified. (See Horsea Ballon Morse, 'The provision of funds for the East India Company's trade at Canton during the Eighteenth Century', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April 1922, Part 2. pp. 227ff. MF 950.05/Roy at Dixson Library, UNE.

1630: By 1630 the East India Company has 12,000 employees. (Alison Olson, Making The Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790. Harvard Univ. Press, London, Harvard. 1992., p. 17).

1631: James I had granted in 1618 a charter for a Guinea Company to Sir Robert Rich later Earl Warwick and some merchants. In 1631, the next Guinea Co. arises for England, .... . with charter from Charles I to Sir Richard Young, Sir Kenelm Digby, Nicholas Crisp and Humphrey Slaney and others.
W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti: From the earliest times to the commencement of the Twentieth Century. London, John Murray, 1915., p. 89.

1630: Some 900 Puritans under John Winthrop settle on the Boston Peninsula of New England coast, and at Charlestown, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury and Dorchester. Within a year they are trading with Virginia, later with Maryland.

1632: More to come

1633: More to come

1634: New England, America (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, begins to send masts of local timber for English navy, which does not use them till the Dutch War of 1652-1654 cuts off naval supplies carried by the Baltic trade. A mast sells for £95-115 or even up to £1600 for an extra-large one.

1635: H. B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635-1834. (Five Vols) 1926-1929. *

1636, Foundation of Harvard University in North America.

1637: June: Yorkshireman Capt. John Weddell, calls at Macao as sailing for wealthy London merchant Sir William Courteen. Courteen's organisation had earlier settled Barbados in the Caribbean. Weddell's expedition is only partially successful, carrying sugar, green ginger, cloves, gold and porcelain.

1637: June: Yorkshireman Capt. John Weddell, calls at Macao as sailing for wealthy London merchant Sir William Courteen. Courteen's organisation had earlier settled Barbados in the Caribbean. Weddell's expedition is only partially successful, carrying sugar, green ginger, cloves, gold and porcelain.

The earliest-recorded American slaving ship is Desire of Salem, which transports 17 Pequot Indians for sale in West Indies and brings home some Negro slaves.
K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988., p. 43

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1638: On Barbados by 1638 is Thomas Verney son of Sir Edmund Verney. (Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 12.)

1638: Japan: Shimabara-no ran (Riot at Shimabara) 40,000 Christians and farmers stayed in the island and fought against 100,000 of the government soldiers about 4 months. Protestants (Dutch) helped the government from the sea to seize the riot.

1638-1639: England: February: the Sheriff of Surrey receives a warrant to deliver to one William Flemmen [Fleming?] of London, Gent, some convicts for Virginia. (Wilfrid Oldham, Britain's Convicts To The Colonies. Sydney, Library of Australian History, 1990., pp. 5-6).

1639: India: English acquire Madras from a local dealer.

Late 1630s: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 335), depression in England in the late 1630s, reached a crisis when Charles I seized bullion in the tower, and though it was restored, confidence had been undermined. He also proposes to debase the coinage. A depression went on 1640-1650.

1639: Japan closes its coasts to foreigners.

1640: Founding of Montreal in Canada.

1640: English East India Co establishes Fort St George at Madras.

In 1640: Charles harms the East India Company, buying a lot of pepper, selling it at a loss and depreciating the future market; he anyway never repaid the Company. (See William Foster, 'Charles II and the East India Company', English Historical Review, xix, pp. 456-463). Other companies had similar grievances with the Crown as the depression advanced through 1640-1650.

1640: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 286-287), rapid spread of the joint-stock company, as with EICo from 1600, writers begin to contrast the moneyed interest with the landed interest, no specialized bankers yet exist, spare coin is no longer stored in the Tower, but Charles I in 1640 has threatened to seize bullion there, so merchants used the strong rooms of goldsmiths for "banking".

1640: From the early 1640s, an English settlement at Bengal. From India came calico, spices, raw silk, indigo and saltpetre for gunpowder, pepper, cloves and nutmeg. English exports to India included textiles, tin, lead, and coral from the Mediterranean. It was always necessary for East India Company ships to carry bullion, as imports exceeded imports. During the 1640s, a risk arose that the EICo settlements might have to be abandoned. The Company experienced trouble with the Covenanters and the Civil Wars, and trouble also with the Courteen Association. Matters however improved during the Commonwealth, and a new arrangement was made with the Courteen association. Cromwell gave the East India Co. its first government support. A debate arose concerning joint-stock or shipowners supplying their own capital and ships. (See Davies, The Early Stuarts).

1640: English East India Co. establishes Fort St George at Madras.

1640: English occupy Hooghly, India. All English settlements and factories brought under control of Fort St. George at Madras.

1640: From about 1640, Barbados notables included Edward Cranfield and Edward Shelly, Capt. George Martin. (Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 17).

1641: Dutch capture Malacca on the Malay peninsula.

1642: ... and political repression was giving victims to the English notion of transportation. (Irish Records, Transportation, Belfast, PRO, T.429, Letter from R. West to the Deputy of the Isle of Man and court decree concerning the transportation of rebels from County Down in 1642. Copies from the Rushen Papers in the Manx Museum).

1642: English Civil War.

1642: Dutch mariner Abel Tasman discovers Van Diemen's Land - Tasmania.

1643: Re New Netherland/New York, in 1643 the New Englanders help form the New England confederation, for defense, competition with the Dutch at New Netherland, and in 1664 a new effort to subdue New Netherland, as it was encroaching on English holdings, so the king decided to grant the area to his brother James, the Duke of York, as a proprietary province. James' deputy was Richard Nicholls who sailed for New Netherland from Boston, and Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant surrendered in September 1664, colony renamed New York. New York's staple of trade was fur, part of the New York territory included what would become New Jersey, and James Duke of York here favoured his friends Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, two defenders of the Stuarts during the Puritan Cromwell period. and in 1665 they established a government for the area, but New York protested at this as it clashed with their own interests, there were Finns and Swedes then on the Delaware River, and in 1674, Lord Berkeley sold his New Jersey interests to two Quakers, John Fenwick and Edward Byllynge. And these Quakers used trustees including William Penn. (Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 115-116.)

1642-1643: (Morrell, p. 13ff), The Dutch are dominant on the Indonesian archipelago, and never really challenged Spanish claims in the Pacific. Van Diemen is an ambitious Gov.-general in the Dutch East Indies who plans a voyage for Tasman and his pilot, Major Visscher in 1642-43, the circumnavigation of New Holland, whose western and north-western coasts the Dutch East India Company's pilots had already been mapping. Tasman thought New Zealand was part of a great southern continent. (The Dutch also sent Roggeveen into the Pacific in 1721-1722, but found his work unprofitable. Morrell writes, "The disinterested curiosity of the 'age of reason' brought a new, more scientifically oriented motivation into play in regard of the Pacific."

1643: Evangelista Torricelli invents the barometer.

1644: China: The Manchu state (led by Nurhaci), captures Peking-Beijing. Later, Nurhaci's son Abahai moves from being Khan of Manchuria to Emperor of China.

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1644: Toricelli's barometer explains puzzle re pumping out mines.

1644: China: Ming Dynasty succumbs to foreign invasion, from the Manchus, descendants of the displaced Jurched. Manchus establish the Ch'ing Dynasty.

1644: The last Ming emperor of China hangs himself. His apology: "Now I meet with Heaven's punishment above, sinking ignominiously below... May the bandits dismember my corpse and slaughter my officials, but let them not despoil the Imperial tombs nor harm a single one of our people".

1644-1645: Later the New Model army was formed by Parliament, and a decisive battle at Naseby, June 14, 1645, which lost the Midlands to the Royalists. Later king surrendered to the Scots, and Oxford surrendered in June 1645. Army discontent becoming radical and etc., and looked as though a second civil war might begin. Cromwell had to suppress the Scots at Preston 17 Aug, 1648, as the Covenanters felt the Covenant had been broken. King tried for treason and Charles I beheaded on 30 Jan., 1649. Also, the Presbyterian domination was overthrown. The Queen (of Charles II) later regarded as regicides, Okey, Walton, Scroop, Norton, Pride, Whaley, Edwards, Tichbourne, Lambert and Blackwell, who now had "patriotic possession of large portions of the queen's dower":

1645: "The first identified American vessel to import slaves from Africa is Rainbow." She brings to Boston two slaves been kidnapped, not purchased. Puritans are offended and set them free, then sent them home.
See K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988., p. 43.

1646: More to come

1647: More to come

1648: More to come

1649: Russia: Recent laws fully establish serfdom in Russia, by when serfdom has virtually disappeared from Western Europe.

1649: Little is known, but it is thought Thomas Crispe in 1649 was the chief factor on the Gold Coast for Rowland Wilson, Maurice Thomson, John Wood and Thomas Walter, whom he called The Guinea Company. The original site of Cape Coast Castle had been given to the English, then taken by the Swedes, then re-taken by English during Crispe's time on the coast. Crispe claimed he had obtained the original site from the local natives. (Davies, RAC, pp. 40-41).

1649: Charles I of England executed after trial. See career of Cromwell.

1649: Trial and execution of England's King Charles I.

1649: Recent laws fully establish serfdom in Russia, by when serfdom has virtually disappeared from Western Europe.

1650: Year tea is first drunk in England as imported from China.
Meantime, on piracy, see George Wycherley, Buccaneers of the Pacific: of the bold English buccaneers, pirate privateers & gentleman adventurers, who sailed in peril through the stormy straits or pierced the isthmus jungle, to vex the king of Spain in the South Seas & the Western Pacific, plundering his cities & coasts & preying on his silver fleets & his golden galleons. London, John Long, 1929.

Between 1604-1606, one of King James I's court was Sir Edward Michelbourne, one of the founders of the East India Company. However, James I also licenced one English and one Scots courtier to make their own voyages to the East, against the interests of the infant Company. Michelbourne became an interloper, as he'd fallen foul of the Company in London by not paying his dues. By 1604, Michelbourne had obtained from James a license to make an independent voyage to Asia, to China and Japan, in violation of the earlier royal charter, and he cruised as a pirate for two years; he returned to England in 1606 and shortly died. The East India Company desired but did not gain redress for the damage he'd done their reputation till 1609. (Later, Charles I when he backed Courteen's endeavours behaved much as James I had - distrustfully). (The East India Company "recalled" earlier distributing some 70,000 pounds in bribes to win a new charter, about or after 1604.)
(Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, pp. 71-79.)

In 1606, as returning interloper, Michelbourne had warned the Company that the English at Surat could expect trouble from the Portuguese (Middleton later fought the Portuguese; so did Captain Thomas Best of Company Voyage 10). With the English East India Company, 1607, Voyage 3, Captain Keeling and his second-in-command, Captain William Hawkins, had orders to open trade at Surat, or Red Sea ports, before going to the Archipelago. Hawkins here was ex the Levant Company and spoke Turkish (it is hard to align the career of this Hawkins with what we find on the other Hawkins' of Plymouth, treated earlier in these files.) James I meantime had written to the King at Surat. (There was at one time a Captain Keeling with a Lt. William Hawkins on Hector.)
(Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800.)

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Otherwise, in 1606, James I also with one charter established the London and Plymouth Companies, giving them grants extending 200 miles inland of "America". In early 1607, three ships under the command of Captain Christopher Newport (ex Mediterranean and Asia trades) carried 100 men and four boys to the Chesapeake. (Here, Sir Thomas Smith/Smythe, the leading merchant of the Virginia Company of London, was the same man also interested in the East India Company). Another Virginia Company investor was George Calvert (1578-1632), Lord Baltimore, a Catholic whose title had been granted by James I. Calvert had been the king's principal secretary of state but resigned, and he also invested in the New England Company.
(Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 21-22, pp. 42ff.)

In 1606, a few days before Christmas, sailed from London the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to begin the American colonisation.
(R. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 3.)

The third East India Company voyage was in 1607, sailing for the Red Sea. The Company's fourth voyage was commanded by Alexander Sharpie (who receives uncommon little attention from historians). In January 1608, Sir Edward Michelbourne led an independent interloping voyage and found Surat unsafe. In 1608, William Hawkins (was he of the noted Plymouth family?) went to Surat, then to Agra, the Mogul Imperial capital, for permission to open trade on the Indian sub-continent. The Portuguese were represented at the Mogul Court by Jesuits, who succeeded in having Hawkins expelled in 1611. So the English East India Company's first bid to move into India ended in failure. Another move was made by Best in 1612. Later followed Sir Thomas Roe's visit to the Moguls.

From 1607 the English East India Company ceases using its own ships and begins to charter ships.
Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 95.

Following this commercial decision, a list of notables with links to both the Virginia Company and also the East India Company would include:
Thomas Dyke (active 1617), interested in the 1612 voyage for a north-west passage, investor in the East India, Virginia and Bermuda companies;
Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously.
John Dyke, of the Rich/Earl Warwick faction controlling the Virginia Company by 1624, owner of some privateering ships used by the second Earl of Warwick, and a deputy-governor of the Providence Island Company;
Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 63.
The dissident Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629), MP, of the Rich faction of the Virginia Company as its treasurer 1619-1621, also East India Company investor;
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 70-100. Who's Who /Shakespeare, pp. 214ff.

William Paget (1572-1628/29), fifth Baron Paget;
GEC, Peerage, Paget, pp. 283ff. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Asshurst, p. 18; Lorimer, Amazon, p. 215, Note 3. By 1612 he had invested in the East India, Virginia and Bermuda companies. He was a member of the council of the Virginia Company, 1611-1612 and actively promoted colonisation and colonial trade.
(Privateer, Christopher Newport. An East India Company investor, he commanded the Virginia Company voyage of 1606.
K. R. Andrews, `Christopher Newport of Limehouse, Mariner', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, 11, 1954., pp. 28-41. D. B. Quinn, `Christopher Newport in 1590', North Carolina Historical Review, 29, 1952., pp. 305-316. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 36, p. 84; Rabb, Enterprise, p. 221.
(Richard Weston, first Earl Portland. (GEC, Peerage, Denbigh, p. 179; Portland, p. 583ff. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 605; Hervey, Arundel, p. 262.) a Catholic and friend of Spain, who in 1624 was a Commissioner for Virginia, a navy comptroller and a commissioner of the East India Company; Gabriel Barber of the Bermuda and Virginia companies (died 1633):
( Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 63, p. 125.)
Thomas Cordell (died 1612);
London Lord mayor Ralph Freeman.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 73-103.)

1604: 5 December: James I has permitted an expedition by Sir Edward Michelbourne to the East Indies with Tiger and Tiger's Whelp departing Isle of Wight on 5 December, 1604, and with aboard the highly-experienced John Davis, who had sailed with James Lancaster. Davis had been bad-mouthed by Lancaster to the East India Company re dealings at Achin concerning Davis' views on availability of pepper at Achin, and prices. On this voyage, Michelbourne behaved like an unprincipled pirate in regard to local and Dutch shipping. A Japanese pirate junk which had already worked the coasts of China and Cambodia, Borneo, quietened Michelbourne down - and killed John Davis. Michelborne had to shoot cannon through the interior of his own ship to get rid of the Japanese. Michelbourne got home to England in 1606.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1604+: The first French East India Company was founded in 1604 - with letters patent granted by Louis XIII, but this effort was still-born. (See Mukherjee's book here on French activity.) In 1623, Coen, "the real founder of the Dutch eastern empire", tortured and killed ten Englishmen at Amboyna, the Spice Islands, ousting the English except from Bantam at Java. This soured English-Dutch relations and also, as a shifting of focus, led England to concentrate on the Indian mainland. The English remembered the Amboyna incident bitterly for generations.
(On Coen, see Om Prakash, The Dutch Factories in India, 1617-1623: A Collection of Dutch East India Company Documents pertaining to India. New Delhi, Manoharial Publishers, 1984.)

1605: More to come

1606 Spring: Middleton arrives back to England after voyage to the East Indies/spice islands of the Moluccas, with little cargo due to the depradations of not the Dutch or Portuguese, but Englishman ("gentleman adventurer") Sir Edward Michelborne. Michelborne had earlier sweet-talked James I, who scarcely grasped the issues about trade, and the necessity for a properly-backed monopoly against the powers of the Portuguese and Dutch, into permitting a Michelbourne expedition to the East Indies with Tiger and Tiger's Whelp departing Isle of Wight on 5 December, 1604.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

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1606: Ships chartered by Elizabeth I are instructed to purchase the finest Indian opium and transport it back to England.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1606: Sir Edward Michelbourne arrives home to England from his piratical voyages to the spice islands to retire to disgrace. Meantime the English East India Company realised that after sending three fleets to the East Indies, and about 1200 men, they had lost 800 lives, mostly by disease. The Dutch were about sending 14 fleets made of 65 ships. So the English East India Co. decided to send out a Turkish-speaking Englishman, William Hawkins to negotiate with the Moghul Emperor of India, Jehangir, from 1607.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1607: Under William Keeling, third expedition of ships of English East India Co. to spice islands, with instructions to keep ahead of the Dutch, with £17,600 of gold bullion and only £7000 worth of English-produced goods. Also sailing is David Middleton, captain of a small ship, Consent (at Table Bay by 24 July 1607), who knew Gabriel Towerson, who had been left at Bantam in the spice islands by David's brother Henry in 1604. David Middleton sailed for the Celebes Islands, where he bought cloves (and slaves) and sailed for England. Middleton spent £3000 and reaped more than £36,000.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1607: William Hawkins is sent on ship Hector by English East India Company to negotiate with Moghul Emperor of India, Jehangir for creation of an English factory on India's western coast at Surat. Hawkins had the bad luck to encounter the Indian owner of a ship that had earlier been pirated by Sir Edward Michelbourne. But Hawkins had luck in getting on well personally with Jehangir (a binge drinker and opium taker), speaking in Turkish. Hawkins became a member of the Moghul inner court, and ended up married to an Armenian woman. Hawkins finally died on his way home and his Armenian widow married East India trader Gabriel Towerson, who took her back to the East. (Towerson once kidnapped a Negro named Coree of the Table Bay area, took him back to London, to be met by Sir Thomas Smythe. Coree was cheered up by a present of some chain mail, which he often wore, then taken back to South Africa.)
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: Christmas: William Keeling's ships in the spice islands sail home for England via the Banda Islands, only to be interrupted by arriving Dutch ships. Even more Dutch ships on a seriously commercial-military mission under Peter Verhoef, with 1000 Dutch fighting men and Japanese mercenaries. Verhoef proposed to build a fort on Neira Island, to defend the Dutch from the Portuguese, which locals found outrageous. This fort was built on the foundations of an old fort abandoned by the Portuguese about 100 years earlier. A massacre followed, perhaps co-organised by Keeling. The Bandanese massacred 42 Dutchmen. Dutch command went to Simon Hoen who demanded revenges, but signed a peace treaty by 10 August 1609 which gave Neira to Dutch power. But the Dutch ended killed by the locals including dyak head-hunters), so that when David Middleton arrived, he had great complexity to deal with. Encouraged by Middleton, the islanders killed even more Dutch. In London after Middleton got home, the East India Co. directors began to look at maps and the island of Run.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: By 1608, reports are that Henry Hudson (an Englishman) has sailed to within ten degrees of the North Pole. He has also touched the eastern coast of Greenland. English merchants are interested, the Dutch also. Hudson arrived in Amsterdam in 1608 to meet the Dutch East India Co., to have his navigation theory questioned by Petrus Plancius. The seventeen of the Dutch East India Co. failed to accept Hudson's plan, so Hudson was approached by the French (King Henry IV) via dissident Dutchman Isaac Lemaire. The Dutch found out and recalled Hudson for an expedition for 1609.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1609: August: Crew on Henry Hudson's ship Half Moon see the shores of Chesapeake Bay. later Hudson got to Coney Island at the mouth of the Hudson River. (The Hudson River had been discovered 85 years before by Giovanni da Verrazano in the service of the French, searching for a way to the East Indies.) Hudson's findings (eg about Manhattan Island) generate different views in Holland versus England. The Dutch are not interested, the English were.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1610: Samuel Eliot Morison, European Discovery of America. (Two Vols.) Boston, 1971-1974.*

1610: David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America. New York, 1974.* Also, Set Fair for Roanoke. Chapel Hill, 1984.*

Notes on merchant history of the English-speaking world since 1550:

Virginia to 1749: how it grew out of Amazon ventures:

Virginia. A word applied to tobacco. The name comes from Virgin, from the Virgin Queen, England's unmarried Queen Elizabeth. The area's name first referred to parts of North America not held by the Spanish or the French. Raleigh's piratical English colony on Roanake Island had failed, but England tried again, slightly north, with a venture sponsored by The London Company, or, the Virginia Company.
(On the merchants behind the first Virginia Company, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 98ff.)

James I in 1606 with one charter established the London and Plymouth Companies, granting them land extending 200 miles inland of the Virginian coast.
(A few days before Christmas 1606, sailed from London the ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to begin the American colonisation; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 3. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 93-94. C. M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History. Four Vols. New Haven, 1934-1936.)

In early 1607, three ships and 144 men under the command of Captain Christopher Newport, ex the Mediterranean and Asia trade, carried 100 men and four boys to the Chesapeake Bay. They entered the bay in April 1607, landing on Cape Henry. The new colony elected local councillors, selected a peninsula up the James River, and established there on 31 May, 1607, the first permanent English settlement, called Jamestown, the first of some 13 British colonies-to-be. Richmond is the capital of Virginia, today. Norfolk is the next largest city. The coastal plain or Tidewater region was flat and swampy enough to be called Dismal Swamp. It is cut by four large tidal rivers, the Potomac, the Rappahanock, The York and the James, which empty into Chesapeake Bay. By 1697 the best Tidewater lands had been taken up and some soils were found exhausted; so began the settling of the Piedmont.

At the western end the Tidewater rises and provides the Piedmont, which stretches south to the North Carolina boundary. Rising abruptly in the piedmont is the Blue Ridge, and between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian plateau further west is the Shenandoah Valley, which has provided one of the world's memorable songs inspired by great rivers, songs that are often wide and sweeping, reflective, pensive if not outrightly melancholy.

As troubles reigned in Virginia, the numbers of newcomers were cut to only 38 by the end of 1607. The Virginian colonists held out, however, and more supplies plus additional settlers arrived in January and October 1608. A new charter of May 1609 abolished the original 1606 patent and a local governor with near-dictatorial powers was appointed. A large expedition, nine ships, sailed from England in May 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates as deputy-governor.
(On the English discovery of Bermuda, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 14. As a comparative view, (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 59) in 1609 there were 176 traders active in the unregulated trade with Spain.)

Two ships were lost in the Bermudas, the others arrived in May 1610 to find the people at Jamestown had barely survived "the starving winter". More settlers arrived however.

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James I thought tobacco smoking horrible, loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to lungs, and he blasted it anonymously in a pamphlet, A Covnter [sic] Blaste to Tobacco by R.B. anno 1604.
(Richard B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry. Yale University Press, 1950., p. 116.)
Aware of lung cancer, modern medicine would agree with him. As early as 1610 the Virginia Company experienced trouble in covering the expenses of voyages, since many investors had defaulted on the second and third payment of their stocks. By 1612 it had to use lotteries to keep solvent. In 1611 Sir Thomas Dale was given authority in Virginia. In 1612 a third and final charter was given to the Virginia Company over the Bermuda Islands. This charter was more liberal in that each person transporting himself to Virginia would be granted 50 acres, and the company also set up subsidiary, private joint-stock companies to settle larger areas. And so, agriculture.

