INTRODUCTION: ORIGIN STORIES
In 1609, Robert Gray, an Anglican preacher and a propagandist for the Virginia Company, writing from the comfort of his home in London, would recruit overseas adventurers by promising them “all happie and prosperous successe, which may either augment your glorie, or increase your wealth, or purchase your eternitie.”1 This was the same year the Sea Venture wrecked on the coast of Bermuda, while Jamestown’s settlers, faced with the prospect of starvation, were forced to resort to cannibalism. But like the children of Joseph, assured of a new homeland by Joshua, Gray’s readers were instructed to “flie out and looke abroad” for a kingdom providentially bestowed upon a great people, if only they were willing to cross seas, level mountains, and vanquish America’s “brutish savages.” His readers’ happiness had been discovered and rhetorically envisioned; now they would need only to realize it.2 Though recent ages in England had felt no urgent need for expansion, or so Gray asserts, “multitude,” or what we would now call overpopulation, occasions his biblically framed injunction to emigrate. Behind his vision of the New World as New Canaan is then a vision of an implied present gone wrong, or at the very least, a less than utopian England.
Indeed, GoodSpeedtoVirginia, like so many sermons advocating for early seventeenth-century settlement, overoptimistically imagines the early English colony as a solution or “remedie” to England’s demographic and social crises, particularly unemployment and dispossession.3 Gray describes the English body politic’s illness and ailments as follows:
Our multitudes like too much bloud in the body, infect our countrey with plague and pouertie, our land hath brought foorth, but it hath not milke sufficient in the breast thereof to nourish all those children which it hath brought forth, it affordeth neither employment nor preferment for those that depend vpon it: And hereupon it is, that many seruiceable men giue themselues to lewd courses,
as to robbing by the high way, theft, & cosoning, sharking vpon the land, piracie vpon the Sea, and so are cut off by shamefull and vntimely death: others liue prophanely, riotously, and idely, to the great dishonour of Almightie God, the detriment of the commonwealth.4
There are echoes of Thomas More’s near-sociological correlation of unemployment with crime here, yet in Gray’s tract, the country’s nottoo-distant past—like Nova Britannia—might also be said to be an alteraeterrae, or a more Golden Age, since this plagued nation once “yéelded vnto all that were in it a surplussage of all necessities” when the “Commons of our Country lay free and open for the poore Commons to inioy, . . . [and] there was roome enough in the land for euery man, so that no man néeded to encroch or inclose from another.”5 Contrasted with a contemporary England that has birthed more children than it can rear, an imaginary, romanticized, and irrevocably lost past offers a second fiction to counterbalance Virginia’s redemptive plantation. Gray gestures both backward to a feudal commons and outward to a land of limitless property (because not yet claimed) in order to envision a more peaceful, plentiful future commonwealth that will immortalize its settlers, purge England of its excesses and crimes, and all the while, “increase” the nation’s collective wealth.
I do not start with this tract because it offers a novel colonial or nationalist fiction, but because it might be said to exemplify the rhetorical rule. In the propaganda of early empire, idealized fictions of an English past and future belie an England made strange to itself —historically as well as geographically. Caught in the purgatorial limbo of its self-generated mythical histories and its fictions of millennial-colonial destiny, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is represented in a state of transitional indeterminacy. Gray is not alone in this regard; as Andrew Escobedo—building on Walter Benjamin’s, Benedict Anderson’s, Michel Foucault’s, and Michel de Certeau’s theories of homogeneous time—has explained, “Renaissance writers often find the national present eerily empty, temporally isolated from both past and future,” and consequently, they evoke “the impression of historical difference,” “temporal
provisionality,” and even “anachronism.”6 In other words, for many early modern subjects, just as for Hamlet, their moment seemed a “time out of joint.”7
This sense of self-alienation, this perception of difference, has several overdetermined causes that historians and cultural critics of the redubbed “early modern” era have long identified: demographic growth, yes, but also religious reformation, a royal consolidation of power, the epistemic shift occasioned by Atlantic exploration and discovery, and as Gray himself suggests, the economic transformations that marked the end of feudal Britain, like the enclosure of the commons. My concern in this study is mainly with the means by which England’s agrarian, mercantile, and imperial transformations created both crisis and hope, and crucially, an impression of systemic social difference that would generate a future-oriented historical consciousness articulated through fictions of state. This experience of the present as Other, as transitional and provisional because both territorially and historically estranged from an English past, I will suggest, prompted writers to compose totalizing, utopian fictions of difference and economic improvement, both ambivalent and earnest.
This is to say, the personal experience of social transformation—as loss or gain—need not only have triggered nostalgia; living memory often combined with a proleptic, worldly curiosity and, just as often, a violent will to make history anew. For every nostalgic writer like John Stow, who summoned “up the ghost of a past world to redress the unequal balance of the new,”8 there were also those who sought solutions in sites beyond London’s ruins, and others, still, who actively welcomed a changeable world, willfully leaving the known one behind. Colonial and/or utopian discourses like Gray’s sermon are a case in point: here, the New World is cast as a chance for both England and its subjects to begin again. What this suggests is that for promoters of exploration and expansion, time had a spatial character, and thus, the representation of other worlds could be put to use in the ideological construction of the future or as a means for unmaking the present. In an effort to
encourage mass migration and new social experiments abroad, the future was often projected beyond the shores of the British Isles. Utopian fictions, like the travel and colonial writing they discursively mimicked, begin with this spatio-temporal conceptualization, playfully posing the possibility of an England that is and is not yet, and while nowhere, it is simultaneously here and elsewhere. This book will argue, then, that the spatial irony of early English utopias formally and ideologically registers the transitional, indeterminate present of what would become a capitalist world economy. And moreover, that the novelty of early modern utopias—specifically, their tendency to privilege the systemic reform of institutions as the means for (re)forming both individuals and communities—must be understood as a representational engagement with historical change in the abstract as well as the felt, experiential sense.
Historicizing Utopia
In ArchaeologiesoftheFuture, Fredric Jameson defines utopiaas a “representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and the systemic nature of the social totality.”9 Jameson’s definition aptly captures what distinguishes most early modern utopias from previous traditions of the ideal society—namely, the emphasis on social systems as opposed to either philosophical idealism or prelapsarian myths—while still leaving the term utopiaopen enough to account for multivalent, interchangeable meanings as either a literary genre, historical project, mode of thinking, social desire, or even an innate human propensity. As Ruth Levitas has charted, utopia in its diverse incarnations has historically constituted a discursive concept, a literary form, and a social function aimed toward transformation, to which we might add, a communal project actualized in the world.10 While some literary critics have taken a more hard-line approach to the project of defining utopia, arguing like J. C. Davis for structural understandings of utopia against the “imprecision” of other writers, the “conjunctural,”11 or historical, approach to defining utopia has won out in recent years. Following
in the wake of Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s seminal UtopianThoughtin the Western World, critics have tended toward historical analyses which recognize the “persistence of symbolic and residual utopian forms, as well as the . . . ‘hot’ motivation generated by immediate socioeconomic” and political factors.12 Because the historical context against which utopias take shape leaves such an indelible imprint on the utopia in question, usually as the social order being reproached (or, as Louis Marin and Jameson have argued, neutralized),13 historical analysis becomes an unavoidable concern. In other words, despite the lingering, popular misconception of utopia as an implausible, other-worldly discourse, it is in fact a most historical, this-worldly form.
