Henry Porter: As the 400th anniversary of Jamestown nears, its spiritual father is being unjustly ignored
... We are flush with anniversaries. The abolition of slavery on 25 March 1807 is still being observed. Ahead of us are the anniversaries of the Act of Union and the founding of Jamestown, to be marked by the Queen's state visit to Williamsburg and Washington, DC, in May.
British history, or at least the history of English expansion, is flashing past us with unnerving and, perhaps in Scotland, consequential speed. Anniversaries prompt questions and suggest reassessment, particularly in Jamestown, where the histories of Britain and Anglophone, Protestant America meet at the moment when the characteristics of one nation were transmitted to the new settlement and so to the America of today.
As yet, the Jamestown anniversary has attracted little fuss, but for world history, the precarious foothold gained by the English that summer is by far the most important of the '07 dates. It occurred in the reign of James I, but the achievement was really the result of Elizabethan will, a modest but gritty strategic enterprise to compete with the Catholic superpower of Spain, which already dominated much of the West Indies and Central and South America. The English were late off the mark, yet with the Susan Constant went the inflexible perseverance and self-possession of the Elizabethan age, qualities that were to become essentially American from the moment the 104 men and boys set foot in Virginia.
Settling the land named after the Virgin Queen was not the obvious course of action that it appears today. The English could have chosen the east and left the Americas to the Spanish and, but for a little-known geographer named Richard Hakluyt, they might have. During his lifetime, Hakluyt, a cleric, academic and occasional spy, never travelled further than Paris. But as a new biography by Peter C Mancall explains, he 'invented the grammar of colonisation' and kept the idea alive so it would not 'wax cold and fall to the ground' during the period when England faced invasion by Spain. Like Nasa scientists announcing the mission to the Moon without knowing exactly how it was going to be achieved, Hakluyt declared in 1586, 20 years before the Susan Constant sailed, that Chesapeake Bay was his preferred target.
His great work is The Principal Navigations of 1589, which assembled all that was known about the voyages to America, its people, their customs and the wealth locked up in the continent. Last week, I sat down with the London Library's copy of the first edition and realised it is as much an achievement of the English renaissance as Shakespeare's plays.
Hakluyt, Mancall writes, 'believed in the power of words, written or spoken. He saw troubles and engineered solutions from the premise that it was the task ... of the intellectual elite to diagnose problems and find answers'. One of the great problems of Elizabethan England was unemployment among the expanding population, which then stood at about 3.6 million. Colonies would provide labour for every possible trade, for clerics and for failed merchants 'schooled in the house of adversity'....
Read entire article at Guardian
British history, or at least the history of English expansion, is flashing past us with unnerving and, perhaps in Scotland, consequential speed. Anniversaries prompt questions and suggest reassessment, particularly in Jamestown, where the histories of Britain and Anglophone, Protestant America meet at the moment when the characteristics of one nation were transmitted to the new settlement and so to the America of today.
As yet, the Jamestown anniversary has attracted little fuss, but for world history, the precarious foothold gained by the English that summer is by far the most important of the '07 dates. It occurred in the reign of James I, but the achievement was really the result of Elizabethan will, a modest but gritty strategic enterprise to compete with the Catholic superpower of Spain, which already dominated much of the West Indies and Central and South America. The English were late off the mark, yet with the Susan Constant went the inflexible perseverance and self-possession of the Elizabethan age, qualities that were to become essentially American from the moment the 104 men and boys set foot in Virginia.
Settling the land named after the Virgin Queen was not the obvious course of action that it appears today. The English could have chosen the east and left the Americas to the Spanish and, but for a little-known geographer named Richard Hakluyt, they might have. During his lifetime, Hakluyt, a cleric, academic and occasional spy, never travelled further than Paris. But as a new biography by Peter C Mancall explains, he 'invented the grammar of colonisation' and kept the idea alive so it would not 'wax cold and fall to the ground' during the period when England faced invasion by Spain. Like Nasa scientists announcing the mission to the Moon without knowing exactly how it was going to be achieved, Hakluyt declared in 1586, 20 years before the Susan Constant sailed, that Chesapeake Bay was his preferred target.
His great work is The Principal Navigations of 1589, which assembled all that was known about the voyages to America, its people, their customs and the wealth locked up in the continent. Last week, I sat down with the London Library's copy of the first edition and realised it is as much an achievement of the English renaissance as Shakespeare's plays.
Hakluyt, Mancall writes, 'believed in the power of words, written or spoken. He saw troubles and engineered solutions from the premise that it was the task ... of the intellectual elite to diagnose problems and find answers'. One of the great problems of Elizabethan England was unemployment among the expanding population, which then stood at about 3.6 million. Colonies would provide labour for every possible trade, for clerics and for failed merchants 'schooled in the house of adversity'....