From 1612, John Rolfe tried tobacco planting using a Trinidad variety which found favour with the English. He married the Indian princess Pocahantos and thereby obtained some eight years of peace with the Indians of the area.
(In 1616, as a convert to Christianity, the wife of John Rolfe, and mother of a son, with several other Indians, Pocahantos sailed to London and was presented as a princess to the king and queen. She intended to return home in 1617 but took ill and died at Gravesend to be buried there. She was one of a line of indigenous people to visit England, including, from the Pacific, Tahitians and Australian Aboriginals. For example, Aboriginals Bennelong with Governor Arthur Phillip, Mydidie with Sir Joseph Banks. Like Pocahantos, several of these indigenes died in England, although Bennelong returned to Sydney. On John Smith and Pocahontas, see Ch. 4 in Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London, Methuen, 1986.)

The new governor became Thomas West, Lord De La Warre. ( Thomas West (1577-1618), Lord De La Warre.
Following sections reply heavily on Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire.)

The first Negroes arrived in Virginia in 1619 in a Dutch ship. Initially, most Negroes were indentured, not enslaved, but later, atrocious legislation by Europeans successively eroded any ideas or sentiments protecting the rights of Negroes so as to justify slavery, where human beings were owned as property. The local assembly, the House of Burgesses, became the first of its kind in the New World. By 1619 the urge on American soil for self government asserted itself very quickly, and by 1641 the colony was well established.

Regroupings in London of Virginia merchant factions:

One early Virginia Company investor was a magnate of the Levant and East India companies, Sir Thomas Smythe, whose plantation efforts were unsuccessful.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 97-98, p. 154.

Sir Thomas Smythe in 1623 became governor of the Bermuda Company, to be succeeded in that role by his son-in-law, alderman Robert Johnson.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 98; Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 70).

Regrettably, confusion still exists about the genealogy of Sir Thomas Smythe. Here, however, arises a further genealogical mystery concerning a Lord Mayor of London about 1518, Sir Thomas Mirfyn. The implications are as follows - Mirfyn's possible longer descendancy via a son Edward and a daughter Frances involves the later names Palavicino, Cromwells, Earls Fauconberg, the later Edens, the eighth Marquis Tweeddale, other Cromwellians, second Baron Ashburton (that is, Baring), and Barringtons of the Rich faction. If the same Sir Thomas Mirfyn had a daughter Joan who married Lord Mayor Andrew Judd, then Mirfyn's shorter or other descendancy would include names such as customs receiver, "Customer" Smythe (died 1591), Knightleys as republicans, Lord Mayor Rowland Hayward, Roper/Lords Teynham; and perhaps some members of the Rich faction.)

By 1616, Smythe, a London alderman, had been sometime governor of the East India, Muscovy, French and Somers Islands companies. His son-in-law was Robert Johnson, a director of the Levant and East India companies who became a governor of the Bermuda Company. Smythe became one of the leading merchants of the Virginia Company of London, but he remained interested also in the East India Company.
(The Rich family, Earls Warwick, had a large interest in Bermuda; and the second Earl of Warwick became governor of the Bermuda Company in 1628. Alison Olson, Making The Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790. London, Harvard University Press, London. 1992., p. 17.)

Sir Horatio Palavicino (1540-1600) was an Elizabethan financier from a Genoese family who died a remarkably wealthy English commoner. By 1592 he had tried to corner the world supply of pepper (does anyone ask if this had relation to reasons for the establishment of either the English or Dutch East India companies?) He had children by his wife Anne Hoftman, who as widow married the Royalist, Sir Oliver Cromwell (died 1626). Several of Cromwell's children by his first wife, Elizabeth Bromley, married Palavicino's children. Sir Horatio lived in the notable parish, St Dunstan's, Tower Ward.
Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956.)

Another of the "Virginia Magazine" was Sir John Wolstenholme, a leading London financier and a customs farmer as well as East India Company director. Other Virginia investors included William Essington, a leading Merchant Adventurer who was a son-in-law of the Merchant Adventurer, Sir Thomas Hayes, a Lord Mayor of London; William Canning, a noted Merchant Adventurer, was also deputy-governor of the Bermuda Company and several times master of the Ironmongers. (Ironmongery became important items of trade on the African slave coasts).
(Another noted Virginia Company investor was George Calvert (1578-1632), Lord Baltimore, a Catholic with a title granted by James I. Calvert had been the king's principal secretary of state but resigned; he also invested in the Virginia Company and the New England Company, and spent money on a Newfoundland colony, Avalon. Later his son Cecilius acquired land which became the colony of Maryland. Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, 1607-1763. London, Macmillan, 1965., pp. 21-23, pp. 42ff. GEC, Peerage, Baltimore, p. 393.)

With the arrival in London of James I after the death of Elizabeth I, earlier English interest in anti-Spanish privateering abated somewhat, but interest in Amazon adventures was retained, especially by the first and/or the second Earl Warwick. The descendants of Amazon adventurers gradually developed an interest in Caribbean plantations, which also allowed them to retain an anti-Spanish spirit. Meanwhile, seven or more Levant Company merchants had helped establish the East India Company in 1599-1600, and that grouping had little interest in the Caribbean, or anti-Spanish activity. But from about 1618, some figures interested in Amazon adventures firmed their interest in Virginian business.

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The "Rich faction", the second earl of Warwick's faction, remained extremely active, although the extent to which it owed its Virginian interests to its earlier Amazon interests is debatable, and has not yet been traced in detail by historians. In 1618 the second Earl of Warwick had become an original member of the Guinea Company, newly-incorporated to engage in profitable trade in Negroes.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 34-36.)

In 1618 the ship Treasurer Capt Daniel Elfrith was fitted with a Savoy Commission as a man-o-war; she carried the first shipment of Negroes ever sold in Virginia, and her arrival provided Warwick's enemies in Virginia with reasons to attack. They accused him of piracy, though Elfrith said the Negroes been obtained properly.
(Here, Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 36, notes with irony that the same man, Warwick, who introduced Negroes slaves into British America also introduced the charter of Massachusetts, later the foremost abolitionist state.)

At the time of the ship money dispute, the value of the Rich navy was so great that Warwick obtained a commission modelled on the lines of Queen Elizabeth's commission to the anti-Spanish privateer, George Clifford (1558-1605), the thirteenth Lord Clifford, and third Earl of Cumberland , who according to Newton in European Nations in the West Indies had been "more prominent than any other English nobleman as a leader of corsairs; since 1587 he had organised and fitted out at his own expense no less than eleven expeditions against Spanish commerce", with his twelfth attempt being his last.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 37ff. R. G. Marsden, `Early Prize Law', English Historical Review, April, 1910. Arthur Percival Newton, (Ed.), The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, Black, 1933., p. 115. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 70. GEC, Peerage, Cumberland, p. 568; Clifford, pp. 294ff. Some of Cumberland's commercial associates were Thomas Cordell (Mercers, and Levant Co.), William Garraway, Sir John Hart, Paul Bayning, John Watts.)

In 1619, the Earl of Warwick took a prominent part in financing Roger North's Guiana expedition, and in 1620 he was granted a seat on the council of the revived Plymouth Company for New England, and went to its meetings. As to linkages between Puritans, Warwick/Rich was a neighbour of Sir John Bourchier, whose daughter Elizabeth had recently married Oliver Cromwell. Warwick as organiser of the Guiana Company had wanted to settle there some of the separatists of Robinson's congregation at Leyden, but the dissolution of the Guiana Company meant that Company looked to North Virginia instead, hence the sailing of the Mayflower in August 1620. (The captain of the Mayflower seems to have been Capt. Peter Andrews, who engaged in Virginia and West Indies tobacco planting. Andrews was brother-in-law of the ship's owner, Samuel Vassall)
( Vassall was a Presbyterian City man and a navy commissioner who married a daughter of the London-Levant merchant, Abraham Cartwright. He was once interested with Pym in suppressing an Irish rebellion. He refused to pay ship money, was a wholesale clothier, imported eastern currants and silks, and also tobacco, flax and hemp. With Mathew Cradock he became a co-founder of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Vassall probably owned the Mayflower, taking the Puritan Fathers to America. William Vassall was a Massachusetts Bay colonist.
Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 59-60, p. 193, Note 22. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 151ff.)

(It was later, by 13 January, 1630 that Warwick obtained for the Mayflower puritans a grant of the second Plymouth patent.)

Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, was the eldest son of Robert (1559/60-1618-19), the first Earl Warwick and third Baron Rich, and great-grandson of Richard, first Baron Rich, chancellor of the Court of Augmentations to Henry VIII, founder of the family fortunes, a Puritan and a contemporary of John Preston.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 192ff. GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff; Newhaven, p. 539.)

The Rich family were anti-Spanish and therefore distasteful to James I. The second Earl of Warwick continued the earlier privateering expeditions of his forebears; in 1614 he became one of the original members of the Somers Isles Company. In 1618 he had 14 shares in the Somers Isle Company and one of the divisions of the Islands was called Warwick Tribe (sic, a peculiar appellation). In 1616 he and his father fitted out two ships with a Savoy Commission to rove in the East Indies. In fact, the second Earl of Warwick, and his commercial associates busily united the themes of anti-Spanish activity, interest in Virginia, and trade in the zones desired by the English East India Company. The anti-Spanish vehemence of Warwick's day lasted long in English cultural life, and was once expressed once Australia had been settled, by the Enderby whalers, by way of fantasies about attacking parts of the western coasts of South America. On one album of English folk songs can be found two anti-Spanish lyrics:

Take this scone to wear this horn, it was the crest when you were born,
Your father's father wore it and your father wore it too...
Hal-an-Tow, jolly rumble-o, We were up, long before the day-o.
To welcome in the summer, to welcome in the May-o.
The summer is a comin' and the winter's gone away-o.
What happened to the Spaniards, that makes a greater boast though?
Why they shall eat the feathered goose, and we shall eat the roast-o.
Hal-an-Tow. Jolly rumble-o. We were up, long before the day-o.

And again:

And now I will tell of brave Elliott, the first youth that enters the ring,
and so proudly rejoice I to tell it, ... he fought for his country and king.
When the Spaniards besieged Gibraltar t'was Elliott defended the place,
and he soon caused their plans for to alter, some died, others fell in disgrace...
(From (1) Hal-an-Tow and (2) Earsdon Sword Dance Song, sung by The Watersons, Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ceremonial Folk Songs. Topic Records, UK. 12T136.

The Earl of Warwick's Savoy commission was obtained for considerable money from Scarnafissi, the agent of Charles Emmanuel I, who was then on a money-seeking mission to England. In the East, the Rich ships took a Mogul ship worth £100,000, which was recaptured by an East India Company ship; there followed a long dispute with the Company, though while it proceeded, Rich was "constantly at the Company", borrowing stock ordnance and stores for his ships.

In 1618, Rich sent his ship Treasurer to plunder the Spanish West Indies; then he sought to use Virginia as a base for similar pirating. However, by 1620, Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629) and his circle intervened in this, and brought information to the Privy Council and the Spanish ambassador.
(Relevant here is Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, Chapter IV, The New-Merchant Leadership of the Colonial Trades.)

How far the colonising faction led by Warwick should be regarded as "aristocratic" or "commercial" remains unclear. Answering to Warwick in commercial matters from 1619, it appears, was his kinsman Sir Nathaniel Rich. (Newton regards Nathaniel Rich as the business head of the Warwick faction.) And some opponents of Sandys included an East India Company officer and alderman, Morris Abbot, a Levant Company officer Christopher Barron, and some top Merchant Adventurers including William Essington, William Palmer and Edward Palmer.
(Sir Nathaniel Rich is noted thus in Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16.)

Sir Thomas Smythe led another anti-Sandys faction of merchants including Sir John Wolstenholme and Sir William Russell, both leading crown financiers, plus merchants Hugh Hamersley, alderman Robert Johnson, Nicholas Leate, Anthony Abdy, John Dyke, Humphrey Slaney, Robert Bateman, Thomas Styles, Richard Edwards (all Levant Men), William Canning and Humphrey Handford (of the French trade and an importer of European wares).
(On the rivalry between the camps of Sandys and Sir Thomas Smith, see Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16.

In 1619, Sandys supplanted Smith as treasurer of the Virginia Company. In the Sandys camp were Wriothesley, Earl Southampton, Lord Cavendish (William Cavendish (1551-1625), first Baron Cavendish, first Earl Devonshire), and John and Nicholas Ferrar. Sandys saw "direct links between power and freedom, company profits and colonial prosperity". Lord Cavendish also had one-eighth of the Bermudas. It might also be noted that Frances, sister of Lord Cavendish, married William Maynard, first Baron Maynard, son of secretary of the treasury for Lord Burghley, Sir Henry Maynard. Frances' brother Charles, an auditor of the Exchequer, married Essex Corsellis, daughter of a colleague of Maurice Thomson, Zegar Corsellis, a Dutch financier name. In later generations, Cavendish women married Charles Lord Rich and Robert Lord Rich.
(GEC, Peerage, Maynard, p. 599. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 621.)

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So, the anti-Sandys faction included Smythe and the Rich/Warwick factions. There was a tendency to first destroy the Virginia Company in order to save it, and at the time, James I's treasurer was Sir Lionel Cranfield.
(Lionel (1574-75-1645), first Earl Middlesex, was early in his career, to 1622, a merchant adventurer. Rabb, Enterprise, p. 21, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 68. GEC, Peerage, Middlesex, pp. 689ff.)

The pro-Sandys faction from 1618, the year of the "Great Charter" of the Virginia Company included William, first Baron Cavendish, and Wriothesley, Earl Southampton, plus brothers John and Nicholas Ferrar.

Squabbling over Virginia, and with company reforms of 1618, Sir Edwin Sandys' "gentry party" battled Sir Thomas Smythe's "merchant party" for the position of treasurer of the Virginia Company.
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 99-100.)

Sandys' gentry party from 1618 ousted the Smythe faction, but still found it hard to keep Virginia supplied financially. London merchants withdrew from Virginian adventures, till 1623 when they joined forces to regain control of tobacco handling. Just who gained that control is difficult to find, but by 1617, Virginia was shipping 50,000 pounds weight of tobacco per year, and her planters were developing a boom mentality. By 1638, Virginia exported two million pounds of tobacco.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 113.)

Dissolution of the Virginia Company:

In 1620 came the abandonment of the charter of the Amazon Company. By February 1621, Sir Nathaniel Rich had wanted to see the establishment of a West India Company.
(Sir Nathaniel Rich, (1585-1636), knighted in 1617, was the senior business manager for the second Earl of Warwick, with Maurice Thomson evidently reporting to him. Nathaniel was grandson by illegitimate descent of Richard, first Baron Rich. Nathaniel's father Richard (died 1610) had been a Virginia colonist. DNB entry for Nathaniel Rich. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 242. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 195, Note 1.)

From 1618 erupted a squabble between the Sandys/Smythe factions for the role of treasurer of the Virginia Company.
(Here, the present writer would agree more with Brenner's analysis than with Bliss' analysis. The solution to the problem with the Virginia Company lay in finding a mode of government which fitted a plantation production system novel to the English; not, as was the Sandys plan, of finding ways to transplant English community life in a new environment. It rather seems as if Rich, the puritan Earl of Warwick realised more astutely than many others that an individualistic Puritanism that discriminated less against common folk - colonists - could solve this problem more easily).

In 1620, James I had stepped in to stop the Rich faction using Virginia and the Somers Islands (Bermuda) as bases for privateering against the Spanish in the West Indies. Later the king made the Rich faction abandon their efforts with Guiana. (Charles 1 gained the throne of England on 27 March, 1625.) In 1621 James 1 revoked the lottery funding the Virginia Company and in 1621-1622, James 1 tried unsuccessfully to back the Smythe faction in the battle for the position of treasurer of the Virginia Company. By 1623, when Sandys' faction thought they had convinced the king their views on the government of Virginia were sound, the king amazed them when in 1624 there was declared a vacancy of the Virginia Company charter, and with some involvement from Sir Nathaniel Rich, control of the company was given to Lord President Mandeville.
(Viscount Mandeville, first Earl Mandeville, sometime treasurer, Henry Montagu (1563-1642). His family turned part Whiggish; his son Edward was anti-ship money, a Cromwellian peer, although he later assisted the Restoration. GEC, Peerage, Manchester, p. 365; North, p. 657. The new governor of Virginia was Sir Francis Wyatt (a descendant of the Wyatt plotters early in the carer of Elizabeth I, who had married a niece of Sir Edwin Sandys).

Charles I when he examined the Virginia Company situation dealt with two Sandys supporters, the Earl of Dorset and William, first Baron Cavendish.
(Earl Dorset, This was Richard Sackville (1589-1624)), third earl of Dorset, an investor in the Virginia Company by 1609.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 194, Note 5).

He was married to Anne Clifford, daughter of the anti-Spanish "privateer", George Clifford, third Earl Cumberland. Anne Clifford also married the anti-Spanish Philip Herbert, fourth Earl Pembroke, who was also interested in the Virginia Company, and was patron of Sir William Courteen Snr. in squabbles over the development of England's Caribbean interests. The first Earl of Dorset, sometime treasurer, Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), was of the descendants of Lord Mayor Geoffrey Boleyn.
(GEC, Peerage, Dorset, p. 422.)

Thus, the third earl of Dorset, as consulted on "colonisation" represented, as it were, two powerful families who had been affronted by Henry VIII's treatment of his wives; the Parrs and the Boleyns. )
Baron Cavendish: In 1624, (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 113), Virginia had only 1000 colonists. On 1 March, 1624, the House of Commons' motion regarding seizure of departing East India Company ships, became part of the Smith/Smythe/Sandys squabble. Treasurer Cranfield had backed Sandys' opponents. The Commons gave some backing to Sandys and his gentry men trying to retain control of the Virginia Company. Maurice Thomson et al, were led by Smythe and backed by the Rich faction, the Earl of Warwick. At first, Charles and Cranfield had backed the merchants in their fight with Sandys; by 1624, Charles and Cranfield had destroyed Sandys tobacco monopoly, dissolved the old Virginia Company, and reconstituted it with merchants plus the Rich faction.

Behind the whole squabble seems a view taken in England, that one was either for or against the right of the individual in Virginia to own property, manage resources and make a profit in ways new to traditional English life and politics. Sandys lost the battle because his assumptions, while "democratic" enough in some ways to disaffect the king, were not well-fitted to the system of production which at the time was stimulating a boom mentality. What the king wanted finally was sufficient control over trade and profits, and so he conceded some ground on questions of colonial government, resulting in Virginia's new independent House of Assembly.)

In 1623, Buckingham and Charles had returned from their mission to Spain, determined to end the Spanish match. Their stance seemed to open ways for a rise in anti-Spanish feeling generally. Buckingham and Charles wanted to resurrect the careers of the anti-Spanish Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton...
(This was Thomas Wriothesley, (1607-1667) fourth Earl Southampton; or his father, Henry, (1573-1624), third earl, an investor in the Virginia and East India companies, also interested in finding the north-west passage. The third earl was a backer of the Sandys faction in the Sandys/Smythe squabble over the treasuryship of the Virginia Company.)

....and the Earl of Oxford, lately imprisoned by James. They welcomed William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and also the second Earl of Warwick. (Another figure to be mentioned is the great Puritan minister, John Preston, linked to Calvinist ministry, who had tutored the Earl of Warwick's son). Also with close ties of friendship to Lord Saye was the puritan Sir Richard Knightley (1593-1639).
(One of Knightley's wives was Anna Courteen, daughter of Sir William Courteen Senior. Knightley's cousin Sir Valentine Knightley was a member of the Virginia Company. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 69. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Knightly. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 261.)

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As Saye became an ally of Buckingham, there was also alliance with the parliamentary opposition. Buckingham even managed to recruit "the mighty earl of Pembroke", who hated Buckingham.
(Philip Herbert (1584-1649/1650), fourth Earl Pembroke, whose first wife was Susan De Vere and second, Anne Clifford. This fourth earl was given a grant of Barbados but he lost it to Earl Carlisle; by 1627-1628 he held this grant in trusteeship for Courteen Senior (as noted in DNB , entry for Courteen).

Pembroke in 1645 was Commissioner of Admiralty. In 1637 Pembroke with others was given a grant of the province of Newfoundland, which area became "a nursery of seamen". He was in the Virginia Company by 1609, East India Company by 1611, North West Passage Company by 1612 and was privateering by 1625. He and his brother were councillors for Virginia. He or his father appear to have been patrons of Courteen's early attempts to settle Barbados; whether he was double-crossed by the Earl of Carlisle remains unclear.
Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 516. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 188. Lorimer (Ed.), Amazon, p. 291, Note 2. GEC, Peerage, Carnarvon, p. 44; Pembroke, p. 415; Oxford, p. 253; Dorset, p. 424; Clifford, p. 295. One of this earl's daughters, Mary, married Sir John Sydenham, Bart, (1642-1696) (Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 516.). He was of the same family line as Elizabeth Sydenham, the second wife of privateer, Sir Francis Drake.)

A secretary of state, and a Buckingham protégé, was Sir Edward Conway, who tried to turn James to an anti-Spanish position and to recover the Palatinate. There was arising, a joint Anglo-Dutch move against Spain in the Caribbean, which may also have come to the notice of the Anglo-Dutch merchant, Sir William Courteen senior.

By 1623, writes Davies, James 1 was economically weak, with little credit given him for the good years. He restricted and disorganised trade by adding burdens, a rationalisation being that extra trade would result from peace with Spain. Earlier in James I's reign there had been new enterprises such as the East India Company and the Russia Company, and developments such as Scottish colonisation in Nova Scotia. Too little however was ever reported of Maurice Thomson till Brenner published his research.
(Here, one should also see Newton, Colonising Puritans.)

The extraordinary range of trading engaged by Maurice Thomson (agent for the second Earl of Warwick) and his associates is all the more remarkable if a brief tour is made of the fringes of English settlement and interest patterns of the decades 1600-1640, since it is helpful if the aspirations of a wide range of merchants is known as England expanded.

By Charles' proclamation of 13 May, 1625, Charles rejected Sandys' views on the government of Virginia as smacking too much of "popular government".
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 19-24.)

In short, from 1618, the Sandys faction's views on the management of Virginia were brought undone by bad luck, the outcomes of earlier problems, and too much leaning to popular government. (One suspects the king realised that those with the most powerful grip on rising tobacco production, and import, including the Rich faction, had the political views he could live with more comfortably!) Sandys' faction between 1618-1622 sent over 3500 colonists to Virginia, mostly young men, but their policy of diversifying the economy and discouraging tobacco planting failed.

It appears to the present writer that the level of tobacco profits from 1618, problems on the ground in Virginia, plus disputes over how to govern Virginia - popularly, or within the confines of some kind of royal charter - blasted the Sandys faction. The extent of Charles' enthusiasm for controlling the tobacco trade is not explained in Bliss's political analysis - but till April 1623, Charles had favoured his father's outlook on managing Virginia - and the views of the Sandys faction. It seems then that the Earl of Warwick with the help of Sir Nathaniel Rich and later, Maurice Thomson, created means of dominating trade to Virginia - perhaps at the cost of abandoning their anti-Spanish prejudice, and not without the aid of some Dutch capitalists.

By 1624, the Virginia Company's charter was dissolved and declared vacant, and the Crown took over the colony. Charles I had stepped in and Virginia (along with the Bermudas, (the Somers Islands) and New England, became England's first royal colony. The Sandys faction, or the "old Virginia Company" meantime, consisted of customs farmer Sir John Wolstenholme, George Sandys, Sir John Danvers, Sir Robert Killigrew, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir Robert Heath, Sir John Zouch, the Ferrar brothers John and Nicholas, Heneage Finch, Gabriel Barber and Sir Dudley Digges.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 132.)

