Hariot’s report spoke to a multiplicity of different agendas as far as American exploration and settlement were concerned. Above all, it sought to counteract what Hariot described as the many “slaunderous and shamefull speeches bruited abroade by many that returned from” the New World. For Hariot, it was a case of managing expectations:
Some also were of a nice bringing vp, only in cities or townes, or such as neuer (as I may say) had seene the world before. Because there were not to bee found any English cities, nor such faire houses, nor at their owne wish any of their olde accustomed daintie food, nor any soft beds of downe or fethers: the countrey was to them miserable, & their reports thereof according.
So far from miserable, Virginia was, Hariot stressed, a land of great natural promise, one both suitable for traders and settlers. He opened his argument with a reference to luxury goods. Silk worms in Virginia, he reported, were “as bigge as our ordinary walnuttes” and all that was needed was the planting of mulberry trees for a productive and profitable sericulture to develop. Development was the point. Hariot’s observation that nature's bounty, whether that was in the form of wood, ore, fur, fruit or cereal crops, simply required the application of English labor, and not much hard labor at that, to become economically viable was more than an enticement toward profit; it was the basis on which the English justified their usurpation of the land from the indigenous people whose country it was. Turning to the subject of these people, Hariot reported that in “respect of vs they are a people poore, and for want of skill and iudgement in the knowledge and vse of our things, doe esteeme our trifles before thinges of greater value.” Nevertheless, he considered
figure 1.3. Title page of Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia : of the Commodities and of the Nature and Manners of the Naturall Inhabitants : Discouered by the English Colony There Seated by Sir Richard Greinuile Knight In the yeere 1585 : Which Remained Vnder the Gouerenment of Twelue Monethes, At the Speciall Charge and Direction of the Honourable Sir Walter Raleigh Knight Lord Warden of the Stanneries Who therein Hath Beene Fauoured and Authorised by Her Maiestie and Her Letters Patents (London 1588, 1590). Newcastle University Special Collections.
them “very ingenious; For although they haue no such tooles, nor any such craftes, sciences and artes as wee; yet in those thinges they doe, they shewe excellencie of wit.” It would be no great difficulty, he proposed, to show the natives the error of their non-English ways. Just as soon as they understood “our manner of knowledges and craftes to exceede theirs in perfection, and speed for doing or execution,” he argued, “by so much the more is it probable that they shoulde desire our friendships & loue, and haue the greater respect for pleasing and obeying vs.”5 In short, conversion of the natives to European norms, both cultural and religious, seemed a real possibility.
White's illustrations for Hariot's volume reinforced the argument of the text. His images of America's Algonquin peoples were, of all those that had appeared, perhaps the most naturalistic and expressive. Yet for a readership more interested, perhaps, in the background against which these individuals were portrayed, it was his first image that would have resonated most strongly (Figure 1.4). What Hakluyt, Hariot, and others in the late sixteenth century were offering Europe was a new Eden in the New World. Some quite literally believed in its existence; Columbus, for one, continued to believe that a New Eden lay at the origins of the Orinoco River in Guiana (in present-day Venezuela). Almost exactly a hundred years later, Ralegh set off in the same direction, although he was seeking profit, not paradise - El Dorado, not Eden. Above all, it was the constant lure of the colony, the chance to start again in an imaginary version of the world before the Fall, that was being held out here. Hariot’s Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was, metaphorically speaking, the Book of Genesis. Yet in White’s illustration, Eve already has her hand on the apple. If Virginia was a new Eden, it was one from which the original inhabitants were about to be ejected.
By the 1580s, the Tudor monarchy under Elizabeth had achieved sufficient stability to contemplate an increase in foreign trade and exploration. The growth of a new enterprise, the joint-stock company, made financing such endeavors a more realistic proposition. The first such was the Muscovey (or Russian) Company, established in 1553 with a view to finding a northeast passage to the Indies. Its charter served as the basis for all future ventures, and it was through companies such as the Virginia Company of London, established as the London Company in 1606 (it became the Virginia Company in 1609), three years after Elizabeth’s death, that future New World ventures would be conducted. Ralegh had already sold his rights in Virginia to one of London's foremost merchants, Sir Thomas Smith, and it was Smith and Hakluyt who drove England's
next main foray into Virginia. This was, however, a rather different type of settlement proposal. If the men whose hopes for profit from America had been chastened by the Roanoke experience, they were also restricted in terms of how to make colonization pay. With the ascension to the
English and Scottish thrones of James I (and VI), England could no longer be openly antagonistic toward Spain, nor look to Spanish prizes to furnish a return on any trans-Atlantic ventures. If profit was to be had, it was from the many plants, crops, minerals, and the promise of the land itself that the published works on Virginia had enumerated and mapped in such painstaking detail.
The Virginia Company, therefore, hoped to entice settlers who would pool their resources, both financial and in terms of labor, to colonize Virginia. Shares in the company were available to “adventurers,” whose passage was paid by the company, or shares could be acquired simply by paying one's own way. The long-term plan was that the resultant profit would fund future settlers, some unemployed, some skilled trades, who would serve a form of what was called indenture. They would work for the Virginia Company for seven years and then be free to make their own fortunes in the New World. As far as the indigenous peoples were concerned, the Virginia Company, from the outset, was both wary of contact and, simultaneously, more ambitious about what could be achieved in terms of conversion to Christianity, in its Protestant form. The Virginia Company's intentions, its founders stressed, were not solely concerned with profit, but with souls. Although it had issued instructions to Captain Christopher Newport, in charge of the expedition, “not to returne without a lumpe of gold, a certaintie of the South sea, or one of the lost company sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh,” they sought to put a more moralistic spin on the endeavor, and on their company's intentions. The “ends for which it is established,” they emphasized, “beinge not simply matter of Trade, butt of a higher Nature.”6 In their publicized vision, at least, investors, Indians, and the indigent poor of England would all benefit from this latest New World venture.
With such high hopes sustaining them, the 104 men and boys who journeyed across on the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery under the leadership of Newport arrived at the southern headland of Chesapeake Bay in April of 1607. They did not stay long. Reconnoitering the shore, they were chased back to their ships by the locals. Yet Hakluyt had issued them with instructions for where best to establish their colony, and by the following month they had selected the site, sixty miles inland on the newly named James River, which they named Jamestown. From the first, the colony struggled. The indigenous Algonquians, ruled by Powhatan, were understandably suspicious and, at times, overtly aggressive, but that was not the greatest threat that the Jamestown colony faced. Its main problem in its first few years was starvation, which, given the natural abundance previously described by Barlow, Hakluyt, and Hariot and repeated in such promotional documents as Robert Johnson's Nova Britannia: Offering most excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia (1609), was the last thing its promoters had expected.