USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > History of grants under the great Council for New England: a lecture of a course by members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, delivered before the Lowell Institute, Jan. 15, 1869 > Part 1
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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01088 1743
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At the signs of.
HISTORY OF GRANTS
UNDER THE
GREAT COUNCIL FOR NEW ENGLAND:
A LECTURE
OF A .
COURSE BY MEMBERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
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Delivered before the Lowell Institute,
JAN. 15, 1869.
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BY
SAMUEL F. HAVEN, A.M.
BOSTON: PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 1869.
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1760800
HISTORY OF GRANTS
UNDER 4
THE GREAT COUNCIL FOR NEW ENGLAND.
BY SAMUEL F. HAVEN, A. M.
F 84 .39
1.
A
Haven, Samuel Foster, 1S06-1881.
History of grants under the great Council for New Eng- land : a lecture of a course by members of the Massachusetts historical society. delivered before the Lowell institute. Jan. 15. 1869. By Samuel F. Haven. A. M. Boston. Press of .J. Wilson and son. 1869.
36 D. 24cm.
Also pub. in the Massachusetts historical society's "Lectures deliv- ered in a course before the Lowell institute ... " Boston. 1869. -
Xerox Copy ... England. 2. Land grants -- New England. 3. New England-Ilist .- Colonial period. I. Massachusetts historical society, Boston. II. Lowell institute lectures, 1868-69.
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Library of Congress
I.T.HIRS
SHELF CARGA3611]
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HISTORY OF GRANTS
UNDER
THE GREAT COUNCIL FOR NEW ENGLAND.
THE subject assigned to me for a lecture to-night is, " History of Grants under the Great Council for New England."
However important this may be in a historical point of view, so far as pleasurable interest is concerned it certainly has a rather dry and unpromising aspect.
Moreover, it was said of this Great Council for New England, by the learned Dr. Belknap, after he had tried in vain to harmo- nize their proceedings, that -
" Either from the jarring interests of the members, or their indistinct knowledge of the country, or their inattention to business, or some other cause which does not fully appear, their affairs were transacted in a con- fused manner from the beginning ; and the grants which they made were so inaccurately described, and interfered so much with each other, as to occasion difficulties and controversies, some of which are not yet ended."
So, too, Governor Sullivan in his work on "Land Titles in * Massachusetts" declares that the legislative acts of the Council for New England and their judicial determinations " were but a chain of blunders ;" and " their grants, from the want of an ac- curate knowledge of the geography of the territory, were but a course of confusion."
Possibly, it was with the hope of obtaining additional light upon these obscurities and perplexities, to the extent of recon- ciling apparent discrepancies, that the subject was selected for treatment in this series of historical lectures. But intricacies which learned historians and acute lawyers have failed to eluci- date, it may be presumed are not susceptible of a distinct and
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definite solution, such as Courts require for the establishment of a title to property ; and we may be compelled to find in a nar- rative of the circumstances under which they had their origin their only reasonable explanation.
You will therefore be spared a technical dissertation upon charters, patents, grants, and other methods of conveying terri- torial rights, and be asked to listen to a relation of the rise, the character, the operations, and the end of the great corpora- tion in England created by James I. on the 3d of November, 1620, consisting of forty noblemen, knights, and gentlemen, and called " The Council established at Plymouth, in the County of Devon, for the Planting, Ruling, and Governing of New England in America."