This faction had little interest in the Caribbean, which was also part of their undoing, since their commercial enemies were linking business between West Indian islands and Virginia. On 15 July, 1624 a new commission was issued by James I to "the merchant party" and also to members of the Rich faction. If there had been linkages between the Rich/Warwick faction, and Sandys' gentry/merchants faction, they were probably cast more in terms of Puritan affiliation, where religious viewpoint helped shape views on the government of colonies, than in terms of more traditional or gentry politics.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 30ff.)

From 1623-1628 the affairs of the Somers Island Co. been going from bad to worse. The Governor. in 1622 was John Bernard, sent out to inspect Capt. Butler's proceedings, but Bernard died, and his successor was John Harrison, a nominee of the Sandys faction, who only held office in 1623. He was succeeded by Capt. Henry Woodhouse (1623-1626); Woodhouse was succeeded by Capt. Philip Bell qv, one of the Warwick/Rich faction. The company's agents were accused in England of monopolistic practices, as they sold dear to planters for necessities and bought cheap. There was conflict with a Barnstaple merchant, John Delbridge, who wanted a right to trade to the islands without paying high license duties required.)

What hampers many historians' treatments of the era is failure to recognise the role of Puritan nobles in what is termed, the anti-Sandys merchant faction.
(The Virginia Company was dissolved by the Crown, and in 15 July 1624 a new commission issued by James I to the merchant party and Rich faction, 41 members including Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir James Cambell and Sir Ralph Freeman, and, plus ten commissioners who were leading officers in the government of James I. But with the death of James I, this new commission was abrogated and Charles I never re-established it. So many of the City's merchants withdrew from trade with Virginia, except for some remaining, including Samuel Vassall and Matthew Craddock, plus Humphrey Slaney who traded with his son-in-law William Cloberry. Some others remaining were Edward Bennett (Levant), Nathan Wright (Levant), Benjamin Whetcomb (sic) (Levant), Anthony Pennyston (Levant), Richard Chambers (Levant), and Wm. Tristram (Merchant Adventurer).
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 103, p. 216.

These were some of the merchants involved by the time William Claiborne in Virginia was promoting the Kent Island project. And so, a newer generation of Levant Company men, different to those first involved with the creation of the East India Company, were becoming interested in North American trade.)

Meanwhile, Warwick's chief business manager, Sir Nathaniel Rich, was understudied by a man who seems more like a merchant banker than a merchant with a great many associates, Maurice Thomson.

( Scattered material on Maurice Thomson surfaces in various books, but he has never been treated comprehensively.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 120ff.

When the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624, William Tucker and Maurice Thomson were partners and brothers-in-law, and were leading Virginia development. Another brother-in-law of Tucker was William Felgate. By 1626, Maurice Thomson had returned to London to organise trade for Virginia, which suggests he had earlier lived in Virginia. Given his timing, one suspects that Thomson had astutely gauged the extent to which Puritan ideology would continue to remain an ally of the production system developing in Virginia.)

It is still not entirely clear that either Sir Nathaniel Rich or the powerful and puritan second earl of Warwick were fully involved in all the schemes in which Maurice Thomson became involved, yet, the schemes had a seamlessness of interest and push about them which suggests a continued high-level and successful inspiration, presumably from Warwick.

Following the settling of the Smythe-Sandys squabbling, a group newly-emerging in Virginian affairs had 41 or more members, including Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir James Cambell (Lord Mayor of London in 1629 and no relation to any Campbells of the extended Campbell family discussed here, who started on Jamaica in 1700). And Sir Ralph Freeman.
(Sir James Cambell; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 98ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 89-90.)

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There were also ten commissioners who were leading officers in the government of James I, but with the death of James I, this new commission was abrogated, and Charles I never re-established it.

London merchants by the mid-1620s found that Charles (son of James I) and Buckingham were willing to confront London's Merchant Adventurers in order to try to find new sources of merchant or financial support. The Earl of Carlisle was a dependent of Buckingham, and as proprietor of the Caribbean, Carlisle became an unexpected winner in colonisation stakes, since neither he nor his kin had ever had any interest in maritime activity. (In early 1624, Buckingham did not scruple to stop an outgoing East India Company ship and get from the Company some £10,000 for himself and an extra £10,000 for the king.)
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 216.

On 1 March, 1624 came a House of Commons' motion regarding the seizure of departing East India Company ships, and such matters became part of the squabble between the Smythe and Sandys factions. When the Commons backed Sandys and his gentry men as they tried to retain control of the Virginia Company, this meant that they moved against Maurice Thomson's interests, which meant they moved against the interests of Robert Rich the second Earl of Warwick, and/or those of Sir Thomas Smythe. The treasurer, Cranfield, had backed Sandys' opponents. The king and Cranfield had backed the Sandys party of merchants, but by 1624, Sandys' tobacco monopoly was destroyed, the "old" Virginia Company was dissolved, and it was reconstituted with merchants including associates of the Rich faction.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 252.)

London's America merchants in the City became disconcerted by the stance adopted by the Commons, as they could not deal with America on a monopoly basis, as free trade was to become the rule. Brenner feels it would have been worse for Virginia if the monopoly style of trade had been continued to there, as it would have bled the colonists dry. Sir Francis Bacon suggested that noblemen and gentlemen would be more useful for the Virginia trade as they'd be more inclined to bear a loss than merchants who wanted quick gains. But the nobles were "not interested"; they invested on average a mere £35 each at one time in Virginia. Some gentry did back the "hundreds", or plantation deals, including Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Sir Richard Berkeley, but these were short-term operations. Finally it was seen that new Virginia capital came not from gentry or the greater merchants, so American trade was infiltrated by merchants from lesser backgrounds, including "mere mariners".
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 79, pp. 104-108, pp. 114ff, pp. 116-118.)

So, many of the City's earlier-involved merchants withdrew from Virginia/America trade. Some men remaining in American trade in the 1620s included Samuel Vassall (a name to be known also on Jamaica) and Matthew Craddock, plus Humphrey Slaney, who traded with his son-in-law William Cloberry. Some other investors remaining were Edward Bennett (Levant Company), Nathan Wright (Levant Company), Benjamin Whetcomb (sic) (Levant Company), Anthony Pennyston (Levant), Richard Chambers (Levant), and William Tristram (Merchant Adventurer).
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 103, p. 136.

In 1630 Samuel Vassall failed to settle South Carolina, helping Huguenots, in territory granted to Sir Robert Heath. Emigrants for there were mistakenly landed in Virginia. Vassall often worked with Richard Bateson and Edward Wood, who were Maurice Thomson's privateering partners. Also linked was Richard Cranely, a Levant man, an American sea captain who worked Virginia and the West Indies with one Mr. Thomson (possibly the "founder" of Nevis, Edward Thomson); plus Nathan Wright, a Levant Company man trading with New England and an interloper in both the Greenland and Newfoundland trades, before he began with America in the late 1630s.)

Between 1600 and 1630 then, it appears that the following happened: by about 1624, the Warwick circle, and some privateers, entered conflict with Sir Thomas Smythe and City magnates, who led the Virginia Company and East India Company, plus other operations. This conflict encouraged the lesser Sandys faction. Rich's circle otherwise sent out two vessels to the Red Sea with a privateering commission from the Duke of Savoy, and attempted to plunder a great ship belonging to the queen mother of the Great Mogul.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 100.)

The East India Company had just secured trade privileges from the Moguls and were worried. Several Company ships interrupted Rich's vessel and so bad feeling developed between Rich and the East India Company. Then Smythe and his friends frustrated Warwick's attempts to have his protégé, Nathaniel Butler, appointed governor of Bermuda. Smythe's son married Warwick's sister, Isabella.
(Isabella Rich; GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff, Newhaven, p. 539.) ... of which Smythe Senior disapproved.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 216. Isabella Rich; GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff, Newhaven, p. 539.)

By the 1630s, a new group or generation of Levant traders, whether or not they remained interested in the East India Company, were also becoming interested in Virginia/American trade, though not necessarily in Caribbean or West Indian trade. This disposition in trading groups would probably have remained, had not Thomas Warner discovered Barbados, the matter which prompted Sir William Courteen Senior to invest in settling Barbados.
On Caribbean dealings between Warner and Maurice Thomson, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 127.

1620: Puritans, the Mayflower and other matters:

The Puritans' Mayflower had sailed in September 1620, landing at Plymouth, an area later annexed to Massachusetts, in 1691, after failing to find Virginia. The Scottish colonisation of Nova Scotia about the same time gave some stimulus to English trade (as we shall see, via Maurice Thomson's interests), but Britain in 1629 abandoned her efforts on Nova Scotia, when Charles I made peace with France. Meanwhile, in 1620 occurred the first known exploration of the African interior, up the Gambia River. A factory was established at the river mouth and later a fort was acquired at James Island. The English probably also visited Sierra Leone and Sherbro River.

An Englishman on one such expedition is said to have been offered slaves, but he magnanimously declined to deal in human beings. Unfortunately, things changed, although it should be emphasised, when chattel slavery began to be used on Barbados, the institution was initially unfamiliar to the English there. On Barbados, a "code" had to be drawn up, in which situation of course, the Negro had no voice, such was the voice of what would become Imperialism! This became the Barbados slave code, later exported to Jamaica, then to Virginia.
(K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company. London, Longmans, 1960., p. 9, p. 15, p. 42. I have leaned heavily here on the use of Davies' lists of investors in the slave trade, as given in his index, in order to link names with other information on men involved in the English slave trades from the 1640s.)

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Also as part of developing trends, in 1620 the City of London sent "a swarm of 100 children" to Virginia; street children.
(F. L. W. Wood, `Jeremy Bentham versus New South Wales', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. XIX, Part 6, 1933.. pp. 329-351; here, p. 330. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, p. 24, pp. 35-37. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 273.)

In this, London's aldermen got their way without protest. The tradition was arising, of people being "disappeared", especially from Middlesex. So, in the American colonies, by 1619, after the struggle between the Smythe/Sandys factions for control of the Jamestown settlement at Virginia, instructions were received for the formation of a local government, the House of Burgesses, which became more democratic in ideas than anything in England or Europe (as Ver Steeg notes). But the need for labour led a demand for slave, convict and indentured labour that would also mean that over time, that any nascent sense of "democracy" was to be corrupted by equations of rights to citizenship with rights arising from property ownership; meaning that citizenship would be offered to fewer European individuals, and denied to those of other races.
(This theme is traced with some feeling in James Michener's novel, Chesapeake, although Michener there makes little mention of transported convicts. Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 32-33.)

How colonisation provoked the transportation of offenders:

In 1620, Sir Thomas Smith (Smythe?) had been allowed to ship 20 people to the Somers Islands (Bermuda). (Within a few decades, the term "being Babadosed" came to mean being kidnapped to work on Barbados. Long later, the term was "Shanghaied"). By the 1640s, many younger people on Barbados had arrived after being kidnapped. Later, other new inhabitants included London thieves and whores, Scottish and Irish soldiers captured in Cromwell's campaigns. Cromwell did much to encourage the transportation of people deemed undesirable, but not before certain trends had earlier been set by the second Earl of Warwick, his associates, and those who answered to them. Between 1623-1624 the newly-organised Dorchester Company was granted permission by the Council of New England to fish and trade. By 1626 the company - with some members prominent Puritans - had established a settlement at Salem, promoting the idea of a Bible Commonwealth.
( By 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company was formed with a charter from the Crown. Some Levant Company men investing in Massachusetts Bay Colony included Francis Flyer, Matthew Craddock, Samuel Vassall, Nathan Wright, men already active in America trade. It is difficult not to see them co-operating with "the Rich faction". The Massachusetts Bay Company members were merchants, some fishing men of the Dorchester Company, some London merchants and some Puritan gentry. (In 1630, some seventeen English ships sailed for Massachusetts, with 1000 persons plus provisions and animal stock).)

Renewed anti-Spanish feeling after the Sandys/Smythe squabble:

Puritanism remained a strong theme in politics. In 1628-1629 were parliamentary confrontations with the crown over unparliamentary taxation, forced loans, arbitrary imprisonment, and Arminianism and persecution of Puritans. A political opposition grouped around the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and Sir Nathaniel Rich and their colonizing ventures.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 148ff.

It would appear that Brenner is the first historian to strongly link the second Earl of Warwick with the formerly unreported extent of the trading engaged by Maurice Thomson and Thomson's associates. To date, it seems arguable that the significance of the Earl of Warwick's commercial efforts have been understated. On Warwick and some of his aristocratic-investor connections.
See also, Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, pp. 194ff. It is given in Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, A&C Black, 1933., pp. 172ff, that Warwick's efforts should be associated with English efforts seen in the Virginia Company, North's unsuccessful settlement of the Amazons, and the settlement of the American New England - as well as with the anti-Spanish Providence Island Company. Warwick was greatly responsible for the promotion of the English use of chattel slavery - and this is said far too seldom by historians.)

Warwick was probably encouraged by conflict with Spain, as it is almost as though having won his part of the Sandys/Smythe squabble, the Earl of Warwick wished to renew his anti-Spanish fervour, fully aware that English commercial shipping would now sweep wider from Africa, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Virginia, and north on the Canadian coasts.

From 1625, England was to be at war with Spain, then with France. One of England's responses was to promote privateering again, in a context where proposals for the establishment of an English West India Company as well as for improvements to the navy were common. "A group of MPs associated with the second Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich", became vocal. Warwick was a "privateering magnate" and "was to lead the Providence Company in a private war with Spain".
(Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 36-37. [Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 39] has Winthrop at Massachusetts believing by 1640 that the Providence Island Company had lost £120,000. Bliss writes, by the early 1640s, "Meanwhile, parliamentary leaders like the Earl of Warwick were as aware as anyone of the potential for sugar to fuel the sinews of war.")

Andrews in Ships, Money and Politics writes, Warwick was "the only great shipowning aristocrat of his time, patron and chief entrepreneur of westward colonization, especially in the West Indies and the Somers Islands"... Is this remark significant? "The only other peer with a considerable interest in shipping [was] the Earl of Carlisle..." However, it remains difficult to find ship men or traders associating with Carlisle. As he worked to "plant" the Caribees, Carlisle relied even more than Warwick did, on merchant backing. Carlisle's clique of merchants being led by Marmaduke Roydon.
Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, p. 156, p. 183. There is little information however on Roydon's family history or career, and his associates seem surprisingly few.

Later regarding Barbados, the associates of the Earl of Carlisle (family name Hay) were such as Peter Hay, James Holdip. Carlisle's backers included Marmaduke Roydon, William Perkins, Alexander Bannister. The Barbados experience acclimatised English people to managing chattel slavery.
Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 33.

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These men Hay had kinsmen, Sir James Hay and Sir Archibald Hay who helped shore up the influence of the Earl of Carlisle, re rent collections. The new governor, Henry Huncks, threatened Peter Hay with physical violence. But the Hays did however understand colonial reluctance to undertake trade regulation if there was a share in colonial government a la issues later rising with the outbreak of the American Revolution].)

There seems however to be little evidence that Carlisle was interested in maritime activity before he developed ambitions to dominate the English efforts in the Caribbean. In fact, little is found in books on the merchants Carlisle used, and his commercial activities, as distinct from his political influences, remain rather blank to the historian. And further, Carlisle's interests cannot be properly understood without reference to Courteen's investments on Barbados - and much else. Perhaps, Carlisle was constrained to use shipping deployed by merchants whose greater loyalty was to the Earl of Warwick?

In 1628 the second Earl of Warwick took over the governership of the Bermuda Company to make it a Puritan project. By 21 June, 1628, Digges and Rich had again put forward a plan for a West Indies company; Rich had a bill pre-written. An associated idea was to "breed up mariners". Similar plans were expressed in late January 1629. (In August 1628 the Dutchman Piet Heyn (sic) reportedly took a Spanish treasure fleet for £1,200,000.)
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 267-268.)

In 1629, many Englishmen with vehement Puritan views backed the Providence Island Company, to be theirs exclusively, and in 1629 the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nathaniel Rich, Lord Saye and Sele, and another puritan, the third Earl of Lincoln (Thomas Clinton, 1571-1619), patronized the Massachusetts Bay Company.
(Third Earl Lincoln: Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 152. GEC, Peerage, Lincoln, p. 695, Clinton, p. 318.)

So, American puritan ports siphoned off religious exiles (and later, undesirables). There emerged a large network, finally, of merchants, puritans and nobles, each influencing the other, and most of them influencing trade.
(Titles consulted for this section include: Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550-1646. London, The Hakluyt Society, 1989. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530-1630. London, Yale University Press, 1978. See Chapter on Hawkins and the slave trade, Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, Manchester University Press. 1990. Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. With some information on William Courteen, see R. H. Major, FSA, Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of that Vast Island, from the beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the time of Captain Cook. London, For the Hakluyt Society, No. 25. M.DCC.LIX. First published in 1859. J. A. Doyle, The English in America: The Puritan Colonies. Part 1. New York, Ames Press, 1969. (Orig. published in 1887). Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies.)

(In the late 1620s and early 1630s, a few Levant-East India Company men also dominated the Russia Trade, being Hamersley, Job Harby, William Bladwell and Henry Garway.)
(W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-stock Companies to 1720. Three Vols. Cambridge, 1910-1912.)

Once again with the plan for a West Indies Company, the idea was to keep fifty ships stationed, and fifty as back-up. The Venetian ambassador thought any such plan would only keep the Dutch and English at each others' throats. Soon, by 1630, the Bermuda Company would be joined by John Pym, Rudyerd, Lord Saye, Lord Brook (either Fulke Greville or Robert Greville; Fulke the first Baron Brooke, Robert his cousin, second Baron Brooke), and Sir Richard Knightley - all of whom began to deal with Maurice Thomson and Thomson's many associates.

By 1634 there were 175 men trading with Virginia; by 1640 there were 330.
Here, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, Chapter IV, The New-Merchant Class Leadership of the Colonial Trades, is particularly interesting. On debts, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 129.

(And planter debts were to become a matter for comment.) By 1640, America trade was in great contrast to the East India Company's style of operation. In Virginia, a distinction between merchant and planter became blurred as planters dealt in trade, also as merchant-councilors appeared. A large name in the American trade continued - Maurice Thomson. Thomson was born around 1600, the eldest of five sons of a Hertfordshire family, father Robert.
On Thomson, see Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 6, pp. 57ff, p. 91, p. 183, pp. 195ff.

By 1623, Maurice had been in Virginia for six years. He had settled there in 1617, then became master of a 320 ton ship in which he took passengers and provisions for the Virginia Company and the Virginia colonists. He obtained a Virginia estate of 150 acres, and in 1623 his three brothers, George, William and Paul joined him in Virginia, with their brother-in-law, William Tucker, who covered costs. (Tucker had married a Thomson sister.) And in view of the many kinds of trade engaged by Thomson's associates, it may be more appropriate to view Thomson as something other than a merchant. He was more a prototype for a merchant banker with a determination to promote colonisation. He helped expand various forms of commerce - many of them later dependent on slavery.
Perhaps the fullest account of the mutuality of the interests of the Earl of Warwick and Maurice Thomson is given in Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I. Sydney, Cambridge University Press, 1991., p. 6, p. 13, pp. 36-37, pp. 146ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 1255ff treats Maurice Thomson's earlier career.

Sir William Courteen and the struggle for control of Barbados: the Earl of Carlisle and proprietary rights to the Caribbean:

NB: To the end of this chapter is a chronologised listing of the merchant associates of Maurice Thomson, the "merchant banker" who worked consistently for decades to promote the colonising interests of the second Earl of Warwick.

At this point in the narrative must be entered information on two more careers not fully detailed in history books - those of Hay, first Earl of Carlisle, and Sir William Courteen Senior. The Carlisle genealogy is short. Sir James Hay of Kingask, wife unknown, had a son, James Hay (1580-1636), first Earl of Carlisle, who married first Honora Denny (died 1614) who had a fortune; and secondly Lucy Percy (1599-1660) the daughter of the anti-Spanish Henry Percy, third Earl Northumberland.
(Henry Percy, third Earl Northumberland (1564-1632); GEC, Peerage, Halifax, p. 243; Northumberland, p. 734 and Note H; Romney, p. 83; Percy, p . 465.)

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Honora Denny had a son, James (1605-1660), second Earl of Carlisle who married Margaret Russell (died 1676). The second earl's title became extinct.
(GEC, Peerage, Carlisle, p. 32; Denny, p. 187; Norwich, pp. 768-769; Manchester, p. 371. On Lucy Percy" Strickland, Lives of the Queens Of England, Vol. 5, p. 284. Lucy's sister Dorothy (died 1659) married the second Earl of Leicester, Robert Sydney (1595-1677). Robert's father was a member of the Virginia Company, the East India Company and the North West Passage Company. ) Who's Who of /Shakespeare, p. 39. Margaret Russell was daughter of Francis Russell (1593-1641), fourth Earl of Bedford, and Catherine Brydges (died 1656).)

James, first Earl Carlisle, became a favourite of Buckingham. It has been said that the Rich family (Earls Warwick) and the Hay/Carlisle family had bad blood due to a feud between members in Paris in 1624, and long squabbles over proprietary rights in the Caribbean do seem to bear out the existence of such enmity.

Sir William Courteen Senior (1572-1636) was the son of an émigré tailor, William, who had married Margaret Casiere. William's sister was Margaret, who married John, first Earl of Bridgwater. Another of Margaret Casiere's sons was Sir Charles Courteen. Sir William, a financier, married firstly a Dutchwoman with a fortune, named Cromling; and secondly, Hester Tryon. Tryon's son Sir Peter, Baronet (active 1623) married Jane Stanhope (died 1683) the daughter of Sir John Stanhope
(Jane Stanhope married as second wife to Francis Annesley, first Viscount Valentia. GEC, Peerage, Valentia, p. 207.)

Sir Peter's brother was the financier Sir William II Courteen, (died 1666), who married Catherine Egerton, daughter of John Egerton (1646-1701 and a First Lord of Trade, 1695-1699) the third Earl of Bridgewater.
(The third earl married as second wife, Jane Paulet, daughter of Charles Paulet, sixth Marquis Winchester. GEC, Peerage, Egerton of Tatton, p. 16 and note A; Bridgwater, p. 313.)

As noted in an earlier chapter, a daughter Anna of Hester Tryon married Sir Richard Knightley; and another daughter Mary (died 1643) married the MP, Henry Grey, Earl of Kent.
(GEC, Peerage, Kent, p. 176.)

The Courteen genealogy is imperfect. At Cologne was an unmarried Peter Courteen, merchant (1581-1631), but it is uncertain where to place him in the family.

The career of merchant Sir William Courteen Senior:

The capitalist settler of Barbados, Sir William Courteen Senior, was "an Anglo-Dutch financier finally bankrupted by his involvements with the Dutch East India Company".
(Titles generally useful for the preparation of this file included: Griffiths, A Licence to Trade; Furber, Rival; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution; , Ian B. Watson, Foundation. W. K. Hinton, `The Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun', Economic History Review, Second Series, VII, 1955., pp. 277. D. C. Coleman, `Naval Dockyards under the Later Stuarts', Economic History Review, Second Series, VI, 1953-1954., p. 134. S. A. Khan, The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century. London, 1923. P. J. Thomas, Mercantilism and the East India Trade. London, 1926. W. H. Moreland, From Akbar to Aurangzeb. London, 1923.)

Furber writes, Courteen had married a wealthy Dutch woman, Cromling (presumably a widow of a man well-connected with the Dutch East India Company?).
(Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, p. 157. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 43, 51, pp. 200-201.)
(Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff.)