The narratives of Renaissance utopias tend to work by way of socio-spatial juxtaposition, representing the ideal through a critical interrogation of the real. In the spatial play of two islands or two societies—sometimes explicitly or sometimes only implicitly evoking the real—the utopia gives fictive form to an authoring context which Christopher Kendrick has identified as an overdetermined economic modality.14 In the case of sixteenth-century England, this modality involves the coexistence of late feudal and early capitalist productive forces. In fact, a long line of critics, including Karl Kautsky, Louis Marin, Jameson, Richard Halpern, and Kendrick, have noted as much, situating utopias (and Thomas More’s founding work in particular) within moments of historical conjuncture, with special concern for locating the “origins” of the genre—or at least its rebirth —in the origins of capitalism.15 This contextualization requires no great stretch of the imagination when one recalls what is arguably the most straightforward passage in More’s playfully ambiguous Utopia: Raphael Hythlodaeus’s attack on the “dispeopling” enclosures of Henrician England.16
In Book One, Hythlodaeus tells the literary personas of More and his humanist companion from Antwerp, Peter Giles, about a past conversation he had with a lawyer at the house of Cardinal Morton. He offers his views on the reputed justice of the English penal system in this dialogue within a dialogue. For Hythlodaeus, the
English execution of thieves is not only unjust, it is a facile remedy to the nation’s social ills.17 He instead suggests that rising rates of idleness, vagrancy, and crime in England are the result of peasant dispossession, not moral depravity. He cites the enclosure of arable land for pasture and the gentry’s greed as the real sources of England’s problems. In an ironic reversal that mocks the lawyer’s logic, he charges the sheep of England with an insatiable appetite that is ruining the livelihood of commoners and undermining the commonwealth’s stability:
Your sheep . . . that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour men themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns. For in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even some abbots though otherwise holy men, are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury without doing society any good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land free for the plough: they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns, keeping only the churches and those for sheep barns.18
There is a quick slippage here from England’s voracious sheep—who consume both the commonwealth and its populace—to a nobility that breeds overconsumption and acts according to an unnatural desire for ever-increasing profits. The carnivorous sheep of Book One stand in for enclosing—and metaphorically, cannibalistic— landlords and the idle rich of More’s England, who embody the moral corruption, religious error, and legal injustice of Tudor society. Hythlodaeus goes on to explain that as pales and hedges are thrown up by landlords, husbandmen are “thrust out on their own.”19 In what we would now identify as a systemic account of crime, More explains how necessity compels the dispossessed to wander, beg, or steal for their daily bread—regardless of the threat of capital punishment. Despite the humor and ambiguity that characterizes More’s humanist book, Hythlodaeus’s indictment seems to escape the ambiguous conceit of the work to present a moment of irrefutable critique.
In contrast, the Utopian island’s state of near full employment and communal property—as described in the second book of More’s Utopia (which was, famously, composed before the first)—quite explicitly outlines a society where theft is not only prevented, it is ostensibly not possible, given the absence of private property. In this way, More subtracts European practices from his imaginary island, and repurposes the masses of dispossessed English whom he discusses in Book One. As such, the fictional society of Utopiaoffers a vantage point from which to view the injustices of England itself, suggesting that to at least some extent, the utopian form emerges as a critical interrogation of what Marx would later call primitive accumulation—the historical theft of land that initiates the capitalist wage relation. Indeed, Marx himself would cite More’s satire on sheep in his chapter on “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital.20
For Kendrick, whose work is strongly influenced by Marin’s Utopics:TheSemiologicalPlay ofTextualSpaces, and by Jameson’s own extensions of Marin’s poststructuralist, psychoanalytical work, passages like the one above suggest that the liminal, quasi-feudal, and quasi-capitalist social relations of sixteenth-century England enable More to imagine “modes of production . . . in their interrelation.”21 Richard Halpern, too, in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, examines Utopia as an expression of capitalism’s preconditions, a context he describes throughout his book as a structural “decoding” and deterritorializing crisis of dispossession and “chronological dislocation,” which had not yet settled into a system of accumulation generated by the wage relation.22 In all of these accounts, More’s moment is one of conjuncture and overdetermination, in which a late feudal, relatively localized structure of production is increasingly defamiliarized and abstracted as the result of the rise of centralized monarchical rule, monetarization, commodity production, and the dispossession of petty producers.23 These readings of More’s book, then, highlight the spatial play of islands as a “neutralization” of sociohistorical contradictions—as opposed to an ideological resolution of them—
that is, at least in part, a figuration and a reaction to an English transitional context that was both a moment of loss and “progress.”
To locate the origins of More’s Utopiain the context of capitalism’s original moments is by now a well-rehearsed argument, especially among Marxist literary scholars and theorists. However, while Marin, Jameson, Kendrick, and Halpern serve as important, ground-clearing precursors to this study, they have by no means exhausted this position in their sophisticated, theoretical insights into the mechanism of Utopiaand its conditions of possibility. OtherEnglands will expand on this tradition in at least three specific ways: first, as a genuine genre study of early modern utopias that looks beyond More to consider a fuller range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century utopian responses to capitalism’s uneven development—including utopian works that represent more marginalized viewpoints on such changes; second, by looking beyond Marx and engaging throughout with competing histories of proto-capitalism offered (and disputed) by twentieth- and twenty-first-century British Marxist historians, world-systems theorists, and materialist feminists; and third, by thinking of the early modern utopian tradition and capitalism as always already implicated in an imperial imaginary that seeks outside solutions and spatial fixes to domestic crises. After all, the island and Atlantic imaginaries of most early modern utopian fiction suggests that even as early as 1516, domestic problems provoked oceanic explorations for solutions, as well as global alternatives and perspectives. In terms of methodology, then, this study will borrow from postcolonial, feminist, geocritical, and cultural materialist frameworks, in an effort to extend the Jamesonian utopia-intransition thesis to a developing, dialogical tradition of utopian literature.
