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Colonizing lands and landscapes in the English Atlantic, c.1580 - c.1640

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Colonizing lands and landscapes in the English Atlantic, c.1580 - c.1640

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1

Keith Pluymers
Colonizing lands and landscapes in the English Atlantic, c.1580-c.1640

A Dissertation Submitted to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (History)

May 2015

2
Contents

List of Figures and Tables
4

Abbreviations
5

Acknowledgements
6

Introduction: Colonies and Commodities
8

Chapter I: Writing the colonial landscape: scarcity, improvement, and Eden
22

Decay, shortage, and expansion
25

“As if houses and all those commodities did grow naturally”
37

Conclusion
61

Chapter II: Contested knowledge: defining lands and landscapes
63

Description and division: setting the pattern in the first Munster plantation
67

Natural limits and economic development in Bermuda
94

Economies of scale and environmental knowledge in Virginia
124

Conclusion
135

Chapter III: “Fair and large cattle and of our English breed”
137

Accommodation, competition, and the role of animals in the Munster Plantations
139

3
Bermuda: from feral pigs to nuisance hogs
158

“Free range of the country:” wild and domestic animals in Virginia
166

Conclusion
181

Chapter IV: “Fit to clear”: preservation, exploitation, and the uses of woodlands in the
English Atlantic.
183

Commerce and cutting in the Munster Plantations
185

“Subject to blasting”: environmental feedbacks and conservation in Bermuda
216

“Great labor and great loss:” the political economy of woods in Virginia
224

Conclusion
240

Conclusion: English Political Economy and Political Ecology
241

Works Cited
247

4
List of Figures and Tables
Figure 1: Diagram showing how to build a complicated knot from a gridded base.
45
Figure 2: Map of lands available for plantation in Munster.
76
Figure 3: Map of a model plantation parish in Munster.
77
Figure 4: Map of the manor and lands of Tralee.
80
Figure 5: John White’s map of Mogeely.
88
Figure 6: Detail from Dartmouth Atlas of Ireland showing Thomas Norris’ ironworks.
190
Table 1: Percentages of Households Reporting Possession of Domestic Animals or Fish in
Virginia.
172
Table 2: Distribution of fish by settlement in Virginia according to the 1624-1625 census.
173

5
Abbreviations
British Library BL
Ferrar Papers FP
Lambeth Palace Library LPL
The National Archives (UK) TNA
National Library of Ireland NLI

6
Acknowledgements
Over the course of my PhD, I have benefited greatly from the intellect, generosity,
kindness, and tolerance of many people. Words cannot capture the depth of my gratitude for
everyone who made this work possible. Nonetheless, I hope these few sentences will begin to
repay my intellectual and personal debts.
First and foremost, I am grateful to Cynthia Herrup and Peter Mancall for providing
steadfast support, insightful criticism, and personal warmth from the moment I entered graduate
school. I cannot imagine better advisers. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and Rebecca Lemon read the
entire dissertation and offered valuable advice and criticism. Sean Roberts and Alexander Marr
taught me to read images. As an undergraduate, John Montaño first showed me the joys of early
modern history and has remained a supportive reader.
At USC, I have been fortunate to have fantastic friends and colleagues. Karin
Amundsen, Justin Colvin, Stefan Smith, and Pat Wyman have read my work and indulged my
chatter about cattle and trees as the project took shape. Nick Gliserman, Ellen Dooley, and
Lindsay O’Neill have been particularly generous with their time and friendship. I have learned
so much from each of you during research trips, at conferences, and at so many enjoyable
lunches at the Huntington.
In the course of my research travels, I was the fortunate recipient of many kindnesses.
In Ireland, Breige Flynn and Eoghan Falvey gave me a home away from home and showed me
all the glories of County Clare. In England, Tom Farnsworth and Ross Kemble took me in. The
library staff at the National Library of Ireland, Chatsworth House, the British Library, The
National Archives, Lambeth Palace Library, the Huntington Library, and the Virginia Historical
Society were wonderful resources.

7
I have received generous financial support for my research beginning at the University
of Delaware with support from the Undergraduate Research Office, the alumni association, and
the Association of Retired Faculty and Professors. At USC, I have received financial support
from the provost’s office, the graduate school, and the Early Modern Studies Institute. In
addition, I am grateful to the Mellon Foundation and the Virginia Historical Society for a short-
term fellowship.
Finally, I am grateful to my family for supporting my quest to become a historian,
particularly to my dad, who has offered unwavering encouragement for my curiosity since I first
started borrowing books from his shelf. To Kristen Siemientkowski: You have lived with this
dissertation since it began. You have been a welcome distraction, a supportive voice, a generous
reader, and a loving companion. Thank you.

8
Introduction: Colonies and Commodities
In an oft-quoted line from his 1596 Discovery of Guiana, Sir Walter Ralegh compared
the land to a virgin, and he suggested that England should metaphorically copulate with the
personified territory to keep pace with the Spaniards, “who had the maidenhead of Peru.”
People had never “sacked, turned, nor wrought” Guyana, and “the face of the earth hath not
been torn.” Ralegh claimed that English men needed to colonize the virgin land. Ralegh’s
disturbing words showed little concern for the long-term health of the Guyanese landscape and
failed to even acknowledge the existence of the people already living there. After English
settlers tore open Guyana’s flesh, he wrote, they should spend “the virtue and salt of the soil,”
open graves in search of gold, and break open mines with sledges. English settlers, according to
Ralegh, should extract profits with little delicacy.
1

In his Briefe and True Report—another emblematic text for early English colonialism
first published in 1588 to describe Ralegh’s attempt to plant English settlers in North America—
Thomas Harriot described “Virginia” (the present-day coast of North Carolina) through its
“Merchantable Commodities.”
2
Unlike Ralegh, Harriot avoided the language of conquest. He
described Roanoke’s Algonquians as a sophisticated and gentle people open to conversion to
Christianity and submission to English rule. Despite his gentler rhetoric, Harriot nonetheless
proposed that English men and women extract valuable commodities from the land and that
Roanoke’s Algonquians should be assimilated into an English system of governance.

1
Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596).
2
Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), 7-13,
Harriot used the term “commodities” to describe native vegetation that served as food as well
as the building supplies and plants used by Roanoke’s Algonquians.

9
For many historians, these two texts capture the range of English attitudes towards
nature in the colonies. At best, their destructive nature was accidental, the unfortunate result of
the emergent forces of early capitalism—“asset strippers” who wanted to get rich and get out.
3

At worst, they remorselessly pillaged, buoyed by unshakable belief in their cultural and
religious superiority. Both attitudes, these historians suggest produced waves of settlers who
descended upon newfound colonies like a plague of locusts leaving denuded forests and worn-
out soil as they drove ever westward. According to environmental historian Donald Worster,
the seed of capitalist agriculture, first planted by English settlers in North America, has borne
poisonous fruit through the succeeding centuries.
4
German environmental historian Joachim
Radkau, who has warned against “declensionist” environmental history and has argued that the
development of European capitalism was compatible with semi-sustainable land use, claimed
that European colonists pursued the “ruthless exploitation of natural resources and the arbitrary
transformation of the environment with no regard for regional traditions and experiences.” The
ability to raid colonies for resources, he claimed, enabled the English and the Dutch to ignore or
mismanage environmental concerns at home.
5
These narratives characterize European
expansion as the moment when capitalism, or at least its worst aspects, burst its European banks
and poured out unregulated upon new lands armed with lists of commodities and an unwavering
faith in the superior power of European labor to extract riches.

3
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (2001), 314–317; Jane H Ohlmeyer,
Making Ireland English : The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (2012), 372–377;
Raymond Gillespie, The Transformation of the Irish Economy 1550-1700. (1991), 34–35.
4
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England,
1st rev. ed (2003); Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the
Ecological Imagination (1993), 67.
5
Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas
Dunlap, (2008), 153, 160–161, 190–191.

10
Casting early modern English expansion as the opening scene in the story of western
capitalism makes contact the most important feature of the early modern period. Once European
people, plants, animals, and diseases crossed the Atlantic, environmental degradation, the
decline of native peoples, and ceaseless European expansion became inevitable. There are
several flaws in this narrative. First, historians, particularly those studying Native American
peoples, have pointed out that Europeans did not become immediately dominant upon contact.
European diseases, though often horrific, did not result in the wholesale destruction of Native
American peoples. Moreover, many Native American groups remained politically powerful and
defined the political geography of numerous parts of the North American continent long after
contact.
6
Second, this narrative oversimplifies European attitudes and behavior, and in doing so,
often gets the “facts” of European colonial settlement wrong. Historian Brian Donahue’s
excellent micro-history of land use in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Concord,
Massachusetts demonstrated that English farmers continued to follow the semi-sustainable
practices of small English villages until population pressure made them untenable.
7
Drawing
heavily on Virginia Anderson’s groundbreaking study of livestock in early America, Allan
Greer argued that commons, rather than private property were the engine of European colonial
expansion in North America.
8
These important critiques have forced scholars to add greater

6
David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 60,
no. 4 (October 2003): 703–42; James Rice, Nature & History in the Potomac Country : From
Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (2009); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a
Woman : Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (2007); Juliana Barr,
“Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early
Southwest,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 5–46; Pekka
Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2008).
7
Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord, Yale
Agrarian Studies (2004).
8
Allan Greer, “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,” The American
Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 365–386; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King

11
contingency to their narratives of European expansion, but as historian James Rice has written,
the “ecological imaginations” of colonial English people remain mysterious. Rice offers a
powerful set of questions about these “ecological imaginations”: How did English people
conceive of their relationship with the natural world? Was there disagreement between English
people over these ideas? How did ideas about nature translate into land use and policy?
9
In the
absence of answers, scholars continue to fall back onto transhistorical notions of profit and
property.
I begin to provide answers to some of these questions. To do so, I demonstrate that
English settlers did not just colonize land: they colonized landscapes. The American
geographer D.L. Meinig has claimed that each landscape is “an expression of cultural values,
social behavior, and individual action worked upon particular localities over a span of time.”
10

Though landscapes are bound to physical reality, they exist outside of that reality and mediate
human understanding of it. Landscapes are ephemeral and subjective. They are necessarily
political and subject to contestation. The words and tools—such as maps, property titles, or
stories—that we all use to describe and define the physical world necessarily carry value
judgments about the environment and its components. Like landscapes, natural resources are
also culturally constructed. Trees only become a resource and certain groups of them forests as
the result of human actions and decisions.
Looking at landscapes forces us to question the definition and categorization of the
natural world and to situate these processes within historically and locally specific social,

Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” The
William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4, Third Series (October 1994): 601–624; idem,
Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004).
9
Rice, Nature & History in the Potomac Country, 6.
10
D.W. Meinig, ed., “Introduction,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes :
Geographical Essays (1979), 2–6.

12
cultural, and economic contexts. Historians have too often assumed that English expansion
consisted solely of the imposition of a monolithic English colonial ideal which colonized
peoples resisted with varying degrees of success. Such a view obscures the constant battles over
perceived and actual changes to the organization of rural land, agricultural techniques, and
economic life during the early modern period. Beginning in the late-fifteenth century, rising
population and rising grain prices coupled with stagnating wages contributed to changing
patterns in English rural life. Rents and entry fines rose, pushing small farmers off their land.
The boom of English wool exports from the late-fifteenth century until the early 1550s
encouraged the conversion of land from tillage to pasture. Across England, landlords and
tenants fought over enclosure and access to common resources. Members of the nobility
squabbled with the Crown and with each other over plans to divert water, fell trees, enclose
commons, or drain marshes or fens. The changes to English agriculture were not uniform.
Different regions had different farming and animal husbandry practices that in some cases
included enclosure. Nonetheless, where changes did occur, they frequently provoked conflicts.
Riots, petitions, local ordinances, and acts of Parliament offer glimpses of the often-fierce
debates that accompanied change. These glimpses make it clear: there was no uniform
“English” attitude towards the landscape or what constituted a natural resource.
The efforts to colonize lands in the English Atlantic did not exist separate from the
changes to English landscapes. Colonial promoters, courtiers, and government officials
consistently lobbied the state to receive resources, troops, land grants, or permission to enact
widely varied colonial schemes. Texts like Harriot’s and Ralegh’s were just one set of voices in
the debate over the definition of colonial landscapes. I show that different English interest
groups—the Crown, poor settlers, wealthy landowners, and London-based investors or

13
merchants—each sought to define resources for their benefit. Sometimes each of these groups
ruthlessly exploited a resource, but other times they conserved it. In most cases, someone
disagreed with the action that was taken. Settlers frequently disparaged indigenous traditions
but were not above adopting them as a result of political weakness, expediency, or the
realization that native practices were well suited to particular environments. Promotional
writers, London investors, and royal authorities wanted settlers to carry fixed ideas about nature
and its ideal uses across the seas: I show that English colonial attitudes were forged in the
Atlantic World, not imported into it.
Resource management was a part of colonial ventures from planning through settlement.
The crown, joint-stock companies, governors, and individual landlords issued regulations
designed to protect property, profit, and legal or customary right. Tenants fought against actions
they deemed exploitative. Even the anonymous forces of the market erected limits upon plans to
exploit natural resources. The system of land use and resource management that developed in
English colonies was neither unrestrained nor unregulated. Deforestation, commercialized
agriculture, and a plantation system were not the inevitable consequences of English expansion.
Decades after the first settlers landed, English settlers and governors continued to experiment
with systems of land use and resource management. In Ireland, powerful nobles like Richard
Boyle, first earl of Cork, and the colonial government fought over whether woodlands and rivers
were state resources or sources of private profit.
11
In Bermuda, governors attempted to discredit
the ecological knowledge of their predecessors to justify the intensification of tobacco
cultivation and an increase in the number of enslaved African laborers on the islands. The
Virginia Company and several of its adventurers campaigned to curtail Irish timbering and to

11
I will hereafter refer to Richard Boyle without using his title to avoid confusion with the
county of the same name.

14
restrict trade with the Baltic to create a market for North American timber and iron. These
conclusions prove that scholars cannot separate the environmental history of English colonial
expansion from the political and economic history of early modern Britain.
Explaining how English people viewed colonial environments in the Atlantic World
reshapes the narratives of both environmental historians and historians of early modern English
colonialism. First, it shows that historians cannot explain relationships between people and the
environment through transhistorical capitalism. English people hotly contested ideas about
property, profit, and commodities in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.
Moreover, classifying a plant, animal, or landform as a commodity was a historically specific
and conflict-filled process.
12
English settlers did not carry a coherent set of ideas across the
Atlantic World that eventually resulted in the dramatic reshaping of the physical environment in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, ideas about ownership, exchange of goods, and
the physical environment evolved. Early modern English expansion is a crucial part of that
evolution, not because it was the moment when an already-formed capitalism took root across
the Atlantic, but because early modern English people debated whether and how proposed
colonies should fit into different environmental and economic visions. Ideas about nature both
shaped the patterns of production and exchange in the early modern English Atlantic and were
shaped by conflicting economic ideas and patterns.

12
Londa L Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and
Politics in the Early Modern World (2005); Daniela Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields:
Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica,” in Colonial
Botany; idem, “Exploration in Print: Books and Botanical Travel from Spain to the Americas
in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 1 (March 1, 2007):
129–151; E.C. Spary, “Of Nutmegs and Botanists: The Colonial Cultivation of Botanical
Identity,” in Colonial Botany, 187–203; Peter C. Mancall, “Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-
Century Europe,” Environmental History 9, no. 4 (October 2004): 648–678.

15
Second, examining conflicts between English people over the definition and use of the
natural world provides new insights into early modern English economic thought and its
relationship to colonial expansion. Historians have shown that commerce was crucial to the
ideology, administration, and practice of English colonial expansion. Colonial promoters cited
economic factors to justify expansion and merchants invested in early colonial ventures. But
those accounts have tended to focus on the economic thought of prominent colonial promoters
like Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas or on the investments and actions of merchant
companies.
13
In contrast, I look beyond promoters to see how their ideas functioned on the
ground. Historian Joan Thirsk has argued that projects played a crucial role in the English
economy during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries and noted that many projects
also had ties to colonial expansion, but Thirsk did not examine the relationship between colonial
and domestic projects.
14
I show that projects to produce new trade goods for the English
economy were crucial to colonial expansion, particularly to agriculture in Virginia and Bermuda
and to the management of woodland resources across the Atlantic, but that there was
competition between domestic and colonial projects and anxiety about the role of colonies in
English economic life. This conclusion reinforces historian Steve Pincus’s argument that there
was no “mercantilist consensus” in England, but shows that debates about the role of colonies in
an English Atlantic economy began a century earlier and demonstrates that ideas about nature
were central to these economic debates.
15

13
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000); Robert Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas
Traders, 1550-1653 (2003).
14
Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early
Modern England (1978).
15
Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the
Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The William and Mary

16
What follows is a study of three early English colonies —the plantation of Munster,
Ireland’s southwest province begun in 1585 after a bloody rebellion and reconquest, the
Virginia Company of London’s settlements along the James River in Virginia, and the Bermuda
and Sommer Islands Company’s settlement in Bermuda—that show how settlers and
administrators defined and exploited nature.
16
Thousands of miles and often-dramatic
differences in climate, flora, and fauna separated these places. The colonial ventures emerged
for very different reasons. Mass attainders of alleged rebels enabled the Munster plantation and
the Dublin government, which personnel from England largely ran, oversaw it. A joint-stock
company formed and administered by investors mainly from London received a grant from
James I to create the English settlements on the James River in Virginia. The Company
administered the colony until James I’s government launched quo warranto proceedings against
the Virginia Company in 1624 that led to its dissolution and Virginia’s new status as a royal
colony. The English colony in Bermuda was the result of the fortuitous crash landing of the Sea
Venture, a supply vessel on its way to the Virginia Company settlement at Jamestown, on the
islands during a hurricane in 1609. The Virginia Company received a royal grant to colonize
the islands in 1612, but three years later investors from the Virginia Company formed an
independent group, the Sommer Islands Company, that administered Bermuda until 1684.
Nonetheless, promotional writers, aware of the unique characteristics of each place,
offered remarkably uniform recommendations for economic activity drawn from improvement
literature. In the minds of many investors, administrators, and settlers, these colonies were
interchangeable. So-called “staple commodities” would thrive in all three. The common

Quarterly 69, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 3–34.
16
The Sommer Islands Company went by several different spellings at the time. In the text, I
have standardized those variations to “Sommer Islands.”

17
economic vision for all three colonies produced opportunities for competition and collaboration
between them. The availability of cheap timber in Ireland hampered attempts to erect forest
manufactures in Virginia. Competition and political maneuvering from New World interests
stifled attempts to cultivate tobacco in Ireland. Bermudian planters searched for any commodity
that would allow them to survive after London merchants tossed their tobacco into the Thames
in favor of Virginia’s plants. Decisions and policies in one colony shaped land use policies
across the Atlantic.
Historians have traced the connections between colonies and compared social and
economic development in Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda, but have made comparisons between
two colonies.
17
Looking at three case studies—Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda—shows that
English governors and settlers across the Atlantic World shared common issues in their attempts
to define the landscape and often drew on common stores of solutions. In Munster, English
settlers sought to set up commercial tobacco cultivation in response to profits seen overseas.
The Virginia Company attempted to set up ironworks to take advantage of localized wood
shortages and political difficulties that hampered iron production in Munster and looked to
Munster settlers to bring herds of cattle to Virginia. Bermudians, recognizing that their lower

17
Virginia Bernhard, “Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative
View,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 1 (October 1, 1985): 57–70; William Smyth, Map-
Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland
C.1530-1750 (2006); Annaleigh Margey, “Representing Colonial Landscapes: Early English
Maps of Ulster and Virginia, 1580-1612,” in Reshaping Ireland 1550-1700 : Colonization
and Its Consequences : Essays Presented to Nicholas Canny, ed. Brian. Mac Cuarta (2011),
61–81; Michael Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade : Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime
Atlantic World, 1680-1783 (2010) Jarvis explicitly cast Bermuda as a pleasant colony in
contras to the starvation and brutal slave systems found in continental North America.
Audrey J. Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (2013).