Sir John Coke, as it happened in April 1625, set out a program for privately financed (£361,200) anti-Spanish piracy in the West Indies. Coke's plan seemed to be a project backed by the Earl of Warwick. Secretary Heath had a similar idea for attacking the West Indies by April 1625. Courteen was probably aware of such stirrings. It was at about this point that Warner "discovered" Barbados. But firstly...
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 257.)

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It is possible that Courteens in the City of London had perhaps been given some expansionist inspiration after 1615-1617, since about 1617, the king allowed "the Cockayne project", promoted by George Cockayne, a plan which was protested in parliament as a pocket-liner. The project collapsed.
(Cokayne's project is noted in an earlier file.)

One source says the crown extracted £20,000 per year for granting a charter for the Merchant Adventurers, but treasurer Cranfield instead accepted a lump sum of £80,000 plus bribes and gifts to courtiers. By 1620, trade was in doldrums and calls for free trade (as from Sir Edwin Sandys) were growing. There were strong attacks on merchant privileges. Parliament in 1621 blasted all merchant companies. The issue, of course, was the promotion of royal monopolies and their restricting affect on traders with less respectable backing; monopoly versus free trade.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 211.)

Early on, the Courteens traded to Portugal; and with Spain in the salt trade. Courteens were creditors of the English king, and they also had many connections with illicit trade of the time.
(Peter (died 1631) the brother of Sir William Courteen Senior is named in Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean, pp. 233-244ff. Peter at Cologne apparently co-managed the European departments of Courteens as Anglo-Dutch merchants.)

Their training was in contemporary commerce, possibly in the cloth trade, in Haarlem. In time, Courteen's body of "adventurers" included influential personalities at the English court. These "influentials" tend never to be named, but it appears that through them, Courteen developed an association with the king.

By 1621, the East India Company was again criticized for exporting bullion. On 3 May, 1621 James I forbade the various company charters from being examined by parliament. A trade crisis peaked in 1622. Parliament did not dent the merchant companies till 1624, especially not the Merchant Adventurers. Some free-trade leaders were Sir Edward Sandys, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Dudley Digges and Sir Robert Phelips (sic), who also opposed the crown on issues of foreign policy and free speech. They entered into alliance with the Duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles (that is, the later Charles II), and they wanted a new (anti) Spanish foreign policy. Buckingham helped turn the tide. The Merchant Adventurers was opened up to new, fee-paying wholesalers. It seems unlikely such men would have ventured an anti-Spanish policy unless such a prejudice had not been heightened by the "Rich faction".

Some Merchant Adventurers of the old school were Sir John Savile, plus Sir Humphrey May, steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, Sir Francis Nethersole, diplomat to Germany, Sir Heneage Finch the recorder of London and a royal appointee, Sir Henry Mildmay the master of the Jewel House. The general hope rose of freeing up the Guinea and Muscovy companies, plus the Eastland Company with its monopoly on importing naval stores. (In time, American traders would become interested in naval stores.)
(Robert G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problems of the Royal Navy, 1652-1862. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1926. Incidentally, the sign used in North American colonies to designate timber set aside for British naval purposes in the eighteenth century was a broad arrow, meaning, naval property. This is the genesis of the "broad arrow" seen on the clothes of convicts around Sydney after 1788.)

There were to consider, the New England Company's newly-granted monopoly of fishing offshore England, and free fishing on the North American coast. The Commons upheld Sir Edwin Sandys, and Sandys' gentry party conducted its bitter fight with some of the City's great merchant leaders in the East India and Virginia companies. Sandys quarrelled with the Virginia trader Sir Thomas Smythe from 1618.

Oddly enough, by 1626, relatively early in colonisation business, George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, in his essay On Plantations vainly emphasised the shame of taking "scum of people" to plantations, which they only spoiled.
(Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 340.)

It was an interesting remark, an objection to what became an English tradition lasting centuries, using colonies as genealogical sumps. Davies records, about 60,000 people left England, one third for New England, and between 1630 and 1643, nearly 200 ships carried 20,000 men women and children at an estimated cost of £200,000 - many emigrants being unwilling to submit to a "hateful government".
(Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47. On the "pouring" of lower-class Englishmen onto Caribbean Islands by the Earl of Carlisle, see A. P. Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, pp. 156-157. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 340. Villiers (1592-1628, assassinated), Lord High Admiral, anti-Spanish, first honorary governor of the Guiana Company, married Katherine Manners, daughter of the sixth earl of Rutland. Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628. London, Longmans, 1981. Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 85. GEC, Peerage, Chichester, p. 194; Denbigh, p. 178; Grandison, p. 76; Ros, p. 111; Buckingham, pp. 392ff. The sixth Earl of Rutland, Admiralty Lord Francis Manners (died 1632) was an investor in the East India Company and also took part in the 1620 Amazon adventure. GEC, Peerage, Rutland, pp. 261ff; Lennox, p. 610; Antrim, p. 175; Suffolk, p. 465.)

Buckingham and Charles wanted to resurrect the careers of the anti-Spanish Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Oxford, lately imprisoned by James.
(Thomas Wriothesley, fourth Earl Southampton (1607-1667) had three wives. He helped promote the Courteen plan to settle Mauritius. GEC, Peerage, Bedford, p. 81; Carbery, p. 8; Chichester, p. 194; Devonshire, p. 344; Digby, p. 354; Gainsborough, p. 599; Somerset, p. 78; Northumberland, p. 739; Molyneux, pp. 44ff; Holderness, p. 536; Southampton, p. 131.)

They welcomed William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele (probably first Viscount Say and Sele), and also the Earl of Warwick.
(William Fiennes (1582-1662) first Viscount Saye and Sele is "semi-forgotten": His own DNB entry. GEC, Peerage, Saye and Sele, pp. 486ff; Wimbledon, p. 743, Hibbert, Cavaliers and Roundheads, pp. 300-310, lists. John Kenyon, The Civil Wars in England. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988., p. 261. Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 36ff, pp. 65ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 261ff. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 12.)

Republican-minded and anti-Spanish, Fiennes was eager for the settlement of Providence Island. He was a Presbyterian enemy of James I and Charles I, and interested in colonisation from about 1629. He led the Oxfordshire resistance to ship money, and once obtained land on the Connecticut River from the second Earl of Warwick; John Winthrop later helped govern that area.)

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Also part of a newly growing network was the great Puritan minister, John Preston, linked to Calvinist ministry, who had tutored the Earl of Warwick's son, and who also had ties to Lord Saye, and the puritan Richard Knightley. Buckingham even managed to recruit the "mighty earl of Pembroke", who had hated Buckingham. A secretary of state and a Buckingham protégé was Sir Edward Conway, who attempted to turn James to an anti-Spanish position and to recover the Palatinate. A joint Anglo-Dutch move against Spain in the Caribbean was also mooted, although it is uncertain if Courteen was part of this. Certainly, the second Earl of Warwick was in an anti-Spanish mood.

Merchants and terra australis incognita:

Attention however now needs to be diverted further to a little known twist in the story of English interest in terra australis incognita, which might have been settled by "the Courteen Association" headed by Sir William Courteen Senior. What is extraordinary is that Courteen (or he and his association) had sufficient capital after they met Thomas Warner, the "discoverer" of Barbados, to sink £10,000 into the island from 1625, and to also manage shipping to the East in a way that remained a thorn in the side of the East India Company - prior to the spectacular Courteen bankruptcy.

Here, Brenner is helpful:
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 176.)

"The program of trade and colonization launched by the new merchants' East Indian interloping association found its origin in Sir William Courteen's interloping and colonial projects of the 1630s, as well as those of Arundel, Rupert and Southampton." They wanted to pursue Courteen's plans for the Far East, and also settle areas off Eastern Africa, or, Madagascar. So, in 1645, they sent Capt. John Smart to Madagascar. Some of these projecters were Maurice Thomson and his relatives, plus some of Courteen Senior's associates. And so an argument presents itself, that English interest shown in terra australis from 1625 was part of a grand commercial vision perceived by Sir William Courteen, or, the inheritors of his visions. These inheritors tended to be East India "interlopers". If memory of this persisted in London's commercial circles, it helps explain why the East India Company of 1786 was so negative to ideas of colonizing eastern Australia!

The English find Barbados:

In contrast with Virginia, Barbados in the West Indies, 166 square miles in size, had a "soft" founding, or origin, partly as it was originally uninhabited. Barbados' settlement is oddly similar to the founding of Britain's convict colony in Australia in 1788, respecting the number of people involved at least. Some 1420-1530 people were initially part of the First Fleet complement to Australia.
(Figures vary. See Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet. Sydney, Library of Australian History, 1989. Furber, Rival, pp. 69ff. A London researcher, Gillian Hughes, has advised me thus: Calendar of State XC9452, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I. 1625-1626, State Paper Dept., PRO, Edited by John Bruce, London, 1858., p. 206.)

Courteens involved a similar number of people in developing Barbados as were sent to New South Wales on the First Fleet.

In London, Courteen, Anglo-Dutch financier, was informed that an English ship had touched at Barbados, which was found to be uninhabited, and so had been claimed in the king's name. It is not yet clear when or why Courteen Senior first began to seem influential in London. Furber provides this... Sir William Courteen Senior was the son of an emigre Protestant clothier, and brother of an even lesser-known Sir Charles Courteen. There were two men named William Courteen, father and son, and it is not impossible that some historians have confused the biography of one with the other. William Senior died in 1636; Sir William Courteen the younger died in 1666.

By the mid-1620s, Courteen had many interests in Amsterdam and "along the wild coast of South America". Between 1610-1620, the Courteens of Middleburg used Trinidad for "illicit trade" in tobacco and were attempting to build a network of trade routes to the interior of South America. In 1619 Courteen Senior was involved in proceedings in the Star Chamber, accused of transporting "secretly seven millions of gold" from England. He was discharged about July 1620 with a fine of 20,000 l. for the "unlawful transporting of coin", with a general pardon of past offences.
(Letter from Gillian Hughes, 27 September, 1993, after she had searched information from 1619 to 1636 for the present writer.)

By 1625, "Sir Wm. freely lends his money for supply of the King's instant occasions, and that without interest of the old debt". Courteen's terra australis aspirations may not have been unrelated to the money Courteen had loaned to Charles I in 1625?. (While Courteen's links, if any, to the Dutch East India Company are never mentioned).

In 1625? We find, Item 33: Petition of Sir Wm. Courteen to the King:

"the lands in the South part of the world called Terra Australis Incognita, are not yet traded to by the King's subjects. The petitioner desires to discover the same and plant colonies therein. He prays therefore for a grant of all such lands with power to discover the same and erect colonies."

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On the same original page as this is also mention of a case of concern over enriching the Kingdom, increasing shipping and employing the idle... (Employing the idle was to be a long-standing English pre-occupation, but it should be noted, "idle" came to mean not slothful, but insubordinate). Courteen had first wanted to settle "Australia", but could not, so he settled Barbados. We also find he invested in the Dutch East India Company, which "finally sent him bankrupt".
(Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff. Furber, Rival, variously.)

We find, Courteen had been intriguing against the English East India Company since the late 1620s. It is generally unheard in Australia that Courteen wanted to settle terra australis incognita. Where this is mentioned, the information is hedged about with various other controversies about the discovery of Australia.
(Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 250 Years before Capt. Cook. Revised. Sydney, Pan, 1977. For a modern view here on the origin of the "Papal Line", Oskar H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake. Vol. 1 of The Pacific Since Magellan. Canberra, Australian National University Press. 1979-1988. [Vol. 2, Monopolists and Freebooters; Vol. 3.)

Various stories are told about Barbados and Warner. In one story, in 1622, Warner became interested in establishing a West Indies colony. He found capital from London merchant, Ralph Merrifield, and became interested in "undercover" West Indian trade. Warner got to St. Kitts by 1624.
(Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, A&C Black, 1933., p. 143 on Warner and Courteen, p. 155.)

Another story has it that Capt. John Powell, sailing for Courteens, chanced on Barbados, uninhabited, and found that the island was rich in dye woods (known as logwood) used in the English textile trades. Powell claimed Barbados for James I and England, and then called at St Christopher (a haven for freebooters) to visit Thomas Warner, who had earlier been involved in Amazon adventures. (Some reports have it that Warner established Barbados from 1625, with little mention of Powell).
(C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies. The West Indies. Vol. Two. Second Edn., Oxford, 1905., as cited in Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 8.)

By 1624, anyway, the founding father of St Kitt's (St Christopher's) became Sir Thomas Warner, a Suffolk Man and a friend of John Winthrop (the founder of Massachusetts).
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 50-51.

One early Courteen arrival on Barbados was Henry Winthrop, a "scapegrace second son" of the founder of Massachusetts John Winthrop, for £100 a year, but Winthrop's father very suspicious of such poor tobaccos coming from Barbados - Winthrop at one point switched loyalty from Courteen to Carlisle and one of 12 magistrates on island, but ended back in England. About 1630, an early arrival on Barbados, trying tobacco planting, was Henry Winthrop, a scapegrace second son of the founder of Massachusetts, John Winthrop. (One of Winthrop's motives for founding Massachusetts was to find better opportunities for his children; Winthrop had links in London with influential people such as some of the family of Emmanuel Downing (the Downings intermarried with the Winthrop family).

1624, circa: About 1624, Joshua Downing was a Commissioner of the Navy. Only a generation or two earlier, the Hawkins/Gonson family, with Hawkins as slavers, had helped managed the navy.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 50-51. On Winthrop connections, see entries in American Dictionary of Biography. An early Leeward sugar planter was Samuel Winthrop of the same New England family, arrived in the Caribee by 1647, aged 20, who settled at Antigua. He was ruined by the French in 1666.)

Warner had tried and failed in Guiana, then tried again at St Kitts, which he occupied in 1624. Warner then returned to England (about a forty-day voyage) to find further merchant backing for a St Kitt's project; he returned to St Kitts by January 1624. When the French arrived there in 1625, Warner was so weak he agreed to share with them (large numbers of Caribbean Indians were massacred one night in their hammocks). All were attacked in 1629 by the Spanish - although some English held on. About then the Courteen Brothers, Sir William and Sir Charles of London and Middleburg were active. By 1624, before they decided on settling Barbados, Courteens had wanted to settle terra australis and promoted this Antipodean idea to James I.
(I am indebted to Edward Linn of Sydney for initial discussions about Courteen.)

Also interested here was Sir James Lancaster.
(On Lancaster: Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, p. 73 on Ralph Fitch and variously; Furber, Rival, p. 39. Lancaster's first voyage was form 1591, before the East India Company was formed.)

However, in another confusing story, the Earl of Carlisle, Lord Proprietor of the English Caribbean, made Warner governor of St Kitts. (There was later an Edward Warner a Lt.-Governor of Nevis.)
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 119. Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 29ff. G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 337. 1631: Massachusetts Bay Colony was administered by Gov. Winthrop and Lt.-Gov. Thomas Dudley. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, p. 13, p. 41.)

Some say that before Warner had returned to St. Christopher by January 1624, having obtained financial support from Ralph Merrifield (who is heard of relatively little). Warner evidently did obtain the ear of the Courteen Brothers. By September 1625, Warner had again returned to England and with Ralph Merrifield obtained from the crown some letters Patent for the colony of St Christopher, and for the colonisation of Nevis, Barbados, and Montserrat. In 1625, Capt John Powell in William and John, with 30 settlers financed by Sir William Courteen, made the first permanent English settlement at Barbados, in which matter, it is said, one of Courteen's patrons was William Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke, (1584-1649/50). Merrifield and Warner meanwhile had gained the patronage of James Hay, first Earl of Carlisle. In what looks like a doublecross, in 1626 Carlisle obtained a grant of rights to the government of the whole of the Caribbean Isles. The Courteens, meantime, had begun cotton and tobacco plantations.

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Courteen Senior will interest the historian of Barbados, of the Caribbean, or of slavery, since he was largely responsible for settling Barbados, the colonisation of which induced England to use, (rather than sell people into, as Hawkins did before 1600), the institution of chattel slavery.
(On the Asiento or, a highly capitalistic European organisation for the regular supply of slaves, circa 1518 with King of Portugal for supply of black slaves, and later developments, see pp. 62ff and pp. 226ff. of Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688, 1933, and p. 197, p. 209. Not till the 1650s did English planters rely on London-based capital, not capital from Middleburg or France.)

Courteen will interest the historian of the English East India Company since he interfered with the Company. And he will also interest the Australian historian, since Courteen Senior (and perhaps also, Sir James Lancaster), once with royal assistance from James I, planned to settle terra australis incognita, in ways which raise the bogey of discussion of the very sovereignty of Australia. Australians usually ignore information about such matters. The background to many scenarios is "Amazonian", as noted earlier.
(Even earlier, there had been a proposal that Francis Drake settle terra australis and be made life governor there. However, one has no clear idea if those listening to the Drake proposal had any later-arising links to anyone associated with Courteen.

Notably, Raleigh had predicted that the area would have a thin population - a view which influenced later Mercantilist views on the region. Raleigh wrote: "for if the title of occupiers be good in land unpeopled, why should it be bad accounted in a country peopled over thinly? Should one family or one thousand hold possession of all the southern undiscovered continent, because they had seated themselves in Nova Guiana, or about the straits of Magellan?"
(From, A Discourse of War in General, Sir Walter Raleigh, Kt, The Works of... Vol. 8. New York, Burt Franklin. Orig. 1829., p. 255.)

In yet another version of stories... Courteen had already gained experience in Caribbean trade, and he formed the syndicate sponsoring the first settlement of Barbados in 1627, sending two shiploads of colonists under the command of John and Henry Powell. The Courteen syndicate invested £10,000 in the venture, hoping for returns comparable to the returns made by the backers of the privateers of the 1590s.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 50.)

Historians have consulted four lists of nearly 2000 people going to Barbados before 1640. The earliest list records 74 settlers with Capt John Powell in the ship Peter in 1627. Another count gives Courteens sending out Powell's brother, Henry, plus 80 colonists, from February 1627. There were no women in that party, and only six of this same party were still on Barbados eleven years later when there were 764 landholders. In contrast to the intentions of the Earl of Carlisle, who invested relatively less on Barbados, Sir William Courteen did not grant his original people any land; he had paid them wages and wanted to take all the results. By 1629, Courteens had up to 1800 people on Barbados.
(Arthur P. Newton, (Ed.), The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, Black, 1933., on Barbados, and Sir William Courteen, pp. 142, 145, 155, 156.)

In the period in question, further conflict had broken out in London as parliament sought to limit the power of the king, James 1. It had become convenient to seek the impeachment of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. James' financial situation had not improved and he remained uneasy; by 1629 the royal debt was over one million pounds. It was about then that James 1 backed a rival to the East India Company, the Courteen Association, which from about 1625 abandoned the idea of colonising terra australis in favour of settling Barbados. Meanwhile, it seems that due to the actions of the Earl of Carlisle, what Courteen finally obtained as return from royalty was a bad title to Barbados.

Cartographic arguments:

It rather seems, what the British government later did for Sydney and New South Wales, Australia, just one firm, Courteens, did for Barbados. What of terra australis incognita in Courteen's day? This remains complicated. A proper view of the series of discoveries of Australia by European navigators entails discussion of the "Papal Line", which by fiat of Catholic or Vatican hegemony once divided the world into two spheres of interest subject to the Spanish and Portuguese; a proposition of course that England never accepted. So it might here be suggested, that an inability to fit the financial biography of Courteen Senior into nationalistic history, during an historical period involved with changes in English views of royal authority, goes hand in hand with an inability to fit Courteen's interest in terra australis into the Anglicized history of the discovery and settlement of Australasia. The people who might most be inclined to agree with this proposition might be cartographers?

An Australian historian, George Collingridge, tried to discuss these cartographic issues after 1859, but his views were chewed up in a separate controversy about Capt. Cook and the creation of maps of New Holland, or, New South Wales.
(Macintyre, Secret Discovery, pp. 3ff, p. 196. In his first volume of a trilogy, The Pacific Since Magellan. (Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1983.), Spate treats the "Spanish Lake" and (p. 56) illustrates the anti-meridian of the Papal line.
(Here, Spate, p. 27 discusses the Treaty of Tordesillas; and, p. 29, the Peak of Darien. On Balboa and "Darien", see Spate, Vol. 1, p. 32-34. In his second volume, Spate treats Dampier, pp. 160ff. In this second volume, Spate treats the Pacific Since Magellan, Monopolists and Freebooters, the Dutch, Priests and Pearlers, the Buccaneers, William Dampier; Anson sailing against Manila, Peru and California.)

(It is no accident that the present north-south eastern border of Western Australia coincides roughly with the "Papal Line", which, today, means these issues have vague connection to questions concerning sovereignty over Australia, and today's (1997) related issues of indigenous land rights).

Macintyre in his Secret Discovery of Australia mentions that Joseph Banks tried in 1811 to refer to this matter as he was writing an introduction to Matthew Flinders' book on his circumnavigation of Australia. Banks alluded to Holland's once-existing (theoretical?) right to colonise Australia, or parts thereof. Probably because of the hegemony then in European affairs exercised by Napoleon, especially over Holland, Robert Peel suppressed Banks' views so effectively, Banks withdrew in disgust and forgot about introducing Flinders' book.

Whatever, a historians' dispute on cartographic matters began in 1859. George Collingridge produced The Discovery of Australia: A Critical, Documentary and Historic Investigation concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia by Europeans before the Arrival of Lt. James Cook in the "Endeavour" in the year 1770. (Sydney, Hayes Bros., 1895. Also by George Collingridge, `The Early Discovery of Australia', Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society of Australasia. Sydney, NSW, 1893.) Here, the preface makes reference to R. H. Major, Early Voyages to Terra Australis. London? 1859.)

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A dissident historian, Major, had noted incorrectly, that Harley, the first Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (this might be Edward Russell, Lord High Admiral, Treasurer of the Navy, (1652-1727) Earl of Orford) when backing Dampier's voyage to Australia, had owned a copy of the Dauphin Map.
(Collingridge, p. 167: Earl Orford: His own DNB entry. GEC, Peerage, Orford, p. 78. Orford married his cousin, a daughter of William Russell, first Duke of Bedford and was second son of his father, and brother of the fifth Earl of Bedford and first Duke of Bedford.
Dampier on Jamaica worked for Helyars of Somerset, who were military compatriots of Modyford on Jamaica, who is mentioned variously in the essay. Collingridge's Discovery informs, (p. 270), in 1621 a treaty between the Dutch and English was signed, including provisions on trade to the Spice Islands. "It prevented war for a time, but did not put an end to the disputes or animosities of the rival English and Dutch Companies, which culminated in the well-known massacre of the English at Amboina (sic) in 1622." In all, Collingridge here seems confused between Earls Orford (Russell, then Walpoles), and Harley the first Earl of Oxford and Mortimer; not an earl of Oxford, as McIntyre states in his book, Secret Discovery. (This is discussed in a later file in more detail.)

However, it might be reasonable all the same to suggest that when Courteen or his men were looking at existing maps, wondering where terra australis incognita might be, they would have been aware of the existence of the Portuguese settlement at Timor (begun from 1514), rather south of the Spice Islands and the Straits of Malacca. Whether or not Dampier knew of a "Dauphin Map" or not, or cartographic arguments, it would be hardly surprising that Timor and nearby areas were on Dampier's itinerary.)

