The Dawn of Anglo Canada
In the 23rd instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes the first faltering attempts to bring English and Scottish colonists to Newfoundland in the early seventeenth century.
What follows is the twenty-third instalment of The Nations of Canada, a serialised Quillette project adapted from Greg Koabel’s ongoing podcast of the same name.
As Cardinal Richelieu transformed New France from a trading post on the St. Lawrence into a full-fledged colony in the 1620s, he brought Canada into the sphere of European power politics. Europe’s wars had become global affairs. As a result, the handful of colonists at Quebec were swept up in imperial campaigns far above their pay grade.
It’s important to note, however, that the proclamations made in Paris, London, and Amsterdam during this era often lost something in translation by the time they were communicated to the other side of the Atlantic (a process that took weeks, at best). These policies were interpreted through the prism of local interests, sometimes (as we shall see) in a cynical manner that allowed local actors to prosecute their own parochial grievances or settle old scores.
At the time, the most immediate emerging threat to the colony at Quebec came not from Dutch competitors on the Hudson River (the subject of our twenty-first instalment); but rather from the English, who, until now, have had only a cameo role in our narrative.
Greg Koabel
Till this point, English accomplishments in what would become Canada were unimpressive. Fifty years earlier, Martin Frobisher had inspired hopes of establishing a gold-mining colony in the North American Arctic. But that project was quickly abandoned. English forces had also intervened in the disputed and nebulously defined territory the French knew as Acadia. But while they’d succeeded in disrupting French operations, English attempts at creating a settlement on the Kennebec River (in modern Maine) had been almost immediately abandoned.
A group of English Puritans did found a successful colony at Plymouth, a bit further south. This project, as modern readers know, would lead to a permanent (and much mythologized) English community in what came to be called New England. But at the time, the Plymouth Colony was still small and insular, populated exclusively by Protestant religious zealots. Large-scale settlement of New England wouldn’t come until the 1630s.
That leaves Virginia, which truly was turning into a thriving plantation colony, particularly as a source of tobacco for the European market; with manpower and resources on a scale that posed a potential threat to the fledgling French colony on the St. Lawrence. However, the Chesapeake was almost a thousand kilometres from Quebec, and the Virginians had little to gain from waging a costly campaign in the north. Quebec and Jamestown operated in completely different spheres, and weren’t competitors in any real sense.
In fact, the Englishmen who’ve been most relevant to us up till this point in our story were the humble fishermen who, for more than a century, had been plying the Grand Banks fisheries around Newfoundland, where the open ocean offered a seemingly infinite volume of cod. The growth of French Canada in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, led by Samuel de Champlain, had limited the ability of these independent English traders to access the Indigenous-supplied fur market. As we will see in this instalment, however, growing tensions between France and England would provide the latter with an opportunity to expand its commercial footprint.
I don’t think I need to use the words “spoiler alert” before noting that the English will become a very big player in the story of Canada’s history. And since we’ve spent almost all our time till now with the French and Indigenous narratives, it’s worth going back and summarising some of the early English efforts at gaining a presence in the region.
Throughout most of the sixteenth century, readers will recall, the fishing fleets that appeared off Canada’s east coast every spring hailed from many parts of western Europe—including not only England and France, but also Portugal and the Basque regions that straddled the Pyrenees mountains. The Newfoundland fisheries was something of a free-for-all. But that started to change in the 1590s, when the Anglo-Spanish War raised the stakes in many far-flung theatres, Newfoundland included.
Walter Raleigh, then one of Queen Elizabeth’s leading sea dogs, had already taken part in an ill-fated attempt to colonise Newfoundland, led by his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, who was lost at sea as he returned home from a failed expedition. It was only by luck that Raleigh survived, as his ship had been forced to turn back for repairs during the initial westward crossing.
Over a decade later, Raleigh was still at it, overseeing an English campaign to clear rivals off Newfoundland’s Atlantic coast. By the time England and Spain formalised their peace in 1604, privateers had made Newfoundland an unfriendly place for non-English fishermen. Back in the 1570s, an average of about 30 English fishing vessels travelled to Newfoundland every season. By 1610, that number was over 200. The eastern coast of Newfoundland wasn’t a colony—because no one lived there year round. But it had become, for commercial purposes, a de facto English possession.
In 1608—the same year Champlain was establishing his colony at Quebec—a sailor named John Guy put out of Bristol to systematically survey the Newfoundland coastline, his goal being to find a suitable place for a permanent settlement. As with Champlain in Quebec, the dream was to create a profitable corporate monopoly—the difference being that this one would focus on fish, not fur.