18
quality tobacco had no market in London, sought permission to sell directly to Ireland and to
relieve the islands’ purported population excesses by sending settlers to Virginia.
18

In my first chapter, I investigate the writings of colonial promoters in the context of
improvement writing. I focus on husbandry guides, gardening manuals, and surveying tracts
because these texts were the locus for ideas about improvement that emerged in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Scholars have argued that the improvement discourse provided
ideological justification for colonization and shaped the expectations for the behavior of
colonists upon their arrival.
19
This chapter explores how notions of self-sufficiency, the
redemptive power of labor, and the imposition of order onto landscapes in husbandry guides

18
For the attempt by Thomas Ball, Richard Boyle's partner in an ironworks, to establish a
tobacco plantation in Munster see TNA E 214/1164; For attempts to open trade in “bashaw”
or low quality tobacco with Ireland see Vernon A Ives, ed., The Rich Papers: Letters from
Bermuda, 1615-1646: Eyewitness Accounts Sent by the Early Colonists to Sir Nathaniel Rich
(1984), 307; A. C. Hollis Hallett, ed., Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1612-
1684: Civil Records, (2005), 3:661. For the Virginia Company’s importation of Irish cattle
and attempts to establish ironworks see chapters 3 and 4, respectively.
19
Joan Thirsk noted the crucial role husbandry guides played in the farming knowledge of
elites in “Making a Fresh Start: Sixteenth-Century Agriculture and the Classical
Imagination,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England : Writing and the Land,
ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (1992), 18; Andrew McRae catalogued the array of
sources for English views of the land in God Speed the Plough: The Representation of
Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (1996) For McRae’s general comments on the improvement
discourse see Part II, “Imperatives of Improvement,” he postulated a shift in the meaning of
“improvement” on pgss. 135-7. Scholars using ecocriticism have produced several recent
works on sources for ideas of nature in early modern England: Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps
and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place, (2002) For a discussion of
improvement and surveying see Ch 4. Jeffrey S Theis, Writing the Forest in Early Modern
England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation (2009); Robert N Watson, Back to Nature: The Green
and the Real in the Late Renaissance (2006); For works discussing the connection between
colonization and improvement see: John Patrick Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism
in Ireland (2011); T.C. Barnard, Improving Ireland? Projectors, Prophets and Profiteers,
1641-1786 (2008); idem, “Gardening, Diet and ‘Improvement’ in Later 17th-century
Ireland,” Journal of Garden History 10, no. 1 (1990): 71–85; Richard Harry Drayton,
Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World
(2000); Amir R Alexander, Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of Discovery and the
Transformation of Mathematical Practice (2002); Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and
Memory.

19
translated directly into descriptions of potential colonies. These texts portrayed Munster,
Virginia, and Bermuda as landscapes replete with a cornucopia of commodities only requiring
labor and skill to turn a profit. Writers offered little advice on the salability of these
commodities, instead justifying colonial production as an escape from dependence on unreliable
and religiously suspect Continental producers. Writers nonetheless displayed unease with their
own rosy images. Amidst the emphasis on the redemptive power of labor, the authors were
clear that finding land that required little of it was ideal. Throughout their work there was
tension between the natural capacities of land and the power of labor.
In the next chapter, I offer a close analysis of the ways in which environmental
knowledge was learned or unlearned. In each of the three case studies, different interest groups
contested ecological knowledge to serve their political and economic ends. In Ireland, land
grants encouraged disputes over whether land was “improvable.” These disputes highlighted
the political nature of land classification in the Irish plantation. Through a close study of
Richard Boyle’s land use, we see that Boyle adopted a diverse strategy to estate management,
sometimes preserving so-called “wastes,” sometimes engaging in improvement projects. His
flexible attitude contributed to his meteoric rise to wealth but left him politically vulnerable to
charges that he had failed to fulfill the plantation requirements. In Bermuda, soil erosion and
sugar cultivation provided two examples for how settlers learned and unlearned land use.
Finally, the history of sericulture in Virginia points to the ways in which political considerations
could shape environmental knowledge and behavior.
The next chapter examines the role of animals in each colony. In Virginia, Bermuda,
and Ireland animals were central to the colonization enterprises. Colonial animal husbandry
forced English settlers and governors to confront economic and intellectual problems at the

20
heart of the English colonial enterprise. In Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda, settlers and
governors struggled to define the commercial roles for animals. In Ireland, political tracts
critiqued the Irish for their dependence on pastoralism and recommended the elimination of
animal husbandry as a first step towards political integration with England. In Virginia, the
natives were deemed inferior because they lacked domestic animals and the introduction of
those animals was seen as a necessary step towards colonial success. England produced plenty
of sheep and cattle and competition from cheap colonial animals might upset the domestic
market (as Irish cattle wound up doing). Yet the absence of extensive colonial herds forced
adventurers in Virginia and Bermuda to provide costly stores of provisions to settlers barely
able to feed themselves. The tension between commercial and subsistence animal husbandry
revealed fractures between poor settlers dependent on nearshore fishing, a pig, and a few
turkeys to survive and large landowners seeking to participate in colonial and Atlantic
provisioning trades.
My final chapter looks at the policies and practices that governed wood use across all
three case studies. Across Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda theorists had looked to trees as
sources for profit. The early modern world was a wooden one. Wood served as fuel for homes
and proto-industrial activities, as a building material, as a place. Yet within Europe broadly and
England specifically the classification and uses of woodlands were in a state of flux. The state
made new claims over woods as sites for control and regulation. Large landowners looked to
turn the lands to profit through commercial uses. Peasants, free miners, and cottagers resisted
these processes where possible and sought to achieve their own uses in woodlands like free
pasture, small industries (brewing), etc. These conflicts did not end at the English shoreline,
however, and in the evolution of wood uses and regulations across all three places we can see

21
continuities. The most important differences occurred in Bermuda and Virginia. In Bermuda,
unique environmental conditions (wind) forced settlers to adopt preservation measures
disconnected from economic interest. In Virginia, issues of labor, transportation and accident
led to the failure of commercial forestry. The combined failure of commercial forestry
initiatives and war with the Powhatan led to a militarization of the forests that had never
occurred in Ireland.
English settlers did not colonize a static and transparent physical environment. Each of
these chapters chronicles contests between different groups to define nature. English settlers did
not arrive in Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda in possession of a monolithic colonial mentality.
They fought over what resources were in their newly acquired lands and how to manage and
profit from them. Settlers sought to dominate the land but they rarely agreed on what
dominance meant. Their struggles were not merely parochial squabbles. Instead, the efforts to
control and exploit colonial natural resources reveal deeper debates about England’s economy
and its place in the Atlantic World.

22
Chapter I: Writing the colonial landscape: scarcity, improvement, and Eden
In his epistle to the reader in the 1588 and 1590 editions of his Brief and True Report,
Thomas Harriot claimed that he wrote to refute the “envious, malicious, and slanderous reports”
poisoning the public on the enterprise. Harriot’s response centered on “commodities,”
particularly “Merchantable” commodities, “already found or to be raised” which would “greatly
profit our own country men, to supply them with most things which heretofore they have been
fain to provide, either of strangers or of our enemies.”
20
Harriot organized his description of
“Virginia,” the present-day Outer Banks and portions of coastal North Carolina, through
commodities, using the term to explain the resources available for basic sustenance and as an
opportunity to describe the Algonquians he had encountered. Trade and profit defined the
landscape and the people in it.
Harriot did much more than hawk Ralegh’s enterprise with promises of profits. He had
begun his career as a mathematician, and his detailed observations of the religion, language, and
customs of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of “Virginia” testify to his keen ethnographic
sense. Nonetheless, Harriot emphasized the commercial potential of the newfound land, not
natural philosophical or ethnographic concerns. Promotional texts served as crucial evidence
for advocates for expansion to justify their plans and as basic references for governors,
administrators, and adventurers to craft policies and assess the progress of colonies.
21
Other

20
Harriot, A Briefe and True Report, 6.
21
Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise : An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America
(2007); Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print : English Travel America, 1576-1624 (2007); Andrew
Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625
(1998); Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early
America (2014); Bruce Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s a View of the Present
State of Ireland,” ELH 57, no. 2 (July 1, 1990): 263–79; Canny, Making Ireland British;
David B Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to
1612, vol. 3, (1979); David B. Quinn, European Approaches to North America, 1450-1640

23
promotional writers, working both before and after Harriot, frequently emphasized the
commercial prospects of potential colonies. In the James River, Virginia settlements and in
Bermuda, the commercial emphasis is unsurprising. Joint-stock companies governed both
enterprises—the Virginia Company and the Sommer Islands Company, respectively. The
companies depended upon stock purchases and the investments of so-called “adventurers” to
charter ships, purchase supplies, and ship people to Virginia and Bermuda. Nonetheless, the
structure of colonial ventures alone does not explain promoters’ focus on commodities. Even in
Ireland, where the state played a far larger role in the plantations and where the desires to
prevent rebellion and firmly close a back door to Continental Catholic invaders animated the
ventures, writers filtered these political goals through concerns about creating a productive
landscape.
22

The obsession with economic productivity in these texts reflected powerful and
persistent English anxieties about rising population and prices, the slow transformation of
English rural landscapes and worries about England’s place within an increasingly integrated
European market. Literary scholars who have studied these texts have reached a consensus that
English travel and promotional writing helped to craft an English identity. Promotional authors’
persistent concerns with commodities and profits demonstrate that they sought to locate
prosperity and abundance at the heart of English identity.
23
Literary scholar Timothy Sweet has
argued that sixteenth-century promotional writers’ concerns about population and the productive

(1998).
22
For analysis of this trend among writers describing Ireland throughout the sixteenth century
see Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland.
23
Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625
See particularly chapter 2; Jennifer Mylander, “Early Modern ‘How-To’ Books: Impractical
Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World,” Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (April 1, 2009): 123–46.

24
capacity of land pushed them to craft a vision of a “steady state” economy that would cope with
England’s increased population and threats to natural resources. This vision, Sweet has
claimed, marked one of the earliest attempts to envision a sustainable society in the English-
speaking world.
24

Reexamining promotional writing, however, reveals that there was not a coherent vision
of an ideal productive landscape across the English Atlantic. Writers describing Ireland,
Virginia, and Bermuda struggled with scarcity and abundance and disagreed on which plants or
animals constituted valuable resources and which were useless or pernicious. Writers
describing all three places made recourse to ideas about scarcity and value, but other writers,
merchants, and politicians disputed these claims. At times, promoters for one colony disparaged
other colonies in order to compete for money, monopolies, or state support. Claims that
England needed to adopt plantations in Ireland or set colonies in Virginia or Bermuda to avoid
acute scarcities did not reflect a consensus: they were contentious and inherently political
positions. In addition, writers who focused on abundance and fecundity grappled with tensions
over the need for labor and the skills required to properly harvest new resources. These claims
about labor and skill helped define the landscape and in turn, served as evidence used to assess
or avoid taxes, determine the shape and scale of local government, and award or reject contracts
for experts. The tensions and fissures within colonial promoters’ visions of colonial landscapes
left uncertainties about whether English people should engage in colonial enterprises that
reflected doubts about the best methods to cure perceived domestic economic woes.

24
Timothy Sweet, “Economy, Ecology, and Utopia in Early Colonial Promotional Literature,”
American Literature 71, no. 3 (1999): 399–427; idem, American Georgics : Economy and
Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), chap. 1–2.

25
Decay, shortage, and expansion
In his 1609 tract, A Good Speed to Virginia, Robert Gray used a pastoral metaphor to
explain the need for English expansion overseas: “For we see the husbandman deal with his
grounds when they are overcharged with cattle, he removes them from one ground to another,
and so he provideth well both for his cattle and for his ground.” According to Gray, England
had a fixed productive capacity. Once the population increased beyond a breaking point
“hereupon comes oppression, and diverse kinds of wrongs, mutinies, sedition, commotion, &
rebellion, scarcity, dearth, poverty, and sundry sorts of calamities, which either breed the
conversion, or eviction, of cities and commonwealths.” To avoid these impending upheavals,
colonization was essential.
25
Gray’s bucolic metaphors were uniquely florid but his general
argument was part of a diverse early modern English intellectual tradition that had been
attempting to cope with changes to the agrarian economy since the mid-fifteenth century.
26

Shortage and environmental or economic declension were common themes in promotional
literature; however, authors disagreed on the types and sources of declension. These
distinctions shaped their accounts of the natural world in potential colonies.
Complaints about the decay of England were a common feature of sixteenth-century
protest literature, projects, and pamphlets from across the political spectrum. As historian Andy
Wood has shown in his analysis of the 1549 rebellions in England, self-proclaimed “diggers”
who tore up enclosures and the so-called “Commonwealth men” each denounced dearth and

25
Robert Gray, R. Rich, and Wesley Frank Craven, A Good Speed to Virginia (1609) (1937),
B2r–B3v.
26
The Elizabethan colonial promoter Richard Hakluyt used this argument extensively. See, for
example, Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison
M. Quinn, (1993), chap. 4; The argument also appeared in the 1580s in tracts calling for
plantations in Munster. See BL MS Cotton Titus B XII f. 399; Sweet has extensively studied
the uses of this rhetoric in Sweet, “Economy, Ecology, and Utopia in Early Colonial
Promotional Literature”; Sweet, American Georgics.

26
used the specter of shortages to plead for restrictions against gentry and nobility who erected
enclosures or otherwise altered the traditional fabric of agrarian life. Projectors marshaled the
language of scarcity to justify projects. Even the royal government made recourse to this
language. Beginning in 1472, Parliament passed acts urged by nearly every Tudor sovereign in
response to claimed wood shortages and the crown created commissions to measure and
regulate royal forests.
27
The language of scarcity was ubiquitous and its persistent use suggests
that sixteenth-century English people felt it was an effective way to convey their grievances or
to justify political action. It is unsurprising that colonial promoters availed themselves of the
same powerful rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is important to analyze the specific uses of scarcity and
dearth within promotional writing. Doing so shows that despite recourse to similar language,
promoters often disagreed about the nature and scope of purported English decline and resource
shortages.
As the Desmond Rebellion drew to a close in 1583, numerous writers from England and
Ireland proposed solutions to cure Ireland of rebellion that ranged from demonstrative
punishment to radical solutions such as mass attainders and plantations of English settlers.
Plantation was only one of the proposed solutions, and as the Irish historian Steven Ellis has
argued, the attempt to seize huge chunks of territory in Munster and repopulate the land with
English settlers engaged in English-style agriculture represented a radical shift in Tudor policy

27
Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England, (2007), 30–40;
Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (1969); R.H. Tawney,
The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912); R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power,
eds., Tudor Economic Documents: Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic and
Social History of Tudor England (1924), vol. 3 See, for example, William Cholmeley’s 1553
project for dying cloth in England, pgs. 130-148; N. D. G. James, A History of English
Forestry (1981) For the discussion of scarcity and a summary of the acts to measure and
regulate royal forests see pgs. 119-140; Paul Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality
of the Woodland in Europe, c.1450–1850,” History Workshop Journal 62, no. 1 (September
21, 2006): 28–57.

27
in Ireland.
28
Plantation proponents needed to justify their policy over competing options
involving far less bureaucratic effort from the English and Dublin governments. Among the
many arguments for plantation, several promoters cited putative English wood shortages to
enable a desired military and political goal in Ireland. An anonymous 1583 tract claimed that
English woods were “greatly decayed” but essential to supply the navy, which the author
claimed was “the bulwark of [the] kingdom.” Fortunately, “you shall have that want abundantly
supplied in Ireland.”
29
Contemporary English military leaders and governors in Ireland
consistently complained that Ireland’s dense woods were a source of disorder that provided
shelter and food to criminals and rebels. By conjuring English fears of wood shortages, this
tract deftly transformed Irish woods from a costly political and military problem for the English
crown into a resource for the English state.
30
Several later tracts from English soldiers,
governors, and reformers in Ireland adopted similar strategies. They continued to complain that
Ireland’s thick woods were a military liability and a source of cultural degeneration, but framed
their pleas for money or settlers to fell Irish woods in terms of profit for the crown and needed
supplies for the navy.
31

The shift in the rhetoric describing Irish woods created tension in reformers’ plans for
Ireland. If woods were cut down all at once, where would the timber come from to repair and
replace the new English fleet? If Irish woods were preserved as a permanent source of timber
for the English navy, would that imperil the political order sought in Ireland? After the defeat

28
Steven G Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447-1603: English Expansion and the End
of Gaelic Rule (1998); Ellis’ argument does not represent a consensus position. See Canny,
Making Ireland British; Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland.
29
LPL MS 621 ff.97r-106v.
30
For an example of the potential costs associated with governing Irish woods see LPL, Carew
MS 635 pg. 117; see also BL MS Cotton Titus B XII ff. 158-166.
31
LPL Carew MS 627 f.165; 614 ff. 254-255; 607 ff. 110-111v.

28
of the Spanish Armada in 1588, these issues only became more difficult. The threat of Spanish
invasion made the need to secure Ireland more pressing, but the need to maintain a strong navy
demanded reliable stores of wood. These tensions are best displayed in the poet Edmund
Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, which was composed and circulated during the
1590s but was not printed until 1633. At the beginning of the text, which takes the form of a
dialogue between two fictional characters, one of Spenser’s interlocutors claims that Ireland is
“adorned with goodly woods, fit for building of houses and ships, so commodiously, as that if
some princes in the world had them, they would soon hope to be lords of all the seas.” Yet for
the remainder of his text Spenser’s characters denounced Irish woods as a source for Irish
cultural degeneracy and a haven for criminals. Spenser’s animosity towards woodlands was so
strident that it almost overwhelmed his earlier claim about their utility for the navy. Spenser
compared the disordered state of Ireland to early medieval England. At that time, according to
Spenser, England was “greatly infected” with criminals and outlaws who thrived on thick
woodlands. Spenser’s historical argument implied that the absence of dense woods in England
was a triumph of law and civilization, not a fact to be lamented.
32
In casting deforestation as a
marker of progress, Spenser raised troubling questions for his own earlier assertion that Irish
woods would provide enough shipping to rule the seas. The specter of English wood shortages
gave an economic and political imperative to maintain Irish woodlands but preserving Irish
woodlands also threatened to imperil the most radical plans to transform the Irish landscape.
At the same time as Munster plantation promoters argued that the English state needed
to plant Munster, in part, to assuage dangerous wood shortages, the renowned colonial promoter

32
Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Printed Edition (1633), ed.
Andrew Hadfield, (1997); On Spenser’s place as a representative for English colonization
theory in Ireland, see Canny, Making Ireland British, chap. 1.

29
Richard Hakluyt the younger summoned the rhetoric of decay and scarcity to begin his
argument for colonial expansion in his 1584 “Discourse of Western Planting.” Unlike the
roughly contemporary works from Munster, Hakluyt avoided claims that England’s economic
woes stemmed from natural shortages. Hakluyt had been sent to Paris in 1583, where he had
numerous contacts, by Sir Francis Walsingham to investigate Spanish and French colonial
efforts and report back to the Elizabethan government. Hakluyt’s “Discourse” was composed as
a secret report, intended as a policy paper for Elizabethan ministers, rather than an appeal to a
wider audience. Nonetheless, Hakluyt opened his account with a discussion of the decline in
England’s fortunes that echoed the rhetoric found in more public forums. Foreign trade,
according to Hakluyt, had grown “beggarly” and “decayed.” In England, “multitudes of
loiterers and idle vagabonds” plagued the country in spite of “all the statutes that hitherto can be
devised, and the sharp execution of the same in punishing idle lazy persons.” Despite his grim
prognosis, Hakluyt claimed that the problems facing England stemmed from economic rather
than environmental factors. Tariffs had slowed English exports and undermined industry at
home; however, if the population could be put to work, then England would achieve
unprecedented riches. Hakluyt argued that England could sustain increased population. “The
honor and strength of a prince,” Hakluyt claimed, “consisteth in the multitude of the people.”
So long as they “know how to live and how to maintain their wives and children,” England
could support more people and even produce an agricultural surplus.
33

Hakluyt’s exposition of the commodities available in the North America and the
environment that produced them was a direct response to his economic narrative. North
America “from Florida northward to 67 degrees (and not yet in any Christian prince's actual

33
Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, chap. 2, 4.

