If there’s fake news, there’s fake history and this might be the very reason every U.S. citizen should buy a copy of James Evans’s book, Emigrants: Why The English Sailed to the New World.
American folklore – which
all too often passes for historical knowledge – suggests the Pilgrims came
ashore in 1620, made friends with the natives, settling peacefully along the
Massachusetts coastline while earlier settlements, Jamestown, Virginia and
Newfoundland, Canada, receive little, if any, attention in U.S. classrooms and
in the country’s culture.
And that’s the reason to
buy this book. What Evans does so
masterfully is dispel many myths Americans hold near and dear about the
country’s founding and writes it so that is neither accusatory nor
presumptuous.
Nearly 400,000 English men,
women and children sailed for the New World (which included the Caribbean) in
the 17th century for any number of reasons – to find riches, to
escape religious persecution, for safety because they were loyal to the
executed English king, Charles I, or because the Old World’s economics provided
so few opportunities that they were without a reason not to take what was, for
many, a fatal voyage.
The Pilgrims, of course,
are dominant in the story about American settlement. But as Evans, a BBC historian, suggests, “...
religion was not the reason which prompted English men, women and children to
emigrate ... Some went to fish – astonished at the teeming resource in the
western Atlantic, at a time when European (fishing) stocks were much depleted,
thinking that while many crossed and re-crossed the ocean to do so, there might
be a benefit in staying to live.”
“In spite of all these
reasons for emigrating, there is little doubt that the majority who went from
England to America during the seventeenth century did so for none of them. They were, as it was said of one shipload,
‘mostly miserable poor people.’ They
went because they were desperate, and because this was a course, perhaps the
only course, which offered some hope ... England, then ... (with) ... Its
rising population – what one Londoner called the ‘late unspeakable increases of
people’ – ... made ... the majority of opinion (certainly of published opinion)
backed a ‘diminution of the people’, by transplanting ‘no small number of them’
into some other soil,” Evans writes.
In other words, as English
leaders saw it, the country needed to rid itself of its poor. If those leaving thrived in the New World,
wonderful, that would benefit England.
If they died, well, so be it, a point-of-view that seems all too similar
to Mexico’s view of its citizens heading to the United States: They’re expendable and the home country is
better off without them.
Why does any emigrant
leave their country – to become an immigrant in a different one?
The same reason so many Latin American
emigrants (as well as others from across the globe) leave their homes – hope
that the new country will be better than the current one.
Seventeenth-century England
was dangerous, especially during its Civil War, when pitched armed battles between
those for Parliamentarian rights and those defending the government and the
monarch of Charles I were fought in the 1640s, taking about 85,000 lives.[i] Charles would eventually be tried and
beheaded and the country ruled by Parliament’s leader, Oliver Cromwell.
England’s economy and
employment opportunities were also undergoing fundamental change, colliding with
numerous years of crop failure and the “cloth industry, that bulwark of
England’s economy, was sickly and collapsing,” leading one man to lament that
everything was “‘in a heap of troubles and confusions.’”
But if political danger and
economic troubles weren’t precarious enough, there was always the trouble of
being part of a faith that wasn’t fully trusted. Much of the trauma suffered by those seeing
profound problems with the Church of England, or having a different faith,
whether it was Puritan, Catholic or Quaker, could suffer dearly at the hands of
the authorities, as detailed not only by Dr. Evans but also in an earlier book,
by John Barry, entitled, Roger Williams
and The Creation of the American Soul:
Church, State and the Birth of Liberty.
The first English settlement
– more likely a seasonal fishing camp, say some historians – in the western
Atlantic was St. John’s, in what is Canada’s Newfoundland, in the 1580s. It was a harbor for fishing ships and, in
time, the English were joined there by many European fisherman, too.
The first versions of
diversity are also seen in some 17th century English settlements in
America. William Penn never wanted an
exclusively Quaker community in Pennsylvania, telling those who followed him
that liberty of consciousness (religious faith) was paramount, especially since
he witnessed religious discrimination in England. In earlier decades, Roger Williams promoted
religious tolerance in Rhode Island and the stock holders of some English
colonies told their colonists, upset that there was a lack religious cohesion,
that it was the least of their worries.
Of course, settlement in
America was more than just about fishing, harvesting tobacco and an improved
life. It was also about the century’s
global politics. In other words, it was
a chess match, with a series of moves and countermoves. In many ways, the St. John’s settlement and
those that followed were checks against England’s significant European rivals,
like Spain, which built a fort in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and the
Dutch, who started settling New York in 1614.[ii]
Is any of this significant
400 years later? The great 19th
century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck thought so, Evans writes. When asked what he thought the pre-eminent
fact of the modern world was, Bismarck said, it was that the United States
spoke English, inheriting just enough English culture to keep it tied to Great
Britain. Although Bismarck passed before
they happened, he likely wouldn’t be surprised to know that this shared
language and heritage weighed heavily in 20th century history,
deciding the outcome of both World Wars, the Cold War and the post-war world. This combined language, culture and history will
likely determine world events long into the future.
(For those readers curious to know what
distinguishes an emigrant from an immigrant, see the following: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/immigrant-emigrant-emigre-refugee-how-to-tell-the-difference)
[ii]
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/essays/general/the-united-states-of-america-and-the-netherlands/first-dutch-settlers.php
Publishing Information:
Emigrants: Why
the English Sailed to the New World, by James Evans, published Weidenfeld
& Nicholson, London, 2017, 303 pages, including endnotes and bibliography,
price: £20.00
The book is currently available on Amazon.com’s UK
website, amazon.co.uk., and the prices you pay will be in British pounds,
converted into your local currency on your credit card bill. The book won’t be available in the United
States – according to Barnes & Noble – until early March 2018.