. It will be necessary to go back a little; not indeed to the days of Adam and Eve, as did our distinguished New England chro- nologer, Dr. Prince, who devoted so much time and space to the preliminary annals of the world, that he died before completing those of this limited portion of the globe, which were the real object of his work, - but to the beginning of England's conven- tional title to American possessions. It was a conventional title, inasmuch as it rested upon an understanding among the so-called Christian powers, that the rights of nations and peoples, who were not at least nominally Christian, should be entirely disregarded. The sovereigns of Europe carried out in practice the principle . which the Puritans of Cromwell's parliament were said to have asserted in theory, and apparently regarded the scripture promise that the saints shall inherit the earth as a mere statement of their own just prerogative. Among Catholics, the Pope, as an inspired administrator, distributed newly discovered regions according to his inclination and infallible discretion. His assignments of con- tinents and seas by the boundaries of latitude and longitude were valid in Spain and Portugal and France; but in England the King, when he had become also the head of a church, claimed authority to empower his subjects to discover " remote; heathen, and barbarous lands, not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people, and the same to hold, occupy, and enjoy, with all commodities, jurisdictions, and royalties, both by sea and land;" of course, in subordination to his own paramount author- ity, but with no reference to the supremacy of the Roman pontiff.
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John and Sebastian Cabot were commissioned, in like phra- seology, by Henry VII., " to seek out countries or provinces of the heathen and infidels, wherever situated, hitherto unknown to all Christians, and to subdue and possess them as his sub- jects." If their discoveries had been followed at once by pos- session, the papal sanction might have been deemed essential to a sound title ; but England had long been a Protestant country before steps were taken to maintain her claims to a portion of the New World. Remote events, like distant objects, are apt to seem crowded together, for want of a perspective to make the intervals which separate them evident to our perceptions. Thus we often fail to realize the duration of uneventful periods of history which come between the strifes and commotions, or other great occurrences which chiefly occupy the attention of both the historian and his reader. From A.D. 1495, the date of the commission to the Cabots, to A.D. 1578, the date of the letters patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, under which possession was first taken for the English crown, the lapse of time exceeds that of two generations of men, as these are usually estimated.
Meanwhile, circumstances were silently and indirectly, as well as slowly, preparing for the settlement of this portion of the American continent. Unrecorded voyages were annually made to our coasts for fish by the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French ; the fasts of the church causing a large demand for that article of food in Catholic countries. The people bordering on the Bay of Biscay were hereditary fishermen. Their ancestors had cap- tured whales in their own tempestuous sea; and Biscayans, or Basques, as they were more frequently termed, were in great re- quest as experts for the fisheries at Newfoundland, and along the shores of New England. They professed to believe that their countrymen visited the same fishing-grounds before Columbus crossed the ocean. The business was so lucrative that the re- ports first brought home by the Cabots of the great abundance of codfish in those regions produced an excitement among the people engaged in that trade, not unlike that which rumors of gold in California and Australia have created in more recent times.
No account has been preserved of the commencement of fishing voyages to the American seas; but they can be traced back to
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within half a dozen years of the return of the Cabots; and twelve or fifteen years later as many as fifty vessels of different nations were employed on the Grand Banks.
Of such voyages no journal was kept and no history was writ- ten; because it was the policy of the adventurers to keep these prolific sources of wealth, as much as possible, from attracting the attention of competitors.
The presence of European vessels on our shores, in consider- able numbers, a century before the arrival of the Pilgrims, may account for traditions among the natives, and the occasional dis- covery of articles of European manufacture in their graves, that have been supposed to point to the visits of the Northmen at far more distant periods.1
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A process of preparation not less marked and effective was at the same time going on in England itself. Until the reign of Henry VII., that kingdom had been behind all other European States in mercantile enterprise. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and even Germany, were before her in commerce or manufac- tures. The fluctuations of trade, in the removal of its seats from one place or country to another, are among the marvels and curi- osities of history. The chief wonders of the world - the costly and gigantic remains of decayed cities, where now all is silence and desolation - are the fruits of accumulated capital in what were once the forwarding and distributing stations of trade. Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Palmyra, Tyre, and Carthage were great and magnificent, because, as the prophet Nahum saith of Nineveh, " They multiplied their merchants above the stars of heaven."