In many Marxist readings, More’s book is treated as both the exception and the rule, which may explain why it remains for a survey of the genre of early English utopias to test out the transition thesis; Utopia is at one and the same time both the most brilliant because ambiguous and original English utopia andthe example that establishes a pattern to be adapted by nearly every other work in the tradition. While the novelty of More’s Utopia—a main point of
consideration in the first chapter of this study—partially explains our tendency to privilege it in discussions of the discourse, genredefining exercises and historical studies obviously require a comparative approach, both to reveal enduring trends and interrogate assumptions of uniformity. Consequently, I examine the idiosyncrasies in the form and content of each alternative social model, and approach utopia as a genre that is dialogically constructed in each intertextual iteration.24 Indeed, as capitalist practices of production, exchange, and expansion became more commonplace by the early seventeenth century, the concerns and forms of utopian literature also alter, often more explicitly aligning with an emerging ideology of improvement. Raymond Williams’s Keywordsexplains the sixteenth-century association of improvement with “profitable operations in connection with land,” but likewise notes that by the seventeenth century, the word was taking on a more general meaning of “making something better”25 a definition that tellingly suggests emergent capitalism’s own developing utopian rhetoric. In this comparison, the idealization and reorganization of labor and property will be shown to be a predominant, even primary feature of the early genre—not just of More’s Utopia—suggesting that historically pertinent problems like unemployment, dispossession, and the material and ideological crises of emergent capitalism drive the early modern utopian imagination. The very diverse perspectives and aesthetics of the utopian spatial narratives by Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Isabella Whitney, Aemelia Lanyer, Francis Bacon, Gabriel Plattes, and John Milton that are examined in this study all reinvent systems of labor and property, while productive forces are shown to create possibilities for new collectivities—whether these solidarities are national, regional, classbased, occupational, gendered, or religious. Early English utopias, I will seek to demonstrate, were uniquely systemic narratives, reimagining the socioeconomic changes witnessed by their authors. While the mechanism of utopia is crucial to this inquiry (in terms of elucidating the cultural work utopia performs by asserting the possibility of difference), a materialist approach to the tradition
seems to require more attention to the imaginary societies as they are schematized and charted in each text. The blueprint utopia, however, has been a favorite whipping boy in the twentieth-century turn against utopia—in anarchic and liberal critiques as much as in the anti-communist, Cold War variety. Russell Jacoby makes precisely this point in his study of Hannah Arendt’s, Karl Popper’s, and Isaiah Berlin’s writings on democracy, where the model orders of early utopias are often equated with a will to domination; utopianism here becoming virtually synonymous with national socialism or Marxist totalitarianism.26 In twenty-first-century recuperations of utopia, such as Jameson’s ArchaeologiesoftheFuture and Jacoby’s two books on the topic, TheEndofUtopia27 and Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, this equation between utopianism and authoritarianism is identified as a major obstacle to radical social movements and Leftist thought. Thus, Jameson and Jacoby rally the Left back to utopian thought by way of a strategic redefinition. Utopia is instead resuscitated by what Jameson—in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre—dialectically calls an “anti-antiutopianism,”28 and what Jacoby refers to as “iconoclastic utopianism,”29 a modeof utopian thinking or an impulse he traces to Frankfurt School intellectuals like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and (perhaps more convincingly) Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse. In Jacoby’s account, in particular, the reputation of utopia has been sullied by the “blueprint utopian tradition,” a static, self-limiting style of utopianism that strives for social engineering. Writing on the failures of this tradition, Jacoby states:
[B]lueprints not only appear repressive, they also rapidly become dated. Even with the best of wills, they rapidly tether the future to the past. In outfitting utopia, they order from the catalog of their day. With their schedules and seating arrangements, their utopias stand condemned not by their capaciousness, but by their narrowness, not by their extravagance but their poverty. History soon eclipses them.30
Jameson, as a literary critic, does not share in Jacoby’s wholesale dismissal of the blueprint form—after all, ArchaeologiesoftheFuture concerns the history of utopian science fiction—but his concern is
precisely with the way in which all utopian thought is eclipsed by history and tethered to the present. In this failure to imagine a wholly Other future, or in our poverty of imagination, Jameson finds a utopian impulse nonetheless. By calling attention to the limits on the thinkable or the representable, he argues that utopia “can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.”31
No contemporary thinker has done more for Utopian Studies than Fredric Jameson, but I will suggest here that the diminishment of blueprint utopias seems to risk erasing the imaginative power of literary utopias—especially early examples from the genre—and to overlook the remarkably sociological and systemic perspective of utopian fictions, peculiar especially to those authored in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To ignore the specificity of utopian plans is to overlook was what so novel about the early modern tradition: the idea that life is profoundly shaped by institutional formations and that scholars, poets, and dramatists might themselves reimagine centers of power, community formations, or geopolitical identity. I would add that descriptive utopian fictions, however dated or impoverished they may now appear, from our vantage point of hindsight, often uncannily schemed worlds that were to come—an assertion that the following readings of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (chapter 2), Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (chapter 3), and Gabriel Plattes’s Macaria (chapter 5) hope to bear out. As such, these works, along with more truly radical blueprints like Gerrard Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom, seem to possess a practical, historical function that hints not just at the limits of the possible or the epistemological but at a future in the making.
But just as importantly, I will also explore how early English fictions of alterity demonstrate a range of subjective and class responses to the lived experience of emergent capitalism, from ambivalent or staunch critiques to anxious anticipations of a more extensive, complete expansion of capitalist policies like enclosure, colonial dispossession, free trade, the division of labor, and the
gendering of labor and property. This is an insight that Marxist critics of utopia have tended to repress, preferring instead to cast utopia as an inherently anticapitalist form, spirit, or praxis.32 In viewing utopia as the antithesis of ideology (as Karl Mannheim does) or as the communal, compensatory mechanism that pairs with ideology in all cultural works (as Bloch and Jameson have argued), utopia is often conflated with a longing for communism.33 But as Marina Leslie points out, one of the defining characteristics of utopian literature is the tendency for each subsequent work within the genre to fashion itself as “an explicit or implicit rejection of the model offered by every other utopia,” meaning that utopias give expression to diverse and competing dreams for a better world.34 Indeed, a close look at the early tradition of utopian writing also stands as a reminder that capitalism has historically required its own utopias, if for nothing else than the winning of subjects’ consent to its cause.35 Especially in a moment of capitalism’s genesis, an “improving,” mercantile or imperial vision of another Britain possesses a kind of anticipatory power that puts literary innovation at the service of an emergent social order. This is not to claim, as was once the fashion, that Renaissance utopias possess a prophetic power, but instead to argue that culture possesses a social function that intervenes in historical praxis just as much as it represents it. One need only consider Vasco de Quiroga’s settlement in New Spain, or Oliver Cromwell’s campaign against the Irish, or the founding of the Royal Society to recognize that writers like More, Spenser, and Bacon exerted their own kind of influence. This study, then, will focus predominantly on the early history of capitalist utopias, and in some chapters, examine utopian fictions as a literary counterpart to early political economy and colonial propaganda.
Raymond Williams’s cultural materialist scheme is therefore an important source for this study of early English utopias. While Williams defends the importance of epochal analysis, he also insists that cultural critics must recognize not only “‘stages’ and ‘variations’ but the internal dynamic relations of any actual process.”36 In discussing the role of culture within social formations, Williams
argues that “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.”37 In other words, culture is composed not only of dominant ideologies but also of oppositional or alternative experiences, meanings, desires, and beliefs. In Williams’s account, counter-hegemonic possibilities include the residual ways of living and thinking held over from past societies, as well as “emergent” forms or values. Williams’s concept of structures of feeling is therefore particularly useful for the study of utopia, especially when one considers Bloch’s theory of utopia as a form of “anticipatory consciousness.”
38 Like Bloch, Williams complicates old notions of ideology, which even in twentieth-century redeployments too readily collapse culture, politics, and belief into a reflective expression of class position. Williams, however, recognizes modes of production as historical formations in process, and just as crucially, he identifies culture as a site of social struggle in which existing contradictions can be contested or torn asunder just as easily as resolved. While works of art are “explicit and finished forms,” Williams explains that “art itself is never in the past tense” because it belongs to a historically specific moment that is only ever experienced in process.39 Thus, he cautions that the literary critic should be careful not to assume the primacy of art either as an ideological, fixed form or as a purely subjective or idiosyncratic aesthetic. He argues instead that art, language, and literature are “inalienable elements of a social material process,” and that they are active agents in constituting practical consciousness. The plurality of structures is significant, for as Williams defines them, structures of feeling concern “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent to private dissent.”40 In this sense, cultural works can possess an anticipatory impulse; they need not belong to an already established, solidified social formation with its congealed ideologies, but can function as a kind of “pre-emergence,” as meanings that
press the limits of consciousness and semantic possibility.41 According to Williams, it is in moments of dynamic historical transformation that structures of feeling proliferate, and culture becomes a site for working through these upheavals.
