James Evans is an Oxford trained historical researcher. Here, he puts his considerable skills to work to answer the question ‘what led so many people, principally English, to leave their homes, their communities and risk everything to visit and settle on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean?’
He does this by choosing a particular factor in each chapter through which to see the process of emigration in action; fishermen in late sixteenth century switching from seasonal visits to building permanent settlements in Newfoundland; adventurers exploring the coastal regions looking for a route to India, or gold; groups fleeing persecution, keen to build a new society in New England, based on their religious beliefs; Royalists and merchants settling Virginia for profit; then Dutch and English settlers building an economic hub (New York) based on the trade in Beaver fur. Two further chapters deal with different issues; one on the establishment of Pennsylvania by Quakers (and others) led by William Penn, and one focusing on how desperate was the plight of the poor, destitute English to impel so many of them onto such a hazardous journey across the seas.
The timeline, given this organisation of information, necessarily jumps about a bit, and we spend time in different decades of the seventeenth century in different parts of the book. This didn’t impede the rolling momentum that builds as an understanding of that momentous time crashes into my mind. Mr Evans is a lucid guide and the stories he shares are interesting and absorbing. Would I have volunteered to go? Would I have been willing to run the risks of investing in the business? Could I have survived the journey and the instability of the plantation? And what would it be like to be so desperately poor that signing up to be an indentured servant for seven, or more, years and boarding a leaky, little ship for a two-month sea crossing seemed the best opportunity on offer?
I had previously thought of the colonisation of the Eastern coast of North America by Europeans in a foggy, monolithic way. I knew a few nuggets of history and a few stories. Now Mr Evans has led me beneath the surface to recognise the swirling factors in play over a century that led to a settled group of colonies destined to help shape the modern world.
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