The group of London-based investors that backed Guy was led by Ralph Freeman, who also had a stake in the Virginia Company, as well as Mediterranean commercial ventures, but who was most noteworthy for his dominant position in the whaling business (which was then highly profitable, as our old friend Henry Hudson had just discovered new whaling grounds off the Arctic island of Spitsbergen).
Joining professional investors such as Freeman were amateurs—many of them country gentlemen desperate to find the next get-rich-quick scheme. The key figure in this group was Percival Willoughby, a man who’d taken on enormous debt through a socially ambitious marriage to his cousin Bridget.
She’d come with an impressive estate—Wollaton Hall, which her father had built just outside Nottingham in the 1580s. (It’s still there today, and open to visitors—I recommend it. Christopher Nolan used the exterior for Wayne Manor in The Dark Knight Rises.) Alas, Wollaton Hall came with a huge debt of £30,000. And resolving this financial challenge while still retaining his status as a leading gentleman in the kingdom became Willoughby’s life mission. His long list of creditors included some of the London men financing the Newfoundland Project, and they convinced him to leverage his remaining assets in order to invest in a stake himself
Till this point, Willoughby had been attempting to pay down his debt by playing the energy market. In the early seventeenth century, England was urbanising at a tremendous pace, and all the new town-dwellers needed some way to heat their homes without expensive firewood from local forests (many of which had all been cut down). The answer, of course, was coal. And luckily for Willoughby, some of his properties in Northamptonshire contained loads of it. Even better, they were situated reasonably close to the London market.
Alas, Willoughby was priced out by low-cost competitors from Newcastle—who could sail their product to London at much lower cost than the overland route that Willoughby was forced to rely on. All he had to show from the venture was more red ink.
In Newfoundland, however, Willoughby saw a truly can’t-miss opportunity. Reports suggested that the rocky island was full of iron, coal, and a variety of valuable minerals. Willoughby imagined a transatlantic energy operation that would supplant Newcastle. He even dreamed that a full-blown smelting operation might be set up in Newfoundland, making it a source of usable metal and not just raw ore.
The Newfoundland Company attracted 48 investors, and secured a charter from King James I. Crucially, however, the charter didn’t include a monopoly on the Newfoundland fishery. In part, this was due to lobbying from the merchants of Bristol. As in France—where, as we’ve seen, there were plenty of commercial rivalries amongst traders from Rouen, La Rochelle, Caen, and other major ports—many regional investors in England had interests that diverged from those of their London counterparts. Bristol’s sailors and businessmen, in particular, weren’t particularly happy with an upstart clique of Londoners horning in on a profitable business that Bristolians had been plying for more than a century.
Nevertheless, in the summer of 1610, John Guy and 38 would-be settlers sailed to Newfoundland with a plan somewhat similar to the one Champlain was following on the St. Lawrence. The goal was to show everyone back home the value that a permanent settlement could provide, so as to secure a monopoly from the state that would, in turn, finance a larger-scale operation.
Guy’s destination was the Avalon Peninsula, the southeastern corner of Newfoundland that juts out into the Atlantic (where St. John’s sits today). The region had long been used for stopovers by vessels sailing to and from Europe. Its coastline has many natural harbours, and it offered the shortest distance between the Old and New Worlds (to employ terminology rooted in the European perspective).
In August, the settlers landed at Cuper’s Cove, in Conception Bay, on the north side of the peninsula, where the early returns were positive. Unlike the initial experiments at Jamestown in Virginia, there was no famine period during which the colonists suffered through a process of trial and error while living off an unfamiliar land. This was a region the English already knew, surrounded by waters that were frequently trafficked. Keeping the settlement supplied from Bristol was relatively easy. And within two years, the colony’s population had almost doubled to sixty-two. The Company was even constructing a second settlement nearby, and recruiting more migrants.
In 1612, however, the colony’s good fortune ran out.
The most obvious culprit was a pirate named Peter Easton—one of the privateers whom Queen Elizabeth had commissioned to clear enemy vessels out of Newfoundland’s waters in the last years of the Anglo-Spanish War. In order to help him achieve this goal, the Queen had granted Easton the right to impress English fishermen into his crew. This was war, after all, and every Englishman had to do his part.
When the new monarch, James, signed his peace with Spain in 1604, Easton was out of a job. But only technically. In practice, the English Crown had little control over what went on in Newfoundland, and Easton didn’t see any reason to discontinue his profitable work.