30
possession),” was, according to Hakluyt, “answerable in climate to Barbary, Egypt, Syria,
Persia, Turkey, Greece, all the Islands of the Levant Sea, Italy, Spain, Portingale [Portugal],
France, Flanders, high Almanye [parts of modern Germany], Denmark, Estland [Eastland],
Poland, and Muscovy.”
34
His list of climate types corresponded almost entirely with the list of
places where English trade had decayed due to religious hostility, tariffs, or war. As the
historian Karin Ordahl Kupperman has argued, early modern climatic theories associated
temperature and precipitation with latitude.
35
Nonetheless, early modern writers retained the
power to shape their descriptions of climate within this theoretical context. Hakluyt organized
his description of North American climate through regions that produced desirable goods—not
landmarks from Biblical or Classical geography, as did some of his contemporaries.
36
Hakluyt’s
description of the North American climate in terms of commodities offered a compelling
argument in favor of English expansion to overcome the destructive trade policies of
continental, Baltic, and Mediterranean polities.
Other parts of his “Discourse” subtly undermined Hakluyt’s argument. In his
explanation for how expansion would benefit the English navy, Hakluyt claimed that the recent
English claim on Newfoundland provided “tar, rosen, masts, and cordage...all which
commodities cannot choose but wonderfully invite our men to the building of great shipping.”
This boon in supplies, Hakluyt noted, would lure able English shipwrights back from Denmark,

34
Ibid, 16.
35
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial
Period,” The American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (December 1982): 1262–89.
36
Camden organized his description of Ireland almost entirely around its relative position to
England and citations of Pliny and Strabo. William Camden, Britain, (1637); BL Sloane 750.
Bermuda governor Nethaniel Butler used Jerusalem as a reference point for Bermuda’s
climate.

31
where they had been driven “for want of employment at home.”
37
Hakluyt did not elaborate
further on the reasons for English shipwrights’ underemployment, but his argument for
Newfoundland’s value hinted at the absence or cost of domestic naval stores. This implicit nod
towards a shortage suggested that the decay of at least one English industry stemmed from a
dearth of resources rather than the onerous demands of European and Mediterranean potentates
or religious persecution. By the time Hakluyt published the first edition of his Principal
Navigations in 1589, wood shortages made a small but explicit appearance in the text through
Harriot’s Brief and True Report. Harriot noted that iron might profitably be produced in
Virginia due to the “want of wood and dearness thereof in England.”
38
Harriot’s brief comment
was the only mention of wood shortage in Hakluyt’s collection of texts on Virginia, but it
explicitly introduced the fear of resource shortages as a justification for expansion. Hakluyt’s
writings made recourse to the language of decay and redemption, but cast shortages as the result
of political and economic actions, not the natural fertility of England.
In contrast, promotional writing to justify the settlements along the James River in
Virginia at the beginning of the seventeenth century made consistent arguments about acute
shortages of natural resources. Gray’s Good Speed argued that England’s increased population
had threatened the commonwealth and had pressed England to the limit. There was neither
enough land to support the population without destructive enclosure nor enough corn to feed
them. Other writers promoting Virginia also described wood shortages in the most extreme
language of any promotional material. A 1610 pamphlet from the Council for Virginia
lamented, “Our mils of Iron, and excess of building, have already turned our greatest woods into

37
Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, 68.
38
Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation
(1589), 269.

32
pasture and champion, within these few years; neither the scattered Forests of England, nor the
diminished Groves of Ireland, will supply the defect of our Navy.” Another worried that
“continual cutting [in England]… [was] such a sickness and wasting consumption, as all the
physick in England cannot cure.”
39
Timber shortage was crucial to the construction of
landscape in Virginia. In 1612, the notable settler and writer John Smith began his description
of “things which are natural” with trees. Oak and walnut, according to Smith, dominated
Virginia’s woodlands. These trees were “so tall and straight, that they will bear two foot and a
half square of good timber for 20 yards long.”
40
Smith’s description of Virginia’s oaks
corresponded exactly to “standards,” the tall, straight trees most desirable for shipbuilding and
those counted in surveys of royal forests.
41

The Virginia Company promoters’ appeal to wood shortages was a canny political
maneuver. Hakluyt’s early writings and Harriot’s Briefe and True Report predated the 1588
defeat of the Armada. In the aftermath of that battle and England’s improbable victory, naval
power became even more important for the English state. Moreover, after James I became king
following Elizabeth I’s death, he took a personal interest in the active management of royal
forests, a maneuver that the politically connected leaders of the Virginia Company would have
noticed.
42
Casting Virginia as the solution to a domestic problem that had become part of
James’ royal agenda offered a powerful justification for the enterprise that transcended the

39
Council for Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), 25;
R.I., Nova Brittania (1609), ed. Virtual Jamestown Project (2002),
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/jamestown-browse?id=J1051; Peter Force, ed., Tracts and
Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in
North America, vol. 3 (1844), 23–25; A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and
Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia (1610), 26.
40
John Smith, A Map of Virginia. (1612), 11.
41
Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c.1450–1850.”
42
James, A History of English Forestry, 166–167.

33
profit-driven nature of the Virginia Company. At the same time, the Virginia Company’s
proposals tacitly assumed that James’ efforts to reform domestic English forestry would fail.
Looking beyond promotional literature demonstrates that English people did not
uniformly subscribe to the Virginia Company’s bleak assessment of English forests. The
husbandry writer Arthur Standish lamented “former times, wherein was left a precedent and
plenty of that which is now in effect destroyed.” He expressed fear that the shortage of corn
would create political disorder, but channeled his energies towards domestic improvement:
If the whole kingdom were to be enclosed, there would be sets enough soon
gotten, to enclose all; and it would be the greatest benefit to the king and
kingdom, that can be devised: the reason is, there would be more Corn, Beeves,
Muttons, Butter & Cheese, by many degrees, then there is, and much more work
for laboring men: and for firewood, timber, and corn, we should exceed all
Nations.

Standish argued that the decay of English woodlands was primarily responsible for England’s
problems: “The want of wood is, and will be a great decay to tillage, and cannot but be the
greatest cause of the dearth of corn, and hindreth greatly the yearly breeding of many cattle.”
43

Standish’s claims implied that England could not simply look abroad for timber. Thriving
domestic woodlands defined the health of the rest of English agriculture.
Over two volumes, published in 1611 and 1614, Standish provided thoughtful, detailed
solutions to the loss of woodlands. Landowners and tenants should “plant all their hedges with
wood (and not only with thorns) so thick as conveniently trees may grow and prosper.” They
should plant trees useful for fuel, construction, and fruit production. Standish also placed an
emphasis on the long-term care of woods, arguing forcefully against clear-cutting and
destructive fuel gathering. He wrote, “Others for a little present profit stock up woods, and

43
Arthur Standish, The Commons Complaint. (1611), A2v; 1; Block quotation taken from idem,
New Directions of Experience Authorized by the Kings Most Excellent Maiesty, as May
Appeare, for the Planting of Timber and Fire-Wood. (1614), 24.

34
soweth the ground with Corn, which ground within a few years is made so bare as the present
gain is quickly lost.” Instead, he proposed that woods, pastures, and tilled fields intermingle
with the plant composition determined by the soil and climate. He claimed that cattle would
prosper “by their quiet living in the wood thus planted.” The “cattle's running, treading, and
soiling of the grass,” would fertilize the pasture. In addition to endorsing woodland pasture,
Standish recommended planting wheat, rye, and oats in shaded pastures, claiming that this
method would eliminate dependence on towns for poor relief.
44

Standish offered radical solutions to poverty, political disorder, and deforestation.
Nonetheless, James endorsed Standish’s 1614 work, further demonstrating royal interest in
improving English woodlands. Standish lamented declining stores of trees in England, but he
did not share the Virginia Company pamphleteers’ sense of hopeless domestic decline. Instead,
he championed a system of reform that would provide economic renewal in rural England and a
self-sufficient supply of timber to supply the navy. This plan for renewal posed a direct threat
to the arguments for colonization in Ireland or Virginia predicated on wood shortages. Without
a domestic timber crisis, high transportation costs rendered Irish and North American timber
economically unviable.
Even without the radical transformation of the agrarian landscape, other writers
questioned the severity of purported English wood crises. A series of pamphlets in 1614 and
1615 focusing primarily on English herring fishing also debated wood shortages and the merits
of foreign trade. The pamphlets’ authors disagreed on the value of the East India trade but
nonetheless agreed on a far more sober assessment of English woodlands than the Virginia
Company publications. Two pamphlets opposing the East India Company’s trade—the

44
Standish, The Commons Complaint, 1; 5; 9; idem, New Directions of Experience, 2.

35
shipbuilder Edward Sharpe’s Britain’s Busse and Robert Kayll’s Trade’s Increase—each
complained that the large ships and distant destinations of EIC voyages had contributed to the
waste of English woods. They nevertheless argued that timber shortages had not grown dire.
Ireland and Scotland, Sharpe claimed, could provide the short, low quality boards required to
build casks. England, he added, retained sufficient store of high quality timber to build large
ships. If that source should fail, then Ireland “will yield us busses enough besides many other
good ships… and Scotland will help us with masts.” Only after these were exhausted might
English shipwrights venture to Virginia or Bermuda for timber.
45
According to this argument,
England still retained the capacity to build ships and only the most low-skilled and destructive
cutting of cask staves needed to be outsourced to Ireland and Scotland.
Two texts defending the East India trade—Dudley Digges’s Defense of Trade (1615)
and Thomas Mun’s Discourse of Trade (1621)—argued more forcefully against English wood
shortages. Digges argued that English shipping was the noblest use of English woodlands.
Ought we “have our Timber spent on Beggars nests,” he asked, “whose rotten rents make many
Gentlemen before their time, or that our Woods should bee consumed in fire & Furnaces for
glasses & such baubles when God hath blest us with a Fuel in the bowels of the earth to make
use of?” Instead, he argued, English shipwrights should make profitable ships of “well-grown
timber ere it rot.” Both texts looked to Ireland as the ideal source for additional timber, arguing
that the costs of finding wood in Virginia were far too great and that concerns over the
destruction of Irish woodlands were based neither “for need, nor to save charges” for the navy.
46

The combatants in this pamphlet skirmish disagreed vigorously over the appropriate uses of

45
E[dward] S[harpe], Britain’s Busse (1615); Robert Kayll, The Trades Increase (1615), 16–17.
46
Dudley Digges, The Defense of Trade (1615), 27–28, 30–33; Thomas Mun, A Discourse of
Trade, from England unto the East-Indies. (1621), 29–32.

36
English woodlands, but neither side subscribed to the radical rhetoric of archipelago-wide
shortages found in the Virginia pamphlet literature from the first years of settlement on the
James River. Moreover, both sides also acknowledged the expense and difficulties in procuring
wood from across the Atlantic. Shortage determined whether a colony possessed valuable
timber or simply trees.
Promotional writing from the 1620s and 1630s continued to wrestle with the tension
between wood shortage and value. Irish pamphlet writers emphasized their proximity to
England and their convenient position for European trade. While one author worried about
“want of good husbandry” destroying profitable woods, he made it clear that this stemmed from
overproduction forcing prices down on the Continent.
47
In contrast, writers in Virginia persisted
in arguing for shortages, despite experiencing firsthand the difficulties producing economically
viable timber in Virginia. Writing after the so-called “Massacre of 1622,” Edward Waterhouse
claimed, “The Iron, which hath so wasted our English Woods, (that it self in short time must
decay with them) is to be had in Virginia (where wasting of Woods is an ease and benefit to the
Planter).” Like promoters of Irish plantations in the 1580s, Waterhouse used purported wood
shortages in England to justify deforestation in support of English settlers and at the expense of
the native population. John Smith, whose General History suggested familiarity with the
arguments in the pamphlets regarding trade discussed earlier, nonetheless persisted in citing
wood shortage as an economic incentive to plant colonies. Smith knew the risks that came with
the failure to be economically viable. In a later text, he recalled how the stores of timber,

47
George Augustine Thomas O’Brien, ed., Advertisements for Ireland: Being a Description of
the State of Ireland in the Reign of James I: Contained in a Manuscript in the Library of
Trinity College, Dublin (1923), 14, 30–31; Victor Treadwell has presented a strong case for
the authorship of this pamphlet in “Richard Hadsor and the Authorship of ‘Advertisements
for Ireland’, 1622/3,” Irish Historical Studies 30, no. 119 (May 1, 1997): 305–36; G. N, A
Geographicall Description of the Kingdom of Ireland. (1642), 32.

37
wainscot, and other woodland commodities sent back from Virginia in the earliest days of
settlement had failed “to answer the Merchants’ expectations with profit,” without which “they
would leave us there as banished men.”
48
Smith and other promoters used the rhetoric of wood
scarcity to cast Virginia as the only viable option for timber, but their words did not sway
merchants who could acquire woodland products closer to home.
“As if houses and all those commodities did grow naturally”
In the same passage where Smith noted the failure of woodland commodities to satisfy
commercial interests, he groused at what he perceived to be the unrealistic expectations of those
same merchants. Settlers endured “such tedious Letters, directions, and instructions,” Smith
alleged, “[that] we did admire how it was possible such wise men could so torment themselves
and us with such strange absurdities and impossibilities.”
49
Smith’s list of problematic
individuals sent to fit these commodities focused on those who searched for or processed gold
but also included “silkemen.” Their inclusion is puzzling, since Smith had placed silk in his
catalogue of commodities “the Country would afford in time by labor.”
50
Skill and labor lay at
the heart of his critique. The silk experts claimed the project required their unique skills: Smith
argued that it needed labor. Just as perceived scarcity helped define the nature of woodlands,
ideas about labor and skill defined the landscapes of potential colonies. As Kupperman has
argued, “Unreasonable and conflicting goals and expectations … frustrated each other and made

48
Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia. With a
Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in the Time of Peace and League (1622), 3–5; John
Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), 213,
228, 248; John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England, or
Any Where. (1631), 4–5.
49
Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters, 5.
50
Ibid

38
all planning go awry” in the Roanoke voyages.
51
Promotional writers throughout the late-
sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries continued to supply confusing and often contradictory
goals. The often-incoherent agendas were not the result of careless scheming. Instead,
promoters reflected deeper tensions in English thought about the relationship between labor,
skill, and natural abundance.
Contemporaneous writers anxious about the threat of famine, resource shortages, and
overpopulation proposed schemes for agricultural “improvement” that sought to increase
domestic English production. England, they claimed, could produce enough food to feed a
growing population as well as a surplus for commercial sale if landlords and husbandmen
adopted proper agricultural techniques and labor supervision. Husbandry guides ranged from
elaborately engraved editions for elite consumers to popular texts that went through numerous
editions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The guides offered an opportunity to
close the gap in agricultural knowledge for nobles and gentry who had only recently begun
farming their own land. Early modern English people built their concepts about nature from
diverse sources including practical experience, georgic and pastoral literature, Shakespeare,
Milton, and the Bible. Nonetheless, husbandry guides, the authors of which drew heavily on the
same stores of agricultural wisdom, became crucial sources for agricultural “improvement” and
influenced the actions of landlords and farmers across early modern England.
52

51
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke, the Abandoned Colony (1984), 17.
52
Thirsk “Making a Fresh Start,” 18; McRae God Speed the Plough, see Part II, “Imperatives
of Improvement,” he postulated a shift in the meaning of “improvement” on pgs. 135-7.
Scholars using ecocriticism have produced several recent works on sources for ideas of
nature in early modern England: Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England. For
a discussion of improvement and surveying see Ch 4. Theis, Writing the Forest in Early
Modern England; Watson, Back to Nature.

39
Husbandry guides and their authors were implicated in English expansion. Husbandry
guides were some of the most popular texts in seventeenth-century North America. Barnaby
Googe, translator of the popular sixteenth-century husbandry guide by Conrad Heresbach, was
part of the Elizabethan courtier and administrator William Cecil’s entourage. Googe also served
in Ireland under Lord Fitzwilliam in the 1570s. He dedicated his translation to Cecil, who
helped shape the Elizabethan plantations in Munster. The subtitle of the surveying guide
Feudigraphia advertised its use to settlers in Ireland or Virginia. The case of John Bonoeil, a
French writer and Jacobean courtier, best illustrates the entangled relationship between
husbandry manuals and colonization. Bonoeil aimed his treatise on producing silk and wine
directly at Virginia’s settlers in the first edition (1620). By December of 1620, the court of the
Virginia Company was searching for a copy of the book. The second edition opened with a
letter from James ordering colonists to read the book and follow its advice so the enterprise
would “receive no more interruptions nor delayes.” The Virginia Company responded by
sending copies of the book to Virginia and ordering settlers to set up a silk-producing enterprise
according to its dictates.
53

53
For works discussing the connection between colonization and improvement see: Montaño,
The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland; Barnard, Improving Ireland?; idem,
“Gardening, Diet and ‘Improvement’ in Later 17th-century Ireland,”; Drayton, Nature’s
Government; Alexander, Geometrical Landscapes; Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and
Memory. For the popularity of husbandry guides in North America, see Mylander, “Early
Modern "How-To" Books”. Joan Thirsk noted Googe’s role in Ireland in “Making a Fresh
Start,” 25–6; Ralph Lyne, “Googe, Barnabe (1540-1594),” ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B.
Harrison, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11004; Wallace T. MacCaffrey, “Cecil, William,
First Baron Burghley (1520/1-1598),” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4983; W. Folkingham, Feudigraphia. The Synopsis
or Epitome of Surueying Methodized. (1610); John Bonoeil, Observations to Be Followed,
for the Making of Fit Roomes to Keepe Silk-Wormes in (1620); idem, His Maiesties Gracious
Letter to the Earle of South-Hampton, Treasurer, and to the Councell and Company of
Virginia (1622).

40
Both agricultural improvers and colonial promoters claimed to offer a way out of decline
and dearth. Colonial promoters, colonists, and investors in colonial ventures embraced
husbandry guides as a way to ensure the success of their ventures. At the same time, numerous
agricultural writers saw colonial expansion as an opportunity to prove that their techniques were
successful. Each group struggled to justify their ventures or advice. Improvement writers
needed to convince their readers to invest their time and money in new and often different
farming methods, many of which could provoke conflict with their tenants or local authorities
concerned with disorder. Colonial promoters needed to convince investors to back their
ventures and settlers to leave England. Claims about the purported abundance of potential
colonies depended on limited English access to similar plants, animals, or products at home, due
to either economic or environmental constraints. Likewise improvement writers needed to
convince their audience that they needed to engage in new labor practices to avoid damaging
consequences.
After the Fall, writers agreed, nature was imperfect. Labor was the only way to
approach Eden's lost bounty. In his popular poetic calendar, Thomas Tusser pithily wrote, “No
labor no bread,/ no host we be dead./ No husbandry used, how soon shall we starve,/
housekeeping neglected, what comfort to serve.” The letter to the reader that introduced Maison
Rustique, a French husbandry manual compiled by Charles Estienne that Richard Surflet
translated into English in 1600, offered a similar sentiment. The whole Earth, Surflet wrote,
was once an Eden, but “through their [Adam and Eve’s] sin it was cursed, and they cast out of
the most pleasant, commodious, and beneficial part thereof.” Now people are “found
everywhere either pinched with penury, yea worn out with want, and (as it were) fast shut up in
prison far from all sufficiency: or else loosely and lewdly running riot.” Yet, as John Norden

41
argued, the fall from Eden did not offer an excuse since, “God blesseth the labors of men, and
Waters even the highest Mountains, from his chambers...So that whether God send his blessings
under the earth, upon the Mountains, or in the Valleys, whether in grass for Cattle, in herbs for
the use of men, whether in Wheat, Oil, or Vines.”
54
God may have banished Adam and Eve
from Eden, these authors suggested, but industrious men and women might recapture some of
that bounty at home just as colonial promoters promised settlers might find Eden abroad.
The strident call to labor carried an imperative to substantially alter tracts of land. In
Maison Rustique, Surflet and Estienne employed rhetoric of sickness and cleanliness to describe
fields. The farmer’s first job was “to cleanse arable ground of stones, weedes, and stubble.”
Rocks and natural vegetation comprised a kind of filth, polluting the ground. The rhetoric
became even more intense when describing “wild grounds or deserts.” There the farmer needed
to cure “the disease of your fields.” Surflet recommended, “if you desire with more haste and
certainty to destroy them, you shall burn the ground the two first years.” Natural vegetation,
rather than a source of potential sustenance, was an illness that the farmer cured through total
immolation. Even valued plants, such as trees, were only appropriate in specific locations, such
as gardens or planned woods. If there were too many woods, then farmers needed to employ the
same solution as they would on weeds – fire.
55

Many writers argued that even pastures, which seemed least likely to require additional
labor, needed extensive human action to be productive. Both the Heresbach's Whole Art of
Husbandry and Estienne's Maison Rustique argued, “Pasture grounds requires more care then

54
Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573), 5 verso; Charles Estienne,
Maison Rustique, or The Countrie Farme., trans. Richard Surflet (1600) unpaginated epistle
to the reader; John Norden, The Surveiors Dialogue (1618), 70.
55
Estienne, Maison Rustique, 668; 14–15; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983),
192–7.