Utopia, as a genre of and about social transformation, then, seems to be a privileged site for exploring the way in which early modern subjects represented and responded to the social, religious, ethical, and geopolitical changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We might even say that early modern utopias, as fictional blueprints, expressions of longing, spatial fantasies, or social criticisms, are structures of feeling par excellence. Though utopias often appear as static, fixed forms, they may be better understood as origin stories; utopias project new worlds, and each of these worlds registers its own historical situation as one of novelty, conjuncture, rupture, estrangement, contradiction, struggle, and renewal. Consequently, an inquiry into the economic transformations and instabilities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can help us explain the defining characteristics of the then young literaryfictional genre now half a millennium old. In what follows here, and in the ensuing chapters, I will orchestrate a dialogue between theoretical, hermeneutic traditions of Marxist literary criticism and their empiricist, historicist siblings, thus bringing the transition debate to bear on the utopia-in-transition thesis, so as to expand the scope of both the contextualization and character of the emergent literary form.
Primitive Accumulation and the Transition Debate
The new world, which is painfully rising in so many English villages, is a tiny mirror of the new world which, on a mightier stage, is ushering modern history in amidstorms andconvulsions.
R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the SixteenthCentury, 408.
A debate among economic and mainly Marxist—historians over the conditions and defining characteristics of capitalism’s earliest moments has long concerned the question of whether or not
capitalism began in the English countryside or on a “mightier stage.” The transition debate, as it is often called, can be traced back to Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s competing understandings of what they, respectively, called “prior accumulation” and “primitive accumulation.” In TheWealthofNations, Adam Smith had proposed that capitalism’s beginnings lay in a stockpile of wealth accumulated through individual acts of thrift, frugality, and ultimately, selfinterest. In Smith’s optimistic and rather hypothetical account,42 accumulated wealth would generate trade and a specialization of the labor force that, in turn, would fuel capitalist economic development. Marx, however, interrogates Smith’s account, in the postscript to volume one of Capital, by historicizing “so-called primitive accumulation,” or the extra-economic form of accumulation that precedes capitalist accumulation proper. For our present purposes, Marx’s definition of the preconditions for capitalist development can be generally summarized as the transformation of communal property into private property, and un-free, usually serf labor into wage labor. What this entailed (and in some instances, continuesto entail) is the expropriation of the masses from their means of production, and thus, their conversion into a class of wage laborers, dispossessed of land and no longer direct producers of their own subsistence. Principal instances of this in early modern England, according to Marx, included the enclosure movement and the dissolution of the monasteries, but also colonial projects, which served as “the basis of the capitalist mode of production” in his discussion.43 In the colonies, according to Marx, an entire surplus population was also created, forcibly removed from the soil and their own labor power, then resting in the hands of a small body of capitalists backed by a mother country.44 Importantly, in Marx’s account, force—not frugality—plays a pivotal role in the transformation of land into property and of peasants and natives into tenants, wage laborers, and in the case of the colonies, slaves. The difference between Marx’s and Smith’s theories of capitalism’s origins, then, has as much to do with geographical scope and
empirical method as with their overall competing assessments of capitalist economic development.45
The debate about capitalism’s origins then found new form in the mid-twentieth century; this time among Marxists themselves. In 1950, the American economist and co-founder of the Monthly Review Paul Sweezy published a critique in the journal Science and Society of Maurice Dobb’s then recent book Studies in the Development of Capitalism. Dobb’s book offered a neoclassical, Marxist account of the transition in England, proposing that capitalism’s beginnings required the internal collapse of feudalism itself. In a dialectical argument, Dobb saw contradictions within the existing mode of production—in other words, class struggle—as the engine of historical change. What he was essentially critiquing was the commonplace assumption that capitalism was a product of increasing trade and urbanism—a theory that later voices in the transition debate would refer to as the commercialization model.46 For Dobb, the widening of the market was not a “sufficient condition” for the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism;47 instead, he sought an explanation in “internal relationships” which stemmed from the “inefficiency of Feudalism as a system of production” for increasing ruling class revenue without exhausting or “squeezing” the labor force.48
Sweezy’s contention was that to understand proto-capitalism one needed a wider lens whose scope looked beyond Europe to also consider the influence of foreign trade, especially in the Mediterranean but also in the New World and Asia. In essence, what Sweezy proposed was that there was never such a thing as a nationally circumscribed capitalism. For Sweezy, long-distance trade was “a creative force, bringing into existence a systemof production for exchange alongside the old feudal system of production for use.”49 This initial exchange kindled a series of articles, subsequently collected in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1978), in which Sweezy and Dobb, among others, articulated competing accounts that concerned much more than capitalism’s point of origin; despite the empirical emphasis of both writers, what was
always at stake in the Sweezy-Dobb exchange was the ability to predict capitalism’s future demise, or in other words, the transition outof capitalism. Over the course of the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, Sweezy and Dobb’s debate has gradually drawn in many Marxist economists and historians, including (but not limited to) Rodney Hilton, Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, André Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Silvia Federici, and Jim Blaut. The crux of the debate continues to be the question of capitalism’s primemover or historicallever.50 Brenner and Wood, for instance, follow Dobb in viewing the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a matter of internal or immanent development, with its beginnings in agrarian England, whereas dependency and worldsystems theorists Frank and Wallerstein have explored the transition as a condition of global productive forces and the transfer of wealth from the south to the north.
More than half a century after Sweezy and Dobb’s exchange, the global origins explanation remains a controversial position, owing mainly to the intervention of Brenner in the late 1970s. When Brenner published “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” in Past and Present in 1976 and, fast on its heels a year later, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism” in the New Left Review, the popularity of Third World theory was on the rise.51 The Vietnam War had recently ended and theorists like Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong attracted radical thought to the study of social development, to some extent displacing Eurocentric views of social causation and historical progress.52 Frank, for instance, challenged the tendency of development theory to portray modernization as a process of capitalist incorporation. He did so by examining underdevelopment, predominantly in Latin America, as the legacy of conquest and the result of the “structural inequality and temporal unevenness of capital accumulation.”53 Frank and Wallerstein challenged dualist conceptions of the developed and undeveloped world, arguing that the discoveries of 1492 had played a crucial role in beginning a process, however uneven, of world
integration under an increasingly totalizing system of production and exchange. In their accounts, capitalism is recognized as possessing geographic centers of concentration and transfers of surplus, along with unequal productive relations that aim toward profit maximization. Here, capitalism depends on a global commercial network, where, in Frank’s scheme, the “satellite’s” internal economy serves the “metropolis,” or in Wallerstein’s terminology, the “periphery’s” surplus supports the “core.”54 Brenner, however, was to challenge, and quite provocatively so, these macroscopic studies of commercial circulation and imperialism as the mainsprings of capitalist social relations.
Advancing a neo-Dobbian position, Brenner located a crucial confusion in the commercial models of transition. He argued that even though the work of Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein reversed Smith’s positive appraisal of trade by highlighting how “growth” also depended structurally on backward economic change in the colonies, these theorists nevertheless retained an emphasis on trade as the defining characteristic of a capitalist economy. Brenner took issue with this characterization, claiming that it emphasized “productive forces” (or the means of capital accumulation) over “social relations of production,” which Marx, in his later writings, such as the Grundrisse, prioritized as the fundamental characteristic of capitalism.55 The primary category here is class; capitalism’s fundamental character is its organization of class power that, Brenner explains, entails both a relation to property and a relationship of surplus-extraction.56 As he quite rightly points out in his studies, accumulation does not inevitably produce capital, for trade, slavery, and plunder long predated the changes of early modernity, and thus, it cannot serve as an adequate definition of a capitalist economy.57 Brenner’s claim, then, is that if we understand capitalism as a set of social relations, its origins must be located in a historically specific region where labor first became a commodity. For him, this recognition gives further support to Dobb’s claim that capitalism was the consequence of agrarian dispossession in early modern Western Europe, and particularly England, beginning in the
late fifteenth century. Following the lead of Marx in Capital, it is the three-tiered English landlord, tenant farmer, and free wage laborer class organization that he sees as the earliest instantiation of capitalist social relations, whereby the middle class of yeomanry, in particular, is positioned as a driving force of capitalist innovation.58 In Brenner’s account of primitive accumulation, therefore, his concern is mainly with the centuries-long disintegration of feudalism, a process that resulted from internal contradictions, class struggle, and the extra-economic force inherent to a coercive organization of labor.
