Made In America - Bill Bryson [103]
I bring this up here to make the point that, throughout the early American period, communications were a perennial problem. If winds were unfavourable it could take months to cross the Atlantic. In December 1606, when John Smith and his party set off to found Jamestown, the winds proved so ‘unprosperous’, as he rather mildly put it, that it took them six weeks just to get out of sight of England. A good crossing, such as that of the Mayflower Pilgrims, would take eight or nine weeks, but crossings of six or seven months were by no means unknown.2
In such circumstances food rotted and water grew brackish. If the captain or shipowner was unscrupulous, the food was often rotten to begin with. Journals of the time are full of baleful remarks. ‘What with the heat and dampness, even the biscuit was so full of worms that, God help me, I saw many wait until nightfall to eat the porridge made of it so as not to see the worms,’ wrote one dismayed mariner.3 Personal hygiene became an impossibility. Lice grew ‘so thick that they could be scraped off the body’.4 Occasionally circumstances would be so dire that sailors would refuse to put to sea and would ‘strike’, or lower the sails to show their defiance, which explains why workers today who withhold their labour are said to be on strike.5
For mariners conditions were challenging enough, but for passengers unaccustomed to the perils of the sea the experience all too often proved unbearable. One ship sailing from Leyden to Virginia in the winter of 1618 set off with 180 people. By the time it reached the New World all but fifty had perished.6 The passengers of the Sea-Flower, sailing out of Belfast in 1741, were so consumed with hunger that they ate their dead. Throughout the whole of the early colonial period, the problem with populating the New World wasn’t so much one of finding people willing to go but of keeping them alive before and after they got there.
The Atlantic was an equally exasperating barrier to the spread of news. Rarely did a letter posted in Boston in November reach London before the following spring. In 1745 the Board of Trade in London wrote to the governor of North Carolina asking him, a trifle peevishly, why it hadn’t heard from him for three years.7 Even news of crucial import was frequently delayed. No one in America knew of the Stamp Act or its subsequent withdrawal for two months after both events. The Bastille was stormed in July 1789, but President Washington, newly inaugurated, didn’t learn of it until the following autumn.
Within America matters were, if anything, worse. Often letters never found their destination and when they did it was not uncommon for a year to elapse before they received a reply. Letters routinely began with a summation of the fate of previous correspondence, as in this note from Thomas Jefferson, writing from Philadelphia in 1776, to William Randolph in Virginia: ‘Dear Sir, Your’s of August1 received in this place, that of Nov. 24th. is just now come to hand; the one of October I imagine has miscarried.‘8
There was good reason for the difficulty: until well after the time of the Revolution, America had virtually no highways worthy of the name. Such roads as existed were often little more than Indian trails, seldom more than fifteen inches wide and fraught with the obvious peril that you might at any time run into a party of Indians, not necessarily a thing you would wish for in the middle of the wilderness even in times of peace. One such trail was the Natchez Trace – trace here being used in the sense of something that describes a line – which covered the five hundred miles of risky nowhere between Nashville and Natchez. It was principally used by boatmen who would float freight down the Mississippi on rough rafts, sell their goods, break up the rafts for lumber and hike back. Even in the more built-up East, such roads as existed would routinely disappear