42
travaile.” Husbands still needed to “destroy…Brambles, Briers, Bulrushes, and Sedges.”
56

These authors envisioned pastures as regulated fields, not free commons. John Norden's
Surveyors' Dialogue (first printed in 1607) explained the wastefulness of commons. “If the
wastes and unprofitable commons in England were inclosed and proportionably allotted,” his
surveyor claimed, “it would feed more people by good manurance then any one shire in
England.” Descriptions of grain fields and pastures valued only plants that farmers deliberately
planted within enclosed, regulated space. Native plants and a diverse array of species were to
these writers, at best, a nuisance, and, at worst, a disease. Good husbands could not simply
monitor what grew in their pastures: they also needed to maintain ideal moisture through
drainage and irrigation ditches.
57

Their emphasis on labor suggested that untouched nature could only produce
problematic weeds and insufficient yields. Maison Rustique and The Whole Art of Husbandry
spent extensive time discussing manure, maintaining that it was essential to manure every field.
They gave advice about the proper blends of manure, how to prepare and maintain a dung heap,
and the best way to fertilize. Their emphasis on manure created an interdependent relationship
between animal husbandry and tillage that seemed completely natural. John Fitzherbert’s
extremely popular Book of Husbandry, which was reprinted over ten times in the 1530s and
1540s, claimed that animal husbandry and tillage were necessarily bound “because they be
adjuncts, and may not be discevered [severed].” Googe waxed at length on this interdependence

56
Conrad Heresbach and Gervase Markham, The Whole Art of Husbandry Contained in Foure
Bookes, trans. Barnabe Googe (1631), 79. Earlier editions offered similar advice; Estienne,
Maison Rustique, 634.
57
Norden, The Surveiors Dialogue, 99; Estienne, Maison Rustique, bk. 4, Ch 6; For another
contemporary description of drainage ditches see Folkingham, Feudigraphia, 20.

43
citing Virgil’s Georgics, Xenophon, and Aristotle before describing the interdependence
between herding and tillage: herders needed feed and farmers needed manure.
58

While growing grain and maintaining pastures required extirpating many wild species,
agricultural writers nonetheless valued diverse arrays of plants in their gardens. Husbandry
manuals included extensive lists of plants and trees that their readers should include in their
gardens along with detailed descriptions of the virtues and preferred habitats of each. Gardeners
painstakingly ordered their grounds. Hedges or walls enclosed gardens and orchards and
divided them into plots. Manuals described the ideal composition of hedges, the order in which
husbands should plant trees based on their proximity to the house or the hedge, and the
dimensions of beds for vegetables and herbs as well as their position in the garden. Nature,
these manuals instructed their readers, was most enjoyable when it was strictly controlled.
59

Husbandry manuals expressed this longing for completely ordered nature in diagrams for
setting up various designs in gardens. Maison Rustique and A New Orchard both contained
several drawings showing different geometric patterns for planting, though every pattern grew
out of square diagrams, like the example below (Figure 1). Lawson explained in A New
Orchard that the square was the preferred form for gardens because “one principal end of

58
Estienne, Maison Rustique, 669–672; John Fitzherbert, Fitzharberts Booke of Husbandrie.
(London: I. Roberts for Edward White, 1598), 3; Heresbach and Markham, The Whole Art of
Husbandry Contained in Foure Bookes, 34–45; 210–211.
59
William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (1626); Estienne, Maison Rustique, bk. 2–3;
Heresbach and Markham, The Whole Art of Husbandry Contained in Foure Booke., bk. 2;
Thomas made this point in Man and the Natural World, chap. 5; Chandra Mukerji, “The
Political Mobilization of Nature in Seventeenth-Century French Formal Gardens,” Theory
and Society 23, no. 5 (October 1994): 651–677; idem, “Dominion, Demonstration,
Domination: Religious Doctrine, Territorial Politics, and French Plant Collection,” in
Colonial Botany; Jill H Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (2005); The best
and most recent treatment of English gardening is Paula Henderson, The Tudor House and
Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries
(2005).

44
Orchards is recreation by walks, and universally walks are straight, it follows that the best form
must be square, as best agreeing with straight walks.” Yet the diagrams of garden or orchard
forms that followed belied his explanation – some depict curvilinear paths, others mazes. All
these forms, however, originated in squares divided into grids by straight lines. These diagrams
suggested that nature found its best expression when linear logic underlay it.

45

Figure 1: Diagram showing how to build a complicated knot from a gridded base in A New Orchard or Garden. Courtesy of the
Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

46
Surveying guides pushed the mathematical ordering of nature even further than
contemporary husbandry guides. Works from the later-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
emphasized the need for surveyors to understand both geometry and land use. Valentine Leigh's
1578 surveying treatise urged surveyors to the use of instruments and spent most of his time
defining terms and explaining their legal significance. Other guides treated land in a similar
way. Ralph Agas's 1596 Preparative of Platting Lands for Survey listed twenty-two different
kinds of land within an estate defined by use and the buildings on it, seven different physical
divisions between lands, and fourteen additional features of note in two paragraphs. He offered
no further explanation of his list. In contrast, he spent multiple pages analyzing the flaws of
earlier surveying instruments and discussing the benefits of the theodolite. Aaron Rathborne's
The Surveyor (1616) reduced the land to pure geometry. His large and carefully engraved work
contained hundreds of diagrams illustrating geometric formulae and providing mathematical
solutions to overcome irregular boundaries and elevation changes that had led earlier surveyors
into error. All land, Rathbone's work implied, could be reduced to conformity through the
application of universal mathematical principles.
60

Discussions of profit and the limits on the benefits of labor revealed greater tensions
within the improvement ideal. Like colonial promoters, husbandry guide authors struggled to
find the right balance between natural bounty and productive labor. William Lawson, a minor
clergyman from Yorkshire, warned that husbandry, like all arts, originated from experience,
“and therefore is called the Schoolmistress of fools.” Any discipline based on “the senses,
feelingly apprehending, and comparing (with the help of the mind) the works of nature,” was

60
Valentine Leigh, The Moste Profitable and Commendable Science, of Surueiyng of Landes,
Tenementes, and Hereditamentes (1578); Ralph Agas, A Preparative to Platting of Landes
and Tenements for Surueigh. (1596), 18; 5–9; Aaron Rathborne, The Surveyor: In Foure
Bookes (1616).

47
prone to error. Yet nature too had its flaws: “good ground naturally brings forth thistles, trees
stand too thick, or too thin, or disorderly, or (without dressing) put forth unprofitable suckers.”
He concluded, however, that “art reformeth” every flaw in nature, and therefore was superior.
61
Nonetheless, Lawson’s discussion suggested that labor, improperly applied, might lead to
foolish and costly actions.
Improvers sought to ensure that their readers did not waste their labors by describing the
skills required for successful husbandry, but these discussions of skill exposed tensions about
the sources of knowledge and raised the possibility that improved agriculture was simply too
difficult to be widely applicable. John Gerard's famous Herball (1597) exemplified this tension,
which had been a constant feature of agricultural, gardening, and surveying books throughout
the later-sixteenth century. Gerard presented his garden as a botanical cabinet of curiosities that
blended an encyclopedic collection of materials with detailed descriptions of wondrous or rare
specimens. Certain plants were simply too difficult for any but the most skilled gardener to
grow. His description of the “Woolly Bulbus” chronicled the suffering of the gardener:
My self have been possessed with this plant at the least 12 years, whereof I have
yearly great increase of new roots, but I did never see any token of budding or
flowering to this day: notwithstanding I shall be content to suffer it in some base
place or other of my garden to stand, as the cipher 0 at the end of the figures to
attend his time & leisure, as those men of famous memory have done.

Yet, he knew some characteristics of the plant as a result of the Dutch naturalist Carolus
Clusius, who had successfully brought the bulb to flower in his garden at Leiden.
62
Possessing
botanical curiosities required skill, making them so rare that, in the case of the Woolly Bulbus,
only one man in Europe had seen it flower.

61
Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, “Preface to all well minded,” unpaginated.; John
Considine, “Lawson, William (1553/4-1635),” in Oxford Dictionary of National
Bibliography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16210.
62
John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, (1597), 106.

48
Specimens like the Woolly Bulbus were exceptions in Gerard's Herball: most of his
work explored quotidian plants. Other plants were less common, but like the “Flower de-luce,”
grew “in the gardens of London, amongst Herbarists and lovers of plants.” The “herbarists and
lovers of plants” Gerard referenced were likely a limited group of men, but at other times
Gerard seemed to suggest an even wider range of London gardeners. Hyacinths or “the grape
flower...are kept in gardens for the beauty of their flowers, wherewith our London gardens do
abound.” When describing the flower de-luce Gerard referenced the specific group that could
grow them, suggesting that they possessed the skill and experience to cultivate a difficult plant,
but in the case of hyacinths, he removed the subject. These flowers simply “abound[ed]” in
enough gardens that Gerard did not need to identify the cultivators.
63

In the second book of his Herball, Gerard demonstrated that his respect for skillful
cultivation extended even further beyond London's circle of plant lovers and the republic of
letters. “The small Turnip groweth by a village near London (called Hackney) in a sandy
ground,” he wrote, “and brought to the Crosse in Cheap-side by the women of that village to be
sold, and are the best that ever I tasted.”
64
According to Gerard, the “small Turnip” was
remarkable for its size and taste. Moreover, given his usual attention to where plants could
grow, he may have thought that this turnip only grew in Hackney. Even for common
vegetables, skill could produce remarkable or rare objects. The people with the skill to cultivate
this plant were villagers, both men and women, not natural philosophers or lovers of plants in
London. At the same time, Gerard's suggestion that skill was important to all kinds of
cultivators meant that limitations like those he experienced with the Woolly Bulbus might affect
cultivators of common crops.

63
Ibid, 52;104.
64
Ibid, 178.

49
Other agricultural writers had earlier suggested that skill and knowledge of natural
secrets applied to common crops. Reginald Scot believed English growers needed rules and
special instructions for cultivating hops. “Truly it grieveth me daily,” Scot wrote in his letter to
the reader in 1578, “to see time ill spent, labor lost, cost cast away, much good ground naughtily
applied, and many good men shamefully abused through ignorance and ignorant workmen that
undertake to deal herein.” As a result of this ignorance, England sacrificed thousands of pounds
importing hops from Flanders. The solution he proposed was common to many husbandry
guides—order. English husbands needed to order their hop garden because “ground orderly
used, doth not only yield the more, the greater, the Harder, and the weightier Hops.”
65
Despite
his emphasis on order and hard work, the language Scot used to describe hops and orderly
cultivation prefigured Gerard's interest in rarity and his advocacy for skillful, diligent labor.
English husbands did not grow hops, Scot claimed, because the mischievous Flemish, “[are]
dazzling us with the discommendation of our soil, obscuring and falsifying the order of this
mystery.” Though Continental Europeans grew hops as a commercial crop, Scot complained
that they nonetheless remained mysterious to English growers. English husbands, he claimed,
needed to demystify the plant and the characteristics of English soil.
66

Leonard Mascall's Book of the Arte and Manner How to Plante and Graffe (1582) had
also used the rhetoric of secrecy to describe cultivation. Mascall dedicated the first half of his
work to practical matters—the wind direction, amount of light, and soil conditions that each
plant required. Grafting, Mascall wrote, “[is the skill by] which not only we may see with our
eyes, but also feel with our hands in the secret works of Nature.” He followed up on this claim

65
Reginald Scot, A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden (1578), unpaginated epistle to the
reader; 5.
66
Ibid, unpaginated epistle to the reader.

50
with the second section of his work, “a little treatise, how one may Graffe [Graft] and Plant,
subtly or Artificially and to make many things in Gardens very strange.” Mascall's descriptions
of the “secret works of Nature” that the grafter could produce “subtly or Artificially,” were
generally recommendations on which trees to graft together to produce effects that would
produce larger, better, tasting, or longer enduring versions of common fruits.
67

In 1558, the writer Thomas Hill claimed that he only sought to describe the proper way
to order a garden “after my rude manner.”
68
Even as Hill claimed that he wrote in a “rude
manner,” his previous work on English translations of works by John Dee and Conrad Gessner
and the techniques he described belied his modesty. In both his final work, The Gardener's
Labyrinth, and a posthumous edition called The Arte of Gardening, Hill feared “that the
common sort of men will suppose these rules to extend somewhat above their capacity.” He felt
obligated to share his secrets, he claimed, because they were necessary for cultivating a
successful garden. He did not, however, suggest that the “common sort” were incapable of
applying these techniques in their gardens. Instead, he urged them to “request the counsel of
some skillful.”
69
Classifying gardening as a door to nature's secrets helped Hill speak to the
natural philosophers, but it also threatened the universal appeal of improvement.
Hugh Plat's The New and Admirable Arte of Setting of Corne (1601) railed against so-
called skill for excluding common people from improved husbandry. Plat complained about the

67
Leonard Mascall, A Booke of the Arte and Maner How to Plant and Graffe All Sortes of
Trees (1582), unpaginated dedication; passage on strange plants begins on pg 51 from which
the quotation is taken.
68
John Considine, “Hill, Thomas (c.1528-c1574),” in Oxford Dictionary of National
Bibliography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13303; Thomas Hill, A Most Briefe
and Pleasaunte Treatise, Teachyng How to Dresse, Sowe, and Set a Garden (1558),
unpaginated introduction.
69
Idem, The Gardeners Labyrinth, ed. Henry Dethick (1586), 43; idem, The Arte of Gardening,
Wherunto Is Added Much Necessarie Matter, with a Number of Secrets (1608), 25.

51
Italian natural philosopher Giambatista della Porta's “thicke and foggie clowdes of skill, which
he hath in so many close and figurative termes (as willing to vaunt of his owne wit, but
unwilling to benefit others) so strangely delivered unto us.” Plat attacked della Porta for veiling
advice on nature in obscure language, that Plat himself sought to demystify. Unlike other
authors who promised to reveal secrets, Plat reprinted della Porta's advice in Latin, translated it
into English, and then translated della Porta's mystical metaphors into specific advice.
Ultimately, Plat urged his readers to ignore della Porta's advice altogether, asking, “Why should
we spend these costly liquors that are fitter for Taverns and Alehouses than rusticall [rustic]
ambitions?” Instead, he recommended that farmers fertilize their seeds with manure, wort, and
the dregs of beer.
70

Like Hill, Plat argued that agricultural improvements were available to anyone, and
suggested that skill could be learned. Yet many of his other suggestions undermined the
accessible model for improvement he championed in his critique of della Porta. In The Jewell
House of Art and Nature (1594), Plat also championed humble farmers: “For whose good
health and recovery, and for the better comfort of sundry simple and needy farmers of this land,
I have partly undertaken these strange labors, altogether abhorring from my profession, that they
might both know and practice some farther secrets in their husbandry.” By the end of the
paragraph, however, he introduced “new sorts of marl not yet known.” In the work, he
introduced diagrams of stills and recipes for distillation that might also have appeared in an
alchemical work.
71
Plat peppered The Jewell House and The New and Admirable Arte of Setting

70
Hugh Plat, The New and Admirable Arte of Setting of Corne (1601), B3v; C3v. Plat discussed
issues of secrecy throughout chapter 6.
71
Idem, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594), B3. Deborah Harkness has discussed
Plat’s work extensively in The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific
Revolution (2007).

52
Corne with references to the work of other natural philosophers, experimentalists, and
husbandry writers. In The Jewell House, he noted that the French natural philosopher Bernard
Palissy had discovered a new kind of salt that Plat believed held the key to fertility. While
discussing soil, he needed to “acknowledge that M. Taverner in his Booke of Experiments,
concerning Fish and Fruit, being of this year's date, hath bereaved me of one of my best
observations in Orchard grounds.”
72
Plat's references to new kinds of marl, rare salts, and his
references to other writers demonstrated Plat's participation in natural philosophical discourses,
but they also excluded readers who could not draw on the republic of letters.
The most threatening tension within the improvement discourse came in discussions of
practical and physical limits to the transformative power of labor. In The Whole Art of
Husbandry, Markham advised readers to purchase good land that had been poorly husbanded,
but offered little advice on how to accurately determine what land was fertile. In Maison
Rustique and Feudigraphia, which focused on surveying but also provided advice on husbandry,
Surflet and Folkingham each provided detailed instructions for finding good land. They
described ideal soil types and distributions of water, but both agreed that the best method for
ascertaining soil quality was surveying what plants grew there. Land was good “if without
being husbanded or mended by great labor or fatness of dung, it bring forth flourishing herbs,
timber trees, straight, having great arms, and abounding with store of their several fruits, and
those good and well relished in their kinds, and if it yield great fruitfulness of corn.”
73
This
description exposed one of the main tensions underlying husbandry manuals. Images of
flourishing herbs and tall, straight trees rising from the ground without any human effort seemed

72
Ibid, 2–3; Plat, The New and Admirable Arte, A4.
73
Heresbach and Markham, The Whole Art of Husbandry Contained in Foure Bookes, 83;
Folkingham, Feudigraphia, sec. 1–2; Quotation taken from Estienne, Maison Rustique, 17.

53
to invoke Edenic leisure. The guides maintained that labor might improve these fruitful lands;
however, they also suggested that all lands were not equally fruitful. The possibility that equal
labor might not yield equal results opened the possibility that some lands were ill suited to the
ideal use configurations that improvers endorsed.
Lawson also questioned the universal solutions championed by other writers. He
focused heavily on native plants from the north of England, and avoided discussion of foreign
plants. Moreover, he even dissuaded local husbands from using trees from southern England:
“we meddle not with Apricots nor Peaches, nor scarcely with Quinces, which will not like in our
cold parts.”
74
Lawson's recognition that certain plants could not tolerate the climate of northern
England reinforced the importance of local knowledge. If apricots, peaches, and quince would
not grow in a cold climate, he suggested, the fault lay with the choice of plant, not with the labor
or skill of the planter.
Other writers discussed the limits on the utility of labor through analysis of extremely
fecund meadows. After Norden’s surveyor described pastures to the bailiff where grass grew
sixteen feet long, the bailiff remarked with wonder on the achievements of human artifice. The
surveyor replied, “Meadows very mean by nature, may be made excellent by charge: but they
will decay, unless they be always relieved. But these that I speak of, require little or no help at
the owner’s hand, only the aid of these rivers and fat of the hills overflowing, do feed them fat,
gives great burden, and very sweet.”
75
His reply threatened the improving ideal in two ways.
First, it asserted that certain places on earth did not require labor and naturally were as fruitful
as possible. Secondly, his statement posited that human labor could never achieve the
fruitfulness of these naturally occurring meadows. These two challenges posed a threat to the

74
Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 3.
75
Norden, The Surveiors Dialogue, 199.