... The English notwithstanding continued to send out ships to [near?] the Australasian regions and in 1624 a petition for the `privilege of erecting colonies' in Terra Australis was presented to King James the First, by Sir William Courteen." (James 1 did not favour colonies or colonisation). But I can find no supportive information that Harley, even though he was a Whig, took any role in promoting Dampier's voyage!
(Collingridge then quoted from E. A. Petherick's publication, The Torch, March 1888, page 89.)

Collingridge, however, wrote further, (p. 270): "In the last year of his [James'] reign however, an eminent London merchant - probably the most enterprising English merchant of his time - Sir William Courteen, desiring to extend his trade to the Terra Australis, petitioned the king for the privilege of erecting colonies therein. Sir William, who was joint owner of more than twenty burden, employing four of five thousand seamen, already carried on an extensive trade on his own account to Portugal, Spain, Guinea, and the West Indies." The following is a copy of his petition now printed [by Collingridge?] for the first time:

'"... extract, (pp. 270-271) ..."that all the lands in ye South parts of ye world called Terra Australis, incognita, extending Eastwards and Westwards from ye Straights of LeMaire together with all ye adjacente Islands [etc] are yet undiscovered... Your petr ... humbly desires yr Maj to bee pleased to grante to him, his heirs and assigns all ye said lands, islands & territories, with power to discover ye same, to erecte Colonies & a plantation there..."

Petherick added the following:
"Having lent large sums of money to the King, Sir William Courteen had some claim upon His Majesty's consideration. But it does not appear that `All ye said lands & territories' were granted to him. He appears to have been satisfied with a bad title to the island of Barbados, where he sent (in 1626) fifty settlers, who built a fort (1627) and remained there till it was taken from them (1628). He then sent eighty men to the island and re-took it in the name of the [fourth] Earl of Pembroke. However, whichever story is attended to, it is still not clear, what interest the fourth Earl of Pembroke had in the Caribbean, except that Pembroke's interests were eclipsed by royalty's favouring of the courtier, the Earl of Carlisle. Sir William Courteen Junior died in 1666, having earlier inherited claim to his father's title to a Caribbean proprietorship. That proprietorship, as hinted at above, was not deemed a good one, and was apparently disallowed in 1660.
(The following may be relevant. There is also a Hakluyt Society publication, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography. And a publication of 1644, being "The Association" [Courteen's?] The East India Trade Stated, Anon, 1644, embodying some notes by a Capt. of John Weddell's fleet and noting events about 1637. Courteen (Jnr.?) also developed a case for trading to China, Canton.)

The entire matter has never been researched fully, but the implications of English dispute about the proprietorship of the Caribbean preoccupied matters from about 1630 to 1700, most of the century.

Discovering specific problems with the first Courteen title to Barbados is not easy. Some of the matters about which ignorance have reigned here may be due to any of the following:
(a) Some possible suppression in England of information on the struggle between Courteen versus the Earl of Carlisle for control of Barbados, with a little-known role for the Earl of Pembroke;
(b) An inability by scholars to accurately trace which explorers used or updated various maps, over various centuries, as Australia was "discovered";
(c) Secrecy of a national security nature which was endemic to all European nations with commercial fleets and an interest in improving navigation; (d) Distractions provided by the histories of pirates, the juvenile delinquents of maritime history;
(e) Losses of information by shipwreck;
(f) Perhaps, some suppression also of the history of the way England began using slavery in the Caribbean?
These are all linked questions.

Both Carlisle and Courteen had royal patents for Barbados and both sent out governors, settlers, supplies; both found their agents were banished or seized. One governor was executed. But when the Earl of Carlisle became "Lord Proprietor" of the Caribbean, he made Warner governor of St Kitts.
(Later, Charles I authorized a courtier, Endymion Porter, to fit out privateers for the Red Sea. There would be formed the Courteen Association, led by "a leading capitalist", Sir William Courteen Jnr., to trade in India where the East India Company had not gone. But this new company sent debased money to India and the East India Company suffered further loss of reputation. The king, in return for withdrawing the annoying patent, managed to extract a "loan" of £20,000 from the East India Company. Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1976., p. 39.)
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 119. In about 1641 the profligate Hay, Earl of Carlisle, eloped with Lady Lucy Percy ("A Venus rising from a sea of jet"); Lady Percy was acting at the instigation of the infamous Countess of Somerset: Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, Vol. 5, p. 284.)

But as Dunn writes, unhappily for Courteen, the Earl of Carlisle challenged Courteen's control of the island (although Dunn does not say what the grounds for the challenge were).
(A. P. Newton, European Nations, p. 156, writes of the "tortuous court intrigues" by which Warner's patron, James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, by 1629 had established his claims to a royal patent on Caribbean Islands, with the claims of Courteen and also the Earl of Pembroke entirely set aside. Carlisle's only interest was the easy profit of the absentee landlord, and otherwise he kept matters in the hands of his merchant associate, Marmaduke Roydon, of whom little is known.)

Carlisle did little to advertise the island, and expected merely to distribute land to settlers who paid to set themselves up. Up to nearly 40,000 acres went to 250 colonists from 1628 to 1630.

The granting of "the West Indies" to the Earl of Carlisle came under the terms of a proprietary patent of 1627. One link with Carlisle was Thomas Littleton, who in turn linked with Edward Thomas via Anthony Hilton's syndicate for the Leeward Islands. Hilton had obtained a licence from Carlisle, and began on Nevis in 1628, there linked with Edward Thomson, who was possibly a relative of Maurice Thomson (of the Rich faction in London - one Edward Thomson, ex-St. Kitts, was often a partner with Maurice). In 1627, having established his proprietorship, of all Caribbean Isles, Carlisle compelled partners to re-purchase from him and to pay for the right to export tobacco customs-free for ten years. In 1628 Carlisle obtained a redrawn grant.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 128.)

The elite merchants and the puritan colonising nobles were two groups both damaged when Charles in 1627 granted the West Indies proprietary colony to Buckingham's follower, the Earl of Carlisle.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 265-270.)

On 17 April, 1627, Charles I meanwhile authorized the Earl of Warwick with a commission to plunder or colonize the king of Spain's possessions in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Buckingham via his spy Sir James Bagg tried to have Warwick's ship, intended to take the treasure fleet off Brazil, prevented from leaving Plymouth. The ship sailed, but Warwick was attacked by a superior Spanish force and barely escaped; this particular expedition was a complete failure. When, due to Carlisle's interventions, the proprietorship of Barbados came into dispute, the slowness of Courteen's supply lines threatened famine.
(In 1637, Peter and John Hay sailed to the Caribbean to help enforce the rights of the creditors of the Earl of Carlisle. But we are not told if any such creditors had any prior links with Courteen or Courteen associates; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 33. Peter Hay had kinsmen Sir James Hay and Sir Archibald Hay who helped shore up the influence of the earl of Carlisle island as rents were collected. The new governor, Henry Huncks, once threatened Peter Hay with physical violence. Interestingly, the Hays however did understand colonial reluctance to bear with trade regulation if there was no share in colonial government - of course, such issues flared dramatically with the later outbreak of the American Revolution. In 1636, a servant ship with Thomas Anthony as supercargo carried 56 Irishmen and women from Kinsale to Barbados. The ship was originally bound for Virginia, but the servants had heard wages were more liberal on Caribbean islands. There were two other ships that year from Kinsale. Servants fetched 500 pounds weight of tobacco each. Their employers were?

By 1636, Carlisle's men included Peter Hay and James Holdip, while the merchant syndicate backing Carlisle included Marmaduke Roydon, William Perkins and Alexander Bannister. One aspect of Carlisle's proprietorship (he died 1636) was that he leased 10,000 acres of perhaps the best land in Barbados in St. George's Valley to his London syndicate - Roydon, Perkins, Bannister.
(See Ligon's map of Barbados. Notes, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 49, Note 10, p. 50, pp. 55-57.)

Barbados' people however survived, and by 1640, after changing from diversified agriculture to using more rationalized, larger holdings, plantation-style, Barbados was profitably exporting tobacco, cotton and indigo. By 1645, the Barbados settlers would buy 1000 slaves in a year.
(Mintz, Sweetness, p. 53.)

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Here, certain the complexities of the day have to be invoked. An Indian historian, Mukherjee, records Charles I as being in constant need of money, apparently the reason Charles backed the formation of Carlisle's association as a rival to Sir William Courteen. Mukherjee also suggests that a group led by William Courteen Junior also remained an irritant of the East India Company, if not a rival to it, with a result that the East India Company "fell into a state of disorganisation, from which it did not recover till 1657". Mukherjee strangely does not elaborate on this "disorganisation".
(Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 79. More specifically (see John Bruce, Annals of the Honourable East India Company. London, Court of Directors of the East India Company, 1810. Vol. 1), p. 346, the Courteen Association wished to exploit a convention between Goa and Surat with a view to using Portuguese ports, an option not open to the English East India Company; pp. 337-362 on a royal licence for the Courteen Association, between 1636-1637 and later, as Courteen Senior died and his son inherited his projects. On the revocation for permissions given to the Courteen Association. (Bruce, Annals, Vol. 1, p. 362.)

But in 1627, when the English arrived on Barbados with ten Negroes and 32 Indians, chattel slavery was still a strange idea to "the narrowly ethnocentric English". These English gathered various tropical plants and seeds, including sugar-cane, from a Dutch outpost at Surinam, and 32 Indians helped them plant and cultivate. Dating the arrival of sugar on Barbados remains difficult, but it was found over time that the Negro was a more tractable worker than the Indian.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 61-71.)

Control over Barbados and Providence Island:

Due to its location, control over Barbados was crucial in the strategic matter of exerting naval and commercial power in the Caribbean.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 156.)

The Providence Island Company was founded in late 1629 as an offshoot of the Bermuda Company, with Capt Philip Bell under the patronage of the second Earl of Warwick; and it was the only major company chartered in or for the Americas after 1625. (Providence Island was off the Nicaraguan Coast.) In 1641, one Owen Rowe, a London silk merchant, became deputy-governor of the Bermuda Company; he was a relative of Susanna Rowe, the second wife of Earl of Warwick.
(Susanna Rowe was daughter of London Lord Mayor Henry Rowe who was active by 1607. GEC, Peerage, Warwick, p. 411. There may have been a link to Lord Mayor in 1568, Sir Thomas Rowe. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 155. Merchant Owen Rowe was involved in Virginia trade and the Massachusetts Bay Company. In 1641 he became deputy-governor of the Bermuda Company. He was of the radical parish of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 281, pp. 527-530.)

Once told of the discovery of Providence Island, Warwick had formed a joint-stock company to exploit it, members being non-merchant nobles and godly gentry... Such as William Fiennes, "Lord Saye and Sele), Lord Brook (either Fulke Greville or Robert Greville, Fulke the first Baron Brooke, Robert his cousin, second Baron Brooke), and the radical John Pym.
(In 1636 the Company made "a private war" on Spain and wanted to move from Providence Island to form a new settlement on a Central American mainland. Later, Maurice Thomson dealt with the Providence Island Company.)

Further anti-Spanish activity:

By an enlarged commission of April 1627 the second Earl Warwick was authorized to invade or possess any of the dominions of the king of Spain or the archdukes of Europe, Africa or America. The court party disapproved, and adventures were mostly allowed due to the preparation for the Rochell expedition. Warwick with help from some London merchants fitted a fleet of eight ships and tried to capture the Brazil fleet. This failed; the ships barely escaped capture and ended losing money. In 1628 and 1629 Warwick sent out more ships which did take prizes from Spaniards and Genoese, but legal disputes arose. Other ships Warwick despatched were Earl of Warwick and Somers Island.
(Cited in this context is a letter from Capt. Bell. Rich led his own clan plus a group of powerful London merchants (whom Newton does not name), with Brooke and Lord Say and Sele aiding unions forming between Puritan Lords and commercial men.)

On 28 April, 1629, Sir Nathaniel Rich, an active member of the Somers Isle Company got from Captain Bell a letter, describing difficulties and faction fights. Bell was being blamed and could not defend himself, but Bell mentioned two ships, Earl of Warwick Capt. Daniel Elfrith and Somers Islands, now returning home. Elfrith had not taken his own ship as he had no crew. Capt Cammock had been left with 30 men on an island, St Andreas; there was mention of an island Catalina and (a mythical island), Fonceta (sic), of which Elfrith knew, or, Bell had sent Elfrith to discover it. (Bell it seems was marrying Elfrith's daughter). Bell wanted the Earl of Warwick to get a patent for Fonceta.

Carlisle by 1629 meantime had the upper hand over Barbados and became recognized as lord proprietor of all the English Caribees, the Leewards Islands as well as Barbados. In 1629, in a dramatic anti-Spanish move that might have been reported more forcefully in history, given its linkages between expansionism, trade and concerted aggression, a company of high-level English puritans including the Earl of Warwick, John Pym, first Lord Brooke, Fulke Greville and William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele sent colonists to occupy Providence Island, off the Nicaraguan Coast.
(Fulke Greville (1554-1628), first Baron Brooke, naval treasurer, Chancellor of the Exchequer, published Sydney's radical book, Arcadia. He was murdered by a servant. GEC, Peerage, Brooke, pp. 331ff; Willoughby, p. 690. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 98. There was also a Sir Fulke Greville (1575-1632) of Newton, of Thorpe Latimer who married Margaret or Mary Copley. He was a friend of Raleigh. Newton, Colonising Puritans; GEC, Peerage, Brooke, p. 333.)

Providence was to be a staging ground for raids against the Isthmus of Panama (the area of the Peak of Darien). In 1631 this same company sponsored another privateering base at Tortuga, off the coast of Hispaniola. All this would have continued the earlier Elizabethan "war" with Spain with typical English puritan vehemence.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 12. That vehemence should not be underestimated. The "Five Knights case" prior to the Civil War involved Warwick, Saye, Rich, Pym, Rudyerd and Digges. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 265.)

As Lord of the English Caribbean, Carlisle was "an indolent absentee proprietor", interested only in collecting quit rents. He died in 1636 with a debt-entangled estate and his proprietary rights over Barbados came into dispute. In the 1630s, all effective government of Barbados went to Carlisle's governor, Henry Hawley, who levied poll taxes on the inhabitants. Hawley called a Barbados Assembly meeting in 1639, but remained largely a petty despot.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 49ff.)

The murmurs of discontent expressed, and some of the issues raised, were of the kind which much later would fuel the American Revolution. For England, Barbados became an early-warning situation about many trends that were to be influential. (And in 1629, as Charles I made peace with France, England abandoned her efforts with Nova Scotia, where Scots enterprise had faltered).
(Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 326. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 252.)

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It is from this point, however, that detail in history books fades, and confusions set in. Broadly, it does appear that Charles I profited from Carlisle's interest, while Charles also owed money to Courteen.

Enter Willoughby of Parham:

In Penson's confused book on Caribbean developments, (for 17 February, 1646-1647) it is recorded mysteriously that "the authority of the proprietor of the Caribbean Islands was represented by the earl of Carlisle's lessee", Francis, fifth Baron Willoughby of Parham.
(Lillian M. Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies: A Study in Colonial Administration mainly in the Eighteenth Century. Orig. 1924. London, Frank Cass and Co., reprint 1971., pp. 21-22.

A pioneer of colonialism, fifth Baron Willoughby of Parham (1613/1614-1666), remarks Harlow, had an easily-provoked temper. He helped develop Carolina, the settlement of Surinam in 1651-1663 and first promoted planters being sent to Santa Lucia. "Lord Willoughby did more to extend the British Empire in West Indian regions that any other man of his time.", which cost him more than £50,000. He left colonial property to his daughters Frances, Lady Brereton, and Elizabeth, a later Countess of Ranelagh. Willoughby sided with Parliament in the Civil War, then the Royalists.
(Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. GEC, Peerage, Ranelagh, p. 733; Wimbledon, p. 743, Note b; Winchilsea, p. 778; Willoughby, pp. 703ff; Coningsby p. 396; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 50. See also various listings for Finch in DNB. Interesting genealogy on the Willoughby line concerning the Muscovy Company is available in Josef Hamel, England and Russia; comprising The Voyages of John Tradescant The Elder, Sir Hugh Willoughby, Richard Chancellor, Nelson and others, to the White Sea. London, Richard Bentley, 1854. (Translated by John Studdy Leigh))

Willoughby gained his authority from Charles, Prince of Wales in 1647. (The Earl of Marlborough may also have had a role here, but if so, this also has not been well explained). Willoughby got from the Earl of Carlisle a 21-year lease of the Caribee Islands, with a post of Lt-General. He was also appointed by Charles II as governor of Barbados.
(With the Restoration of 1660, Willoughby was again confirmed in his "possession" of the Caribees. He had a plantation named Parham at Surinam, which he had colonized in 1651, and later with Lawrence Hyde he was granted a patent over Surinam of 2 June, 1663.)

At some point, Carlisle and associated merchants despatched to St Kitts some emigrants, stores and ordnance (said to be from Scotland), and the first English colony in the Caribbean was launched. Courteen, not to be outdone, obtained the patronage of Lord Treasurer, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough, for the colony at Barbados, apparently unsuccessfully. But in 1627, a wholesale grant covering many islands had been bestowed on the lord chamberlain, Philip, Earl of Montgomery (the fourth Earl of Pembroke) and confusion resulted.
(This was James Ley, brother of John the Amazon explorer. The third Earl Marlborough continued the family's preoccupations with Caribbean adventures.)

To make matters worse, reports on Barbados' history have not been associated with reports on the Courteen bankruptcy, which was due to investment or involvements in the Dutch East India Company. Pembroke's grant of Barbados was revoked in 1629.

Little information exists on the Earl of Pembroke's role, but it is said that in 1627, Pembroke had failed to enforce his own claims in the Caribee against the claims of the Earl of Carlisle, and about 1643, Pembroke failed in a bid to colonise Tobago, Trinidad and Margarita, so Pembroke then gave all his rights (not including those over Barbados, which stayed with the Earl of Carlisle) to the second Earl of Warwick - which resulted in an intensification of rivalry between Warwick and the heirs of Carlisle. Warwick tried to settle plantations on Tobago and Trinidad at his own expense, but was unsuccessful, largely due to manpower problems resulting from the civil war. (During the civil war, Pembroke, as with Warwick, took the parliamentary side). At some point, the Courteen Brothers bankrupted, (that is, Sir William Courteen Senior) with their debts apparently linked to Dutch East India Company men. Remarkably, their debts were bought by the Earls of Bridgwater, the Egertons, seemingly for "family reasons". As a purchase of debts, this transaction seems unique in English seventeenth century history. John Egerton the first Earl Bridgwater had married Margaret the sister of Sir William Courteen Senior; and William Courteen Junior married Catherine Egerton, daughter of John Egerton, third Earl Bridgwater.
(GEC, Peerage, Bridgwater, pp. 311ff; Brackley, p. 272; Derby, p. 212; Exeter, p. 219; Bolingbroke, p. 204. DNB for Courteen Senior.

The third Earl of Bridgwater had taken up Courteen Senior's debts by about 1640. John Egerton (1579-1649), first Earl Bridgwater and second Viscount Brackley was the son of Thomas Egerton (1540-1617) Lord Chancellor and the first Viscount Brackley and Elizabeth Ravenscroft, and had married Frances Stanley (1583-1635) (daughter of the fifth Earl Derby Ferdinando Stanley and Alice Spencer of the Spencers of Althorp) and Margaret Courteen (sister of Sir William Courteen Snr). The first wife of John Egerton (1623-1686) second Earl Bridgwater was Elizabeth Cavendish. John, third Earl Bridgwater married as first wife, Elizabeth Cranfield (1647-169), a descendant of Lionel; Cranfield, ex-merchant and first Earl Middlesex, the Treasurer for Charles I (Rabb, Enterprise, p. 219). Part of the later extended family was Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-1683), first Earl Shaftesbury, often mistakenly regarded as the founder of the Whig Party. By the 1640s, Anthony Ashley Cooper [some claim he invented the Whig party] was an investor on Barbados, but one biographer claims Cooper's role as a commercial promoter or entrepreneur has been overstated.

In May 1646 some Courteen factors at the Madagascar colony planted in 1645 had coated a batch of brass pagodas in gold, to the later "infinite embarrassment" of the East India Company in India. Specimens were sent home to embarrass the Courteens and their dishonesty. It is said, William Courteen Junior after his Weddell disasters had recouped money by marrying Catherine, the daughter of Earl Bridgwater, and he fled "penniless" to the continent in 1646.
(Meanwhile, many merchant names mentioned here, some found in Brenner's Merchants and Revolution, can be cross-checked with names listed variously in Rabb's book, Enterprise and Empire. Maurice Thomson here becomes a partner with William Courteen Jnr.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 110, p. 173.)

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Maurice Thomson had already got into the business, and built a virtual empire in two decades.
(James Williamson, The Caribee Islands Under The Proprietary Patents. Oxford, 1926., cited in Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 13.)

With the English settlement of the West Indies dominated by the earls of Carlisle, proprietors failed to invest and simply milked by way of taxes and impositions. Only the Bermuda Company and the Providence Island Company could function effectively with gentry control and finance, but they also became outposts in the 1630s of Puritanism, and had been backed by the colonising faction of the second earl of Warwick.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously.)

Presumably, the Earl of Egerton had saved his son-in-law, William Courteen Junior, by buying the Courteen debts. Inevitably, purchasing such debts involved Egerton/Bridgwater in fracas with the Carlisle interest over the Caribbean. It is from here one that might begin to discern more clearly the linkages which developed, between slaving interests and East India Company interests, which have gone too unremarked.
(Furber, Rival, p. 39. K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. Penson, Colonial Agents, pp. 26-27.) On the manipulators of Caribbean politics, Povey and Modyford, see Bliss, Revolution and Empire, [on Cordell, p. 48] p. 39, pp. 66-67, pp. 76ff, pp. 98ff, p. 143.)

Courteen Junior's backers included John Dike, Thomas Ferrars, Humphrey Onby, and Thomas Briggs, and perhaps Peter Courteen at Cologne. In Andrews' book, Ships, Money and Politics, is a list of men in the Barbary trade overthrown by Courteen the Younger, who were associates of Maurice Thomson.
(Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 183, Note 69. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution.)

They were William Cloberry Senior and Junior, Oliver Cloberry Junior, George Fletcher, Humphrey Slaney Snr. And Jnr., John Fletcher, Thomas Fletcher, William Geere, Henry Janson, Samuel Crispe, Ellis Crispe, John Wood, Edward Russell, Robert Blake Junior. Several of these traded to North America.

The story of the Courteen/Bridgwater debts has remained unresearched, but these debts seem significant in the history of slavery, in terms of the role of slavery in the development of capitalism (English capitalism, at least). What is not clear is whether the arrangement kept Bridgwater in touch, financially or otherwise, with the Dutch East India Company in a way still unknown to nationalistic history? After the Egerton-Bridgwater interventions in the Courteen disasters, some questions appearing become involved with some history of English infighting in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. And those questions become involved with many family outcomes of English civil war - and some of those family outcomes became involved with the institution of slavery.

In 1631, a new joint-stock East India Company had been formed. In December 1635, Charles I had granted a charter to Courteen Senior and his associates, a licence to trade from the coast of Africa to the Far East, on the grounds that the East India Company had "neglected the interests of England" and broken some conditions of its privileges. Sir William Courteen Junior was fated to continue his father's projects. Sometime in 1635, Sir John Penington wrote to the Council that,
"There is a great rumour there that Sir William Courteen is setting out ships for the South Seas, and that Capt Weddall goes chief commander of them: others say that he is stayed by a letter from the King to go along with our Custos Maris". Courteen appears to have been the treasurer for these "fishing adventurers".