There are several levels of distinction, then, between the position of Brenner and the historical narratives of Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein. In Brenner’s account, capitalism is fundamentally an internal consequence of feudalism rather than an external pressure that disrupts it. Dobb’s and Brenner’s views also represent capitalism as a social structure particular to England, and agrarian in its first form rather than of an immediately transnational or urban character.59 As many have noted, Marx himself was not very clear on this matter. For example, in chapter 26 of Capital, Marx states that “the starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted in a change in the form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation.”60 This casts primitive accumulation as a process of proletarianization in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but chapter 31 provides another account, and one of Marx’s most forceful:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.61 Here Marx suggests that capitalism chiefly depends on the commercial and imperial outcomes of the Age of Discovery, not
singularly in the emergence of accumulation by expropriation in England.
This study does not propose to solve these debates or to locate a precise, singular origin of capitalism, if such a thing is even possible. Yet it will suggest that to explore primitive accumulation as an internal process is to tell only half of the story. Simply put, there is something wanting in Dobb’s and Brenner’s accounts of capitalism’s origin: that something likely emerging from a deductive reasoning that privileges Marx’s theoretical definition of capitalism above a messy history of uneven and gradual economic struggle. England was comparatively late to engage in colonial ventures, and thus, the social relations of capitalism were likely first experienced there as internal acts of dispossession, such as the privatization of the commons and the enclosure of copyhold land, but the accelerated development of these property changes indisputably required external zones of expropriation and the exploitation of non-English populations in order to become a mode of production. Stuart Hall has also challenged exclusively European accounts of what he describes as “organic transformation,” given that in many places the “profound integument of capitalist society, economy, and culture had been imposed by conquest and colonization.”62 And as Crystal Bartolovich explains, if “the ‘England first’ position continues to have considerable purchase in debates about the emergence of capitalism, problems remain when we attempt to determine an absolute distinction (much less priority) of ‘domestic’ over what we might call the ‘oceanic’—or global—aspects of this process.”63 There is also an incompleteness in the focus on the agrarian origin of early capitalism that has as much to do with our contemporary vantage point—that of a capitalism more globalized than ever and highly dependent on state force for its expansion by expropriation—as it does with Brenner’s tendency to find the prime mover at the expense of other economic changes that were (as even Brenner acknowledges) preconditions, attendants, and drivers of capitalist accumulation proper. Although Brenner’s account of emergent capitalism posits the dispossession of the English peasantry as
capitalism’s fundamental starting point, we are still plagued with a nagging question that Brenner must partially skirt in order to preserve the “Marxism” of his position: what causes gave rise to this transformation in class relations? In fact, to answer this question, he finds himself endorsing the demographic model he initially claims to critique, while inevitably, he must acknowledge that the Continental demand for wool encouraged English landlords to lease, enclose, and improve land.64
Moreover, the internal hypothesis might be said to fetishize a Western narrative of progressive development that assumes English capitalism possessed a singular character and that it began in a singular way. This is a problem of narrative that, in fact, almost all Marxists face in the telling of a history determined by past and present events. When one reads Brenner (and to be fair, any other voice in the transition debate, Marx included), origins and ruptures inevitably seem tied to something prior. Every time a historical cause is revealed, new questions and a new search for origins follow in tandem. The fantasy of a pure origin or a simple rupture has a real attraction for certain participants in the debate (as it does for utopians), as if by locating the precise place and time of capitalism’s conception, one could simply reverse its expansion or never repeat the same process. This is certainly not to trivialize such a search for capitalism’s beginnings, but when Ellen Meiksins Wood insists on the singular “origin of capitalism” in her book with this title,65 one is left wondering: can capitalism be denaturalized only by pointing to its historically specific scene of birth? For this reason, I am also compelled by Giovanni Arrighi’s heterodox history of capitalism’s “systemic cycles of accumulation” and its pluralist forms—such as state monopoly capitalism and cosmopolitan finance capitalism— which in his account has many birthplaces (fifteenth-century Venice and Genoa, especially) and which reoccurs and constantly adapts on the world-historical scene.66
The value of the transition debate, I will suggest in this study, lies precisely in its form as a debate. As with most bodies of scholarship, the sum is larger than its parts. For anyone interested in the study of
early modern culture, this debate covers a context of widespread economic changes—agrarian, mercantile, and imperial—while explaining and describing the socially transformative processes that defined the material conditions of cultural production. Taken together, the contributions to the transition debate reveal that late feudal and capitalist histories of development require many narratives and multiple perspectives of narration. Because utopias, too, often adopt the form of fictional debate, and themselves imagine alternative systems of labor and property that emphasize historical and geographical difference, the utopian genre, too, offers special insight into capitalism’s contested, uneven, and displaced origins.
I offer this initial brief sketch of this debate (with the promise to elaborate in the coming chapters) because the transition debate has had a relatively minor impact on the discipline of literary studies. This is especially true in the field of early modern cultural criticism, even though it was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the transition from feudalism to capitalism so crucially played out in England.67 There are a few notable exceptions to this rule,68 but despite the historical turn of cultural criticism in the last three decades and all the intellectual hype surrounding interdisciplinarity, economic history of the Marxist variety still tends to be cast as the Other of a self-reflexive, synchronically minded literary historiography. To some extent, this is the legacy of New Historicism, which, for all its attention to the “historicity of texts and the textuality of history,”69 has often dismissed Marxist history as a grand narrative, preferring Jean-François Lyotard’s petits recits over the macro-minded, economic studies of Marxist scholarship.70
For instance, although Lisa Jardine’s Worldly Goods considers the impact of what she calls “bravura consumerism” and commercial expansion on the cultural achievements of the European Renaissance, Jardine makes no mention of any Marxist historian writing about this moment, though Fernand Braudel and the Annales school are warmly received.71 Even more pointedly, Halpern’s The PoeticsofPrimitive Accumulation, one of the most important studies
to situate early modern English culture within the prehistory of capitalism, still manages practically to ignore the transition debate. Halpern’s study sensibly argues for the “complementarity of Marxist and non-Marxist approaches,”72 but voices within the debate are noticeably absent from his account, as is a discussion of primitive accumulation beyond the shores of England. Halpern references Dobb’s founding study in just one sentence, only to dismiss it as “reductivist historicism” and an “ill-advised attempt” to apply Marx’s theoretical model of primitive accumulation to a historical “stage.”73 Differentiating his own understanding of primitive accumulation from “stagist” models, Halpern explains that the really decisive transformation that is, the institution of capitalist productive relations occurs only in nascent and non-dominant forms. What does characterize this period is the development of various preconditions for capitalist production the spread of markets, the development of merchant’s capital, the creation of a dispossessed class within a complex conjuncture that combines both the late mutation and the partial dissolution of the feudal economy.74
As this passage suggests, Halpern prefers Louis Althusser’s concept of overdetermination to explain this moment of nascent capitalism. But one of the intentions of this study is to demonstrate that most historians participating in the transition debate have themselves consistently troubled a neat, supersessionary narrative of historical development, understanding the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as precisely a period of struggle over different modes of production and alternative social possibilities.75 Dobb himself stressed this very point:
In our preoccupation with the definition of an economic system, we must not let it be implied that the frontiers between systems are to be drawn across a page of history as a sharp dividing line. As those who distrust all such talk of epochs have correctly insisted, systems are never in reality to be found in their pure form, and in any period of history elements and characteristics both of preceding and of succeeding periods are to be found, sometimes mingled in extraordinary complexity. Important elements of each new society, although not necessarily the complete embryo of it, are contained within the womb of the old; and relics of an old society survive for long into the new.76
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Map of Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts, adapted from a modern chart for comparison with Champlain’s map of Port St. Louis, to which it is adjusted as nearly as possible in scale, extent, and meridian
Reproduced from the Champlain Society edition of The Works of Samuel de Champlain, plate LXXIV. The compass is Champlain’s, which is supposed to be set to the magnetic meridian, but the true north is shown by the arrow.
