1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [44]
The English imported bees for honey, not to help their crops—pollination wasn’t discovered until the mid-eighteenth century—but feral honeybees pollinated farms and orchards anyway. Without them, many of the plants Europeans brought with them wouldn’t have proliferated. Georgia probably would not have become the Peach State; Johnny Appleseed’s trees might never have borne fruit; Huckleberry Finn might not have had any watermelons to steal. So critical to European success was the honeybee that Indians came to view it as a harbinger of invasion; the first sight of a bee in a new territory, the French-American writer Jean de Crèvecoeur noted in 1782, “spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.”
Removing forest cover, blocking regrowth on fallow land, exhausting the soil, shutting down annual burning, unleashing big grazing and rooting animals, introducing earthworms, honeybees, and other alien invertebrates—the colonists so profoundly changed Tsenacomoco that it became harder and harder for its inhabitants to prosper there. Meanwhile, it was easier and easier for Europeans to thrive in an environment that their own actions were making increasingly familiar. Despite starvation, disease, and financial meltdown, immigrants poured into Chesapeake Bay. Axes flashing, oxen straining before the plow, hundreds of new colonists planted spreads of tobacco across every accessible river bluff. When they wore out the soil, they gave the fields over to cattle and then moved on.
Ecologically speaking, Tsenacomoco was becoming ever more like Europe—the hallmark of the nascent Homogenocene. By 1650 the Indian empire was mainly inhabited by Europeans.
“SOE INFINITE A RICHES”
By all accounts, John Ferrar was a modest, pious, hardworking man who spent his life tending the family business. His father, Nicholas, was a cosmopolitan London leather merchant with a mansion on St. Sythe’s Lane, not far from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. One of the original stockholders in the Virginia Company, he sank £50 into Jamestown. The investment did not bear fruit, and Nicholas became convinced that the problem lay with the company’s well-connected but feckless managers. Rather than pulling out, though, the family invested another £50 in 1618, acquiring a plantation of several thousand acres, administered by another relative whom Nicholas dispatched to Virginia. A few months later, he participated in a sort of shareholders’ revolt. New corporate officers were appointed, among them two of Nicholas’s other sons: Nicholas Jr., who became the company counsel and secretary, and John, who was given the unsalaried office of deputy treasurer.
Despite his lowly position, John Ferrar found himself effectively in charge of the company’s finances—the actual treasurer, an important aristocrat, was too busy harassing the king in Parliament. The firm now was making money from tobacco sales but had piled up so much debt that Ferrar had to scramble to pay creditors. Worse, he claimed, the previous management had embezzled £3,000. Attempts to restore the funds were countered by the thieves’ attempts to smear him in court. The intrigue grew so all-consuming that Ferrar held daily crisis meetings at the family manse on St. Sythe’s Lane.
Maps like this one, from 1667, were surprisingly common in seventeenth-century Europe. Depicting North America as a narrow isthmus, it suggested to the Virginia Company’s English backers that their colonists at Jamestown (star on map) could easily walk to the Pacific. From there, they could sail to China. (Photo credit 2.7)
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In the end, his hard work didn’t pay off. Opechancanough