54
ideal of universal land use embodied in mathematical landscapes and declarations about the
universal power of labor.
Norden also suggested that practical conditions might also limit the effectiveness of
labor. Just after the surveyor in his dialogue chastised the bailiff for failing to properly drain a
bog, the pair came upon an alder grove. The bailiff claimed that the ground was “rotten” as a
result of the trees, preventing cattle from pasturing there. “The Alder tree is enemy to all
grounds where it grows,” replied the surveyor, “for the root thereof is of that nature, that it
draweth to it so much moisture to nourish it self, as the ground near it, is good for no use.” In
response, the bailiff immediately volunteered to raze the grove, killing all of the alders. The
bailiff’s solution seemed sound, based on the advice that Estienne and other writers urged their
readers to cure the “ the disease of your fields” discussed above. Yet Norden’s surveyor
endorsed a different course of action: “Although this tree be not friendly to pasture, meddow, or
arable land, yet it yields her due commodity too, without whose aid, in some places, where other
wood is scant, men can hardly husband their lands without this.”
76
The surveyor’s suggestion
placed profit from naturally occurring plants above the imperative to completely control the
landscape.
Unsurprisingly, the surveyor’s uncharacteristic statements left his interlocutor baffled.
Moments after preparing to raze the grove, the bailiff reversed course and sought to expand
alder cultivation to capitalize on the trees’ profitable nature. Frustrated, the surveyor replied,
“There is great difference between necessity and the superabundance of every necessary.”
Landowners should only encourage alders where “the place [is] destitute of other means, and fit

76
Ibid, 196–7.

55
for this kind of commodity.”
77
Norden wrote his bailiff as a buffoonish counterpart offering
ridiculous suggestions to the surveyor and eventually agreeing with him. But in this episode,
the bailiff’s confusion revealed tensions within the improving ideal. Norden’s surveyor claimed
that unprofitable woods made excellent pasture and noted that profitable fir trees grew in the
same kinds of soil as the alders, but nonetheless counseled the bailiff to pursue profit from
naturally occurring trees over labor to achieve the ideal set forth elsewhere. The surveyor’s
remarks cast the best landscape as the most profitable one.
Promotional writers describing potential colonies needed to wrestle with similar
questions to those that plagued agricultural writers. Did climate and soil place limitations on the
productive capacity and plant types that could grow on a piece of land? How firm were those
limitations and to what degree might they be overcome by labor? Did husbands need simply to
increase and direct labor to realize increased production in their fields or did increases in yield
or the cultivation of unfamiliar species require specialized and potentially difficult skills?
Promotional writers did not resolve these tensions any better than the authors of improvement
literature. Close analysis of the ways in which promoters succumbed to these tensions
demonstrates that their often-contradictory or seemingly implausible descriptions of potential
colonies stemmed from the same uncertainties about the relationship between human enterprise
and natural abundance, and deep insecurities about how to balance ideal landscapes against
practical and financial factors.
Promotional writers owe much of their reputation for excess to their liberal references to
Biblical abundance in potential colonies. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts describing
Ireland referenced Gerald of Wales’ twelfth-century description of Ireland as “rich in pastures

77
Ibid, 196.

56
and meadows, honey, and milk, and wine” which “makes up for all the wealth of the East,”
clearly invoking God's promise to deliver the Israelites “unto a land flowing with milk and
honey (Exod. 3:8, AV).” Arthur Barlowe invoked Eden in 1584, claiming that in Virginia, “the
earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labor.”
Theodor de Bry’s 1590 edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report included a series of
engravings based on John White’s watercolors made during a trip to Roanoke that presented a
visual argument about natural fertility and the tractability of the nearby Algonquian peoples to
Christianity and English rule. De Bry opened his series of images with an engraving of Adam
and Eve in the Garden, clearly locating the “newfound land” in an Edenic context. In his
description of Bermuda printed in 1613, Silvester Jourdain wrote that they were “one of the
sweetest Paradises that be upon the earth.” Two years later, the Bermudian minister Lewis
Hughes exclaimed that settlers’ difficult landing in Bermuda was analogous to Adam evading
the sword-bearing cherubim to re-enter Eden. The soil needed “neither plowing, nor digging.”
“Men,” he added, “shall live here in much ease, without such moyling and toyling as in
England. The greatest labor will be in worming and pruning of some plants.” This description
of labor clearly invoked Adam's role in the Garden, “to dress it and to keep it (Gen. 2:15).”
78

78
Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara, Rev. ed.
(1982), 34–35; 31; 101–102; 55; Richard Stanyhurst, “The Historie of Irelande from the First
Inhabitation Thereof, unto the Yeare 1509,” in The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of
England, Scotlande, and Irelande, by Raphael Holinshed (1577); Camden, Britain; Fynes
Moryson was more reluctant to simply follow Gerald, but he nonetheless compared all of his
own observations to Gerald’s in An Itinerary (1617); Spenser cited Gerald approvingly in A
View of the Present State of Ireland; Barnabe Rich cited both Stanihurst and Gerald but
doubted the accuracy of their descriptions because they were Catholics. Barnabe Rich, A New
Description of Ireland (1610); idem, A Short Suruey of Ireland. (1609); Harriot, A Briefe and
True Report; James P. P Horn, ed., Writings of Captain John Smith with Other Narratives of
Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America (2007), 826; Silvester
Jourdain, A Plaine Description of the Barmudas, Now Called Sommer Ilands. (1613), f. C3r–
C4r; Lewes Hughes, A Letter, Sent into England from the Summer Ilands (1615), f. A3v,

57
These descriptions of abundance and ease, however, contained subtle discrepancies over
the relationship between human labor and natural abundance that promotional writers’ expanded
upon in subsequent descriptions. Ireland, even if it ever had been a land of milk and honey, still
existed in a post-Lapsarian state, in which men and women needed to toil for their food.
Hughes downplayed the scale of labor required to live in Bermuda, but nonetheless reminded
his readers that even Adam and Eve had to do some work prior to their expulsion. Moreover,
these writers described the land in ways that openly contradicted their earlier Edenic
pronouncements. Barlow noted that the nearby Algonquians needed to break the ground with
hoes to plant their corn, gourds, and peas. Hughes informed readers that Bermuda would only
provide ease and plenty “after the wood is taken off, and the grass and weeds be burnt and
destroyed, and the common business of fortifying be once ended.”
79
The same texts that
promised Eden demanded settlers till the earth and clear undesirable plants, nearly echoing the
curse accompanying Adam and Eve’s expulsion. Promoters intermingled biblical references to
Eden, the Promised Land, and paradise. In doing so, they created an ambiguous set of
expectations around the need for human labor.
Accounts of the plants, animals, and landscapes reinforced the tension between
supernatural abundance and expectations predicated on labor. William Strachey’s account of
Bermuda—the first written by an English author—lamented and then praised the quality of the
soil. Strachey added that Bermuda possessed “shaws of goodly cedar, fairer than ours here in
Virginia, the berries whereof our men, seething, straining, and letting stand some three or four
days, made a kind of pleasant drink.” Unfortunately, these cedars were not “the cedars of

B3v.
79
Horn, Writings of Captain John Smith, 825; Hughes, A Letter, Sent into England from the
Summer Ilands, B3v.

58
Libanus [Lebanon], which bear old fruit and new all the year, being a kind of apple which taste
like prunes” renowned by Peter Martyr. Bermuda's palms were “high and straight, sappy and
spongious, unfirm for any use,” except that they also produced paper, yielded a fruit like
cabbage, housed silk worms, and provided cochineal “so precious and merchantable.”
80
His
consistently conflicting assessments stemmed from his attempt to describe Bermuda through
comparisons to biblical and mythical models and other colonial projects while simultaneously
defining the landscape through commodities to be returned to England.
These same contradictory impulses plagued promotional writers across the English
Atlantic. Writers detailing Bermuda and Virginia described unfamiliar plants with regard to
English or European analogues and frequently evaluated them as either being equal or greater to
their known counterparts. Authors writing on Ireland reassured readers that despite reports of
the damp Irish climate, fruits were equal to those in England.
81
The constant comparisons to
English flora implied that settlers should adopt English husbandry practices in those colonies.
John Rolfe, who introduced West Indian tobacco seeds into Virginia in the 1610s, wrote in 1617
that experiments with English agricultural techniques had allowed settlers to cultivate both
English and native plants. Animal husbandry had also developed, he also informed Sir Edwin
Sandys, one of the leaders of the nascent settlement: “The Cattle thrive and increase exceeding
well, the plows yearly work and oxen are plentiful.”
82

80
Louis B Wright, ed., A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives: Strachey’s “True
Reportory” and Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas, (1965), 22–25.
81
Moryson, An Itinerary, 269.
82
Susan M Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London 1607-1622, vol. 3
(1906), 71; John Rolfe, “A True Relation of the State of Virginia Lefte by Sir Thomas Dale
Knight in May Last 1616,” in Writings of Captain John Smith, 1177–1179 Rolfe’s letter was
also printed for public consumption by Samuel Purchas in 1617.

59
Other writers worried that natural abundance did not yield itself to English labor and
crops. According to Strachey’s report on Bermuda, the earliest settlers’ first action was to
“square out a garden” near the water. In it, they planted “muskmelons, peas, onions, radish,
lettuce, and many English seeds and kitchen herbs.” At first the results seemed promising—
shoots appeared above ground in ten days. These early signs of hope ended in disappointment
when the shoots perished by unknown means. Strachey attempted to moderate this
disappointment by noting that he saw “some spiders, which, as many affirm, are signs of great
store of gold.” This speculation provided cold comfort against the acknowledgement that the
soil failed to respond to labor within an enclosed garden.
83
Irish writers were also at pains to
note that the possibly supernatural abundance of Irish pastures and woodlands did not preclude
mixed husbandry and tillage.
84

Printed descriptions of struggle further heightened the tension between ease and toil.
The 1589 edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations contained a letter from Ralph Lane
describing the colony at Roanoke. In it, Lane described Virginia's fertility and noted the
abundant provisions for foraging. His narrative of the events between August of 1585 and June
of 1586 told a different story. Lane described starving colonists dependent on the kindness of
an Algonquian man called Ensenore to set up fishing weirs and plant surplus corn to supply the
English. Even with native assistance, the English settlement nearly perished in full view of
growing corn “like the starving horse in the stable, with the growing grass.” In his second
printed work on Bermuda, Hughes wrote that settlers should thank God for the abundant natural

83
Wright, A Voyage to Virginia, 23.
84
Rich, A New Description of Ireland, 4–5; Moryson, An Itinerary, 159.

60
bounty that the islands yielded up in 1611, but later chastised settlers' “nastiness & loathsome
laziness, wherein too many of them died, crying night and day for meat.”
85

Rolfe captured the problem best in 1617 in an outpouring of questions:
How is it possible Virginia can now be so good, so fertile a Country, so
plentifully stored with food and other commodities? Is it not the same still it was,
when men pined with famine? Can the earth now bring forth such a plentiful
increase? Were there not Governors, Men and Means to have wrought this
heretofore? And can it now on the sudden be so fruitful?

He replied that Virginia was “the same it was”—fertile and amenable to English settlement.
Rolfe did not deny that hardships had occurred, but he argued that they did not provide any
evidence against the natural abundance described in the first reports on Virginia.
86

Without abandoning the early images of prosperity, writers needed to find some
explanation for failures to achieve their lofty visions. Settlers’ sloth and misgovernment were
the most common explanations. Rolfe claimed, “the greatest want of all is ... good and
sufficient men, as well of birth and quality to command...come with ease to establish a firm and
perfect Common-weale.” Smith printed, “The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia,”
a tract that combined the observations of several colonists and merchants in his 1612 Map of
Virginia. “The Proceedings” delivered a searing indictment of indolence and governors'
incompetence. The authors lamented, “Had we been in Paradise it self (with those governors)
it would not have been much better with us.” Sloth, incompetence, and greed drove settlers to
squander the natural bounty surrounding them.
87
Even in Bermuda, where an enormous

85
Ralph Lane, “An Account of the Particularities of the Imployments of the English Men Left
in Virginia by Sir Richard Greenevill Under the Charge of Master Ralfe Lane,” in Writings of
Captain John Smith, 851–852; Hughes, A Plaine and True Relation of the Goodnes of God
Towards the Sommer Ilands, B4 verso– C recto.
86
Rolfe, “A True Relation of the State of Virginia Lefte by Sir Thomas Dale Knight in May
Last 1616,” 1175.
87
Ibid, 1176; Smith, A Map of Virginia, 105–106; 20–21.

61
infestation of rats “devour[ed] the fruits of the earth, kept us destitute of bread a year, or two,”
authors disagreed on whether the rodents were a natural accident or whether “the correcting
hand of God...lay heaviest upon the lazy ones.”
88
English tracts on Ireland fixated on the
perceived sloth of the Irish and the ostensible degeneration that followed from it.
89

Conclusion
So long as promotional writers insisted on the stupendous natural abundance of potential
colonies, they could only blame failures on the moral turpitude, sloth, and incompetence of the
English settlers who attempted to cultivate the land and the governors who supervised them.
Writers supporting the Munster plantation, Hakluyt, and Harriot had described colonial
landscapes through commodities that would find a ready market due to either economic or
environmental constraints in England. Promoters described landscapes full of resources and
commodities that offered immediate justifications for colonial ventures to the officials of a
thrifty English state or to private investors. Richard Hakluyt had argued for colonial expansion
in response to his analysis not just of ecological factors but also in response to economic
conditions within a European market. Few other promotional writers seriously considered the
nuances of the European economy and England’s place within it. Instead, they simply asserted
shortages or decried dependence on Catholic countries. Their rhetoric, like that used by the
authors of husbandry, gardening, and surveying guides, attempted to ignore the specific
conditions of European markets and instead argued for a self-sufficient England.

88
Richard Norwood, The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda, ed. Wesley
Frank Craven and Walter Brownell Hayward, (1945), lxxli; lxxlii; Hughes, A Plaine and
True Relation of the Goodnes of God Towards the Sommer Ilands,, B4.
89
Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland; Keith Pluymers, “Taming the
Wilderness in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Ireland and Virginia,” Environmental
History 16, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 610–32.

62
This vision of a self-sufficient England was an ideal, not a reflection of actual economic
conditions. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries English merchant companies
traded across Europe and the Mediterranean, often with royal monopolies. Historian Robert
Brenner has argued that, despite contemporaries’ rhetoric of decline, English commercial
expansion stemmed from economic strength and the desire to tap into a burgeoning import
market from the 1550s onward. Wars temporarily disrupted trade with Europe, the
Mediterranean, and Asia from 1550 through 1650, but merchant companies found ways to
circumvent restrictions to trade directly for the suppliers of import goods, including with Spain,
ostensibly England’s Catholic enemy. England’s place within this market meant that colonial
goods needed to compete with European, Mediterranean, and Asian imports. The East India
Company came to dominate silk imports into England by the mid-seventeenth century but the
Levant Company and Dutch merchants also participated in the market to a significant degree.
90

Registers of tobacco importation into London and other ports from 1615-1641 report tobacco
from Spain, Spanish colonies, and Brazil as well as Virginia, Bermuda, and St. Christopher’s.
Moreover, tobacco growers from Gloucestershire and other parts of the West Country competed
for a share of the English market, even after Parliament banned tobacco cultivation in England
and Ireland.
91
War and tariffs irritated English merchants but did not cause them to retreat from
European, Mediterranean, or Asian markets in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries.
Casting the landscape in economic language left questions about whether profit or
necessity compelled English men and women to settle abroad to acquire those goods.

90
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 3–50.
91
Joan Thirsk, The Rural Economy of England: Collected Essays (1984), 259–280; FP 320;
TNA E163/17/16; BL Add. Mss. 35865 f. 248.

63
Promotional writers attempted to move past these worries by relying on rhetoric of scarcity and
decline, the transformational power of labor, and the near-Edens awaiting English settlers
abroad. In doing so, they sought to deny the economic context in which English colonial
expansion occurred. Strong trade networks with the Baltic, Spain, the Mediterranean, and Asia
meant that even merchant companies with monopolies still faced competition. The Virginia
Company’s promoters appear to have grasped this when they wrote about the decay of Irish
woodlands. Nonetheless, promoters continued to render colonial landscapes in economic terms
but only described the state of the English economy through the language of decay.
The struggles documented in promotional literature written after the first settlers had
arrived blamed sloth and greed for their failures or cast the Irish and Powhatans as evil and
destructive. But a bleaker explanation constantly lurked—that these lands simply could not
sustain English people or practices. Promotional writers were unable to seriously modify their
descriptions of potential colonies to accommodate the experiences of English people on the
ground. Instead, self-justifying descriptions of landscapes overstuffed with commodities
persisted into the mid-seventeenth century, even as English people in those colonies continued
to struggle. The same difficulties that rendered promotional writers largely unable to adapt to
new information also plagued English people on the ground in Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda.
Administrators sought to learn more about their new lands but that the same reluctance to
abandon idyllic dreams of natural plenty and doubts about the causes of agricultural or
economic failures led them to question their knowledge.

64
Chapter II: Contested knowledge: defining lands and landscapes
Assessment of the natural world was tricky. Competing myths, contradictory witnesses,
and the desire for profit generated contradictions that stretched across Atlantic environments.
For one group the air smelled “most sweetly” yet in the nose of the other it reeked as if “'twere
perfumed by a fen.” The mixture of desire, tradition, confusion, and misinformation wove a
rhetorical mist as thick as Prospero's fog.
92
Colonial promoters struggled to craft descriptions of
colonial landscapes replete with valuable commodities and to wrestle with sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century disputes about the relationship between human labor and natural forces to
attract English settlers and investors to their enterprises. Contested environmental knowledge
also shaped the political and economic development of Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda on the
ground. Colonial governors—either the joint-stock companies based in London or the English-
appointed Dublin government—clamored for information about colonial lands in order to divide
and apportion property, collect taxes, and plan or approve agricultural or manufacturing
activities. Across the English Atlantic, governing authorities attempted to find reliable sources
of knowledge about land. Instead, they found disputed accounts about the land and its capacity
for different uses that made it extremely difficult to articulate and enact coherent plans for land
use. Moreover, individuals and factions within governing authorities summoned these different
sources of expertise in conflicts with each other. English settlers and authorities were unable to
acquire and agree upon consistent environmental knowledge. Their disagreements about the
nature of the colonized lands prevented the creation of consistent land use policies. In addition,
knowledge of the natural world became ammunition in fights about the competence of officials
and the validity of policies.

92
William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” MIT Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 1993,
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html Act II, Scene I.