But in August 1635 Capt John Weddell and Nathaniel Mountney, a former member of the East India Company's council at Surat, arrived home bringing news of a "truce". Both had grievances and turned to Sir William Courteen Senior as a way of furthering their own eastern ambitions.
(K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. Furber, Rival, p. 39, pp. 69ff. On Weddell here, see also, Austin Coates, Macao and the British, 1637-1842: Prelude to Hong Kong. Oxford University Press, 1988. Coates however makes no mention of Courteen.)

Sir William Courteen and another influential courtier plus another merchant who sometimes lent money to the king had put up a scheme to trade with Portuguese settlements in India, justifying the plan by alleging that the East India Company had neglected to establish fortified factories or seats of trade, to which the King's subjects could resort with safety. By 12 December 1635 this syndicate obtained a license to trade to all areas in the east not exploited by East India Company, and it also hoped to find a north-west passage. The syndicate claimed that the East India Company had failed to fortify, and so had forfeited strategic positions.

So, in 1635 Charles issued letters of patent to the Courteen association for a voyage to the east, assuring the East India Company that the association would not engage in trade in the Company's jurisdiction. Courteen's Association got up four vessels, poached East India Company's naval and mercantile servants as officers and supercargoes, and sent them east under Capt. Wendell (Weddell), says Griffiths.
(Sir Percival Griffiths, A Licence To Trade: The History of the English Chartered Companies. London, Ernest Benn, 1974.)

Two Courteen Association vessels plundered a dhow in the Red Sea and since the Moguls did not distinguish between rival Englishers, the President and Council at Surat were imprisoned. There was a fine of Rs 1,70,000, and English were obliged to take an oath not to further molest Moghul shipping.

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By September 1635 the East India Company directors had stopped a payment on a man named Clement, suspicious of his private trade. At this time, Clement was also privateering with Maurice Thomson in the West Indies. Also involved meanwhile with Courteen was John Fowke, a little known Levant merchant, a man who squabbled with the East India Company for thirty years. Fowke was a partner with William Cloberry, yet another associate of Maurice Thomson. Cloberry was also a promoter of the Kent Island project. This network of merchants evidently fitted out their ship Dragon for Courteen's use in the East as part of an interloping fleet of 1635-1636.

Also in 1635, one of the most powerful of Charles I's courtiers, Endymion Porter (1587-1649), attempted to follow suit (in the East), with London men including Thomas Kynnaston the cashier to the government financier, Sir Abraham Dawes
(Dawes was treasurer of the Earl of Arundel's Madagascar scheme of 1639. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 170, p. 299.)

Two ex-employees of the East India Company were John Weddell and Nathaniel Mountney, who offered to trade to Goa, Malabar, China and Japan, contacting Endymion Porter via Sir William Monson and secretary Francis Windebank.
(An admiral, Sir William Monson, is noted in GEC, Peerage, Monson of Bellinguard, p. 67.)

The final partnership apparently involved Bonnell, Kynnaston, Porter, but was backed by Courteen, as well as by Paul Pindar (so also, it appears, by Sir Peter Pindar). Paul Pindar put in up to £36,000, and John Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury (probably the 8th Earl?) put in about £2500.
(W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-stock Companies to 1720. Three Vols., Cambridge, 1910-1912, Vol., 2. Pindar is noted in the DNB entry for Sir William Courteen Senior. On Bonnell: Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 170.)

Samuel Bonnell had been an agent for Courteen Senior, who now conceived ambitions to exploit the Convention of Goa, which had opened up the Indo-Portuguese markets to the English. Porter sent two ships, the Samaritan and the Roebuck, under William Cobb, licenced to pirate on anyone not in amity with England. Roebuck plundered two Red Sea ships, so East India Company men who had noting to do with these insults were imprisoned, and/or forced to make reparation. It is probable that Courteen was linked to Cobb's endeavour. It is said, that with the truce with the Portuguese, some Englishmen wanted to break with the East India Company monopoly and become interlopers; "chief of them was Sir William Courteen", who troubled the Company's Surat factors.
(Furber, Rival, p. 69.)

After Sir William Senior's death in 1636, his son William and associates received a new charter of June 1637.
(K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. Furber, Rival.)

A first Courteen Junior expedition was sent in spring 1636, equipped at a cost of £120,000 and sent out under Captain Weddell with Mountney as supercargo. The voyage was a success, but they had also did the East India Company's reputation harm. Basically, it seems Courteen and his associates were generally interested in acquiring areas not yet touched by the East India Company. Here with English colonialism is noted the continual tussle between the old versus the new, with the new constantly reworking the fringes of older-exploited areas, till finally, English colonialism moved east, to China and Australia, beyond to Fiji. Piracy also acted (or was used?) as a spearhead at times. And so, the Courteen and other private traders assailing the East India Company were, so to speak, expanding the areas first explored by Ralph Fitch and his companions in the 1580s. It was this expansiveness of English traders, expressed as old versus new, which was finally to dominate not so much actual English interest in Australasia, as certain oddities in the writing of the history of English interest in Australasia - and the Pacific - as we will find with the work of William Dampier in due course.

As we found earlier, Courteen had secured "privileges" regarding Terra Australis Incognita (although Collingridge differs here). The Courteen Association's plans cited latitudes and longitudes. The Courteen plan was to sail basically north of New Guinea, east, to examine "Magellan's islands" and the Straits of Lemair. Courteen's men evidently suspected that an interesting area of land existed south of New Guinea, or south of known areas of the Indonesian archipelago. (A region known to some as Java Le-Grande.
(McIntyre, Secret Discovery of Australia, p. 50 and elsewhere.)

Even by 1650, the East India Company was accused of not being far-seeing enough regarding land possibly lying south of New Guinea.) By about 1637, Courteens also developed a case for trading to China and/or Japan.
(By 1637, Peter Hay was trying to collect proprietary rents for Carlisle. There would be a depression in England 1640-1650, a stimulus to exploitation in colonies as power struggles both in London and on island-colonies, not to speak of conflict with the French, Dutch and Spanish, and chattel slavery, which all led to conflict and turbulence in the Caribbean, making it a place of uncertainty and suffering amid natural beauty.)

(Meanwhile, from the early 1630s, some noted London pepper dealers became Daniel Harvey (of a Levant Company background) and a deputy-governor of the East India Company, Alderman Clitherow, Sir James Cambell (sic) and other Eastland merchants, plus John Langham.
(The Cambell family (who were not Scots Campbells Argyll or Breadalbane) are mysterious in that they rose from nowhere and died away after several generations. They became closely connected with the commercial name Abdy via a marriage of Abigail Cambell to London alderman Sir Anthony Abdy .
(Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, Abdy, p. 1; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 98ff).

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Family members included: London merchant and Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Cambell (1535-1613) married to Alice Bugle; his son Sir Robert Cambell London alderman; and Sir Robert's son, alderman and Levant Company merchant Robert; one of the Abdys also married Mary Corsellis. A Cambell daughter also married London Lord Mayor Christopher Clitherow. One Miss Corsellis also married Sir (Bart) Thomas Cambell of Clay Hall (died 1665).)

In 1639-1640 the East India Company sent pepper to the Levant, then to Venice and Leghorn, selling the balance of stock to the King, who sold it at a loss, as [but the connection is unstated]; the King was then helping to back the Courteen Association... Here, information tends to read as though the English king had exercised some long-standing but little-commented royal semi-monopoly on the English pepper market).

What it means is hard to say, unless the information below is helpful.

In 1640 a fourth East India Company joint-stock was made; the third joint-stock had foundered in the troubles with the Civil War. Charles issued a more comprehensive patent to Courteen's son, and promised to revoke the licence if the East India Company could raise new and substantial stock, but the Company could not raise such stock. Charles I in 1640 bilked the East India Company of an advance of its pepper stock, valued at £63,000. Charles never repaid this money.
(Ian B. Watson, Foundation, pp. 35-36.)

After Courteen Senior died, his son William took on East India ventures hoping to receive half-profits; Endymion Porter got one quarter, and Kynnaston, Captain John Weddell (finally drowned at sea) and Nathaniel Mountney got the balance. Charles I had been secretly bribed with £10,000, and he granted the full royal patent in June 1637 to Courteen Junior and his associates - the Courteen Association. The group seems to have had no official title however, and it turned out a miserable failure. About this time, also, another interloping voyage set off for Madagascar, which the East India Company had used for years as a stopover.

Matters on the West African coast need attention. A name of interest is Sir William St John.
(Sir Percival Griffiths, A Licence To Trade, pp. 62ff.)

In 1618, this man and thirty others were incorporated as "a Company of Adventurers of London trading into the ports of Africa". Known as the Guinea Company, they could not raise fresh capital, so they granted licences to private traders, who can be referred to as interlopers. One prominent interloper here was Sir Nicholas Crispe, who is said to have built the first permanent English settlement at Kormantin. In 1631, Crispe and his partners were issued with a patent giving them a monopoly for 31 years of trade on the entire west coast of Africa, and prohibiting all others importing Africa goods into England. In 1649 a formal protest was lodged against this company with the Council of State. A need for forts was seen, (infrastructure cost), and a monopoly was renewed till 1651, though limited to about Sierra Leone and Kormantin. Thus, the patentees survived the Puritans. But finances worsened, so in 1657 they sold Kormantin to the East India Company, which was glad of the calling point.
(On Kormantin: Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, variously. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 163ff, p. 174. K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, p. 9.)

Crispe had been active in the Africa trade from 1625. On 22 November, 1632, Charles 1 gave Crispe and five others an exclusive right to trade to the Guinea coast, for 31 years patent. Crispe got redwood from Guinea and had a sole importation right. The wealth Crisp got from slaving and other business in 1640 enabled him to contract for two large customs farms, "the great and the petty farm", and on that security he and his backers gave the king use of £253,000. Crispe was knighted on 1 January, 1639-1640. Remaining a loyalist during the civil war, Crispe in that time had fifteen ships at sea. He had a house in Bread Street, many puritan relatives; he again farmed the customs. He advanced £1500 for the re-conquest of Ireland, and welcomed the return of Charles II. In May 1661 his son obtained post of collector of customs for the port of London. He was notable in developing brick-making. His great-grandson Sir Charles Crisp died in 1740.

Between 1655 and 1665 one Thomas Crispe was in dispute with Denmark over land near Cape Coast Castle. In 1662 the Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa had one determination - to oust the Dutch in the slave trade.
(Clark, Later Stuarts, pp. 63, p. 332.)

They were the third English-Africa Company, and took over a former English East India Company base, Cape Coast Castle, a few miles east of a Dutch station, Elmina, on the Gold Coast. One of Crispe's backers was that powerful and also under-rated commercial name of the seventeenth century - Maurice Thomson. Crispe's depositions stated that in 1649 he was the chief factor on the Gold Coast for Rowland Wilson, Maurice Thomson, John Wood and Thomas Walter, whom he called The Guinea Company (of London).

The original site of Cape Coast Castle, said Crispe, had been given to English, then taken by the Swedes. It was re-taken by the English in Crispe's time on the coast.
(K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, pp. 40-41, 215, 282.)

That is, Thomas Crispe claimed he'd established what became the prime English slaving depot. He once deposed that he had bought the site of Cape Coast Castle for goods worth £64 (in the small coastal kingdom of Fetu). That is, he claimed he'd bought freehold. (James Island had been occupied since 1651 by the Courlanders. or, men in service of Duke of Courland. Later it passed into English hands).
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 119.)

Meanwhile, the English East India Company had not fully colonised Madagascar, disliking the expense, in contrast to the Dutch taste for creating fortifications.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 170-172. Porter, a groom of the royal bedchamber, entered the service of Buckingham and married Olivia Boteler, a niece of Buckingham. Porter's descendancy includes tenth Baron Teynham; GEC, Peerage, Teynham, pp. 684-687; Strangford, p. 359. Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628. London, Longman, 1981., p. 74.)

(In 1637, Prince Rupert had wanted part of Madagascar, but he went instead to fight in Europe.) In May 1638 the government gave a trade monopoly to Morocco to a group led by Sir Nicholas Crispe, who already had the Guinea patent. Hostility erupted, and a leading opponent of the Morocco patent was William Courteen with Samuel Bonnell, plus Nathaniel Andrews; and Thomas and Nathaniel would link with more interloping against the East India Company. Oliver Cloberry was also against the Crispe-Morocco deal, and Cloberry was trying with Maurice Thomson to horn in on Guinea trade. Courteen for his part wanted Morocco and Guinea products for trade in the east.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 174.)

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By June 1638 the English Crown is going to war with Scotland, trying to mend its fences with the City, renewing its charter, which cost the City its Irish lands, plus £12,000. The crown also aided the Merchant Adventurers, but in 1639 the Courteen project was halted. Courteen was ordered to send only ships to bring back what he had sent out. The City was reluctant to help with war with Scotland.
(Meanwhile, on Barbados by 1638 was Thomas Verney, son of Sir Edmund Verney (Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 12). On St. Kitts in 1639 arrived penniless one Phance Beecher, a kinsman of the clerk of the Privy Council, regarded as a trashy, saucy upstart, who later led "a rebellion" against Governor Warner. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 120.)

By 1639, of course, a chief of the interlopers working against the East India Company is Sir William Courteen, who "troubled the Surat factors" working for the East India Company. Courteen's men at Surat had found themselves "hampered" by being held responsible for some misdeeds committed by "other English", but the East India Company had the same view of the misdeeds committed by men of the Courteen association. Earlier, Methwold of the Company presidency at Surat had been imprisoned for two months respecting piracy by two English ships in the Arabian Sea - one of those ships had audaciously been flying the colours of England's royal navy. One employer of one such ship was certainly in Courteen's employ (it is thought).
(William Methwold (1633-1638), was bred in Norfolk and come to Bantam by 1616 and been apprenticed to a London merchant nine years, and spent five years in Middleburg. He became fluent in French and Dutch. From 1633 he was the East India Company president at Surat; he concluded a treaty with the Portuguese Viceroy at Goa in January 1635. Methwold had had to deal with the effects of an early 1630s famine and the effects of English interlopers. He was taken on as an East India Company factor, from 1618 to 1623 he was agent at Masulipatam. He had to return to England 1622-1623 regarding charges of private trading, and did some writing. He was first Englishman to visit a diamond mine. In 1633 he was deputy sword-bearer to Mayor of London, then was asked to go out as President at Surat. When he came home in 1639 he was a director and later deputy-governor of the East India Company till he died in 1653.
On Courteen: Furber, Rival, pp. 67-69.

Charles I had given a patent to a group of merchants headed by Courteen and a royal favourite, courtier Endymion Porter, to trade where the East India Company had not yet established factories.

It has been suspected that the king had remained annoyed, the East India Company in 1628 had not let him become an adventurer. (It will be remembered, that the first Company had formally decided, it would not deal with "gentlemen", that is, the aristocratic capitalists of the early 1600s). Weddell and Mountney sent ships east again in 1639, with much richer cargoes, worth perhaps £150,000, but their ships foundered (Methwold barely survived). Courteen's men's behaviour had been quite obnoxious in China and at Golconda. Courteens however managed to send out one or two ships per year; their factors at Surat and elsewhere drove up prices, their fortunes at home slid due to recklessness abroad and Civil War at home.

By early 1639, a leading government financier was Philip Burlamachi, who found the East India Company short of new capital for a new issue. Perhaps linked to Courteen's plans, a new company for joint stock for eastern trade was appearing.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 289.)

By 1639, the East India Company at Surat owned a few country ships (regional traders only, not necessarily beholden to Company authority), and they in various ways saved the Company money. In early 1639 the East India Company was appalled as the Earl of Arundel with the king's backing wanted to get to the east; his plan resembled the Earl of Southampton's venture to settle Mauritius. And that idea simply revived an abandoned project of Prince Rupert.
(Earl Arundel: This was Thomas Howard (1585-1646), fourteenth Earl Arundel, Earl Norfolk. Mary F. S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Cambridge University Press, 1921. Kraus Reprint, New York, 1969; genealogical tables. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 194, Note 3. GEC, Peerage, Arundel, p. 255; Norfolk, pp. 624ff.)

The fourth Earl of Southampton had a similar plan for a colony on Mauritius. This Earl of Southampton was Thomas Wriothesley (1607-1667) also Earl2 Chichester; his third wife was Frances Seymour, who appears in the descent of Sir Francis Walsingham and Ursula St Barbe.

Charles I called a halt to plans for Mauritius in 1639 in response to calls from the East India Company, but he could not back anything up, so Courteen Junior proceeded, though Courteen was in deep financial trouble. This apparently meant that by the early 1640s, Courteen was drawn into linkage with Maurice Thomson. Thomson may have been drawn into such eastern business via Gregory Clement, who by 1631 was in trouble for interloping against the East India Company.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 134.)

Brenner finds direct evidence that by 1641-1642, Thomson and his partners was working with Courteen. For example, Jeremy Blackman was captain of ship William owned by Richard Bateson, Simon Turgis and Thomas Cox - sent out by Courteen.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 175.)

Notes on "the Courteen debts" and on Maurice Thomson, business manager for the Earl of Warwick:

By 1642 Courteen Junior was bankrupt and he repaired to the Continent, leaving his East India Company matters in hands of his partners. Brenner divides these partners into four categories:
(1) the remarkably busy Maurice Thomson, William Pennoyer, Robert Thomson, Edward Thomson, Richard Bateson, Jeremy Blackman, Martin Noel, Nathan Wright Samuel Moyer, Thomas Andrews and his son Nathaniel;
(2) Foreign merchants in London who were friends of Courteens, including Joas Godschalk, John La Mott, Derrick Hoast, Adam Laurence, Waldegrave Lodovicke and John Rushout.
(Notes on Godschalk's family background are contained at the end of this file.)
(3) John Fowke;
(4) New recruits from the merchant community including John Dethick, Stephen Eastwicke a haberdasher, James Russell of the Spanish trade and the Merchant Adventurers, a Southwark sea captain William Ryder, plus a west country merchant, Thomas Boone.

(Some of these names turn up in a 20-man 1649 list on Adventurers in a "Second General Voyage", which included Nicholas Corsellis (who had married Maurice Thomson's daughter and who dealt in lead with Thomas Deacon). There were also in the 1649 list of Courteen's men, names including: James Houblon, John Casier, William Boene and Ahaseurus Regemont (whose widow married Jeremy Blackman).

Between 1642-1645, Maurice Thomson was linked with the Earl of Warwick and William Pennoyer with Capt Jackson's second raid on the Spanish West Indies. By 1640, Thomson was linked George Snelling and Edward Thomas, also Samuel Vassall and William Felgate, in Virginia and with West Indies tobacco and provisioning business. In 1647-1648, Brenner reports, men in the Guinea gold trade, owners of a ship Star, were Maurice Thomson, Rowland Wilson Senior, Rowland Wilson Jnr, John Wood and Thomas Walter.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 192.)

In the 1640s, Maurice Thomson and the second Earl of Warwick became involved with the Guinea Company.
(GEC, Peerage, Warwick, p. 406. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index, Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 441-442. See his son's DNB entry, his own DNB entry, and DNB for his father.)

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About 1645-1647 arose an ambitious plan to settle the Indian Malabar coast with an investment of £80,000; and in 1645 Maurice Thomson led interlopers and sent an expedition with Capt. John Smart, to settle the east coast of Africa to create a provisioning base for eastern shipping; and also to produce sugar, indigo, cotton, tobacco, much like Barbados, which they themselves "owned". Smart went to St Augustine Bay, Madagascar, with 140 colonists (Mauritius and Assada were also in view). But illness among other matters Smart forced to withdraw. The interlopers also wanted their port to handle trade of the Indian subcontinent, and had retained Courteen's long-held idea of integrating regular trade with Guinea with regular trade to the East; they were already active with West Indian and slave trade, and wished to use African gold to pay for Eastern trade.

The Assada project was attempted under Colonel Robert Hunt, a protégé of Lord Brook, (probably the second Baron Brooke). In 1636, Hunt replaced Philip Bell as governor of Providence Island.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 12, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 299. It was probably the "republican" Robert Greville (died 1642-1643) second Baron Brooke. The records seem unclear as to which Baron Brooke was involved. Also see Kenyon, Civil Wars, p. 253. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 66. GEC, Peerage, Brooke, p. 333.)

They also began a second project on Pulo Run, an island in the East Indies seized by the Dutch but legally owned by the English.

By then the English East India Company was on the verge of dissolution, and Parliament, since the King would not control the Courteen Association, had acceded to the request of Maurice Thomson, alderman Thomas Andrews, Samuel Moyer and James Russell for liberty to trade to the East, in April 1645. It was decided by March 1647 not to renew the old East India Company charter. The Company had to re-finance and mount a "Second General Voyage". By that time, new merchants had been interloping privately in the east, presumably profitably.

The Company's Second General Voyage involved sixteen special directors, with £1000 each in the venture, including Thomas Andrews, Nathan Wright, Maurice Thomson, Samuel Moyer, Jeremy Blackman and Capt. William Ryder, who all faced old-stock men of the East India Company. This arrangement lasted till 1649.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 176ff.)

Scattered Courteen ships still sailed to the east, which might have been stopped by an Act of Parliament in 1647-1650.
(Furber, Rival, p. 75.)

But in 1648, fortunately for the East India Company, Courteen Jnr. was short of money, and he gave up the struggle. Still, in 1649 some of Courteen's associates proposed to form a settlement at Assada an island off coast of Madagascar, to extend operations to India, thus infringing on East India Company trade. A long wrangle ensued.
(Griffiths, Licence to Trade, variously.)

In 1649 a new London group headed by Lord Fairfax, with some old associates of Courteen, challenged the East India Company monopoly yet again, and wanted colonies on Assada, off the coast of Madagascar, and in the Indies. Here, the Fairfax name can be linked to the aristocratic Fairfaxs who were so influential in the history of Virginian tobacco planting.
(Thomas Fairfax (1612-1671), third Baron Fairfax, also Lord of the Isle of Man, in 1645 was commander of the New Model Army, although he later aided the Restoration. Hibbert, Cavaliers and Roundheads, p. 299. GEC, Peerage, Colepeper, p. 365; Vere of Tilbury, p. 257, Note b; Fairfax of Cameron, pp. 229ff. Thomas Fairfax (died 1709-10), fifth Baron Fairfax, was governor of Virginia, 1675-1682. In 1702 by the influence of the London-America merchant, Micajah Perry, Colonel Robert "King" Carter (1663-1732) of Virginia became agent for the Fairfaxes; Greene, Carter Diary, Vol. , p. 67, p. 80. The sixth Baron Fairfax was owner of much of the Northern Neck of Virginia. On related colonials, Fairfax of Virginia, see Stella Pickett Hardy, Colonial Families, p. 321, pp. 519-527.)

The friend of Courteen was Thomas, third Baron Fairfax, a Puritan Lord and general, Thomas Fairfax (1612-1671) who had as tutor to his daughter Mary, the excellent poet, Andrew Marvell.
(GEC, Peerage, Vere of Tilbury, p. 257; Fairfax, p. 230; Buckingham, p. 395.)

The Privy Council wanted this group to join with the existing Company with one joint-stock, but everyone now knew that the private traders had virtual impunity. Cromwell tired of all this. In January 1650, the House of Commons decided there should be a united joint stock Company to take over factories in India, leaving Courteen's associates only with their Assada factory, which was shortly abandoned.
(Furber, Rival, variously. Griffiths, Licence to Trade.)