Champlain’s Plymouth visit occurred in 1605, two years after Pring’s expedition. He had spent several days in Gloucester Harbor and a night in Boston Harbor, where he had watched the building of a dugout canoe by the Indians. Coming down the South Shore, his bark grounded on one of the numerous ledges that dot that portion of Massachusetts Bay “If we had not speedily got it off, it would have overturned in the sea, since the tide was falling all around, and there were five or six fathoms of water. But God preserved us and we
anchored” near a cape, which perhaps was Brant Rock. “There came to us fifteen or sixteen canoes of savages. In some of them there were fifteen or sixteen, who began to manifest great signs of joy, and made various harangues, which we could not in the least understand. Sieur de Monts sent three or four in our canoe, not only to get water but to see their chief, whose name was Honabetha.— Those whom we had sent to them brought us some little squashes as big as the fist which we ate as a salad like cucumbers, and which we found very good—We saw here a great many little houses scattered over the fields where they plant their Indian corn.”
The expedition now sailed southward into Plymouth Harbor. “The next day [July 18] we doubled Cap St. Louis, so named by Sieur de Monts, a land rather low, and in latitude 42° 45’. The same day we sailed two leagues along a sandy coast as we passed along which we saw a great many cabins and gardens. The wind being contrary, we entered a little bay [Plymouth] to await a time favorable for proceeding. There came to us two or three canoes, which had just been fishing for cod and other fish, which are found there in large numbers. These they catch with hooks made of a piece of wood, to which they attach a bone in the shape of a spear, and fasten it very securely. The whole thing has a fang-shape, and the line attached to it is made out of the bark of a tree. They gave me one of their hooks, which I took as a curiosity. In it the bone was fastened on by hemp, like that in France, as it seemed to me. And they told me that they gathered this plant without being obliged to cultivate it; and indicated that it grew to the height of four or five feet. This canoe went back on shore to give notice to their fellow inhabitants, who caused columns of smoke to rise on our account. We saw eighteen or twenty savages, who came to the shore and began to dance.” Was this a reminiscence of dancing to the guitar for Pring’s sailor, perhaps? “Our canoe landed in order to give them some bagatelles, at which they were greatly pleased. Some of them came to us and begged us to go to their river. We weighed anchor to do so, but were unable to enter on account of the small amount of water, it being low tide, and were accordingly obliged to anchor at the mouth. I went ashore where I saw many others who received us very cordially. I made also an examination of the river, but saw only an arm of water extending a
short distance inland, where the land is only in part cleared up. Running into this is merely a brook not deep enough for boats except at full tide. The circuit of the Bay is about a league. On one side of the entrance to this Bay there is a point which is almost an island, covered with wood, principally pines, and adjoins sand banks which are very extensive. On the other side the land is high. There are two islets in this bay, which are not seen until one has entered and around which it is almost dry at low tide. This place is very conspicuous from the sea, for the coast is very low excepting the cape at the entrance to the bay We named it Port du Cap St. Louis, distant two leagues from the above cape and ten from the Island Cape [Gloucester]. It is in about the same latitude as Cap St. Louis.”
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CAPTAIN
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JOHN SMITH’S MAP OF NEW ENGLAND, 1614
Reproduced from the Pequot Collection, Yale University Library
Champlain’s map of Plymouth Harbor, which is reproduced herewith, was a quick sketch which he drew from the end of Long Beach after his vessel went aground there, probably during the afternoon of their arrival. Since the expedition stayed in Plymouth Harbor only over one night, too much accuracy of detail must not be expected of it. Saquish Head is represented as an island, and no
distinction is made between Eel River and Town Brook. Plymouth Harbor has probably shoaled a good deal since the early seventeenth century, since it would now be impossible to find a seven-fathom anchorage anywhere except immediately around Duxbury Pier Light; yet Champlain’s anchorage in the middle of Plymouth Bay is so designated. Martin Pring had even described a landlocked anchorage in seven fathoms. The chief value of Champlain’s little map, aside from confirming the locality, is its evidences of very extensive Indian houses and cornfields occupying much of the slopes above the shore all the way around from the Eel River area through Plymouth and Kingston to the shores of Duxbury Bay.
The expedition left Plymouth on July 19 and sailed around the shores of Cape Cod Bay before rounding the Cape and arriving the next day at Nauset Harbor in Eastham. During several days’ stay there, a French sailor was killed by the Indians in a scuffle over a kettle. The following year, when Champlain returned to Cape Cod, a more serious disaster occurred. Four hundred Indians at Chatham ambushed and massacred five Frenchmen in a dawn raid, then returned and disinterred their bodies after burial. The French took vengeance by coolly slaughtering half a dozen Indians a few days later. But, like the English adventurers, the French then abandoned Massachusetts and never returned. Champlain reported that in all his travels he had found no place better for settlement than Nova Scotia. Two years later, changes of plans in France transferred him to Quebec, where he spent the remainder of his career laying the foundations of French Canada along the St. Lawrence. Massachusetts Indians had again rebuffed the threat of European penetration.
We have already noted that while Champlain was in Massachusetts, George Waymouth and Martin Pring had been exploring Maine. The coördination of these exploratory voyages was largely the work of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a diligent organizer of New England colonial preparations. In 1606 the administrative architecture of the English colonial movement in America was built. King James gave charters to two companies, the London Company
and the Plymouth Company, providing for settlements respectively in what came to be known as “Southern” and “Northern” Virginia. The successful colony at Jamestown was founded by the London Company in 1607. The coincident attempt by the Plymouth Company, organized by Gorges, and the Popham and Gilbert families, to found a colony on the Kennebec River in Maine failed after a year’s trial. This Sagadahoc Colony failure was a blow to New England colonization, the effects of which lasted for a generation, since the impression of New England as a subarctic area, impractical for settlement, remained in English minds for many years. It needs to be emphasized, however, that despite this setback to English hopes, the loss of fortunes invested in the enterprise, and the breakdown of the Plymouth Company produced by this failure, the enterprise had come much nearer to success than Humphrey Gilbert’s attempted colony in Newfoundland. Much was learned about techniques of living in the new country, getting along with Indians, and the need for continuous replacement and supply. These ventures were hazardous: they required courage, teamwork, strong leadership, and personnel of heroic wisdom and tenacity.