65
In the immediate aftermath of the Munster plantation, the Dublin government undertook
a series of mapping projects and surveys to determine the extent and value of the land available
to English planters and to determine the tax revenue due to the crown from the newly planted
lands. These sources reveal that from the outset of the Munster plantation, settlers and
authorities were unable to agree on how to assess land. As a result, contradictory evidence
frustrated English attempts to evaluate the progress of the plantations. The ill-fitting
assessments caused English authorities in London and Dublin to miss changes to the landscape.
Commissions sent from England routinely derided the Munster plantation as a failure and
accused settlers of having degenerated and become as bad as the Irish. The methods that the
English and Dublin governments devised to “see” changes in Munster’s landscapes left them
blind to the transformations that did occur and to the logic that governed planters’ behavior.
In Bermuda, disputes over what crops Bermudians should produce shaped political
disputes as well as the development of individual holdings. From the beginning of English
settlement on the islands, local governors and adventurers in England sought expertise and
information about the nature of the islands. Expert knowledge, however, was mutable and
subject to political pressure. Individual planters and governors engaged in protracted battles to
convince the leaders of the Sommer Islands Company about the nature of Bermuda’s soil, the
potential for irrigation, and the suitability of the climate for Caribbean cash crops. Incoming
governors attacked the environmental knowledge of their predecessors in order to justify radical
changes to economic activity on the islands. In addition, during periods of financial stress,
adventurers questioned information they had previously accepted about the islands’ ability to
produce certain crops. The inability of the Sommer Islands Company, its governors in

66
Bermuda, and the islands’ settlers to agree upon the productive capacity of the land left the
company and the colony in a precarious financial position.
Like Bermudians, Virginians also disagreed on the productive capacity of the landscape.
Examining the attempts to produce silk and silk grass in Virginia reveals contests between
settlers, governors, and investors in England over expertise and knowledge that reflected larger
battles over the future of the Virginia Company and the colony. Moreover, the attempts to
produce silk and silk grass demonstrates the English settlers’ inability to adapt plants used by
Virginia’s indigenous peoples to the scale of commercial cultivation. Attempts to produce silk
and silk grass in Virginia pushed English investors and English settlers to question the scale of
production and the expertise required to create a profitable commodity. Travel writing and
promotional literature about Virginia had emphasized natural diversity, but did not address how
English settlers could adapt that diversity into economically viable commodities. The attempts
to cultivate silk and silk grass demonstrate that investors in England and English settlers in
Virginia attempted to work through these problems but consistently struggled to understand that
the diverse landscape created by Virginia’s indigenous peoples would not produce the surpluses
demanded by commercial markets without being transformed.
In Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda, colonial authorities—the Dublin government, the
Sommer Islands Company, or the Virginia Company—struggled to see colonial landscapes. In
each colony, authorities’ political and economic visions led them to question reports from their
agents, hired experts, and tenants. In Munster, the Dublin and London governments fixated on
agricultural land. Even planters, who had access to more detailed information about their
holdings and who showed more willingness to adopt pragmatic evaluation of the landscape,
frequently evaluated their estates according to the government’s categories. In Virginia and

67
Bermuda, economic viability drove the joint-stock companies evaluation of the land. The
companies’ investors and leadership, however, could not agree on how to evaluate economic
viability. Adventurers in England often distrusted reports from the colonies about
environmental conditions including the climate, the soil condition, or the state of woodlands.
Trust dissipated across the span of the Atlantic. In its absence, the companies had difficulty
responding to conditions on the ground or even agreeing to what conditions existed. The
anxieties about the transformative power of labor in nature that permeated improvement
literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also colored English attempts to set land use
policies in potential colonies.
Description and division: setting the pattern in the first Munster plantation
According to Edmund Spenser, the Desmond rebellion ended in 1583 with “such
wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same.” The people of Munster
“looked like Anatomies [of] death” after starving in the woods where, according to Spenser,
they ate shamrocks, watercresses, and carrion, which “they spared not to scrape out of their
graves.”
93
Spenser depicted Munster as a barren land, stripped bare by the ravages of war. His
depopulated and destroyed landscape conveyed the horror of war, but also offered the English
state an opportunity to reform Ireland from a land of rebellion-enabling forests and disordered
pastures into ordered fields. The image of destruction proved compelling. From the ashes left
in the wake of the Desmond wars, the Elizabethan government embarked on a radical shift in
Irish policy—plantation.
94

93
Edmund Spenser, A Veue of The Present State of Ireland (a View...), CELT Electronic Edition
(2003), http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E500000-001/index.html.
94
Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors; Canny, Making Ireland British, Plantations had
previously been attempted in Leix and Offaly; however, the Munster plantation was the
largest and most systematic effort. Despite their disagreements on many other matters, both

68
The long interaction between English and Irish people had produced complex and
contradictory discourses about the state of Ireland. Writers from the twelfth-century cleric
Gerald of Wales struggled to balance descriptions of the potential profits with invective against
Irish husbandry and its allegedly deleterious effects on the land. The administrators and
politicians responsible for the plantations drew on these discourses returning frequently to
Gerald despite centuries of distance. The Munster plantation involved attainders and the seizure
and redistribution of land at an unprecedented scale. Taxing and distributing this land required
new types of information to be collected and presented through maps, surveys, and reports. The
plantation authorities and members of Elizabeth I’s government wrote the earliest plans and
requirements for English undertakers in 1585 and 1586 without substantial knowledge of the
lands that had been seized and without clear or consistent policies for measuring and taxing that
land. The earliest forms divided land into “good” land and bad or waste land, but did not clearly
articulate the differences. As surveyors began presenting the information they acquired in 1587
in maps and surveys generated plantation authorities received a more complicated description of
the Irish landscape that added new categories of assessment including woods and bogs.
Nonetheless, attempts to divide and categorize the Irish landscape according to quality
continued to bedevil English authorities and individual planters. The tools that the plantation’s
guidelines and grant conditions provided proved ill suited to describe and value Irish land.
Surviving estate papers from the late-1580s through the 1640s demonstrate that individual
planters attempted to find more pragmatic solutions to manage their lands and slowly build upon
existing forms of land use. Nonetheless, the ill fitting measures of success and failure
developed prior to the plantation authorities’ acquisition of more detailed knowledge about Irish

Canny and Ellis agree that the Munster plantation marked a turning point in English policy
towards Ireland.

69
land consistently influenced how planters and future administrators understood the Irish
landscape.
Throughout the sixteenth century, English writers railed against perceived Irish land use.
The Irish, according to these writers, refused to farm, preferring to keep large herds of cattle.
Irish pastoralism, they complained, enabled disorder and rebellion by allowing warlike chiefs
and criminal “horseboys” to dominate the countryside. Sixteenth-century English writers used
invective about the Irish landscape to impugn the Old English—largely Catholic descendants of
the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest—as well as any English planters who failed to turn
Ireland to tillage. According to these writers, anything short of the radical transformation of the
Irish landscape signaled that English settlers had “degenerated” to the level of the Irish.
95
The
massive seizure of land following the Desmond rebellion created an opportunity to put these
policies into practice at a large scale. The writers who championed plantation provided only
two options—remake Ireland or sink into barbarity. To them, anything short of the complete
transformation of the Irish landscape signified a failure. Historians have been too eager to heed
complaints that planters ignored agricultural improvements and pillaged natural resources.
Looking beyond these polemics to the sources the plantation authorities used to evaluate land
and to surviving estate papers from the 1580s and 1590s demonstrates that planters' failure to
adopt the changes in promotional literature did not mean that they pursued quick, exploitative
means to profit. It shows that they developed more subtle systems for evaluating their newly
acquired land and defining the resources on it.
From its inception, uncertainty about land plagued the Munster plantation. Only two of
the sixteen articles propounded to govern the Munster plantation addressed the physical

95
Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland; Canny, Making Ireland British.

70
environment. The other articles defined the systems of rent and taxation for planted lands (fee
farm and free socage). They mandated that planters provide a footman for every 200 or 300
acres of their land, depending on the nature of their grant. The document also included
prohibitions against planters intermarrying with the Irish or selling their lands to Irish buyers.
Finally, the articles granted specific exemptions to rent or forms of taxation. The two articles
that directly addressed the physical environment reveal the categorical and classification issues
behind English attempts to value and divide land to be planted.
96

Article 2 exemplified the fundamental problems assessing the natural world at the heart
of the plantation. This article required that land be valued “according to the goodness of the soil
in every county or barony” and taxed by acre. The article did not indicate how to determine
goodness. In a marginal notation on one edition of this document, Geoffrey Fenton, secretary to
the Lord Deputy of Ireland, attempted to clarify how English authorities in Ireland should
determine the quality of land. Fenton questioned whether land measured and taxed included
“wood, bog, and other barren ground shall be brought into the reckoning of the acre, as the
arable land and good ground is.” His question made a clear distinction between good and bad
ground, following the most simplistic formulations of plantation promoters and improvers. As
he saw it, good ground was arable. Woods and bogs were barren and bad.
97
Yet Fenton’s
question subtly retreated from plantation promoters’ contention that the “bad” characteristics of
the Irish landscape were the result of Irish barbarism. Exempting wood, bog, and barren ground
suggested that the blame for the absence of tillage lay with the physical qualities of the land, not
the quality or quantity of human labor on it.

96
TNA SP 63/121 f. 196; SP 63/123 f. 3; LPL MS 614 f.67.
97
Fenton’s marginal comments are found in SP 63/123 f.91.

71
Article 14 ruled that disputes over title or right would be handled in Munster according
to English custom to encourage new settlers to “more quietly and better employ themselves in
manurance.” It authorized the creation of commissions to hear and adjudicate title disputes in
Munster to enable the speedy resolution of “controversies…that may be pretended by the Irish.”
The language in the article clearly conveyed the plantation authorities’ contempt for Irish
claims. Nonetheless, the article left an avenue for the attainted Old English and Irish to
challenge the physical constraints of the plantation. This article implied that legal issues
determined the character of Munster's rural landscape: streamline challenges to title and English
agriculture would blossom. Like so many of the promoters' tracts on Ireland, this article
assumed that the barriers to change in Ireland were cultural or political rather than ecological.
These two articles created a plantation that lacked solid and consistent boundaries. At
the time the articles were written, many members of the Old English nobility and even some of
the Irish managed to maintain their lands. The area available for settlement was a patchwork of
attainted lands scattered across the province and intermixed with the holdings of Old English
and Irish families who had avoided attainder. Moreover, it was a shifting patchwork: suits by
Old English and Irish gentry who had originally lost their land allowed some to reclaim lands
that had already been distributed to planters, despite the creation of legal and administrative
structures in article 14 designed to minimize the threat to planters’ titles. Examinations of titles
and concealed lands further nibbled at the edges of the formal plantations. Planters lamented
their uncertain titles and clamored for greater security in their holdings, claiming that they
would not improve lands that might be taken from them.
98
This legal landscape meant that
boundaries between planters, the Old English, and the Irish were jagged, porous, and shifting.

98
McCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583-
1641 (1986), 4–19; Canny, Making Ireland British, chap. 3.

72
Fenton's question about whether to include wastes in granted land further muddled the
boundaries of individual holdings and the plantation. Instead of subjecting the planted lands to
oversight and taxation, Fenton’s query opened the possibility that even lands not subject to
challenges from the dispossessed might remain in a kind of administrative limbo, uncounted and
untaxed.
Other plantation officials raised other concerns with requiring universal improvement
that undermined promoters’ boldest assertions about the transformation that would accompany
English settlement. In June 1586, roughly six months after the draft articles were written, Sir
Valentine Browne, one of the commissioners for the plantation and a planter himself, added two
amendments to the articles that also struggled to balance between the imperative to improve
land and the recognition that English husbandry simply would not work everywhere in Munster.
Browne’s first amendment clearly endorsed the plantation’s program of landscape
transformation and cultural reform. His amendment required that planters “replenished” waste
land and used it to maintain protestant clergy to serve the English planters and convert the Irish.
Immediately thereafter, he created an exemption for planters holding lands in any of the
mountain ranges in Kerry, arguing that those wilds were unimprovable.
99
Browne, like Fenton
and the other contributors to the articles for plantation, struggled to balance between a push to
transform the Irish landscape and the recognition that certain areas were inappropriate for
improvement.
Browne’s amendments and Fenton’s question demonstrate that even plantation
authorities who agreed that some lands should be considered waste did not agree on what
constituted waste. Fenton focused on bogs whereas Browne emphasized mountains. Browne's

99
LPL MS 611 pgs. 317-322, MS 600, ff. 83-84; BL MS Cotton Titus B XII ff. 259-263, 21r-
22v; TNA SP 63/124 f.139.

73
amendments also differed from Fenton's comments by discussing geographically specific
exemptions to improvement requirements. As a commissioner responsible for surveying
escheated lands in Munster, Browne acquired first-hand knowledge of the province and received
reports and depositions about the land while Fenton served the Lord Deputy in Dublin.
Browne's geographic exemption complicated a binary between good and waste land. Instead,
his comments suggested that some lands were improvable wastes, while others were simply
unsalvageable.
The final version of the document produced in June 1586 articulated a standard for land
use that commissions used to evaluate the plantation through the seventeenth century.
100
It
adopted a scheme for the most basic land valuations that attempted to address some of the
concerns raised in the drafts, but that left ambiguities. The final version abandoned the
language in the draft about the goodness of soil, but continued to value land differently
according to county. It did not offer any of the exemptions for undertakers in the specific
mountainous areas that Browne had recommended. The final articles proposed a plan to assess
“bogs, heaths, and waste” that recognized the diminished value of “bad” lands but also
accounted for potential improvements. The planters, also described in the document as
“undertakers,” held all of these lands as commons, which were not counted as ratable land. If
they improved the land, they would be required to make payments on it. This solution
apportioned rights to bogs, heaths, and wastes but removed one financial incentive towards
converting the lands to agricultural. In doing so, the final plantation articles tacitly ascribed
value to so-called “wastes” as commons that might be improved rather than parcels of ground to
be transformed as quickly as possible. The only incentive the final version offered towards

100
Victor Treadwell, ed., The Irish Commission of 1622: An Investigation of the Irish
Administration, 1615-1622, and Its Consequences, 1623-1624 (2006), 477–480.

74
transforming the landscape was a license for planters to transform part of their seignory into a
park for deer or horse-breeding. Promoters dreamed of transforming the Irish landscape, but the
articles governing the undertakers offered little concrete guidance on the land they were to
receive or how it should be transformed.
101

Two maps from 1586 captured the uncertainties about Irish land reflected in the articles
governing the plantation. The “Plot of the attainted lands” cast Munster as a blank space,
divided by red lines representing the boundaries of attainted lands. Large rivers and six castles
representing Kinsale, Cork, Youghal, Dungarvan, Waterford, and Limerick provided the only
acknowledgement of physical or built environments (Figure 2).
102
The “Plot for a Parishe in
Ireland,” a schematic drawing for the layout of a model seignory in Munster (Figure 3),
exemplified the plantation authorities emphasis on universal solutions rather than responses to
specific local conditions. The image of the model parish was organized on a square grid set
against a white background, intimating its ability to be placed down anywhere. Unlike the
articles, this system of division assumed a landscape without bogs, woods, marshes or other
landforms considered waste. Its only nod to the variations within actual landscapes was the
reluctant admission that the mill should be located “as the commodity of water will serve.” All
of the land in the parish was divided into cornfield and common pasture. The marginal
instructions mandated that “base tenures” have access to both cornfield and common pasture.
Pastoral land was not a liability but an essential part of a system of mixed husbandry since it
provided the manure used to fertilize the land and the animal labor required to plow.
Nonetheless, this plot rejected a predominantly pastoral economy, confining animal husbandry

101
TNA SP 63/124 f.184, 202
102
TNA MPF 1/273.

75
to a relatively small area and making it a common space largely reserved for cottagers and other
small tenants.
103

The authorship of the Plot is uncertain, but its original placement in the State Papers
indicates that it may have accompanied a set of orders sent to Sir Valentine Browne by
Elizabeth I’s advisors William Cecil, Christopher Hatton, and Francis Walsingham. A set of
orders for Munster dated at the same time as the letter offered further instructions on settling
parishes. Like the Plot, the instructions offered a universal vision of a settlement that could be
reproduced throughout the province. Only once did it indicate that the model could not be
followed everywhere, noting that where several model parishes could be placed together that a
market town should lie in the middle. The instructions elaborated on some of the categories
mentioned in the Plot. It provided a breakdown of the professions to be settled as the cottagers,
including twenty laborers for husbandry, two gardeners “for planting hop yards, griffing
[grafting], and such like,” and one miller, millwright, smith, tailor, shoemaker, carpenter,
thatcher butcher, victualer, and parish clerk. The list of professions made it clear that the
parishioners should focus on tillage and gardening, using animals to plow fields and maintaining
some supply for the butcher to process into meat for the residents. Just as the Plot reduced
variations within Munster’s landscapes to white space, the list of professions and the
instructions for the parish made no provision for environmental variation, such as noting that the
cottagers might include fishermen if the parish was located near water.
104

103
TNA MPF 1/305.
104
TNA SP 63/122. The letter from Cecil, Hatton, and Walsingham in which they mention that
they are enclosing instructions is at f.118. The map immediately followed it. The order for
planting Munster immediately followed the removed map at ff. 122-123.

76

Figure 2. TNA MPF 1/273. Sir Valentine Browne commissioned this map of the lands available for plantation. Rivers are
rendered with dots. Red lines indicated county or barony divisions. The text recorded the number of seignories and
their distribution.

77
The articles and grant offered a vision of land that was both vague and simplistic but
they also dealt with an entire province. Grants and surveys of individual estates demonstrate
greater concern with the landscape in an attempt to define the rights and resources attached to
holdings, but their major concern remained poorly defined “good” land. A sample of a land
grant for an individual seignory to be given by the government to an unspecified planter in
Waterford moved beyond the binary description of lands as good and waste. Instead, it granted
“land, tenements, meadows, pastures, wastes, heaths, moors, bogs, woods, underwoods, waters,
watercourses, fishings, mines, quarries, profits, commodities, and hereditaments.” The list

Figure 3: TNA MPF 1/305 "The plot for a Parishe in Ireland." The marginal text offered further instructions and clarifications
on the image, noting the locations for buildings and providing a key to the color scheme.

78
recognized diverse landforms, including pastoral and non-agricultural lands like woods and
bogs as something separate from waste. It also looked beyond a landed economy by granting
aquatic and mineral rights.
105
The sample grant indicated that plantation authorities were
beginning to look beyond arable land to define value.
Nonetheless, other documents from 1587 show that plantation authorities and planters
remained focused on arable land as the sole measure of value. A survey of Walter Ralegh's
seignory only concerned itself with “countable” land—not bog, heath, or waste.
106
A series of
twenty-seven certificates recording the transfer of land between undertakers followed a similar
pattern. Only six certificates gave any detail about land other than the presence of a castle or the
number of plowlands contained therein. Four of these six made some reference to wood. The
other two recorded fishing rights and the presence of a park with a water mill.
107
The scattered
references to wood, fishing, a park, and water show that some planters were beginning to
attempt to understand their new estates as something more than abstract quantities of acreage or
simply in terms of arable land.
Three maps from 1587 demonstrate that English understandings of the Irish landscape
grew more nuanced as surveyors acquired more detailed knowledge of on-the-ground conditions
in Munster. Arthur Robins, one of the four surveyors appointed to survey and map the area to
be planted, depicted escheated lands in County Limerick. His rendering included trees and
mountains across the landscape and labeled large clusters of trees along the Cork and Limerick
border as well as along the River Shannon. Robins added further details that displayed detailed
local knowledge in Limerick, warning viewers about a rock blocking the passage of boats along

105
TNA SP 63/124 f.210; NLI MS 41,983/1.
106
NLI MS 43,308/2.
107
LPL MS 631 ff. 1-5, 7-12, 14, 17-22, 24-26. The only document to mention fishing was f.
27; The four documents to mention woods were ff. 6, 13, 15, and 16.

79
the Shannon.
108
An anonymous map of southwest Munster also pointed towards concern with
the province's potential for fishing and shipping. This map recorded the depth in fathoms of
harbors across the southwest coast of the province and included clusters of trees near Kenmare
and stretching from Rossmore through Baltimore.
109
The most detailed map was a hand-colored
plat of the manor and lands of Tralee, County Kerry (Figure 4). It depicted the legal distinctions
within the recently escheated lands, showing the fragmentary nature of settlements even within
a single manor. Unlike earlier maps that showed escheated lands in Munster as blank swathes
upon which English landowners could inscribe their values, this depiction of Tralee attempted to
capture natural features, albeit those singled out in English land grants. It marked wooded areas
with images of trees, bogs with dotted clusters and a label, hilly or mountainous land with
images of mountains. It used textual markers to identify waste against larger settlement
holdings. Finally, the mapmaker noted that more waste and bog occurred throughout the lands
than he had labeled.
110
The earliest maps and descriptions of Munster from the plantation had
depicted the province as a blank space to be divided into good and bad land and onto which
ideal settlements could be dropped. The maps that the survey produced demonstrated that the
landscape defied neat divisions into good and bad.
The image of Tralee also contradicted the view of Irish nature as unsettled woods and
bogs. In the area of the map with the densest clustering of placenames, the mapmaker depicted
two thin lines of trees along the banks of the River Lee with a cluster where it bends north and
several more clusters near the northern mountains. The absence of trees across much of the rest
of the map save for several clusters along the southern bay pointed towards an attempt to

108
TNA MPF 1/97.
109
TNA MPF 1/100.
110
TNA MPF 1/309.

80
accurately represent the location and volume of forested land within the settlement, rather than
simply adorning the map with decorative trees. The distribution of trees within the map also
hinted at the ways that the previous inhabitants had shaped the land. Isolated, patchy clusters
amidst white land pointed towards deforestation to clear space for agriculture.
More nuanced understandings of Irish landscapes followed the granting of lands. The
original articles to govern the plantation and the earliest maps of Munster made little distinction
between individual parcels of land. Munster was an empty canvas to be painted with English
desires. The information that began to flow to administrators in 1586 and 1587 slowly began to
complicate this image. Mapmakers, surveyors, and administrators continued to focus on

Figure 4 MPF 1/309 Map of the Manor and Lands of Tralee. This map was also likely produced as a part of the survey of
plantation lands. The text in the upper left describes the image and land measurement. A tear obscures the name of the maker.

