Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

But one thing that the Elizabethan voyages had shown was that lines of supply were the point of greatest weakness in any long expedition. Even piracy, in the long term, calls for a secure base, defensible and self-sustaining, but close to the action. And this was prominent in the rationale offered in the prospectus to investors for Ralegh’s newly planted colony in Virginia, written by Richard Hakluyt in 1584. In the executive summary, [192]after pieties about ‘the inlargement of the gospell of Christe’, and the Spanish threat to decent ‘englishe Trades … growen beggerly or daungerous’, he promises that ‘this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia’; most especially, ‘5. That this voyage will be a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine and a means that wee may arreste at our pleasure for the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or twoo hundred saile of his subjectes shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande.’

In the way of business plans, it did not turn out quite like that. The colony was at first hard put to it even to grow its own food, and survive the attentions of the Indians; it had no energy, indeed no ships, to harry the Spanish. But Hakluyt’s term planting , originally just an elegant metaphor for ‘colony’, became in the event very appropriate: the Virginia colony, once re-established at Jamestown, was to find its sustenance through the commercial plantation of tobacco. And although English royal sponsorship of piracy ended when James I came to the throne, this was not the only pirate base that came good in the end through commercial agriculture. British naval strength grew through the seventeenth century, and Britain was able to take possession of some of the islands of the Caribbean, until then really a Spanish lake: most importantly, Jamaica was captured in 1655. At first, piracy targeted on the Spanish remained the major British activity in the region. But increasingly, Britons were noticing the potential in producing sugar, an Asian crop that the Portuguese had pioneered in Brazil. Henry Morgan, the most famous pirate of them all, invested the proceeds of his freebootery in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela to buy land in Jamaica; Morgan ended up a sugar baron, with a knighthood to boot. [667]

The possession of land, taken for whatever reason, made possible commercial cultivation of exotic crops for the European market. There was no gold or silver in the British possessions, but supplying consumers rather than bankers turned out to be much better business. Cultivating crops also meant that a workforce was needed: if these were indentured workers from Britain (as most were at first, especially in North America), they would of course go on speaking English; if they were purchased slaves from the western coast of Africa, they would learn it when they arrived, since all links with their home communities were lost. The revenues from sugar, and later cocoa, in the Caribbean islands, and from tobacco, and later indigo and cotton, in the North American continent, became the firmest foundations of sustainable English-speaking communities across the Atlantic.

They call Old England Acawmenoakit, which is as much as from the land on t’other side. Hardly are they brought to believe that water is three thousand English miles over.

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Chauquock;a knife. Whence they call Englishmen Chauquaquock,that is Knive-men; stone formerly being to them instead of knives, awlblades, hatchets, and hoes.

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Wunnaumwayean;if he says true. Canounicus, the old Sachim of the Narroganset bay, a wise and peaceable prince, once in a solemn oration to myself, in a solemn assembly, using this word, said, ‘I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English, since they landed, nor never will.’ He often repeated this word, ‘ Wunnaumwayean Englishman, if the Englishman speak true , if he mean truly then shall I go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posterity will live in love and peace together.’ I replied, that he had no cause, I hoped, to question Englishman’s Wunnaumwauonck,that is, faithfulness , he having had long experience of their friendliness and trustiness. He took a stick, and broke it in ten pieces, and related ten instances, laying down a stick to every instance, which gave him cause thus to fear and say.

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This question they often put to me: ‘Why come the Englishmen hither?’ and measuring others by themselves, they say, ‘It is because you want firing.’ For they, having burnt up the wood in one place, wanting draughts to bring wood to them, are fain to follow the wood, and so remove to a fresh place for the wood’s sake.

Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America , 1643 [668]

The growth of English in the Caribbean had been achieved with little friction. Very few of the Arawak or Carib population had survived the Spanish takeover of the sixteenth century, and so the English pirates and planters, and the slaves that they imported, were entering an emptied domain. The situation on the North American mainland was very different.

In Virginia and Massachusetts, the first bridgeheads for English settlers, there was still a substantial indigenous population. What with visiting cod fishermen and other scouting voyagers, they were already to some extent familiar with Europeans. [193]This was lucky for the settlers, since in both places it was only through the active help of these knowledgeable neighbours that they survived those first years. In Virginia, John Rolfe, who founded the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, married in 1612 none other than Pocahontas, the spirited daughter of the Powhatan chief Wahunsonacock. [194]This kept relations with the Powhatan sweet until 1622; in 1616 the couple had even led a party of Virginians to London, where they were presented to King James I. In Massachusetts, the colonists were helped crucially in the first few years by two bilingual natives, Samoset, who had learnt some English from cod fishermen, and Tisquantum. Tisquantum was quite fluent in English, having crossed the Atlantic already six times, spending nine years in England, four in Spain and a further year mapping the New England coast, returning home just a year before the arrival of the English settlers in November 1620.

The task facing the English colonists was quite comparable to the challenge to Cortés and the Spaniards who had invaded Mexico just a century before, to establish themselves, as masters, in the midst of someone else’s country. But English motives for being in America were rather different. They were not looking for gold, converts or even dominion. Rather, they were looking for land. This prospect had been the chief inducement for volunteers, ever since Humphrey Gilbert’s prospectus for the first failed expedition of 1583. For Englishmen, the intent to create a ‘New England’ was quite literal, and many showed their earnest by bringing wives and small children out with them.

Since they had no interest in the inhabitants, except as untrusted and expendable helpmeets, it was of little concern to them that there was no major overlord fit for conquest in the part of America into which they had projected themselves, nor that—as it happened—the language spoken by the first inhabitants they met was actually very widespread there and far beyond: they were more struck by the fact that the language as they encountered it was highly riven dialectally, which meant that even those few who made the effort to learn to speak it could scarcely be understood when they wandered farther afield:

I once travelled to an island of the wildest in our parts … I was alone having travelled from my bark, the wind being contrary; and little could I speak to them to their understanding, especially because of the change of their dialect and manner of speech; yet much, through the help of God, did I speak … that at my parting, many burst forth, ‘Oh, when will you come again, to bring us some more news of this God?’