After the Sagadahoc failure, the pattern of English activity on the New England coast reverted for five years to the former state of occasional trading and fishing voyages. The only events that touched even remotely on Plymouth history were Cape Cod visits of three men from different areas of activity. In 1609 Henry Hudson landed briefly on Cape Cod on his way from Maine to his explorations of the Hudson River which led to the Dutch claims in that region. Samuel Argall from Virginia in 1610 likewise saw Cape Cod on a voyage designed to supplement Jamestown’s failing food supplies with New England codfish. And in 1611 Captain Edward Harlow, sent on an exploring voyage to the Cape Cod region by the Earl of Southampton, seems to have had five skirmishes with Indians on Cape Cod and the Vineyard. Harlow’s vessel was attacked by canoes while at anchor, and lost a long boat being towed astern to the Indians, who thereupon beached her, filled her with sand and successfully prevented the English from retaking her Harlow returned to England with little except five captured natives. Among
them was Epenow, an Indian whose treachery later accounted for the death of Captain Thomas Dermer.
In 1613 the French fur-trading activities on the Bay of Fundy were supplemented by an ambitious project to establish a Jesuit missionary colony in that region. But this second French attempt to colonize Maine was nipped in the bud after only a few weeks by Sir Samuel Argall’s armed cruiser, sent from Virginia for the purpose. This ended the threat of France as a colonial power in New England except for occasional incursions into eastern Maine.
The year 1614 opened with a visitor to Plymouth from a new quarter. Dutch fur traders, following in the wake of Henry Hudson’s 1609 discoveries, were already at work in the Hudson River. Two of them, Adrian Block and Hendrick Christiansen, were about to weigh anchor from Manhattan and depart for the Netherlands with a cargo of furs in the fall of 1613 when one of their ships caught fire and burned to the water’s edge. Both crews therefore stayed over the winter on Manhattan Island, and there built a new “yacht,” the Onrust, which they felt must be given a shakedown cruise before attempting the Atlantic crossing. Block therefore sailed her eastward, the first passage of Long Island Sound by a European, and explored the Connecticut shore and rivers, Narragansett Bay and the Cape Cod region, to all of which he laid claim for the Dutch as “Nieu Nederlant.” Contemporary Dutch accounts offer us little of interest about the Massachusetts phases of this voyage except some sailing directions in Massachusetts Bay that suggest that Adrian Block sailed from a place called Pye Bay, usually identified with Salem, to the Lizard on the English Channel. But the Figurative Map which he published in 1616 as a part of his report to the States General of the Netherlands contains many additional details to which Dutch names are applied, including a wholly unmistakable outline of Plymouth Harbor, here called Cranes Bay. From this it seems obvious that Block did visit Plymouth in the spring of 1614, and may be considered as yet another of its explorers. It would be interesting to know whether any of the Leyden Pilgrims, living in the Netherlands for four years after the map’s publication, ever saw it before setting out for the New World. In view of the controversy over whether the
Pilgrims were indeed headed for the Hudson River, it is interesting to note that this map of Adrian Block’s would have been the most accurate one available to them as a guide to the New York region, yet there is nothing in the Pilgrim chronicles to suggest that they had it with them on the Mayflower.
Also in 1614 there came sailing into Plymouth Harbor a man whose map and writings were used by the Pilgrims, though he said that they refused his advice and his leadership. Captain John Smith would like to have been the founder of New England, but had to be content to be its Hakluyt. He named New England, and “Plimouth,” and Massachusetts, and the Charles River and Cape Ann—at least he was the first to publish these names. He produced the best known map of New England of that early period. He spent the last seventeen years of his life writing the history of New England voyages and pamphleteering for its settlement. Yet a succession of misfortunes prevented him from ever revisiting the coast for which he developed such enthusiasm during his three months’ voyage in 1614. Smith had already been governor of Virginia and had experience in what it took to plant a successful colony. His writings had unquestionably a strong influence on the Massachusetts colonial undertakings, particularly since he was not afraid of Indians and since he recognized the difference between the bleak coast of Maine and the relatively better-situated Massachusetts area as a site for colonial development.
John Smith arrived at Monhegan Island in Maine in April, 1614, with two vessels. In the smaller of these he spent his time exploring and mapping the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod, much as Champlain had done nine years earlier Thomas Hunt in the larger vessel remained at Monhegan, fishing. Reaching “the Countrie of the Massachusetts, which is the Paradise of all those parts,” Smith entered Boston Harbor. “For heere are many Iles all planted with corne: groves, mulberries, salvage gardens, and good harbours: the coast is for the most part high clayie, sandie cliffs. The Sea Coast as you passe, shews you all along large corne fields and great troupes of well proportioned people; but the French, having remained heere neere six weeks left nothing for us.” At Cohasset he wrote: “We
found the people in those parts verie kinde, but in their furie no lesse valiant. For upon a quarrell we had with one of them, hee onely with three others, crossed the harbor of Quonahassit to certaine rocks whereby wee must passe; and there let flie their arrowes for our shot, till we were out of danger,—yet one of them was slaine, and another shot through his thigh.” His description of Plymouth, which was variously known as Patuxet or Accomack, immediately follows the Cohasset episode quoted above: “Then come you to Accomack, an excellent good harbor, good land, and no want of anything except industrious people. After much kindnesse, upon a small occasion, wee fought also with fortie or fiftie of those; though some were hurt, and some were slaine; yet within an hour after they became friends.” In another passage he adds, “we tooke six or seven of their Canowes which towards the evening they ransomed for Bever skinnes.” Apparently Smith supplied a motive for the resumption of friendship, knowing that the Indians could be bought off. This was the kind of Indian policy Myles Standish used at times; in fact there is a certain resemblance between the two men. In any case Smith left for England with a cargo of beaver, and the Indians of Plymouth got back their canoes.
But the next visitor to Plymouth, still in 1614, did not leave as good an impression. With Smith departed for England, Thomas Hunt appeared in Plymouth Harbor in Smith’s larger vessel. Not content with a hold full of Monhegan codfish, Hunt now kidnaped twenty or more Plymouth natives, stowed them below decks, and sailed away to Spain, where he sold them into slavery at Malaga, “for £20 to a man.” This was a typical seaman’s private venture, or side bet to the profits of the codfish cargo. John Smith wrote that “this wilde act kept him [Hunt] ever after from any more emploiment in those parts.” Samuel Purchas termed Hunt’s “Savage hunting of Savages a new and Devillish Project.” One can imagine what bitterness grew toward the English among Massachusetts Indians after this demonstration of European barbarism.
The quirks of history are at times worthy of the most fantastic fiction. Thomas Hunt’s universally condemned crime happened to produce one result which proved of great advantage to the Pilgrims.
Among the twenty wretched Plymouth natives whom Hunt sold at the “Straights of Gibralter” was an Indian named Squanto. Then began a five-year European education which trained Squanto for his irreplaceable services to the Pilgrims as their interpreter. Squanto was rescued by good Spanish friars, “that so they might nurture [him] in the Popish religion.” In some unknown manner he reached England and continued his education for several years in the household of one John Slany, an officer of the Newfoundland Company. His subsequent travels will appear in our discussion of Thomas Dermer’s voyage in 1619. It is sufficient at this point to note that perhaps the greatest blessing ever bestowed upon the Pilgrim Fathers was the gift of a treacherous English shipmaster, a Spanish Catholic friar, and an English merchant adventurer.