81
“countable,” agricultural land, but they also began to recognize more diverse landforms and
assimilate them into the description and assessment of planted lands. Trees, mountains, rivers,
and potential harbors shaded the previously blank landscape. Maps depicted woods as discrete
areas within counties and manors, not simply a cloak for rebels drawn across the province.
Distinctions between bog, wood, waste, and meadow hinted at attempts to define resources
within lands. Grants recognized mills, showing that settlers valued the already-present
machinery for processing grain even as projectors lamented an entirely pastoral economy. The
portrait of Munster continued to grow richer as the government granted lands, but many parts of
the landscape continued to fall outside the frame. Adding woods, water, and mountains to the
landscape defined the contours of good land against perceived natural barriers, but it did little to
indicate the difference between previously pastured or tilled lands.
Details about the state of land use on the English plantations began to trickle in during
1589 that added further detail to English understandings of the province. That year the
Elizabethan government sent undertakers a set of twelve questions inquiring into the status of
their estates. Most of these questions sought to gather information on the title to estates and the
number of English tenants planted; however, question eleven asked undertakers to list the stock
and cattle on their lands as well as the amounts and types of crops grown. The government
received twenty-seven answers from undertakers, their agents, and their attorneys providing
information on twenty-three seignories. In some cases, both the undertaker and their agent
responded, and in other cases, seignories had been granted to multiple undertakers. The answers
ranged from relatively detailed descriptions of their estates to chronicles of ignorance and
disappointment about the land, people, and even legal title of their holdings.
111
As a set, they

111
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 33-35; McCarthy-Morrogh has already dealt with these documents;

82
reveal that settlers adopted a mixture of agricultural techniques, building on the people, animals,
and practices of Munster's Irish and Old English populations as well as importing techniques
and animals from England.
The responses suggest that undertakers had better results with pastoral farming than
tillage. Sixteen respondents answered question eleven. Fourteen detailed both the number and
kinds of animals on their land. Only two planters Henry Oughtred and Edward Denny provided
qualitative assessments of their animal stocks.
112
The detailed, quantitative responses from the
majority of respondents indicated that planters, for the most part, kept careful track of their
animals. The same planters provided few concrete details on their crop yields. Arthur Hyde
claimed that his county Cork seignory only had “old corn.” William Herbert gave a more
detailed account of his difficulties. In 1587, he only managed to plant a small crop of corn and
oats. In 1588 poor weather and a labor shortage due to the threat of the Armada hampered his
yields. 1589 yielded a promising supply of oats, but wheat and barley remained unharvested.
Only three undertakers—Henry Billingsly, George Bourchier, and William Herbert—provided a
numeric estimate for their crops, and Bourchier's claim that he had taken in fifteen tons of corn
since arriving on his land was the only quantitative measurement of yield.
113

Despite the strident endorsements of tillage in promotional writing and the emphasis on
agriculture in plantation, undertakers offered minimal evidence for tillage. The limited data that
the responses did provide for the types and ratios of crops suggests that settlers took limited
steps towards mixed husbandry, but that much agricultural production existed to support

however, he used them mainly as a source for the English population in Munster The
Munster Plantation, 109–111.
112
TNA SP 63/146 f.173; SP 63/144 ff. 23-25, 35, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58-59 226, 231-233, 235; SP
63/145 ff. 99, 103.
113
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 48, 52, 226; SP 63/145 f. 99.

83
commercial pastoralism. The founding documents of the plantation had envisioned livestock as
draught animals to plow fields and as sources of manure. The limited data in the responses
suggested that some planters had reversed the prescribed relationship between tillage and
pastoralism. Their fields existed to feed livestock; their cattle did not exist to grow corn. Most
of the responses described crops as “corn,” which captured a wide array of plant species. Five
undertakers provided further detail. Billingsly distinguished between wheat and “summer corn”
Undertakers mentioned wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, and beans. Charles Herbert provided a
ratio for these crops: one-hundred acres of wheat and rye, three-hundred acres of barley and
oats, and sixty acres of peas and beans. This set of cereals and legumes suggests seasonal crop
rotation, but it also suggests an agricultural system geared towards livestock production. Barley
and oats could serve human consumption as cheap grains and also in brewing beer, but both
crops also served as animal fodder. Given their predominance within Herbert's seignory, it is no
shock that his response also reported large numbers of cattle, sheep, and swine.
114

The system of taxation and land valuation contained in the articles governing plantations
colored the responses to the survey and left the plantation authorities and Elizabethan state
unable to see how planters used their lands. Land grants, the articles, and plantation
administrators had strongly encouraged improvement and tillage but imposed increased taxes on
settlers who had improved land. As a result, planters needed to strike a balance in their replies
between providing evidence that they had made an effort to fulfilling the conditions attached to
their grant and disclosing improvements that might substantially increase their tax duties. The

114
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 27-30, 35, 48, 50; William Herbert’s responses, though the most detailed,
provide too little information on the ratios of wheat to rye and barley to oats to offer a firmer
classification of the field system. For examples of categorical analysis of farming see John P.
Power and Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Cluster Analysis and the Classification of Medieval
Demesne-Farming Systems,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17, no. 2
(January 1, 1992): 227–245.

84
detailed responses that some settlers provided suggest that some may have answered honestly,
but the absence of further evidence leaves it unclear whether the less detailed responses
stemmed from reticence to disclose financially disadvantageous information or due to a genuine
lack of information. Nonetheless, the information in the most detailed responses suggested that
planters had intensified existing traditions of pastoral farming rather than radically transforming
the land, as promoters had intended, or utterly neglecting their estates, as they would be accused
of doing by later critics.
Examining Walter Ralegh’s estate papers provide the best surviving examples of how
the first generation of planters in Munster used their land. Yet it also demonstrates that Ralegh
sought to withhold information about his lands from the plantation authorities. Ralegh provided
only vague answers to the 1589 questionnaire, but an abstract of his leases from the same year
showed that he had more information than he provided in his reply.
115
The maps, surveys, and
leases from Ralegh’s settlements in Munster capture the attempts to acquire and present
information about newly acquired lands that enabled estate management but to not inadvertently
increase the tax burden. Overall, these sources suggest that Ralegh, his estate agents, and his
large under-tenants sought to slowly intensify existing patterns of land use rather than radically
transform their holdings.
Nonetheless, the documents and images in Ralegh’s archive conveyed different and
sometimes contradictory information about his lands. Thomas Harriot’s 1589 map of Munster
drew on Robbins' survey and the land descriptions reported to commissioners. It provided the
names and locations of several settlements in the area as well as the location of rivers and
woodlands. The map showed a landscape with considerable stands of woods surrounding the

115
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 60, 62.

85
settlements at the confluence of the Blackwater and Bride: Mogeely, Lisfinny, Tallow, and
Kilmacow. The keen naturalistic or ethnographic interest Harriot had showed for the landscape
and peoples surrounding Roanoke did not appear in this map. Instead, a caption in the upper left
noted, “There is much barren and very bad grounds” and warning that to “divide the same
exactly from the good ground [was] a matter very intricate to be performed and scant worth the
travail.” Harriot visually and textually effaced the cultivation history of the area. Moreover, his
text undermined the official definition and division of the Irish landscape that underpinned the
valuation and taxation of granted lands.
116
Instead, Harriot argued through both his image and
his text that the complexities of the Irish landscape rendered the attempts to divide land into
good and bad impossible.
A written survey of the lands at the former Blackfriars abbey at Molana where Harriott
eventually resided demonstrates the disjunction between images of absence and documentary
evidence for inhabited landscapes with long histories of use. The map labeled “waste grounds
and commons” belonging to Molana and “part of the lands of the abbey of Molana” on the near
shore at Templemichael, but gave no further verbal or visual information on these lands. The
survey, in contrast, provided rich detail on the lands affiliated with the abbey and their use. The
abbey itself was ruined, but nonetheless contained two damaged but functional weirs and the
remnants of a garden and orchard, a common feature of late-medieval monastic lands in Ireland.
The abbey also held lands and rectories throughout the surrounding countryside that the survey
described in detail. Templemichael had twelve acres of arable land, six acres of pasture, and a
weir. Other assets included a ruined mill, one town with eight cottages, two waste towns, and

116
National Maritime Museum P/49, f. 29; Kim Sloan discusses Harriot’s time in Ireland in A
New World: England’s First View of America (2007), 42-43. She describes the Dartmouth
map and Harriot’s signature in greater detail in note 32 from chapter 3.

86
two wasted monasteries. The survey recorded the quantities and values of arable land for each.
The list of duties due to the monastery included in a later copy of the survey suggested that the
divisions between arable and pasture maintained pre-existing limits, noting that Templemichael
could return enough corn to begin repairs on the ruined church, “if the said lands are tilled and
manured (as in times past they have been).”
117
The survey for Molana gestured towards a return
to past productivity and gradual improvement to existing structures, not the radical
transformation of blank space.
Ralegh's leases show that he and his agents incorporated their knowledge of past land
use into their requirements for their new tenants. The leases distributed rights to a diverse array
of natural and human resources, including features of urban settlements like “backsides,” rights
to control water through mills or weirs, and non-agrarian lands such as bog, pasture, meadows,
woods, and underwoods. The surviving leases make it clear that these rights were not stock
language included in every lease. Ralegh's smallest lease to the tanner Henry Walshe assigned
him only a tenement and close adjoining Ralegh's land in Lismore and noted only a small stream
running through it.
118
Ralegh's lease to Robert Marple, the seneschal of Lismore, for land in
Ballynatray provided an expansive list of the land's appurtenances: gardens, orchards, lands,
moors, meadows, pastures, arable lands, woods, underwoods, coppices, commons, feedings,
heaths, bogs, marshes, waste grounds, rivers, waters, water streams, mill ponds, mill streams,
fords, brooks, water mills, tolls of corn and grain, weirs, fishings, paths, granges, fowling.
119

His lease to Dennis Fisher for 400 acres at Curraglass provided many of the same rights but did

117
NLI MS 43,308/5, 6; Terence Reeves-Smyth, Irish Gardens and Gardening before Cromwell
(1999), 113–119.
118
NLI MS 43,156/1.
119
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v1. no. 1, f. 1; NLI MS 43,150/2.

87
not include gardens or orchards.
120
Roger Owfeild held land at Youghal's South Abbey that
included meadows, pastures, and feedings but also “yards” a unique description that did not
occur in any of Ralegh's other surviving leases.
121
Smaller landholders under Ralegh also
adjudicated rights to diverse natural resources. Although Edward Lochland, who acquired
leases to some of Ralegh's lands around Mogeely, did not describe the resources on his lands to
the same degree as Ralegh, he recorded wood acreage for each grant.
122
The London skinner
Guy Toose leased Henry Pyne a plot of land that included a marshland adjacent to the River
Bride. The lease required that Pyne enclose the land, but it did not require him to convert the
marsh to tillage.
123
The legal landscape of the plantations divided lands into arable and waste,
but within his lands, Ralegh’s and his undertenants’ leases recognized a diverse array of land
uses.
Ralegh's leases showed a complicated relationship towards improvement that
encouraged building and enclosure but also sought to safeguard potential resources on his lands.
He required several tenants to build English-style houses, repair castles, or enclose land as a
condition of their tenancy.
124
His lease of two weirs at Lismore to Roger Carew required Carew
to “build a good large and sufficient sluice or flood gate in some convenient place of 12 foot
broad” to transform the existing weirs along the model of English ones.
125
Ralegh's lease to
Henry Dorrell for Ballyghilly near Youghal exemplified the measured rights Ralegh granted.
He allowed Dorrell to cut timber from Ralegh's woods near Youghal and provided him
permission to build a mill and divert water to feed it but limited Dorrell's timbering and

120
NLI MS 43,156/1.
121
NLI MS 43,143/4.
122
NLI MS 43,142/1, 43,142/2.
123
NLI MS 43,142/2.
124
NLI MS 43,156/1.
125
Ibid

88
restricted the volume of water he might take to prevent injury to neighboring tenants. Ralegh
required Dorrell to pay one penny for each acre of bog improved, hardly an incentive to
immediately convert bogs to arable land.
126

Nonetheless, depictions of estates continued to show adherence to the ideals
promulgated at the outset of the plantations. In 1598, John White, the artist who painted the
images of Algonquians that appeared in the 1590 edition of Harriot's Briefe and True Report,
created an estate map (Figure 5) for Ralegh that purported to show the lands being transferred to
Henry Pyne, who was already resident in the area.
127
In it, White depicted the castle and
settlement at Mogeely as well as surrounding settlements along the River Bride. The map
showed a well-wooded landscape with heavy forests at “Mogile Wood,” “Kilcorane,” “the

126
NLI MS 43,143/4
127
NLI MS 22,028.
Figure 5: John White's map of Mogeely, NLI MS 22,028. Vague writing in a contemporary
hand listing tenant names near images of cottages suggests that the map served a pragmatic
function as well as an aesthetic one.

89
Wood Close,” and along the banks of the Bride. Fences with visible gates surrounded named
lands from the eastern edge of Bromfield and the Lime Field to the western edge of the Lower
Road Close and the New Close and from the northern edge of the Park Close to the Tallow
Road. In addition, it showed several settlements. The largest was at Mogeely. It contained a
central green ringed with houses including one large building, likely Mogeely Castle. White
depicted other settlements at Curraglass, Glenatore, Cuylederagh (modern Cooladurragh), and in
the Warren (part of modern Carrigeen East). White's map depicted an estate system that
generally conformed to the idealized version of an English settlement. Labels on the map show
a landscape divided, organized, and enclosed according to different economic and social needs.
The map showed an agricultural system focused on mixed husbandry (the barley field, heath,
and meadow) as well as elite sport and diet (the park and warren). Regularly spaced trees lay
just outside the central green at Mogeely. These may have been part of an orchard, which a
contemporary lease listed as part of the nearby settlement at Tallow.
128

The leases for the areas depicted on White's paint a more complicated picture of
settlement around Mogeely. White did not label any settlement at Lisnabreen, but the lease
history for Lisnabreen point towards the presence of a settlement before the map was created.
In December 1588, the Londoner Dennis Fisher received a lease of Lisnabreen from Ralegh that

128
NLI MS 41,984/1, National Library of Ireland; Eric Klingelhofer performed excavations on
locations derived from White’s map in the 1990s, which failed to yield significant artifacts.
Resistivity testing suggested that locations for settlements in the map corresponded with
archaeological evidence. See “Elizabethan Settlements at Mogeely Castle, Curraglass and
Carrigeen, Co. Cork (Part 1),” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 104
(1999): 97–110; idem, “Elizabethan Settlements at Mogeely Castle, Curraglass and Carrigeen,
Co. Cork (Part 2),” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 105 (2000): 155–
174. See also idem, Castles and Colonists: An Archaeology of Elizabethan Ireland, (2010), 25-
26, 72-78. For a relatively positive review of Klingelhofer’s findings see Dennis Power, “The
Archaeology of the Munster Plantation,” in The Post-medieval Archaeology of Ireland, 1550-
1850, ed. Audrey Horning et al. (2007), 23–36. Horning argues that the findings are
unconvincing in Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 88.

90
listed its borders as the demesne of Mogeely Castle, the River Bride, and Curraglass, directly in
the area depicted on White's map. In February 1589, Fisher transferred the property to
Lochland. In 1593 and 1594, Lochland began letting out portions of his holding to men residing
in Lisnabreen and the neighboring town of Tallow. Lochland's leases show an attempt to
acquire tenants already resident in the area and in many cases on the land being granted.
Moreover, the lease documents show a patchwork quality of settlement: Walter Phillys' twenty-
eight acres were spread over three different plots to accommodate existing property boundaries
in both Lisnabreen and Curraglass. They listed neighbors ranging from Henry Pyne to smaller
tenants, frequently with notes that those tenants were resident on their lands. The omission of
Lisnabreen was not the only absence on White's map. Archaeological finds at Carrigeen also
point to structures absent from the map. Documentary and archaeological evidence shows that
White's map did not convey the whole picture.
129

The leases also reveal details about the landscape at Curraglass and Lisnabreen absent
from the map. Rivers, marshes, and woods all served as natural boundaries in leases. Several
leases for Lisnabreen and Curraglass mention a creek dividing the two settlements, a natural
feature which absent amidst White's linear, planned cluster of houses. Edward Lochland's
provision for Henry Morris to build a mill and watercourse also demonstrates the presence of
water in and around the settlement acting as a natural barrier and a resource. Lochland's leases
also explain the legal geography of the woods above and below the labeled settlement. Woods
served as boundaries in Lee's and Morris's leases, suggesting that Curraglass was not as distinct

129
NLI MS 43,142/1-2. Power, “The Archaeology of the Munster Plantation,” 25–26.

91
from the surrounding woods as White's map implied. On the western side of Mogeely castle,
Toose leased Pyne a plot of marshland adjacent to Mogeely.
130

The inconsistencies between surviving texts and images testify to the fluidity and
flexibility of knowledge about lands and landscapes in early modern Munster. White titled his
image, “A topographical lineament of all such enclosed lands as are holden by Henry Pyne,
Esquire from the right honorable Sir Walter Ralegh.” Although he called it a “lineament” or a
sketch, White’s drawing was precise. He took care to paint fences, including individual posts as
well as opened and closed gates. Yet, as analysis of the leases shows, the map was incomplete
and idealized. It smoothed natural features and missed some settlements. Nonetheless, the map
appears to have been used for practical purposes. Names are written in a contemporary hand
alongside the clusters of settlements, though these do not correspond to surviving leases. The
image was both functional and fanciful. This tension between projection and practicality was
endemic to English attempts to understand Munster’s landscape. Settlers wished to see Ireland
simultaneously for what it was and what they could make it.
As the title of White’s image indicated, enclosure served as one of the primary measures
for improvement. Just as White’s fixation on fences obscured other parts of the landscape
around Mogeely, so too would enclosures color English attempts to understand Irish lands in the
subsequent decades of the seventeenth century. Plantation promoters had long chastised Irish
husbandmen for their failure to adequately enclose the land. Over the course of the first four
decades of the seventeenth century, evidence from Boyle's leases indicates that tenants had
taken these requirements seriously, particularly in areas near towns or manufacturing projects.
His 1613 lease to Richard Silver at Tallow required Silver to maintain, rather than build hedges,

130
NLI MS 43,142/2.

92
ditches, and quicksets on the property. Through the 1620s and 1630s the number of leases with
these conditions increased in the area around Tallow and Kilmacow. The increase in the
number of requirements to maintain enclosures rather than build them points towards fairly
widespread enclosure along the Rivers Blackwater and Bride.
131
Leases from west Cork
contained conditions that would have allowed for enclosure, but did not explicitly mention
enclosures as early as those near Tallow. Beginning in 1616, leases from Henry Shipward and
Boyle gave tenants the right to take wood to build hedges and fences; however, the first
reference to constructed fences did not appear until 1620. Through the 1620s and 1630s
references to already built enclosures appeared alongside requirements to build new fences,
hedges, or ditches. Boyle's lease to Francis Barnard required him to maintain enclosures under
construction. Two other leases compelled tenants to build new enclosures while drawing first
on dead and rotting wood to build them.
132
Similar scattered evidence existed for other areas
where Boyle had interest with some leases indicating enclosures had already been made and
others requiring tenants to build new enclosures.
133
The requirements to maintain enclosures
from leases across Cork and Waterford suggest that tenants had enclosed portions of their land;
however, the continued requirements to enclose new land even at developed towns like Bandon
shows that unenclosed lands continued to exist alongside enclosed holdings.
Other documents from Boyle's papers confirm that he and his tenants adopted a more
nuanced view towards improvement. In 1616, Mary Bates, one of Boyle's tenants near
Clonakilty wrote to him asking forgiveness for her inability to pay her rent. In the letter she
complained, “My husband doth beggar himself with ditching the bogs and will not be ruled for

131
NLI MS 43,142/3; 43,152/2; 43,152/3; 43,156/5; 43,156/6; 43,156/9; 43,156/10; 43,156/11.
132
NLI MS 43,141/1-3; 43,156/3; 43,156/8-9.
133
NLI MS 43,149/3; 43,156/3; 43,156/8; MS 43,148; 43,156/4-5; 43,156/8-11; BL Add. MSS
47035 pgs. 9-12, 74-75.