In June 1651 the Company's activities were at quite a low ebb, and it was almost impossible to raise new capital. So the Company issued licences to private traders, but this only meant paying higher prices in India and getting lower sale prices at home. In 1654-57, the East India Company sent out 17 ships, while private traders sent out 38 ships. In 1656 an audacious rump of East India Company shareholders wanted to sell Company privileges and factories in the east to private traders, for a mere £14,000, with a proviso that the (Old) Company could continue in the trade. Outraged, the Company in October 1656 petitioned Cromwell for support. Cromwell put matters in the hands of a sub-committee headed by his friend, Colonel Philip Jones, who was impressed with the success of the Dutch joint-stock East India Company (VOC). Cromwell's role in negotiations is unclear, Jones remained the main negotiator, but it is said the Cromwell also spoke with the Earl of Bridgwater, which would not have been surprising.

Annoying Spain was one motive for England to attempt to further dominate West Indian islands. Without a base in Barbados, England might not later in 1655-1656 have captured the prize of Jamaica, during the time of Cromwell's "Western Design", which intended to bring proper (Puritan) religion to the New World. Regarding the East India Company, by October 1657 it was thought that a permanent joint-stock would replace the older system of successive joint stock operations. The Charter given by Charles II when he arrived was very near to this; the East India Company would have power to repatriate interlopers, make war, and so on. Yet the Council of State hung back from such a form, so in January 1657 the Company voted to sell unless they got a decision within a month.

The name Willoughby of Parham appeared again on the Caribbean scene. By 9 July, 1660, Francis Willoughby (1613/1614-1666), fifth Baron Willoughby, was married to Elizabeth Cecil. Willoughby took a 21-year Caribbean lease from the Earl of Carlisle. The king directed Lord Willoughby to take up as governor of Barbados and other Caribbee islands, in view of Willoughby's position as lessee of the Earl of Carlisle's Caribbean rights. Soon, interested persons in London protested, and in July and August 1660, one protestor was Sir William Courteen Junior (who died 1666). Another protestor was a Mr. Kendall. They went to law. The decision was for Willoughby.

Bombay came to the English in 1661-1663, and one rather feels that if the Moghul rulers of India made serious tactical mistakes in dealing with the English, as they did, they did so during Cromwell's time, which was also during the "Courteen phase" of England's eastern trade. In the East, after 1660-1668, the Moguls fail entirely to note the rise of the Whigs in England. The Whigs became a most aggressive group, economically speaking.
(K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index.)

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Much depends on linkages, if any, between men engaged in Eastern trade and slaving business.

Further notes on the trading activities of Maurice Thomson:

NB: A chronological listing of the merchant associates of Maurice Thomson, the "merchant banker" who seems to have worked consistently for decades to promote the colonising interests of the second Earl of Warwick.

By 1626 Maurice Thomson was a figure in the St. Kitts plantation and tobacco and provisioning trade. Alison Olson sees Thomson as active in the Canadian fur trade, sending provisions to New England, with a monopoly on the Virginia tobacco crop, as an interloper in East India Company trade, and one of the Guinea Company.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 126-127.)

Thomson was quite prepared to leave London on serious business matters. In April 1626 he went to Southampton for about six days, regarding deals regarding St. Kitts, with one Thomas Combes of there, which later went sour. Combes had a plantation on St. Kitts; having been linked to Capt. Thomas Warner, the "original settler" of St. Kitts. Thomson agreed to put in £4000 capital. In April-May 1626, Thomson and Combes sent three ships with sixty slaves to St. Kitts. A new man joined the syndicate, Thomas Stone, of a Lancaster family, been apprenticed into the Haberdashers, London. He was in Cateaton Street, London, had a nephew in Virginia, one W. Stone, and also had links to Holland. By 1627 Thomson and Stone were re-exporting tobacco to Middleburg, Flushing and Amsterdam.

By the 1630s, Thomson was is in partnership with Humphrey Slaney in Newfoundland and Guinea business and the American tobacco trade. By 1631 he is also with the Kent Island project. By 1631 both Thomson and John de la Barre are interlopers in the Canadian fur trade. By 1631 Thomson was also involved with the Kent Island project.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 184ff.)

By 1634 Thomson's factor in Virginia was one Thomas Stegg. For 1632-1633, Thomson dealt with William Tucker and Thomas Stone in a syndicate given a right to market the entire Virginian tobacco crop. From 1636-1640, Thomson was in partnership with Roger Limbrey in the St. Kitts tobacco trade. To the 1640s, Thomson was in trade to Massachusetts Bay with Nicholas Trerice (sic) and Joshua Foote (sic). By 1637-1638, in partnership with the Virginia tobacco and provision trade with William Harris, Thomas Deacon and William Tucker.

William Tucker had arrived in Virginia in 1610 aged 21. Born then 1589, he later married a sister of Maurice Thomson, Mary. Tucker was originally a sea captain, but by 1616 he was active with several Londoners in founding a Virginia plantation, one being Elias Roberts, whose son Elias married Dinah Thomson, another sister of Maurice. Another participant was Ralph Hamor (sic), who became a Virginia magistrate and politician. By 1619 Tucker had become a major figure in Virginia by 1621. Tucker and Ralph Hamor went to London to see Parliament for Virginia's case in opposing the tobacco contract proposed by Sir Thomas Roe and others.
(On Roe's career: Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 37, p. 149 on his visit to Mogul India.)

Later Tucker went off fighting Indians; he lived at Kecoughtan, or, Elizabeth City. By 1625, Tucker was one of only 15 men in Virginia who had ten or more servants. By 1626 Tucker had been appointed to the Virginia Council.

About 1638, Thomson was in partnership in trade to an unnamed area with William Tucker, George Thomson and James Stone. By 1638-1641, Thomas was involved in Capt. Jackson's raiding voyage to the Spanish West Indies with William Pennoyer, Thomas Frere and possibly William Tucker. By 1638, Thomson was involved in an attempted interloping voyage to Guinea with Oliver Cloberry, Oliver Reed and George Lewine. By 1638-1641, Thomson was involved in Capt. Jackson's raiding voyage to Spanish West Indies with William Pennoyer, Thomas Frere and possibly William Tucker.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 158 has it that Capt. William Jackson was once an apprentice of William Tucker in the London Clothworkers Company. )

By 1638, Thomson had probably become a "general business manager" for the Earl of Warwick, presumably answering to Sir Nathaniel Rich. Thomson here also became a partner with William Courteen Jnr. Brenner for the late 1630s-1650 has a list of East India interlopers and promoters of an Assada plantation, including Maurice Thomson, William Pennoyer, Robert Thomson, Edward Thomson, Richard Bateson, Jeremy Blackman, Martin Noel, Nathan Wright, Samuel Moyer, Thomas Andrews, Nathaniel Andrews, John Fowke, Stephen Estwicke, James Russell, William Ryder, Thomas Boone, Joas (sic) Godschalk, John La Mott, Derrick Hoast, Adam Laurence, Waldegrave Lodovicke and John Rushout.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 118, p. 173ff, pp. 192-193.
This Godschall is presumably of the Godschall-Johnson family, which descent produces a governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham (1806-1855). Burke's Landed Gentry for Barnard of Hotham. Davis McCaughey, Naomi Perkins and Angus Trumble, Victoria's Colonial Governors, 1839-1900. Melbourne University Press, 1993.)

By 1638, Thomson was involved with the Providence Island Company which had plans to use a silver mine in the Bay of Darien. Thomson in the late 1630s was also linked to the Anglo-Dutch-American trader, Nicholas Corsellis, and with a lead mine in Cardigan, Wales, the Mines Royal.
(Nicholas Corsellis a Virginia trader was son of Nicholas Corsellis Senior and married a sister of Maurice Thomson. Also, Sir Thomas Cambell of Clay Hall married a Miss Corsellis. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 89-90, p. 176. One does not however read of commercial links between Maurice Thomson and these Cambells. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 98ff.)

Joshua Foote an ironmonger was busy with an ironworks in Tancready, Ireland; then with Robt Houghton, William Hiccocks and John Pocock he opened up the Massachusetts iron works at Braintree.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 160ff.)

In 1638 at a meeting of the Providence Island Company, apparently, a Mr. Samuel Border told John Pym, that the patron of Benjamin Rudyerd was the Earl of Pembroke; Lord Mandeville may also have been involved here with the Earl of Warwick. There was a large silver mine at the Bay of Darien.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 301ff.)

Some of these men sent to see Maurice Thomson, who led an expedition to this mine personally in 1639. Thomson anyway provisioned for this company.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 3, p. 67.)

Otherwise, in matters probably linked, in May 1638, following the failure of the Kent Island project, Claiborne in Virginia had got a commission from the Providence Island Company to start a settlement on island of Ruatan (Rich Island) off the coast of Honduras.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 157.)

About 1638, Thomson was in partnership in trade to an unnamed area with William Tucker, George Thomson and James Stone. By 1639, Thomson was linked with William Pennoyer in a patent for a fishery at Cape Anne, from the Massachusetts Bay colony. By 1639-1641 Thomson was linked with the Providence Island Company, in provisioning Providence Island itself. In 1639, Thomson was linked with William Claiborne, Samuel Matthews, George Fletcher, William Bennett and the Bermuda Company regarding a great land grant encompassing territory between the Potomac and Rappahanock rivers - but plans here failed to eventuate. And generally, it is beyond belief that Thomson dealt on such a large scale in his own right - but the ambitions of his backers have been poorly described to date.

The second Earl of Warwick was outspoken against Charles I's ship money tax, and would become Parliamentary lord high admiral by 1643. By 1642-1643, London-based merchants had part-control of the navy. Shortly, privateers operated as naval forces. This revamped navy helped win the civil war. One man benefiting personally from this, (Andrews writes), was "that ubiquitous entrepreneur", Maurice Thomson.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 195ff.)

George Thomson, later linked with the Kent Island project, by 1635 was also involved in the founding of colony on Montserrat and in the tobacco and provisioning trade, probably in partnership with Anthony Briskett. Maurice's sister Mary married William Tucker of the American trade, while sister Dinah married Elias Roberts of the American trade.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 195, p. 328.)

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Brenner also conveys that William Thomson married Elizabeth Warner, daughter of Samuel Warner, a link then with Thomas Warner of Barbados

Matters on Barbados:

Between 1640-1660 the Barbados planters switched from tobacco and cotton to sugar, and from using white servants' labour to black slaves.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 59.)

In the 1640s and again in the 1690s, thousands of Barbadians died from yellow fever, called Barbados distemper or bleeding fever. The patient vomited and voided blood. To the 1640s, the Barbadians had been a simple group of peasant farmers on the first port of call for Caribbean-bound ships. The most populous and most successful of islands, it was never invaded by the French or Spanish.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 18.)

By 1639 the members of the later Barbados elite included Allyn, Bulkley, Codringtons (who became immensely wealthy). And James Drax, a militia captain with an Anglo-Dutch background, who made the first-ever sugar fortune.
(This Sir James Drax does not appear to be of the family listed in Burke's Landed Gentry for Sawbridge-Erle-Drax. Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 17. He was linked politically with Sir Thomas Modyford of Barbados and Jamaica.)

Drax brought from Holland a model of a sugar mill - a small instance of technological transfer indicating the breadth of Mintz's view on the revising of capitalism, seen as originating in the Caribbean. By 1680 Drax was said to ship home £5000 worth of sugar. Other notable Barbados names were Frere, Huy, Hothersall, Pears, Yeamans. Dunn notes, many of these names had commercial backgrounds in London. Later came names such Gibbs, Fortescue, Sandiford, Read, Hothersall and Berringer. From about 1640, Barbados people included Edward Cranfield and Edward Shelly, Capt. George Martin.
(Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 17. See Ligon's map of Barbados. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 49, Note 10, p. 50, pp. 55- 58, p. 190.)

Capital and technology told. It was similar on Barbados, where the original "peasants" were done for. Dunn lists the newcomers who renovated the Barbados economy, including John Colleton, Samuel Farmer, Thomas Kendall, Peter Leare, Thomas Modyford, Daniel Searle, Constantine Silvester, George Stanfast, Timothy Thornhill, Humphrey Walrond, Francis Lord Willoughby. Here, some names were those of agents, some names had links to Dutch merchants, some were eager to harvest sugar business. Some, as Dunn puts it, were the younger sons of English gentry who had fought in the civil wars and now wanted, or rather needed, fresh endeavour.

Dunn lists among the newcomers who renovated the Barbados economy - John Colleton; James Colleton, Sir Peter, Thomas; James on the Barbados assembly to 1700.) Samuel Farmer, Thomas Kendall, Peter Leare, Thomas Modyford, Daniel Searle, Constantine Silvester, George Stanfast, Timothy Thornhill, Humphrey Walrond, Francis Lord Willoughby. The newcomers quickly helped consolidate "the Barbados aristocracy."
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 115 on planters Colleton. On the Beckfords, see Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters. Cambridge at the University Press, Published for the Economic History Review, 1960.)

Notes on the genealogy of "Godschalk":

NB: Notes on the probable family background of Joas Godschalk, "a friend of Courteen" and also a connection of Maurice Thomson:
Godschalk, or Godschall, is a rare Huguenot name. Godschalls had first come to southern England about 1561.Their family trade was woolens or cloth. No family background can be found for this Joas, who was active about 1640.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 175ff, pp. 192ff. Contributing information on the genealogy of the Godschall-Johnson family and others as descended from Sir Thomas Warner, governor of Antigua, or linked to other families, is found from the following sources:
(Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Lucas-Tooth (of Kent) and for Payne-Galway. Burke's Landed Gentry for Bonar of Kimmerghame; Eyre of St John's Wood, Henderson formerly of Sedgwick Park; Thornton; Warner formerly of Framlingham. Information on the Tooth family is found in L. M. Mowle, A Genealogical History of Pioneer Families of Australia. Fifth edition. Sydney, Rigby, 1978; and in R. F. Holder, Bank of New South Wales: A History. Vol. 2, 1817-1850. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1970., pp. 37-373. ADB entries various on persons named Tooth. Other sources for Australian persons: Redcliffe. (Brisbane, Queensland), local municipal council, booklet, Redcliffe: 160 Years. Published, 1959. A. B. Paterson, Singer of the Bush. Works: 1885-1900. Sydney, Ure-Smith, 1991. Robert Darvall Barton (1843-1924), noted ADB, Vol. 5, entry for J. P. McCansh. DNB for Sir Philip Francis, possible author of The Junius Letters. A. P. Newton, European Nations, p. 243. On Antigua planter, Godschall Johnson (died 180) of London, an associates of J. J. Angerstein, husband of (1) Elizabeth Hedges and (2) Mary Francis, Close Roll, 25 Geo III, Part 10, No. 5. Godschall-Johnson sets of fiche being copies of Wills, etc., and other material held by family members in Sydney, Queensland, and in Armidale NSW. R. B. Sheridan, 'Colonial Gentry of Antigua', pp. 346ff. On Godschall-Johnson family members emigrating to Canada: Roy St George Stubbs, Four Recorders of St Rupert's Land. Canada, Pegus Publishers, nd?)

James Godschall (resident in England by 1560-died 1636) son of John (Jan) Godschall (died August 1587 and of a church on Threadneedle Street) and Margaret Unknown, had property in Essex, some land about St Botolph without Bishopsgate (the later site of Bedlam Hospital and also near two theatres used by Shakespeare et al). It seems John son of Jan also once gave the crown "a large loan".

Some descendants of John son of Jan had a house in the parish of St Mary Abchurch in an area once burnt in the Great Fire of London. A draper and Turkey Company merchant, John Godschall married to Bethia Charlton, had a son John (died 1725), a Turkey merchant of St Dunstan's in the East. John Jnr. He went to Antioch, Turkey and Syria on family business, such as buying rugs, and had a nephew, William Mann Godschall. (William Mann Godschall, an antiquarian and FRS, in 1787 wrote A General Plan of Parochial and Provincial Police, which plan was unsuccessful.)
(Joanna Innes, 'The role of transportation in seventeenth and eighteenth century English penal practice', pp. 1-24, in Carl Bridge (Ed.), New Perspectives in Australian History. London, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1990.)

John Jnr. Son of Bethia Charlton had a brother, Nicholas (died 1748, also of St Dunstan's In the East, also in the Turkey Company. Nicholas married in 1727 to Sarah Onley (died 1750, of an Essex family. (See Savile-Onley, Burke's Landed Gentry. Sir Robert Godschall (died 1741), a wine merchant, a Portugal merchant, was son of the same Bethia Charlton and became a Lord Mayor of London by 1741.
(Valerie Hope, Lord Mayor, p. 112.)

Robert this Lord Mayor married Catherine Tryon, and Miss Lewin, a daughter of London Lord Mayor in 1717, Sir William Lewin. This Lord Mayor Robert of the Ironmongers Company seems also a Tory MP, a director of the Royal Exchange from 1729 till he died, and a brother-in-law of Sir John Barnard. Today, the Godschall-Johnsons have many family members in Australia and Canada, as two brothers split the family. One brother, Sir Francis Godschall-Johnson (1817-1894) became Chief Justice of Lower Canada; the other brother, Ralph Edward Godschall-Johnson, (1812)-1876) went to Australia where he became first clerk of the Queensland Parliament.
(On Ralph Edward, son of Captain Godschall-Johnson and Lucy Bisshopp, see a booklet, Redcliffe [Brisbane] 160 Years, published by the Town Council of Redcliffe, 1959.)

These two brothers were sons of a minor diplomat at Antwerp, Captain Godschall II Godschall-Johnson, 1780-1859 of Cavendish Square. It seems a genealogical accident that before 1779, Sir Cecil Bisshopp Bart7 (died 1779) had married Susanna Hedges (died 1791), daughter of an East India Company official, Charles Hedges of Finchley, Middlesex.
(Sir William Hedges was governor of Bengal 1681-1684 and then Sheriff of London, 1693-1694. GEC, Peerage, Zouche, p. 954.)

Charles Hedges had married Catherine Tate, daughter of Bartholomew Tate. This Bartholomew Tate happened to be one of the descendants of the Lords Zouche, a line which can be traced (although it had fallen into abeyance) earlier than Alan Zouche (died 1270) husband of Helen or Ellen De Quincy.
(GEC, Peerage, Zouche, variously.)

Sir Cecil Bisshopp Bart8 (1752-1828), became twelfth Lord Zouche. (He married Harriet Southwell (died 1839).)
(Sir Cecil Bisshopp Bart8, twelfth Lord Zouche of Haryngworth, (died 1828). Namier-Brooke, The History of Parliament: House of Commons, 1754-1790. Vol. 1, p. 93, Vol. 2, p. 94, p. 125. GEC, Peerage, Zouche, p. 954. Lord12 Zouche had a daughter Lucy Bisshopp (died 1823) who married a Captain Godschall-Johnson in 1802. Sir Cecil Bisshopp Bart5 (died 1778) of Parham Park, Sussex was a superintendent of foundries for the Ordnance Dept. GEC, Peerage, Maynard, p. 603; Cardigan, p. 16; Dorset, p. 428.)

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In London by the 1780s, the Godschalls, who had lost touch with their kin in Flanders, had become intermarried with the name Warner, which had Caribbean plantations (Antigua) and the name Johnson.
( The descendants of Sir Thomas Warner (died 1649) the settler of Barbados and later governor of Antigua, and some of their linkages with the Godschall-Johnson family are given in Burke's Landed Gentry for Bonar of Kimmerghame; Eyre formerly of St John's Wood; Warner formerly of Framlingham; Thornton of Clapham. The Warner plantations on Antique, inherited by Godschall-Johnson names, were The Folly and Savannah. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 27. A Warner descendant, Colonel Ashton Henry Warner, 41st Regt., was governor of Hobart Goal. Joanna Innes, 'The role of transportation in seventeenth and eighteenth century English penal practice', pp. 1-24, in Carl Bridge (Ed.), New Perspectives in Australian History. London, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1990. Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York, Facts on File, c.1992., p. 76. R. B. Sheridan, `Colonial Gentry, Antigua', p. 346. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 27. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 184.)

It seems by then, some family members had become involved in aspects of the slave business, possibly as dealers in slaves to the Caribbean, or, buyers of slaves.
(Godschall Johnson died 1800 a son of John Johnson (died 1775) and Elizabeth Ann Warner became a business associate of John Julius Angerstein in 1793-1794 in the matter of a loan to government. This Godschall Johnson also took the 1785 Lottery and in 1775 on his father's death inherited estates on Antigua; he married as first wife in 1779, Elizabeth Hodges and then in 1792, Mary Francis.)

From the 1780s, some Godschall-Johnsons lived about the present London borough of Lewisham, and they were on intimate family terms (in terms of god-parentage of various children) with the family of "the father of Lloyd's of London", John Julius Angerstein of Greenwich/Blackheath, who was a personal friend of George III), and also the Temple family (See re Viscount Palmerston).
(On John Julius Angerstein (1735-1823): D. G. C. Allan, `The Society of Arts and Government, 1754-1800', Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 7, 1973-1974, No. 4, Summer, 1974., pp. 434-452. Kynaston, City of London, p. 2 details Angerstein's career and early commercial connections. Also on Angerstein: The Listener, 24 September, 1987.)

Members of the extended family Godschall-Johnson came to Australia in two waves, with the second wave represented by the first clerk of the Queensland Parliament.

NB: I am grateful to Trin Truscett (nee Johnson) of Armidale, Nigel Johnson her cousin (also of Armidale), and John Godschall Johnson of Sydney, all descendants of this far-flung family, Godschall-Johnson, for much of the information given above.

Maurice Thomson as trader:

The argument has so far much concerned juxtaposing information on the careers of the second Earl of Warwick, Maurice Thomson and Courteen, and some tantalising linkages are seen with Thomson and Courteen. Associated with this, the argument has been involved with presenting matters of long-term conflict in the Caribbean between the allies of the Earls of Carlisle, versus Courteen, where matters are greatly complicated by the activities of men who had fought on either side of the Cromwellian Civil Wars.

In late 1644, acting on a mistaken belief that Carlisle had sold his Caribee patent to the Earl of Warwick, Charles I gave the islands to the Earl of Marlborough. Marlborough had earlier been inclined to intervene with parliamentary shipping. By 1647 the earl of Carlisle had leased his Caribee proprietary to Francis Lord Willoughby, a Presbyterian turned royalist who felt that the Spaniards would continue to trade in slaves. In 1650, Barbados went royalist, as influenced by new migrants such as Humphrey and Edward Walrond.
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 77, p. 86, p. 142. Also, A. P. Newton, The European Nations In the West Indies, variously.)

London was watching Barbados keenly, and it is perhaps too-little appreciated that by 1650, London's merchant adventurers were skilfully spreading their portfolio wings in particular patterns. Olson regards Maurice Thomson as a notable colonial merchant about 1650, or maybe later, active in the Canadian fur trade. Thomson sent provisions to New England and was recommended by a governor of Virginia as one of three merchants in respect of a monopoly on tobacco crops. Thomson was also an interloper in East India Company trade and by 1649 was also one of the Guinea Company, English slavers on the African West Coast. Another prominent merchant was Owen Rowe, active in the Virginia trade, leader and merchant backer of Massachusetts Bay, a deputy governor of the Bermuda Company - and related by marriage to the Earl of Warwick.
(Olson, Making the Empire Work, p. 15.)

The seeds of Cromwell's Western Design:

Coldham has many anecdotes on transportation to Barbados. On 16 June, 1647 the ship Achilles (Mr. Thomas Crowder) embarked many Bridewell women for Barbados, where there were three classes of men; masters, servants and slaves. Customs were, slaves were treated better than servants. By 1655, ship managers were sending as many convict-fodder people as possible.
(Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains. Phoenix Hill, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Allan Sutton, 1992., pp. 115-116.)

