In 1606, King James I of England and Scotland, who had been an enthusiastic witch-hunter in Scotland in his youth, made a major bid for influence in the New World. He issued a charter that enabled the appropriation of land in Virginia. It declared that the new colony was intended to “bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility”.
The Virginia Company, formed in the same year, pooled capital, much of it accrued from the enclosure of common lands in England. The model of joint stock investment had been pioneered in the 1580s under the previous monarch, Elizabeth. Jerry Brotton’s new book shows that, facing hostility from Catholic Europe, Elizabeth had looked to Iran, Turkey and Morocco for trade and, in the case of Morocco, military support. This was financed by The Turkey Company, set up and sustained with investments from a variety of shareholders. In 1607, the Virginia plantation was founded in Jamestown – around the same time as the Plantation of Ulster in Ireland (described by the King as ‘a civilizing enterprise’). Race, as it was understood at the time, was ascribed to the Irish – who were being forced off their land and replaced with English and Scottish settlers – as well as the inhabitants of what, for Europeans, was the New World.
By 1609, the Virginia plantation founded in Jamestown was in crisis. The colonialists were so short of food that, in the winter to come, they would resort to cannibalism. On 2 June 1609, a fleet of nine ships set sail from Plymouth to relieve the colony in Jamestown, Virginia. The fleet carrying supplies and six hundred passengers – ranging from aristocrats to people dispossessed by the enclosure of common lands in England – was led by the Sea Venture.
On 25 July 1609, the Sea Venture ran into a terrible storm. After days of trying to seal leaks and pump water out of the ship, the sailors lost heart, defied their captain and his gentlemen, opened the rum and prepared to meet their deaths. But, on 28 July, the ship ran aground on the island of Bermuda with no loss of life.
The island offered an abundance of food and temperate weather and many of the sailors, dispossessed at home and exploited at sea, wanted to remain in this new luxury. In nine months the sailors organised five conspiracies against their superiors. But, with execution as a disciplinary mechanism, order prevailed. Two new ships were built and, in May 1610, the bulk of the party proceeded on to Jamestown. Later that year William Shakespeare, who had invested his own wealth in the Virginia Company, used accounts of the wreck of the Sea Venture to begin to write The Tempest. The play was first performed before King James I in London on 1 November 1611.
In The Merchant of Venice, written somewhere between 1596 and 1599, the quality of the mercy extended to the character of Shylock is, at best, strained. Prester John’s name makes a passing appearance in Much Ado About Nothing. Othello, written in 1603, is the last in a set of three plays to feature Muslims as characters. In the estimation of some scholars it was inspired, in part, by the six-month visit to Elizabeth’s court by the Moroccan ambassador, Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, in 1600. But it is The Tempest that is often taken as an allegory for the colonial situation. Sylvia Wynter reads the play as a record of the moment at which the ascription of race – of “humans who can be not quite human” – began to shift from the theological to the secular, mapped onto what Frederick Douglass first called ‘the colour line’ in 1881.