Wherever traffic has found a seat and centre, art, architecture, enterprise, and political power have been its inevitable fruits. The growth and decay of these local influences, and their distribution in turn among the kingdoms of the earth, though springing from natural causes, belong no less to the mysterious operations of Providence. It was the commercial decline of Italy (the indus- trial Italy of the Middle Ages), whose prodigal remains of æsthetic splendor are the memorials of her merchant princes, that
1 When Captain John Smith visited the Susquehanna Indians, in 1608, they had utensils of iron and brass, which, by their own account, originally came from the French of Canada.
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carried Venetian navigators to England, among them the family of Cabots, seeking employment for the exercise of their native arts.1 At the same time, the incessant wars upon the continent were driving tradesmen and manufacturers from the free cities of central Europe, which they had built up and enriched ; many of whom took refuge in the British Isles, which thus easily acquired the advantages of skill and experience in the production and sale of important fabrics. England's opportunity had come. Though not lying in the course of the world's great thorough- fares, yet, by insular position, favorably formed for maritime pursuits, her chances of wealth and power from the magic agencies of commerce had at length arrived. Through the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., and the bloody Mary, to their full fruition in the Augustan era of Queen Eliza- beth, these causes were not only increasing the riches, but developing wonderfully the mental and physical character and capacities of the British people. More independent, politically and socially, than their neighbors in Holland, they shared with them the accumulation of the precious metals which flowed from American mines, through Spain and Portugal, to the chief marts of trade, and experienced the stimulating effects of capital in all departments of life and action. Enterprise, extravagance, ambition, emulation, greed, were the healthy and unhealthy consequences of a prosperous and excited community.
The tendency to a sort of theatrical exaggeration in sentiment and manners that followed upon this development of physical resources and mental energies was perhaps a natural result. Man has often been declared to be the product of the pecu- liarities of the period in which he was born. Well might Shakespeare say of his own time, " All the world is a stage, and all the men and women are mere players;" for the whole reign of Elizabeth was a theatrical pageant, where Leicester and Essex, Sidney, Southampton, and Raleigh, and not excepting Bacon, the representative of philosophy, personated the various characters of an heroic drama; while the many-sided Shake-
! The superior naval advancement of Italy at that period is illustrated by the fact, that the leaders of discovery in the western hemisphere - Columbus in the service of Spain, Cabot in the service of England, Vespucius in the service of Portu- gal, and Verrazano in the service of France - were Italians.
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speare was himself a dramatic embodiment of the entire intel- lectual expansion of his age.
There lived then a certain remarkable woman, - remarkable for having two sons of different fathers, whose heroic tempera- ment and versatile talents must have been derived from their common mother. The half-brothers, Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh, were more alike in tastes and genius than is often seen in a nearer relationship. It was the blood of the Champernons, - a name that has a place of its own in our colonial history, - and not that of the Gilberts or Raleighs, which made them what they were.
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To these two men, of honorable birth and social standing, each of whom combined the habits and qualities of a soldier with those of a studious scholar, and could handle with equal skill the pen and the sword, we owe it that this New England where we live, and this entire Union of vigorous States, are not dependencies of France or Spain, or such as are those feeble provinces which sprang from French or Spanish colonization.
Whatever constructive right or title England had acquired by the discoveries of the Cabots, a little more delay, and their assertion would have been no longer practicable, except at the point of the sword. It was Gilbert and Raleigh who, in the- nick of time, gave this direction to British energies ; and appar- ently nothing but the grand ideas and exhaustless resolution of these great minds, and their inspiring influence amid disappoint- ment and disaster, saved an indefinite and uncertain claim by means of a positive and substantial possession.
The rival claims of the leading European powers, at this juncture, to the soil of our continent north of the Gulf of Mexico, were not better defined, or more easy of satisfactory adjustment upon legal and equitable principles, than are those of the grantees of the Great Council for New England, which are now the particular subject of consideration. The rules and pre- cedents of national and international law furnish a convenient phraseology for the discussion of questions relating to territorial ownership and boundaries, as phrenology provides a convenient nomenclature for describing the faculties of the mind although it may not be admitted to determine their actual position and limits. In larger divisions of land, even where private citizens
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alone are concerned, the most tenacious grasp is apt ultimately to acquire the legal title. Time heals defeets, and the pertina- cious possessor finds his right to hold and convey seeured by circumstanees, and protected by judicial tribunals.
