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Why did people abandon a life they knew, to embark on a dangerous journey to a land where they would have to carve out a precarious existence from scratch?
The Mayflower was the first ship to carry the Pilgrims, a group of radical Puritans escaping persecution, to New England. On 21 November 1620, while still on board, they agreed the Mayflower Compact, a contract which said that they should elect their governor and assembly themselves. Not everyone who left England for America was so democratic.
People quit England in the 17th century, risking the hazardous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, for different reasons, depending on their place in society. Religious fundamentalists like the Puritans went to escape persecution; rich people went to make a profit; poor people to find work.
When Queen Elizabeth I reigned (1533-1603), the earliest pioneer leaders were risk-takers, not safety-conscious merchants. They were gamblers driven by visions of dazzling wealth – such men as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh made huge profits from overseas adventures.
Many came from the West Country and were devout patriots who worried about poverty in England. They were motivated not only by greed but also by the idea that England's idle poor could be taken to North America to work the land.
Some of the poorer volunteers for these expeditions went in search of honest work, others imagined an easy life in a Utopia where gold and other precious metals were easy to find. Such dreams were doomed to disappointment.
Where did they go?
In Elizabeth's day, England was just a small Protestant island on the edge of Europe, in a Western world dominated by the rival Catholic powers of Spain and France. The Spanish Empire was gigantic, covering South America and Mexico, the Caribbean and the Netherlands; the French were busy in northern America (now Canada). From the middle of Elizabeth's reign, as English pirates found riches in the Caribbean by looting Spanish ships, some entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity. The region between what are now Florida and New England was relatively untouched by Europeans – ripe for colonisation.
But colonies were expensive and risky investments. Settlers had to be transported nearly 5,000km (3,000 miles) across the sea. They needed utensils, clothing, seed, tools, building materials, livestock, arms and ammunition.
The voyage
Elizabethan ships were small and had little room for supplies. Apart from a primitive compass, there was no way of measuring longitude or latitude to work out their exact location, so captains relied on crude positioning using the sun and the stars. For these reasons, the route to America was long and circuitous.
First, helped by a southerly current, ships headed south to the Canary Islands off the coast of northern Africa. That took about a month. After taking on fresh water and supplies, they used the Trade Winds to sail across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, on the route pioneered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. This leg of the journey also took about a month.
But the West Indies were still some 2,400km (1,500 miles) south of their destination. To reach the North American mainland they had to hop from island to island, avoiding Spanish ships and negotiating with native Caribs for supplies. It would take another month or two to reach Virginia. The whole journey took about four months.
What were conditions like?
When, in 1606, Captain John Smith – who later met the Native American princess, Pocahontas – left England for North America, he travelled in a convoy of three ships. The flagship, Susan Constant, was about 35 metres (115 feet) long; the Godspeed about 21 metres (70 feet) long and the Discovery only 15 metres (50 feet) long. Each ship was about 4.5-6 metres (15-20 feet) wide.
Around 100 colonists and 40 crew were jammed on to these tiny ships: some 70 on the Susan Constant, 50 on the Godspeed and 20 on the Discovery. Since the ships were cargo vessels, only the expedition's leaders had cabins so overcrowding was extreme, creating antagonism and tensions.
Living conditions were particularly cramped in the colder northern climes, when everybody huddled below. Once the ships approached the Canaries, it was more comfortable to stay on deck. Beds were straw mattresses or hammocks. Provisions of fresh water and food, usually salted meat and biscuit, would go off, and by the time the ships reached any islands, the water usually stank. Also, room for supplies was limited because the colonists had to carry tools, equipment and items to trade with the Native Americans.
The ships depended on currents and favourable winds, so they would sometimes be becalmed. Experienced mariners were used to this enforced waiting, but pioneers – often new to sailing – became frustrated and angry. Fights often broke out and mutinies were not uncommon. When the ships were on the move, some passengers suffered terribly from sea sickness.
Financing the voyage
Elizabeth I was not a rich monarch, so she subcontracted colonisation by granting licences to private adventurers who were willing to take risks. Men like Raleigh raised money from private investors, equipped ships and took colonists across the Atlantic, hoping to find riches to bring back as cargo and sell in England. From 1580 onwards they gave the Atlantic coast of north America the name Virginia, after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
In the reign of Elizabeth's successor, James I, the Virginia Company was incorporated by London investors, and James gave them a charter to colonise and govern Virginia. In December 1606, when the first expedition of these patriotic promoters of colonies reached Chesapeake Bay (in what is now Maryland) they set up Jamestown in his honour.
Within a few years, the Virginia Company gave up trying to control the pioneers. Instead they encouraged settlers to pay for their own passage and gave them 50 acres, plus another 50 acres for every family member or servant they brought with them. By 1616, however, the company had spent the huge sum of £50,000 for little return. From the colonies, they exported tar, potash and sassafras (a plant producing spices, scents and medicines) but these fetched poor prices. Then, in 1616, planters led by John Rolfe – who'd married Pocahontas two years before – learnt how to grow tobacco.
This brought a boom in company profits and in population, and Virginia started to outstrip the West Indies as the chief exporter of tobacco to Britain. Within a decade, tobacco was Virginia's chief source of revenue.
The massive success of tobacco growing not only made the Virginia colonies viable, it also gave English monarchs and merchants confidence to sponsor the colonisation of new territories such as Jamaica in the Caribbean. This island was originally Spanish but was seized by Britain in 1655. Other islands like Barbados and Antigua had already been grabbed. And, by the 18th century, the British began to look towards India. Slavery and Empire had arrived.
Other Europeans
Some 90% of the early 17th-century settlers in America were English but there was a sprinkling of Dutch, Swedes and Germans in the middle region, a few French Huguenots (Protestants) in South Carolina, and a scattering of Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese.
Then, after 1680, England ceased to be the chief source of immigration as large numbers of pioneers came from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland and France. Thousands fled Germany to escape war; the Irish, Scots and Swiss were escaping from poverty. By 1690 the American population had risen to a quarter of a million. After that, it doubled every 25 years until, in 1775, it numbered more than 2.5 million.
Most non-English colonists adopted the English language, English law and many English customs, but these had already been modified by conditions in America. The result was a unique mixture of British and European ideas conditioned by the environment of the New World.
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