By 1645, Barbadians imported 1000 Negro slaves. Between 1710 and 1810, 250,000 slaves were landed in Barbados alone of Britain's "sugar islands". So the English sailor-pirate waxed increasingly fat on servile labour.
(James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London, Harper Collins, 1992., pp. 7ff. Walvin p. 70 treats Codrington on Barbados. Walvin also, p. 342, cites Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London, 1673., a standard account for early Barbados much cited by historians. Reprinted, London, 1970. See Linebaugh, The London Hanged, pp. 52ff on the origins of the English slave code in Barbados and Jamaica.)

In 1647, evidently unsatisfied with other supply lines, the Barbados settlers Thomas Modyford and Richard Ligon had gone out themselves looking for Negroes, horses and cattle. (In 1657, Richard Ligon produced a first map of Barbados). Their ship went to Africa. That is, they were bartering for their own slaves.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 29, p. 69, p. 231.)

As a seeming mere detail in a scheme to be envisaged, by 1654, James Drax on Barbados had shares in two slave ships. By 1651 the English Navigation Acts had been designed to tie sugar planters to English ships, English merchants and the home market, which might re-export sugar. The revolutionising impact of commodity sugar was growing in power and financial authority. Patterns were building and rebuilding.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 20.)

Between 1647-1656 appeared Povey, a man destined to have great influence on the Caribbean. Povey was a member of the 1647 Long Parliament, an intimate friend of Noell, and, finally, another West India magnate. His Letterbook exists; he described the knighting of Col. James Drax at the instigation of Noell. Noell survived the "holocaust" of the Restoration, Fraser notes, and was knighted by Charles II; but he seems to have died bankrupt.
(On Povey and Noel: Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 67. Fraser, Cromwell, p. 534. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 325. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, variously. Davies, Royal Africa Company, variously. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Bond of Peckham, p. 70. Penson, Colonial Agents, sees Povey as a Carlisle place man. Povey, who was friends with Maurice Thomson, had a brother Richard on Jamaica and another brother William on Barbados. Noel and other merchants are also noted in Shafaat Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century, a book which also has a lengthy treatment on William Courteen and a novel theory on the origins of Mercantilism.
(Fraser, Cromwell, p. 534.)

In the 1650s, some of Cromwell's final lists of English grievances stretched back to 1603 as he tried to "theologize" (rationalize?) his motives for a Caribbean expedition, which of course was a pro-Puritan, anti-Spanish and a morally-doomed exercise - his Western Design. Here, during 1654-1656, Cromwell's philosophy was split by a dichotomy - he wanted to settle Jamaica with the godly, using less than godly means. Is not such naïveté appalling? Also, sinners may as well be exported (one of the long-term rationalisations for convict transportation). 1654 - August. A committee including sea captains and merchants was created to oversee the Cromwellian Western Design. Samuel Desborough was in overall control. Plans went undetailed. It was complained that many soldiers turned out thieves, cheats and cutpurses. The men were Newgate types. Mrs Venables, wife of the general, assessed the situation admirably when she wondered if God's work could be done by the devil's instruments? It was a wicked army, more so for having no arms or provisions. Arrangements for paying the men seemed to be absent. Much of this was Desborough's fault, he was in part responsible for lack of provisions and proper arrangements. The men were not drilled due to haste, not enough food was shipped, officers and men remained separated, so troop morale fell.

It perhaps speaks for the involvement of English names already known in the Caribbean that Colonel Holdip had a regiment. Many more names could be mentioned. Cromwell also made friends with the now-retired earl of Bridgewater, who had become the brother-in-law of the Barbados financier, Sir William Courteen. This earl's father had taken on the debts of William Courteen, after Courteen had finally bankrupted, apparently after unfortunate speculation with the Dutch East India Company. The matter is not explained, but Cromwell tried to smooth things over for, or with, Bridgewater's estates.
(Fraser, Cromwell, p. 491. On Capt. Henry Powell and the Courteen bankruptcy, some details are given in Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 41ff. On Courteens generally: Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 50ff, pp. 200-201.)

During the Western Design period, one commissioner of Jamaica was Major Sedgewick, who wrote back to Thurloe, the brother-in-law of Noell, the friend of the lawyer-merchant Thomas Povey.
(Penson, Colonial Agents, pp. 10-13; Fraser, Cromwell, p. 533.)

In history, a failure to name names has caused enigmas to rise where few should exist by now. Between 1655 -1660, some of the most influential elements in the West India interest were merchants (whom Penson for example does not name) whose rise to power had been mainly due to the share they took in Cromwell's western expedition of 1655.
(Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 45.)

Where possible, merchants were forming links across colonies, chaining business - one problem being that some were also civil servants of a kind, and they often had inside knowledge of the ways government might affect colonial developments and politics. (Now many of their interests of course would be regarded as conflicts of interest, their actions smacking of insider trading, today, legally disabling in financial circles).

At the end of the Roundhead-Cavalier civil war, both sides contributed settlers to Barbados and these men began to contest for control of the island. There were plots counterplots, armed uprising, fines and banishments involving some 115 identifiable colonists, only 55 of whom had been on Barbados before 1640. Conflict reached its climax in 1651, the year the English navigation acts designed to tie sugar planters to English ships were being ventilated.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 20.)

On Barbados, the Cavaliers ousted the Roundheads. A fleet had been sent from England, however, under Sir George Ayscue, to obtain obedience. Ayscue found he could blockade, but not invade and subdue the landed Royalists. Some accord was reached in January 1652, conditions were set, and the island accepted a parliamentary governor, Daniel Searle. Most settlers then went back to making sugar.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 79.)

Then the English sailor-pirate visited Africa, semi-officially. Evidently following up on Crispe's actions in the Gambia area, in 1652, Prince Rupert visited the Gambia. It was apparently through his keenness that ,later, so many members of the Royal Family and Court became interested in Africa trade.
(Davies, Royal Africa Company, p. 41.)

Some Barbados grants being made were "very generous"; Governor Hawley had no arable land left after ten years. One grant went to Edward Oistin (a fishing village remains on Barbados named Oistin). William Hilliard later sold a half share of an estate to Thomas Modyford for £7000. (Many grants of 30-50 acres went to the poorer folk). And of Modyford we shall hear more.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 49ff, p. 81.)

Modyford, the son of a mayor of Exeter, was a kinsman of the Duke of Albemarle. Modyford had landed on Barbados as a young man in 1647 with money and connections after losing the fight in the civil war. He could pay £1000 down and pay £6000 in the next three years, operating with his brother-in-law, the London merchant Thomas Kendall. Modyford soon attempted to dominate island politics.
( Modyford in 1660 negotiated with the Commonwealth to be appointed as governor of Barbados, but as he took office, Charles II was restored, so Modyford reverted to royalism, only to later lose his governorship of Barbados.)

England captured Jamaica in 1655. Fraser in her book on Cromwell reports that in 1655, after England acquired Jamaica, reports flooded back to England of suffering on the island, following efforts to encourage emigration to Jamaica. In other areas... As an innovation, by about 1655, a licence was granted to Sir James Modyford to take all felons convicted on circuits and at the Old Bailey, then reprieved, to Jamaica.
(Wilfrid Oldham, Britain's Convicts to the Colonies. Sydney, Library of Australian History, 1990., p. 5.)

Thus, one of the major figures in the development of English slave-holding in the Caribbean also helped to formalise convict transportation!
(For records on how servants were recruited in London for America from 1750 see William Eddis, Letters from America. Edited by Aubrey C. Land. Cambridge Massachusetts, 1969.)

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As well, (1655) during the Protectorate, pardons conditional on transportation appeared, with their use to be continued by succeeding rulers. Such pardons were later granted by the Crown on the recommendation of presiding Justices and remained a part of the transportation system long after the loss of the American colonies, that is after 1776. Cromwell's men in 1656 suggested that 1000 Irish boys and girls be rounded up to fill the empty island, but there is no evidence this transportation actually occurred. In 1656 Cromwell ordered the Scottish government "to apprehend known idle, masterless robbers and vagabonds" to Jamaica. Cromwell also wanted to send Highlanders out, but he was warned they might incite the island to rebellion.

The Spanish king meanwhile was reportedly furious about the English "rape" of Jamaica.
(Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973., p. 532. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro. pp. 101, 114. Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, p. 49-51.)

Cromwell did send 7000-8000 Scots from the 1651 Battle of Worcester to British plantations in the colonies. In 1656, Cromwell reinstituted transportation by ordering all counties to send in lists of those [who might be] recommended for transportation. So, Coldham writes, with this followed up by an Act of 1657, the Puritans established procedures which were hardly altered in principle till 1776 - at least as far as North America was concerned. Re legislation. In June 1661, Jeremy Bonnel and Co. of London petitioned the King to have delivery of prisoners to ship to Jamaica on their ship Charity. Bureaucracy ruined those overtures, but more pardons were issued on conditions of transportation, whereupon the sheriffs of London complained of the costs of keeping reprieved prisoners. (But the City could reimburse itself by selling its felons!).
(Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 50-51.)

Coldham notes also, James II probably disposed of over 800 pardoned felons, many merely "prisoners of conscience", with less than half actually arriving in the West Indies. Till 1707, London officials had to play round robin to find which colonies found transported prisoners most acceptable, for which reasons, or not, for which excuses. After 1718, Virginia and Maryland took the brunt of the convict transportation situation.

Eric Williams in his book so much concerned with slavery, From Columbus to Castro, suggests that for 1654-1685, it has been estimated, that 10,000 indentured servants sailed from Bristol alone to North America and the Caribbean.
(We find from John D. Krugler, 'Sir George Calvert's Resignation as Secretary of State and the Founding of Maryland', Maryland Historical Magazine, LXVIII, 1973., pp. 239-254.; p. 55 in an essay, James Horn, `Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century', pp. 51ff of Tate and Ammerman's anthology, the first ordnance passed by the British Parliament to prevent kidnapping was in 1645. Ten years later, Bristol passed its own legislation requiring all servants to be registered before transportation, hence the Bristol lists of indentured servants going out and in London, The Lord Mayor's Waiting Books, at the Guildhall. Yet people continued to be spirited away.; Horn's essay, p. 65, Note 42, mentions His Majesties charter to Lord Baltimore, translated into English, London, 1635. See Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, (Eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society. New York, Norton, 1979.)

About half went to Virginia. Williams says that in 1688 it was estimated that in Jamaica alone, the developing agricultural system required about 10,000 slaves annually. Between 1680 and 1688 the Royal Africa Company supplied 46,396 slaves to the West Indies, about 5155 annually; and at 300 slaves per ship, about 17 ships annually.
(Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969. London, Andre Deutsch, 1970., pp. 98-101, p. 137.)

"Besides the white indentured servants, convicts and malefactors provided a second source of white labour. If the existence of a contract gave a semblance of legality to the system of white indentured labour, convict labour was also surrounded with the aura of the law by the commutation of sentences involving death or imprisonment to transportation and servitude in the colonies for a term of years. The crime was extended to fit a punishment which contributed to the solution of the colonial labour problem, and a veritable system in this regard was developed in Bristol, where magistrates and judges were connected, directly or indirectly, [Williams says], with the Caribbean sugar plantations."

God-botherer Cromwell then did much to institutionalise an incipient British attitude - a desire to transport unwanted people from the English island, that has been too-much attached to penal history solely, and been left aside from treatment of the psychology of the expansionism of European states, particularly England, or even the description of English expansionism, which was so much prompted by Puritans. The desire to deport transgressors was to become wrapped increasingly in its own red tape of custom and legislation.

In November 1664 the King told the sheriffs that Sir James Modyford would ship felons to his brother on Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford.
(In 1665, a similar licence was given to Thomas Bennet; and in 1668, Peter Pate was given an exclusive trade in disposing of Newgate convicts. Coldham notes, James II probably disposed of over 800 pardoned felons, many merely "prisoners of conscience", with less than half actually arriving in the West Indies. Till 1707, London officials had to play round robin to find which colonies found transported prisoners most acceptable, for which reasons, or not, for which excuses. After 1718, Virginia and Maryland took the brunt of the convict transportation situation.)

In 1665, a similar licence was given Thomas Bennet, and in 1668, Peter Pate was given an exclusive trade in Newgate convicts. Meantime, Noell's interest in the Caribbean declined, and Povey's schemes disappeared with the decline of the Willoughby interest, which was the interest of the Whig, Carlisle. As a London merchant-lawyer, Thomas Povey by about 1664-1666 was surveyor-general of the Victualling Dept. Povey by then had already been interested as a Carlisle place-man in deals concerning West Indian islands. Penson notes, Povey was a barrister of Gray's Inn and a merchant with widespread interests, "well-known for exerting his influence". His brother Richard was secretary and commissary general of provisions at Jamaica; another brother was William Povey, provost marshal at Barbados.
(Penson, Colonial Agents, pp. 10-13.)

Povey was also friends with the ubiquitous Maurice Thomson, a largely unrecognised Seventeenth Century entrepreneur. And so it begins to seem, that as more is discovered about English commercial life and personalities of the Seventeenth Century, more is discovered also about the entwinement of two trades in labour - slavery and convict transportation.

Just one statistic is telling: Dunn records that by the 1970s, the old Jamaica plantation, Worthy Park, produced 7000 tons of sugar per year, more than all Jamaica's production in 1680.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 48-49; p. 78; p. 115 on Colletons; p. 177, Note 36; p. 98. On the Price family, the owners of Worthy Park, see Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Price of Trengwainton.)

This places much human suffering in bleak perspective - the slaves were used as factors of technology - today, one plantation cannot possibly produce so much sugar without the use of equipment applying hydraulic pressure to sugar cane. As the American Revolution broke out, Worthy Park grossed £10,000 in sugar and rum sales. In 1969 on Barbados there were eighteen factories and plantations still carrying seventeenth century names. During the 1640-1660 period the Barbados planters switched from tobacco and cotton to sugar, and from using white servants to black slaves.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 59.)

After the Western Design:

Between 1640 and 1660 occurred a significant development in the administration and self-government of English colonies which probably bore on the inability of the colonies to provide sufficient education for the sons of original colonists. Associated would have been the debts which colonists had with mostly London merchants. Between 1640 and 1660, noted families in trade who had connections in government sent out sons whose descendants inherited, if they did not develop, the traditions and heritages of the burgeoning colonies. In the North American tobacco colonies appeared later-influential names such as Bland, Burwell, Byrd, Carter, Digges, Ludwell, Mason.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 78, Note 62.)

It is indicative of the commercial links between Britain and North America that the Virginian William Byrd II, (1674-1744) (who owned 4000 books), after his schooling had gone to Holland to learn mercantile matters. Later he was associated with merchants Perry and Lane of London, before studying law and being admitted to the Bar.
(Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, p. 192, p. 103, p. 233.)

William Byrd I In Virginia had 25,000 acres, his son William Byrd II had 175,000 acres. The links Americans had with English firms were often affectionate, productive of family relationships, but would be sundered by the American Revolution.

By the 1650s some of the grandest planters on Jamaica were the Beckfords and the Prices, spectacular figures.
( The career of the Whig, Lord Mayor of London, and slave owner, William Beckford (1709-1770) is often noted; his grandson was the author of Fonthill, William Beckford (1760-1844). However, the Lord Mayor's genealogy is fretted by lack of the names of women. Less often noted as connections of his broader family are: Thomas Howard, eighth Baron Howard of Effingham (171401763); William Courtenay twentieth Earl Devon (1777-1859); Charles Wood second Viscount Halifax; George Richard Lane Fox, first Baron Bingley; George Pitt-Rivers fourth Baron Rivers (1810-1866); Patrick Bowes-Lyon, thirteenth Earl Strathmore and Kinghorn. A connection occurs between Jamaica and Australia, thus. One early Beckford marriage had been with Bathusa Herring, daughter of Colonel Julines Herring who would have been on Jamaica after 1700. The Colonel's son Julines had a daughter Anna Maria who married John Lumley, seventh Earl Scarborough (1760-1835); who had a descendant Anna Maria Manners-Sutton (daughter of a governor of Victoria, Australia, John Henry Manners-Sutton). This Anna Maria married Melbourne merchant Charles Bright, whose firm was absorbed by a firm originally from Bristol, Antony Gibbs and Co. In the late eighteenth century, this Bristol family Gibbs was in West Indies trade, by the late nineteenth century it was involved in Indian Ocean and Australasian trade.
(On Charles Bright, see G. F. Whitwell, `Charles and Reginald Bright', pp. 137-159 in R. T. Appleyard and C. B. Schedvin, (Eds),. Australian Financiers: Biographical Essays. South Melbourne, Macmillan, 1988.)

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In the 1640s and 1650s, some 200-300 planters on Barbados took charge of the sugar business, (and much less tobacco on Barbados). The Barbadians had a full generation earlier than their counterparts on Jamaica and the Leewards managed the change to specialising in sugar, which meant specialising in using slaves.
(On the Price family see Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670-1970. Toronto, 1970., as cited in Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 48-49.)

Sugar colonies also developed some peculiarities in disease patterns. In the 1640s and again in the 1690s, thousands of Barbadians died from yellow fever, called Barbados distemper, or bleeding fever. The patient vomited and voided blood. One Caribbean ailment, called "dry bellyache", seemed to be the result of drinking too much rum processed through lead pipes. Cromwell's troops on Jamaica died appallingly due to malaria, partly as their barracks were near swamps. On Barbados were 20,000 settlers by 1645, 30,000 by 1650 - including many Royalists. Later, during the Puritan Revolution in England, many wealthy middle-class Englishmen emigrated to Virginia, supporters of Charles I. For such emigrants, the death rate on ships or once ashore was painful - up to one in six. This statistic places in perspective the death rate for trans-Atlantic convict ships of the Eighteenth Century - about one-in-seven.

There followed a period of Caribbean prosperity with the Cromwellian Commonwealth, but this ended with more interference from home during the Restoration, partly the result of the Navigation Acts which had been formulated in respect of the success of the Dutch in the maritime carrying trades. The defence of shipping lanes became an obvious necessity. (In September 1706, a huge tobacco fleet left Virginia, to encounter heavy weather and French privateers. Some 30 ships with nearly 15,000 pounds of tobacco were lost. The English market was anyway glutted and the result was a financial crisis for Virginia).
(John M. Hemphill, Virginia and the English Commercial System, 1689-1733. London, Garland, 1985. [Facsimile of a 1964 Ph. D thesis, Princeton University.]., p. 27.)

Slavery and the development of the English Whigs:

Between 1660-1700, England's dependence on profits from textile handling was transformed, new forces were taking up in the economy, especially in re-export trades, and about 30 per cent of goods handled came from the East or West Indies.
(Mintz, Sweetness, p. 63. E. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, p. 143.)

Meanwhile, considering the history of slavery often brings an air of unreality to mind. Unreality, because too many historians seem so accepting of slavery as an institution, and disapprove of it so little, which is an inappropriate attitude for "civilized" people to adopt to a system of unrelieved evil. Unreality, because of the sheer scale of "the Atlantic trade triangle". Unreality, because of the intensity of the continued violence and atrocity necessary to maintain slavery as an institution. Unreality because of the continued genealogical affront and shock given the bloodlines of particular African clans and tribes. Unreality because two religions, Islam and Christianity helped maintain slavery in Africa, and raised so little protest against it. Unreality because of the distortions of economic systems that were installed in "capitalism".

It is the distortions of economic outlook that I want to dwell on here. It is often suggested that "modern English capitalism" began with the Industrial Revolution, from the 1760s and 1770s; particularly with the spread of the new ideas promulgated by the Scottish philosopher and economist, Adam Smith. And this, only a decade or so before the English anti-slavery movement began to have effect. One problem with this view is that it gives almost a "new start" to capitalism in England, and incidentally allows one to avoid consideration of slavery. An alternative view exists, however, developed by Mintz, which fits facts better, a view that modern, "scientific" English/European capitalism began much earlier, on Caribbean sugar islands.

The "scientific" process in question was the crystallisation of sugar, a process which was strictly time-bound and conducted in specified physical conditions with specially designed equipment. This process was staffed by skilled slaves, that is, ultra-cheap labour. The crystallisation process divided the overall process of manufacturing sugar from its agricultural aspects and enabled marketable product to be delivered into ships, then to warehouses, to retailers, to consumers. Ranged around the production and marketing of sugar was a giant system of slave gathering and management completely reliant on shipping, sophisticated use of capital, and partly dependent on sub-markets, such as the market for cowrie shells, which were often supplied from areas such as the Maldives, well east of Africa.
(From the English perspective, by the 1670s, the French had made a major thrust into eastern trade. By 1601 they had sent only two ships for the Maldives, Ceylon, Sumatra and other places, and overall, the Dutch discouraged the French. In 1642, Richelieu had let sailors try to sail to Madagascar, found a colony, and trade there. Fort Dauphin was built. French ships sailed to Arabian and Indian ports. Meantime, French adventurers were going overland, through Asia Minor and by sea, such as Jean Baptiste Tavernier.)

By 1685, sugar beginning to be used with tea (used as early as 1658 at Sultaness Coffee House). Coffee and other beverages, tending to be served hot and sweetened, moved consumers away from the calorific values of ale and beers. Chocolate became more popular.
(Mintz, Sweetness, pp. 110-111.)

Between 1660-1700, England's dependence on profits from textile handling was transformed; new developments were seen in the economy, especially in re-export trades, and about 30 per cent of goods handled came from the East or West Indies.
(Mintz, Sweetness, pp. 110-111.)

There was "scarcely a manufacturing sector in England" which did not gain some business from connections with slavery, from the packaging of bulk food, to ironmongery, to weapons supply, to cotton handling, to the enjoyment of tea, sugar or tobacco. Slave shipping could be as easily regarded as a "nursery of seamen" as any other sector of English shipping, but that is not how maritime historians tend to view matters. Further, "capitalism" was corrupted at its heart by ultra-violent reliance on ultra-cheap labour, while wars might be waged over resources, such as the islands or sea lanes which sugar production required. We still live today with this distortion of a rational and realistic view of input-output costs of production. It is almost unreal: the truer costs of using labour were apparently hidden from the analysis of "economists" by something as visibly widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as slavery.

What is to be done with such an opinion? It becomes relatively simple. Name names, trace careers, examine family and business histories. It becomes clear in the history of English capitalism, that the history of the East India Company is not so free of the smell of slavery-tainted money, as historians suggest. The way money travelled in the City of London made the City a major location for the re-handling of funds which had earlier been associated with some aspect of "slave business", as can be seen in the careers of specific merchants or families who are conspicuous in the history of "Mercantilism". East India Company capital was by no means sealed off from connection with slavery. This chapter, then, is built around the possibilities that arise as names are named.

We find that on the question of a role for London capital in the slave trade, Bristol entered the slave trade soon after 1700 and later took a lead in opposing the Royal Africa Company's monopoly of 1713.
(Davis, Rise of the English shipping industry, p.37.)

Slavery was well established by 1700, and it is hardly likely that capital flows in the City of London knew nothing of money derived from business associated with slavery. So the question here becomes, is, did London capitalists invest in or promote Bristol-based slave business? If so, to what extent? This question is unanswerable if names are not named.

Charles II had made attempts to get the contract for the supply of slaves to Spanish, which was not granted to Britain till the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
(Between 1665-1670: Clark, Later Stuarts, p.328.)

- Dan Byrnes (otherwise indicated in these pages as -Editor)

Note: You will find even greater detail than is given here, for specific periods in American - English - Australian history, with regard to merchants, traders, bankers and financiers, as part of the website, The Blackheath Connection...

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