The English jurists of the reign of Elizabeth maintained, that discovery and possession united could alone give a valid title to a new country. But how far asunder in point of time might these acts be, and yet retain their virtue when brought together? And what if another discovery and a possession eame between them ? Will a possession fairly taken, but not continued by uninterrupted occupaney, avail for a completion of title ?
The answers to these questions are not so distinctly given as to enable us to found upon them, clearly, the right of the British ·crown to issue patents and eharters, empowering its subjects to hold and distribute the regions which, under the names of Vir- ginia and New England, embraced a large portion of the North American continent.
John and Sebastian Cabot discovered, and to some extent explored, the American coast (A. D. 1497-8) from Labrador to the Carolinas, more than a year before the continent had been seen by Columbus or by Amerieus Vespucius ; but the subjects of other powers had visited these shores familiarly, and some of them had taken formal possession in the name of their sovereign, long before Sir Humphrey Gilbert came to Newfoundland in 1583.
On behalf of the King of Portugal, Cortereal ranged the northern coast only two years later than the Cabots, and gave the name Labrador to the country still so ealled.
A map of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the neighboring country was made by the French, from their own observations, as early as 1507.
It is said, that in 1522 there were fifty houses at Newfound- land occupied by people of different nations. There were prob- ably some English among them, although the English fisheries were then chiefly in the direction of Iceland.
In 1524, an expedition for discovery was sent by Franeis I. of France, under John De Verazzano, a Florentine, who explored our coast from the Carolinas to Newfoundland, as the Cabots had done, but with more particularity, and ealled the country
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NEW FRANCE; and in the same year Stephen Gomez, in the service of Spain, sailed from Florida to Cape Race; his object being, as was then the case with almost all the navigators that preceded him, here, to find a passage through to the Pacific Ocean, then called the South Sea.
After this, while the Spaniards were seeking a foothold in Florida, the French, in a series of expeditions from 1534 to 1542, with Cartier as chief leader, were, on behalf of France, erecting monuments in token of possession, and planting colo- nies, in the region of the gulf of St. Lawrence. Having endured several seasons of trial and suffering, these colonies came to an end, as settlements ; leaving, it is claimed, some of their members still in the country. With the exception of a disastrous ex- pedition in 1549, when Roberval and a numerous train of adventurers were supposed to have perished at sea, no farther measures were taken by the French to re-establish themselves in the North till near the close of that century.
Thus, while England had neglected to maintain her rights as a discoverer, Spain, Portugal, and France had explored the same parts of North America; and France had planted her subjects on the soil, without formal remonstrance, so far as is known, from any other power. The English fishery at Newfound- land had become important in 1548; but no record has been preserved of any attempt at colonization. .
This negligence, or indifference, was first broken by Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He had written a discourse to show the probability of a passage by the north-west to India, which may have promoted the voyage of Frobisher to the Arctic Sea in 1576; and, in 1578, he received from Queen Elizabeth authority to discover and take possession of remote and barbarous lands unoccupied by any Christian prince or people, as the Cabots had been empowered to do by Henry VII. It is noticeable, that the patent to Gilbert contains no allusion to the Cabots, or to any rights of the crown derived from former discoveries. For aught that appears in the instrument itself, this was an independent and original enterprise for discovery and conquest, with a right on the part of Gilbert to possess and govern the discovered and conquered lands in subordination to the Queen. But such was not the view of the grantee himself. He did not survive to be
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his own historian; but we learn from the narrative of Edward Haies, " a principall. actour in the same voyage," -
1st, That the enterprise of Gilbert was based upon the con- sideration, that "John Cabot, the father, and Sebastian, his son, an Englishman born, were the first finders out of all that great tract of land stretching from the Cape of Florida unto those Islands which we now call the Newfoundland; all of which they brought and annexed unto the crown of England."