For several years, he followed a seasonal pattern. In summer, he extracted protection money from fishermen around Newfoundland, looting the occasional Spanish interloper or stubborn captain out of Bristol. Then he’d use the proceeds to fund raids on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, or the open Atlantic. This is where the big money was.
By the time the Newfoundland Company was being formed in the salons of London, Easton had built something akin to a company himself, even if he didn’t possess a royal charter. He did have financiers, however: small-time merchants in Cornwall who’d assessed Easton’s business model (such as it was) and found it to be sound.
Which brings us back to 1612 and the two-year-old colony at Cuper’s Cove. Easton anchored his ships provocatively off-shore and demanded that the colonists contribute financially to his oh-so-tireless efforts to keep Newfoundland “safe.” A good old-fashioned shakedown, in other words.
Guy and the other colonists responded by fortifying their settlement, and answering the pirate’s demands with defiance. In the short-term, they prevailed. Easton wasn’t willing to escalate things beyond bluster. He was used to operating outside the normal boundaries of the law, but declaring war on a royally chartered company was a step too far, even for him. (He’d eventually shift his business to friendlier waters, and retired to northern Italy, a wealthy man.)
But although Cuper’s Cove successfully stood up to Easton’s aggression, the tense ordeal had revealed the colony’s vulnerability to outside actors. In two years, the colonists had made no real progress toward self-sufficiency. Newfoundland’s rocky soil, it had become clear, was not amenable to agriculture; and the settlers were entirely dependent on transatlantic supply runs funded by the Company—a lifeline that had been suspended while Easton had been on the prowl.
The winter of 1612–13 was shaping up to be a hungry one. Many of the colonists, John Guy included, decided they didn’t want to see just how bad things might get, and sailed for England before the snow started falling. Soon, anxious investors began pulling out.
Willoughby, on the other hand, remained in something of a fantasy-land. He still imagined that Newfoundland might be the site of a profitable smelting operation—one that might even process iron shipped from Europe until the local mining operation was up and running. (A metallurgical side note: While Willoughby’s plan to turn Newfoundland into a seventeenth-century iron hub was a fantasy, his belief that Bell Island in Conception Bay contained massive deposits of iron ore proved accurate, though it wouldn’t be until the 1890s that the area was developed commercially.)
Eventually, King James struck upon a new use for the North Atlantic island—though explaining what it was will require us to take a side-excursion into European politics.
In the 1620s, the great foreign-policy issue facing both England and France was the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, a bloody conflict between Protestants and Catholics that drew in numerous outside forces. England’s dilemma was that the forces of Catholicism were winning. In Catholic France, then ruled by King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, the problem was that those Catholic forces were led by France’s great rival—the Austrian- and Spanish-based Hapsburg dynasty. And on this basis, Protestant England and Catholic France struck an awkward partnership.
Initially, both countries tried to resolve the crisis by exerting diplomatic pressure on the Hapsburgs. In this regard, the English effort was led by George Calvert, Secretary of State to King James I. Publicly, Calvert conducted himself as a Protestant (a requirement to serve in England’s government). But privately, he was a Catholic. And in time, the English public, which broadly favoured sending troops to support the Protestant forces on the continent, turned against Calvert and his allies, whose reluctance to take a more muscular approach in Germany opened them up to accusations of divided loyalties.
And this is where Newfoundland returns to the story. As Calvert became increasingly convinced that England was no longer safe for Catholics, he imagined creating a kind of refuge on the other side of the Atlantic. And so he used what remained of his influence with James to acquire a new charter, this one for (another) new colony to be situated on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula.
Calvert’s colony grew to over a hundred people by the mid-1620s before he eventually became discouraged by the rugged climate and set his sights on finding real estate further south—eventually seeking a new royal charter to settle the region now known as Maryland. (Calvert’s title, by no coincidence, was 1st Baron Baltimore.) For those keeping count, this is the third English attempt at settling Newfoundland to end in seeming failure.
Meanwhile, by 1627, the awkward Anglo-French alliance had (predictably) fallen apart, and the two former allies turned on each other. What that meant for the French and English residents of the New World—if anything—wasn’t clear, however. On the French side, Richelieu didn’t seem interested in using New France as a base for attacking English interests. And the English king didn’t have the resources to prosecute a conflict in Canada, even if he’d wanted to.
One important point to remember here is that at this point in history, England was a second-rate European power, not on the same tier as France or Spain. Its lack of resources was one of the reasons why it had largely stayed out of the Thirty Years’ War. And if there was little money available for sending troops to the other side of the English Channel, there was none at all for waging war on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, the English Crown had to find creative ways to assert its interests, contracting the country’s geopolitical dirty work out to private actors, as had been the case with Peter Easton (and, more famously, Francis Drake).
