Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [266]
Pirates and planters
The first extensions of the English language across the Atlantic recall the stirrings of Sanskrit across the Bay of Bengal a millennium and a half before, when glamorous sāhasikā pirates could scarce be distinguished from sādhava merchants (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 199). Britain was the last of the Atlantic-fronting powers to seek new fortune in the west, and it was not, at first, an easy game to break into. In the sixteenth century, when Spain was drawing vast profits from its mines in Mexico and Peru, and Portugal stitching up the trade of the Indian Ocean, when even France was exploring the extent of the St Lawrence river, England’s Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had supported a very few exploratory voyages across the North Atlantic which yielded nothing, hardly even a landfall. But Francis Drake had discovered a line that could be profitable, euphemistically known as the ‘taking of prizes’. In fifteen years from 1573 he alone had brought back, from a mixture of raids on Spanish ports, high-sea robberies of Spanish and Portuguese ships, and trading in the East Indies, booty to the value of three quarters of a million pounds, twice the annual tax revenues at the time; Elizabeth’s share was enough to clear the national debt in 1581, and provide another €42,000 to found the Levant Company (which went on to become the financial basis of the East India Company itself).17 And he was not alone. From 1585 to 1604, at least a hundred ships set off every year to plunder the Caribbean, netting at least €200,000 a year.18
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,* 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