2d, That if a man's motives " be derived from a virtuous and heroical mind, preferring chiefly the honor of God, compassion of poor infidels captived by the devil, tyrannizing in most wonderful and dreadful manner over their bodies and souls," and other honorable purposes specified, " God will assist such an actor beyond the expectation of man." Especially as, " in this last age of the world, the time is complete for receiving also these Gentiles into his mercy ; . . . it seeming probable by the event of precedent attempts made by the Spaniards and French sundry times, that the country lying North of Florida God hath reserved to be reduced unto Christian civilization by the English nation."
" Then seeing the English nation only hath right unto these countries of America, from the Cape of Florida northward, by the privilege of first discovery, . .. which right also seemeth strongly defended on our behalf by the powerful hand of almighty God, withstanding the enter- prises of other nations; it may greatly encourage us upon so just ground, as is our right, and upon so sacred an intent as to plant religion, to prosecute effectually the full possession of these so ample and pleasant countries appertaining unto the crown of England; the same (as is to be conjectured by infallible arguments of the world's end approaching) being now arrived unto the time by God prescribed of their vocation, if ever their calling unto the knowledge of God may be expected."
This conviction, that the end of the world was near, was the source of much of the heroic adventure, and the excuse for much of the merciless barbarity towards the natives, which attended the occupation of this continent by Europeans. The WORD was first to be preached among all nations ; and soldiers and priests alike believed themselves agents of heaven in the fulfilment of prophecy, when, acting under papal or royal au- thority, they compelled the submission of heathen nations to the
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Christian faith by violence and bloodshed. Columbus thought he had ascertained by calculation, that there remained but one hundred and fifty years from his time before the final catastrophe. " My enterprise," said he, " has accomplished simply that which the prophet Isaiah had predicted, - that, before the end of the world, the gospel should be preached upon all the earth, and the Holy City be restored to the church." Nearly ninety years of that remnant of time had expired, when, influenced by similar sentiments, Sir Humphrey Gilbert set forth on a similar errand.
It was his intention to take possession at Newfoundland for the northern portion of the country, and at some point nearer Florida for the southern portion of the English claim; going first to Newfoundland to gain the advantage of a favorable season of the year, and the period when fishing vessels were most numerous at that station. The ships of different nations then engaged in that employment, were one hundred from Spain, fifty from Portugal, and one hundred and fifty from France, to fifty from England. But England had become full-blooded and dangerous, and already aspired to rule the seas. She had the best ships, which, as Haies expresses it, were "admirals" over the rest, and controlled the harbors.
Gilbert landed, and calling together the merchants and ship- masters of the several nations, took possession with all the prescribed formalities. He promulgated laws, to which the people, by general voice, promised obedience ; and made grants of land, the recipients covenanting to pay an annual rent, and yearly to maintain possession of the same by themselves or their assigns as his representatives.
We know that Gilbert was lost at sea, without having been able to make a like demonstration elsewhere. But his proceed- ings at Newfoundland have been regarded by all English writers as substantiating the English title to the whole country. No distinct colony was left behind him ; but the British domination continued to be recognized by the mixed population on the shore, and was, when necessary, enforced by summary process among the ships.
On learning the death of his heroic half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, his partner in the enterprise, immediately obtained a similar commission and patent in his own name, and sought to
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complete their purpose by planting a colony at the South. It was his fortune, too, to fail in that part of his design which con- templated the establishment of settlements under his own rule and tributary to himself; but he was the first to possess and occupy the soil of Virginia; and, although interrupted for a time, the occupancy of British subjects in that region became permanent, without the interference of rival attempts at coloniza- tion.
It was under such circumstances, and in such manner, that the title of England, be it good or bad, to a portion of our con- tinent, was originally acquired and maintained.
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