A second important point to remember involves the Indigenous side of the equation. In previous instalments, I’ve emphasised that the French project in Canada was, at least for commercial purposes, completely dependant on creating alliances with Indigenous groups such as the Wendat, Algonquin, and Innu nations that inhabited the area in and around the St. Lawrence basin. But here we are, halfway through this instalment, and Indigenous topics have been absent. Some readers may well be asking themselves why.
The main reason is that the early English and Scottish explorers and colonialists who came to Newfoundland simply didn’t encounter that many Indigenous inhabitants.
The primary Indigenous inhabitants of Newfoundland prior to European settlement were the Beothuk, but their interactions with the new arrivals were minimal. Historians believe this was the result of conscious choices made by both Beothuk hunters and European fishermen.
For the Beothuk, trade with Europeans was unnecessary, as scrap metal and other goods could be scavenged from the seasonal fishing and whaling stations that were left abandoned every winter. Meanwhile, the fishermen who visited Newfoundland differed from the fur traders on the St. Lawrence in that they didn’t require Indigenous assistance or knowledge to pursue their economic goals. Interactions between the two groups remained rare until the 18th century, when the European presence in Newfoundland became more substantial—with (as we shall see) devastating consequences for the Beothuk population.
In regard to the freelance structure that the English crown had settled on, the general idea was to form investment groups that would act as colonial companies. Instead of being granted land by the Crown, however, these new ventures would be required to seize their real estate from the French. The King would then bestow all the usual monopoly privileges on the victors, allowing them to recoup the costs of war.
The first group to organise in this manner was a collection of Scots. Before taking the English throne in 1603, some readers may recall from their high-school history lessons, James I of England had been James VI of Scotland (a title he retained until his death in 1625). His son Charles now reigned as king of both nations (not to mention Ireland), and so presided over a multicultural court that included many of the Scottish grandees who’d originally followed his father south in the early days of England’s Stuart dynasty.
One of these Scots was William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling—a veteran courtier who’d originally made his name by composing poems and other literary works. The Stuart court (like many in early modern Europe) blended politics and the arts, and Alexander applied his romantic ideals to Crown policy. Much as Calvert had imagined Newfoundland as a haven for Catholics, the Plymouth Colony was an explicitly Protestant (or, if you prefer, puritanical) endeavour, Alexander dreamed of a specifically Scottish project to match the fledgling English settlements to the south.
In the 1610s, he was granted territory on the southeast coast of Newfoundland to develop this Scottish project. But due to a lack of funding, the scheme never got off the ground. By 1621, however, Alexander was ready to try again, this time targeting the region the French knew as Acadia. He had a grander name for it, though: New Scotland, or, in the Latin, Nova Scotia.
There was a real opportunity here, as the thin French presence in Acadia wasn’t likely to offer much resistance. Indeed, as we’ve seen, France’s Acadian operations had already been easily wiped off the map once, in 1613, by English sea captain Samuel Argall.
French traders still remained active in the area. And officially, the region’s ownership remained shared between a powerful French noblewoman (and Jesuit backer) named Antoinette de Guercheville, and Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just (whom I’ve been referring to simply as Poutrincourt), a debt-ridden French aristocrat looking to make his fortune on the other side of the Atlantic in the same somewhat desperate fashion as the hapless Percival Willoughby.
Guercheville more or less gave up on the Jesuit mission after the disastrous raids of 1613, and Poutrincourt exited history with his death in 1615. But Poutrincourt’s son, Charles de Biencourt, picked up the baton. He’d assisted his father in trying to make a go of the original Acadian operation, even spending a year living with the local Mi’kmaq as part of a cultural exchange aimed at improving trade. Alas, Biencourt, too, would soon leave the stage, dying in 1623 at the young age of 33.
His claim was, in turn, taken up by Biencourt’s long-time colleague, Charles de la Tour, another young Acadian veteran. As things turned out, de la Tour would remain a fixture in Acadia for years to come. But in the 1620s, the French hold on Acadia was as tenuous—nominal might be the right word—as it had been since the beginning of the century.
That created an opportunity for Alexander. But he had his own problems, as few Scots seemed interested in transatlantic migration. The developing English plantations in Ulster, just across the Irish Sea from England, seemed like a far more attractive proposition.
