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You can find much greater detail for the timeframes 1550-1700 at a new website now almost finished ... THE BUSINESS OF SLAVERY... a website book also designed to bring genealogical studies up-to-date from 1530 to the present-day... as well as questions of merchant lives and activities... Click now to... The Business of Slavery (in English history).
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Merchants
and Bankers 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Reference item: Victor von Klarwill, (Ed.), The Fugger News-Letters, Being a Selection of Unpublished Letters from the Correspondents of the House of Fugger during the Years 1568-1605.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))
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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:
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periods in American - English - Australian history, with regard to
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