Things were going badly in another area of Massachusetts during that eventful year of 1614. As though the expeditions of Block, Smith, and Hunt were not sufficient for one year, Nicholas Hobson now made his appearance at Martha’s Vineyard. Sent out by Sir Ferdinando Gorges in an attempt to establish a fur-trading post in that region, Hobson was using the Indian, Epenow, captured by Harlow’s expedition in 1611, as his pilot through the shoals of Nantucket Sound. Epenow cleverly contrived his escape, and a fullscale battle ensued. “Divers of the Indians were then slain by the English, and the Master of the English vessel and several of the Company wounded by the Indians.” Hobson’s party “returned to England, bringing nothing back with them, but the News of their bad Success, and that there was a War broke out between the English and the Indians.” Increase Mather later remarked that “Hunt’s forementioned Scandal, had caused the Indians to contract such a mortal Hatred against all Men of the English Nation, that it was no small Difficulty to settle anywhere within their Territoryes.”
It was at this point in history that another strange series of events took place, of much more far-reaching significance. With English expeditions defeated and sent back to England emptyhanded, with an Indian war “broke out,” fate, or Providence, or whatever you call that destiny which seems at times to intercede for civilization in its remorseless quest for progress, now took a hand.
Some European disease, to which the natives had no resistance and the Europeans complete immunity, swept the coasts of Massachusetts clear of Indians. Suddenly it appeared in all the river villages along the Mystic, the Charles, the Neponset, the North River, and at Plymouth. No one knows what it was—whether chicken pox or measles or scarlet fever. The Indians believed it was the product of a curse leveled at them by one of the last survivors of a French crew wrecked on Boston Harbor’s Peddock’s Island in 1615. By analogy with what later happened to other primitive races in the Americas and the Pacific islands, it was probably one of the children’s diseases. The Indians died in thousands. A population of a hundred thousand shrank to five thousand in the area from Gloucester to New Bedford. “They died on heapes,” Thomas Morton wrote, “and the living that were able to shift for themselves would runne away and let them dy and let there Carkases ly above the ground without buriall.... And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my comming into those parts that as I travailed in that Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new-found Golgotha.”
Overnight the Indian war had vanished. Overnight the coast from Saco Bay in Maine to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island lay wide open to European settlements. The cleared fields along the rivers and salt marshes grew up to weeds, ready for the spade of the English planter. For twenty miles inland the land was cleared of the Indian menace in precisely the area where they had been most agricultural, in what John Smith had called the “Paradise of all those parts.” The choicest sites for plantations, at the river mouths and along the tidal reaches of Boston Bay, Salem, Gloucester, and Plymouth, were stripped of opposition. Beaver, deer, and codfish multiplied unhindered. Smith’s description of Plymouth, “good harbor, good land and no want of anything but industrious people,” was now doubly true of the whole mainland shore of Massachusetts Bay.
These conditions were confirmed by Captain Thomas Dermer in 1619. Dermer had been associated with John Smith and Ferdinando Gorges in an attempted New England voyage in 1615, and was probably familiar with the coast. He was in Newfoundland in 1618
and there became acquainted with Squanto, who had been living in the household of John Slany in England. Squanto’s European stay was now completed, and someone had brought him out to Newfoundland. Dermer appreciated how valuable he might prove to be in a trading voyage to Massachusetts, and secured permission from Governor John Mason of Newfoundland, and also from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to use him as a pilot for a Massachusetts voyage.
Arrived in Massachusetts Bay, Dermer wrote: “I passed alongst the coast where I found some ancient Plantations, not long since populous now utterly void, in other places a remnant remaines but not free of sickenesse. Their disease the Plague for wee might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who describe the spots of such as usually die.” Reaching Plymouth, which, we remember, was Squanto’s home, he goes on: “When I arrived at my Savages native Country (finding all dead) I travelled alongst a daies journey Westward, to a place called Nummastaquyt [Nemasket or Middleboro], where finding Inhabitants I dispatched a messenger a dayes journey further west to Poconokit, which bordereth on the sea; whence came to see me two Kings; attended with a guard of fiftie armed men, who being well satisfied with that my Savage and I discoursed unto them—gave me content in whatsoever I demanded.” At Poconokit he “redeemed a Frenchman, and afterwards another at Mastachusit,” victims of shipwreck three years before. What a chronicle these two castaways might have added to Massachusetts history had their memoirs been preserved!
Squanto now found himself the only survivor of those two hundred or more natives of Plymouth whom Martin Pring and Champlain and John Smith had encountered. We note that he brought the Englishmen of Dermer’s party into friendly association with the sachems of Poconokit, which was Massasoit’s village at the mouth of the Taunton River. This was the first friendly contact with Massachusetts Indians in five years, the first since the criminal barbarity of Thomas Hunt had aroused the enmity of the natives in 1614. We can read between the lines what a reconciliation the homecoming of Squanto, himself a victim of that barbarous
kidnaping, must have produced among the Wampanoags. For Dermer freed Squanto later, in 1619, and he found his way back to Massasoit before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Whether Sir Ferdinando Gorges or Dermer himself was responsible for this peacemaking gesture, we have no way of knowing, but it seems to have cemented again a long-standing peace between the English and the Wampanoags, which was worth a whole battalion of soldiers to the safety of New Plymouth. Captain Thomas Dermer, who probably never heard of the Pilgrims, thus brought them peace. The Indian war was ended.
It is therefore the more tragic that Dermer died of Indian arrow wounds the next year after a battle with Epenow of Martha’s Vineyard, an Indian captive who had not made peace with the English. Had Epenow, instead of Squanto, lived at Plymouth, history might have run quite differently. Captain Thomas Dermer may be considered the first of the Plymouth martyrs, who lost his life after saving a New Plymouth that did not yet exist, though the Mayflower was on its way when he died.
It is a strange commentary on the justice of history that the men who had spent their lives on New England colonization had almost no share in the first successful plantation in Massachusetts. We have seen what an outpouring of futile struggle men like Gorges and Smith and Dermer had expended on the failures that set the stage for the Pilgrims. It was now to fall to the lot of a group of English exiles, who had lived twelve years in the Netherlands, to arrive by accident in Massachusetts at the precise moment when the merchant adventurers, whom they despised, had succeeded in producing the conditions for success. The Pilgrim legend is well founded, in the tribute it pays to the forthright courage and persistence of the forefathers, but it ignores their utter dependence on the maritime renaissance of England as the foundation on which their success rested. The line of succession stemming from the exploits of Drake and Hawkins and the ships that sank the Armada carried directly on into the efforts of Gosnold, Pring, Gorges, Smith, Hobson, and Dermer to set the stage for Plymouth. The fur trade and the fisheries by which New Plymouth finally paid off its creditors had
been painstakingly developed by many hazardous years of experiment by small shipowners of Bristol and Plymouth and other smaller havens in the west of England. Faith in New England ventures, so nearly destroyed by the Sagadahoc failure, had been kept alive and sedulously cultivated by a little group of earnest men around Gorges and John Smith, so that money could be available to finance even the risky trading voyages necessary to keep a foothold on the coast. We have seen how recently peace had been made with the Indians.
The Pilgrims ascribed all these blessings to acts of Providence in their behalf. But Providence has a way of fulfilling its aims through the acts of determined men. Any visitor to Plymouth who reveres the Pilgrims should also honor those representatives of the glorious maritime energies of the Old World whose discoveries and explorations prepared the way for permanent settlement. To them also applies the phrase which Bradford used of the Plymouth colonists:
“They were set as stepping-stones for others who came after.”