Without adequate funds, supplies, or personnel, Alexander decided to send a ship over anyway. But it never got past Newfoundland, where the would-be colonists appealed to the hospitality of the English settlers. Over the winter of 1622–23, these new arrivals either died or were absorbed into the Newfoundland colony. The only progress Alexander could boast was some mapping of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton coast, which revealed a few sites with potential for European settlement.
Forced back to the drawing board, Alexander searched for a way to fund his as-yet theoretical Nova Scotia settlement. In doing so, he looked to Ulster as a model.
For the past generation, English and Scottish investors had been developing lands in the north of Ireland, which had been seized after the suppression of a rebellion twenty years earlier. Men with capital to spare had been attracted by the promise of property and noble titles, which they could earn if they took on the task of developing the land and (as the English saw it) “civilising” the native Irish.
Alexander reasoned that the same template might be applied farther afield. And so he offered potential Scottish investors a deal whereby they’d fund the settlement of families on Cape Breton, on the promise that if, after two years, the land in question was continuously occupied by at least six men, the backing investor would be granted an aristocratic title (though he’d also have to pay Alexander a fee in exchange for him surrendering his claim to the plot’s ownership).
This scheme was announced in 1624, but met with a muted response from elite Scottish society. Carving out land and titles in Ireland was one thing. Would noble titles based on patches of wilderness on the other side of the world really bestow the same kind of social status?
Alexander’s new plan seemed just as much a bust as those that preceded it. But then, as so often has happened in our story, European power politics created new opportunities.
When war broke out between England and France in 1627, Alexander suddenly was able to re-cast his colonial project as a military venture. Overseas land development was typically seen as a high-cost bet with long-delayed returns. But men such as Drake and Easton had shown everyone that privateering expeditions performed under patriotic military auspices could deliver big returns in timely fashion.
Alexander wasn’t the only one to see this opportunity. A second investor group was led by the Kirkes, an English merchant family with a long history in French commerce. The patriarch of the family, Jarvis Kirke, had settled in Dieppe, where he’d married the daughter of a Huguenot (Protestant) merchant family and fathered five sons (David being the most important for our purposes).
As a prominent merchant family based in Normandy, the Kirkes had close connections with another such clan, the Caens—whose Compagnie de Caën we discussed in our twentieth instalment. Just before the war with England, readers may recall, the Caens had lost their fur-trading monopoly and been pushed out of the Canadian theatre by Cardinal Richelieu.
Greg Koabel
As English subjects, the Kirkes were better positioned to defy the new French monopoly that Richelieu had empowered to run the fur trade—a fact that the Caens sought to leverage as a means to regain their lost trading privileges. Over the winter of 1626–27, the two families worked together on organising a joint expedition the following summer, in defiance of Richelieu. The growing tensions between England and France acted as a useful backdrop, as the English likely wouldn’t be enthusiastic about enforcing French law.
Good news came in the spring, when the Anglo-French relationship broke down completely. The planned voyage suddenly morphed into a privateering expedition, sanctioned by no less an authority than the King of England. Their mission would be to displace the French from Canada—including both the St. Lawrence and Acadia. Any spoils they collected along the way would be theirs to keep.
On the ground, though, things would prove to be a bit more complicated than this summary might indicate, as everyone had different objectives that didn’t map neatly onto national foreign-policy interests.
Even within Scottish ranks, for instance, there were divided interests at play. Alexander imagined that the real mission would be to clear out the French from the area so as to make room for his cherished Nova Scotia. For David Kirke on the other hand, the objective was the creation of a new fur empire, overseen by his father and their French partners.
The war in Canada was entirely in the hands of these expedition leaders, not any kind of central national command. And it is here where Charles I came to discover the pitfalls of a privateer-based approach to colonisation. Yes, it was cheap. But it also meant there was no clear strategic vision that would serve to keep squabbling partners aligned with the same objective.
On the French side, there were also factions emerging. These included not only members of the Caen family, who’d been brushed aside by Richelieu; but also veteran translators such as Étienne Brûlé, who’d worked among France’s Indigenous trade partners for years before seeing their functions taken over by newly arrived Jesuit priests. Then there was the Innu, who, as I’ve discussed, resented the fact that their original role as fur-trade middlemen had been forgotten by the French once the centre of commerce moved upstream to Quebec (which is to say, the site of modern Quebec City) and beyond.
In our next instalment, we’ll see how these conflicting agendas played out on the St. Lawrence and in Acadia. While European affairs sparked the conflict between England and France, the fighting that spilled over into Canada would be driven by local factors that no one in London or Paris fully understood, let alone controlled.
