The World полностью

These colonies were immediately different from their mother country. Very early on, it was clear that the proprietors and founding companies could not control the colonists. Enjoying abundant land, but also afflicted by a shortage of labour and rising friction with the Powhatan, the first Virginians founded an elected assembly in July 1619. Elections were annual, and electorates were wider (over 70 per cent of white males), far ahead of the motherland. But the settlers needed a solution to the labour crisis. Settlers received headrights – the grant of fifty acres per settler – which encouraged the affluent to bring indentured servants to accumulate more land. The indentured labourers, often boys, who formed 70–85 per cent of settlers, worked for around seven years before being freed. But tobacco plantations, owned by Warwick and other planters, required even cheaper labour – and it was the puritan earl who showed the way.

In 1619, a Portuguese slave ship San Juan Bautista bearing 350 enslaved Mbundu left Luanda. During the hellish crossing, 143 perished. On reaching the Caribbean, twenty-four children were sold in Jamaica, ruled still by the Columbus dynasty, but twenty adults were captured by one of Warwick’s ships, which conveyed them to Virginia where they were set to work at Richneck. There were probably already a few Africans in the colonies, but these were the first to be traded to north America. In 1625, further south, in the Caribbean, English settlers claimed a former Spanish island, Barbados. During the next eighty years, 21,000 enslaved Africans were brought to north America,^* but it was a century before slavery became essential to colonial life.

As England was founding these colonies, Spain claimed territory from Texas to California; the French had founded Quebec in 1608 and were exploring the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. In 1624 the Dutch bought Manhattan off a Native American ruler and founded New Amsterdam.^* They did not arrive in an empty continent. Whatever European maps might show, the continent would remain the realm of the many indigenous nations for centuries to come. But it was thinly populated, perhaps two to seven million people, divided into a plethora of warring tribes – Massachusetts, Abenaki, Mohawks – who lived with minimal property, no central government and no formal law. Instead they discussed policies at assemblies in eloquent debates, electing leaders only for wartime. They lived by both horticulture and hunting, moving between seasonal hunting grounds. All were weakened by the pathogens brought by the Europeans, but their lack of any formal command structure put them at a disadvantage anyway. Often at war with one another, keen to obtain European musketry, their leaders allied with the Europeans to win an advantage against their rival tribes.

Had they united against the colonists, the American story might have been very different. But, for the moment, the Europeans clung to tiny, splintered European settlements, farming and praying, their muskets at their side in their fortified palisades. They were able in a series of small-scale but atrocious wars against mutating federations of tribes to hold their own. From the start, the settlers fought Native American ferocity with their own savagery, paying bounties for scalps.^*