93
me, I pray your worship chide him.”
134
Bates argued that enclosing marginal agricultural land
or pasture served little purpose. Boyle and his tenants adopted a pragmatic approach to
enclosure based on cost and potential return.
A survey of Boyle's lands from around 1630 buttressed the picture of patchwork
progress from Boyle's leases but showed that “improvement” remained the persistent metric for
evaluating land. Well established manors at Lisfinny, Mogeely, and Tallow, which had been
settled and subject to English-style agriculture since at least the first plantation, showed mixed
results. The survey reported that some tenants had improved land and planted “great store of
corn” and should pay increased rent. Other lands were deemed hopeless and “fit for nothing but
pasture.” One had “a few oats growing on it which may produce some rent.” The report listed
many lands as waste but added that others were “somewhat improved.” The surveyors' rhetoric
expressed a clear preference for tillage, equating corn with the opportunity to raise rent, yet
throughout it showed that Boyle and his tenants maintained pastoral land. In some cases, his
surveyors wrote that lands were fit for nothing else and should be kept as pastures. In Tallow
manor, they noted that improvable lands had been let to Mrs. Power as pasture.
135

From the 1580s through the 1630s, English planters and tenants in Ireland struggled to
understand their recently acquired lands. The records of estate management show that they
undertook measures to precisely record and distribute rights and responsibilities, paying careful
attention to common resources and pre-existing landforms, yet they did so in the context of
inconsistent expectations of constant and dramatic “improvement” and tax incentives that
discouraged dramatic changes to the landscape. Nonetheless, Ralegh and later Boyle both
adopted a pragmatic approach to land management, encouraging enclosures and tillage, but

134
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v7, no. 83.
135
NLI MS 43,308/7.

94
attempting to recognize ecological and economic constraints limiting the wholesale conversion
of Munster envisioned by plantation promoters.
Natural limits and economic development in Bermuda
The first English people to arriving in Bermuda did not intend to land there. The Sea
Venture had been sent to bring desperately needed supplies to the fledgling colony planted two
years earlier at Jamestown. Caught in a hurricane and shipwrecked, the islands were a welcome
refuge. The decision to plant a colony in Bermuda and the government of those colonies was
intertwined with the people and personnel who governed Virginia. As a result, issues of profit
and economic viability shaped decisions on land use, resource management, and economic
development in Bermuda. From the first formal settlements in 1613 until 1618, the Virginia and
then Sommer Islands Companies and settlers on the ground experimented with different crops
and commodities and searched for the expertise necessary to make the islands profitable.
During this period, settlers in Bermuda and adventurers in England attempted to develop more
detailed knowledge about the islands. This knowledge proved mutable. The arrival of new
governors in the islands and adventurers’ anxieties about profit led them to reevaluate sources of
environmental knowledge, the viability of crops, agricultural practices, and limits on cultivation.
The earliest descriptions of Bermuda captured the islands’ natural abundance but also
the potential limits on intensive agriculture. William Strachey's letter describing the 1609 wreck
and his subsequent voyage to Virginia, which circulated among members of the Virginia
Company as early as 1610 but was not printed until 1624, provided the earliest eyewitness
report to the Virginia Company on the Bermudian landscape. Stratchey emphasized the islands’
natural fertility and their utility for temporary visitors due to the abundant wild hogs, fish, and
edible plants. He warned, however, that pests, seasonal weather fluctuations, and water

95
shortages limited the potential for the agriculture required to support a permanent population.
The birds and pigs that fed the hungry seafarers consumed freshly planted crops. The same
trees that yielded fruits like plums “shed their leaves in the winter months, as withered or burnt
with the cold blasts of the north wind, especially those that grow to the seaward.” The
nearshore fisheries also ran dry after sustained exploitation. Strachey hypothesized “that our
fires, which we maintained on the shore's side, drave [drove] them from us, so as we were in
some want.” Even the ubiquitous, troublesome hogs “grew poor” in “February, when the palm
berries began to be scant or dry, and the cedar berries failed two months sooner.” The water
supply also fluctuated. The wells dug after arrival went dry, leaving only extremely low points
that collected rainwater.
136
Bermuda, according to Strachey’s report, had provided miraculous
salvation for the windblown settlers, but it might not serve as a seat for permanent settlement.
Nonetheless, in 1612, members of the Virginia Company took steps to plant English
settlers in Bermuda, and in 1615 a group of adventurers formed the Sommer Islands Company
as an independent enterprise. The founding charters from both 1612 and 1615 suggest that the
investors in the Bermudian settlements had read Stratchey’s report but believed that English
settlers could overcome the limits he had identified. The investors optimistically set the division
of the forthcoming profits from pearls and ambergris—a waxy discharge from sperm whales
used as a stabilizer in perfumes and in medicines. They sought whale oil and offered
instructions for the care of newly provided fishing nets.
137
They attempted to rectify seasonal
food shortages by erecting a salt works that would allow settlers to preserve the islands’ fish,
hogs, and birds. The adventurers described the process in detail, even suggesting local options

136
Wright, A Voyage to Virginia, 24–27, 30-33.
137
J. H Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers
Islands, 1515-1685 (1877), 1:58–60; TNA CO 38/1 f.1.

96
for creating ceramics drawn from Strachey's description of the use of tortoise oil and lime as a
caulk for ships. In addition to offering advice on preserving meat, the adventurers urged settlers
to learn to grow their own food and minimize their reliance on foraging. The adventurers
ordered settlers to engage in farming rather than instructing them on what to grow or how to
sow seeds, weed, or harvest crops. They offered no explicit response to Strachey’s warnings
about pests, winds, and soil quality. They simply assumed that settlers would understand how
to farm. Instead, the document focused on the commercial potential “for trading with our
people or the Salvages in Virginia and to return and bring thither all manner of Commodities
whatsoever growing or arising in or about the said Summer Islands.”
138
A letter from the earl of
Northampton to the king captured the optimistic assessment of Bermuda. “From this Island of
Devils,” he gloated, “our men have sent some Amber [ambergris] and some seed pearls for an
assay which the Devils of the Bermudas love not better to retain then the Angeles of Castile do
to recover.”
139
For adventurers who had seen only reports of starvation and death from Virginia,
pearls and ambergris offered an opportunity for English people to achieve the profits that had
eluded them along the James River.
The first settlers quickly encountered shortcomings in the adventurers' vision. In a 1639
journal recounting his 1613 arrival in Bermuda and his experiences on the island until 1614,
Richard Norwood, the islands' eventual surveyor, found the pearl fisheries useless. Nearshore
oyster beds yielded only valueless pearls. The enterprising Norwood planned to “make trial in
very deep water… [using] some provision against the aforesaid pressure of the air.” But he
worried that because Bermudian pearls from the shallows were unmarketable, deep-water pearls

138
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:58–60; TNA CO 38/1 ff. 22-23, 28-29.
139
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:65.

97
would not justify the cost of the more difficult dives required to obtain them.
140
In 1614,
governor Moore agreed in this assessment but urged Norwood to make trial at diving anyway.
In 1616, the company warned settlers, “If you destroy their oyster beds by dragges [trawling
with a dredge] or such disturbances, they will forsake the coast.” Instead, the Company wrote,
“the best approved course is diving and drawing them up in baskets.” The Company’s
instructions implicitly discounted the assessment for which they had previously paid Norwood.
Instead, they attributed the failure of the pearl beds to English incompetence and destructive
harvesting practices. In the same document, the Company noted that they had approved a
voyage to the Savage Islands, a set of small islands located off the coast of modern Venezuela,
to trade for valuable goods including “negroes to dive for pearls.”
141
When the Company’s
experts failed to provide the valuable pearls promised in early descriptions of the islands, they
did not reassess the feasibility of pearl fisheries. They sought out new experts.
Larger issues than the failure of the pearl industry faced the early settlers. Norwood
hinted that supplies were low in 1613. By 1614, “the whole country was in great necessity for
want of victuals.” Dearth drove Norwood to consider abandoning the islands altogether. His
hunger pushed him “to think and determine of going from hence in a boat to some of the Cariby
[Caribbean] or Bahama Islands uninhabited, where was store of victuals,” a voyage of at least
700 miles. Instead, Norwood fell back on the survival strategies that Strachey and the first
accidental English inhabitants aboard Sea Venture had used in 1609. He foraged for berries,
constructing an unstable dugout canoe and taking a sixteen-mile journey by sea across Bermuda
to collect “some palmetto berries for relief.” Ultimately, Norwood wrote that his status as
surveyor did more to preserve him than any foraging skills and thanked God that Governor

140
Norwood, The Journal of Richard Norwood, 52.
141
Norwood, The Journal of Richard Norwood, 52; Lefroy, Memorials, 1:110-111, 115–116.

98
Moore frequently wished to dine with him. As the surveyor and the governor dined on English
goods, “there were many in those times that died daily for want of victuals.”
142

The adventurers’ had ordered the settlers to establish self-sufficient agriculture, but
literally failed to provide the seeds to do so. Sir Robert Rich, later earl of Warwick, received a
letter from one of his tenants, Edward Dun, outlining the shortages on his lands. Dun delicately
apologized for “having so small a beginning for the planting of Corn.” But there was little the
tenants could do. Each had only “1 & 1/2 [pounds?] to a man, the which Corn was not good.”
After two years of living off company provisions and foraged goods, the settlers had only barely
enough corn to grow seeds for the next crop. Bermuda's population was living at the edge of
starvation. Any ecological disturbance could not only cause one harvest to fail, but could also
eliminate the seed reserves needed for future crops. The disturbance came ashore from a seized
Spanish vessel laden with meal in 1614. Norwood reported that a few rats swam ashore from
the captured frigate. Within weeks “they overspread all the country, devouring all that was
planted, neither could we by all the means we could use hinder the increase of them, much less
destroy them.”
143
Bermuda's settlement hung in tension. The population was too large to allow
settlers to subsist on foraged goods alone and too small to clear and cultivate crops. The
uninhabited portions of the island provided havens for the rats, which emerged from their nests

142
Ibid, 52–55.
143
Ives, The Rich Papers, 3–4; Norwood, The Journal of Richard Norwood, 53–54. Scientists
and governments have long known that rats are one of the most dangerous invasive species
for island biodiversity. See Carolyn M. Kurle, Donald A. Croll, and Bernie R. Tershy,
“Introduced Rats Indirectly Change Marine Rocky Intertidal Communities from Algae- to
Invertebrate-Dominated,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America 105, no. 10 (March 11, 2008): 3800–3804. Jawad Abdelkrim, Michel
Pascal, and Sarah Samadi, “Establishing Causes of Eradication Failure Based on Genetics:
Case Study of Ship Rat Eradication in Ste. Anne Archipelago,” Conservation Biology 21, no.
3 (2007): 719–730. James C. Russell et al., “Intercepting the First Rat Ashore,” Nature 437,
no. 7062 (October 19, 2005): 1107–1107.

99
to eat the English crops. Lack of seed, invasive rodents, and administrative neglect formed a
toxic combination that left settlers at the mercy of imported supplies to avoid starvation.
The delays of trans-Atlantic communication left the settlers largely alone until 1616,
when the company urged total war against the rodents. They ordered settlers to adopt “any
other means to traps, snares and whatsoever else to destroy them …. lest they multiply upon you
and devour all your fruits and plants.” “Yellow ratsbane” accompanied these instructions along
with directions that it should “be mixed with oatmeal, and laid in shells on the ground where
they haunt.”
144
Settlers in Bermuda and the company directors in London had no
misunderstandings about the scope of the problem. But corrupt merchants and the length of
time required to send trans-Atlantic supplies and communication scuttled the united effort.
Multiple letters from 1617 complained that the ratsbane was “stark nought and not worth two
pence.” The settlers continued to wage war on the rats without the poison. None of the
surviving records mentioned an attempt to find alternative local poisons. Instead, settlers looked
to mechanical traps, cats, and dogs. Sir Nathaniel Rich's brother and agent in Bermuda, Robert
Rich, wrote that his tenants were “worn out in setting of stone traps, which hath destroyed many
thousands of [the rats] in a night.”
145

From the Governor's house in St. George's, Governor Tucker believed the efforts were
having noticeable effects. He wrote that the “noisome vermin...are greatly Decreased since my
arrival.” Robert Rich confirmed Tucker's assessment, but noted that the change was confined to
St. George's. Accounts from other parts of the islands told a different story. According to
Bermuda's minister, the bombastic Lewis Hughes, the rat infestation had only grown. Rat
tunnels crisscrossed Bermuda “in a manner like so many coney [rabbit] warrens.” Even the

144
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:116.
145
Ives, The Rich Papers, 39; 17.

100
straits of ocean dividing the numerous islands that make up Bermuda could not contain the rats.
The rodents “did swim from Island to Island, and suddenly like an army of men did invade the
Islands from one end to an other, devouring the fruits of the earth.” Robert Rich's missive
adopted a more moderate tone to catalogue the rodent havoc for his brother Nathaniel. In 1616,
Rich wrote, Sir Nathaniel and Sir Robert's tenants set their corn five or six times only to find it
devoured before it ripened. The problem became so extreme that Robert Rich moved the
tenants from Sir Nathaniel's and Sir Robert's shares in other parts of the islands to uncleared
land in Somerset Tribe, where “rats did not so much annoy them as they did the other tribes.”
The move offered only temporary solace. As soon as the settlers planted corn, the rats followed.
Rich and his tenants “rest[ed] doubtful of this our Summer crop, in that the rats doth begin to
take the Corn which is eared.” Most Bermudians looked to their grain with similar trepidation.
Those in Sir Thomas Smith's Tribe were so horribly afflicted that they had “little or nothing at
all.”
146

Settlers in Bermuda struggled to fend off the hordes of rats and to retain enough corn to
use for seeds the next growing season, but the company pushed settlers to begin experimenting
with more diverse crops to help build the islands’ commerce. The company's 1616 commission
listed the plants the company sent to Bermuda along with instructions for their cultivation. The
company sent vines both whole and in cuttings. It included aniseeds, seeds for mulberry trees,
“sweet fennel seeds, commine seeds, Marjoram, Basil and Onion seeds...orange seeds, lemon,
and citron.” The company ordered settlers to use this stock of seeds to create a self-sustaining
crop, sending some seeds and produce back to England each year, retaining enough store to sow
the following year. They also sought to improve tobacco cultivation and trade by contracting

146
Ibid, 39; 14; 17–18.

101
with Mr. Tickner, “a skilfull planter & curer of tobacco,” to teach the settlers his method. The
company contracted with a Mr. Wilmot to bring plants from other Caribbean islands for trial in
Bermuda.
147
Even as rats ravaged the corn in 1617, these actions began to bear fruit. Several
letters praised Robert Rich for his skill with vines, some of which Tucker shipped to England.
Rich turned one acre of ground to a vineyard, fenced it with fig trees and planted five-hundred
vines. He sowed indigo, which he planned to distribute throughout Bermuda the following year.
His garden contained pineapples, lemons, and cotton trees. Beyond that, he had made headway
as a beekeeper. Robert Rich's garden and vineyard seemed to be islands of prosperity in
comparison to the destruction that the rats brought forth on the rest of Bermuda. Yet he also
offered evidence that some of his tenants were making small gains as agriculturalists. Rich
claimed that his settlers in Port Royal had planted corn, tobacco, and potatoes. Some of Rich's
plants had likely come ashore with Wilmot, who Rich acknowledged in his dispatch home.
148

Despite Rich's optimistic report, a one acre garden and newly planted corn, tobacco, and
potatoes could not provide enough profits to convince London investors to continue supplying
and peopling Bermuda.
Tucker's settlement at the Overplus—the plot of land left over after Norwood's survey of
the islands—cultivated many of the agricultural goods that the company had endorsed in
previous years. Tucker reported to Sir Nathaniel that his vines prospered. Pineapples,
plantains, and sugar cane also thrived. He reported that the last crop fared so well that he would
have sufficient seed to supply Robert Rich with sugar cane for the next year. Tucker did not
believe this success was replicable everywhere. Sugar cane, he wrote, could only thrive with
abundant water. Tucker's four men at the Overplus had found a well. If Sir Nathaniel and

147
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:116–117.
148
Ives, The Rich Papers, 39; 10; 18; 25; 21; 17.

102
Warwick wanted to plant canes, Tucker told them they would need to purchase land at Brackish
Pond, a settlement in Devonshire Tribe with access to water.
149
Tucker's caution suggested that
limits on fresh water confined sugar production to a few locations. Despite Tucker's warning,
Robert Rich planted sugar cane alongside his plantains on the Rich lands at Port Royal. Rich
wrote that the crops did “greatly fructify.” His fig trees also continued to thrive. He pleaded
with Sir Nathaniel to trade shares with the earl of Southampton, to allow Robert Rich to stay on
the shares he had accidentally settled before the division of land was clear. Robert Rich
complained that the vines “do better flourish delighting in a reddish mold than those do in black
and white.” The soil at his shares at Port Royal were “not yet fitting for them.”
150

Robert Rich gave an account of Rich holdings across Bermuda that chronicled these
variations in greater detail. Rich placed Sir Nathaniel and Warwick's cattle on the General Land
near the future location of Tucker's Town. His tenants paled in land in Hamilton Tribe to keep
the cattle. At Port Royal, Rich's tenants Marmaduke Dando and William Smith cleared land to
set vines. Other Rich tenants did not fulfill Robert Rich's standards. John Man inhabited “the
best [land]... in goodness not inferior to any land in the Islands.” Man, however, refused to
follow Robert Rich's orders for land use but drew goods from his stores. Mr. Wolverstone,
Edward Athen, and Thomas Turner had “not cleared a whitt of land,” on their shares in
Warwick Tribe and they refused to provide an account for how much tobacco they cultivated.
Athen wrote Rich separately, claiming he was sending 135 pounds of tobacco to England.
Robert Rich complained that Ned Athones in Southampton Tribe had overvalued the land.

149
Ibid, 98–99.
150
Ibid, 54; 50; 56.

103
Nonetheless, Robert Rich believed that the shares would yield sufficient potatoes to feed all the
tenants.
151

As in Munster, settlers began to develop more nuanced understandings of the local
landscape after settlement intensified. Early descriptions of Bermuda had done little to
differentiate different portions of the islands, but Tucker and Robert Rich each sought to acquire
land with specific properties. In Bermuda access to water and specific soil types were most
desirable. Yet settlers did not always agree on the natural limits for cultivation. Robert Rich
had cultivated sugar cane on land where Tucker said it was impossible. Robert Rich’s
description of his tenants suggested that some regions of the islands were better suited to certain
crops. He hedged this assertion by complaining about the labor and skill of some tenants.
Robert Rich and Tucker each struggled to find the balance between skill and natural limits, just
as the authors of improvement guides did. Nonetheless, the move towards specialized
cultivation at different locations across the islands suggested that Robert Rich had come to some
conclusions about the best use of different lands across Bermuda. Many of these efforts were in
their early stages. The settlers Rich described were clearing lands, fencing pasture, and setting
vines, rather than tilling fields, herding cattle, and pruning vines. Settlers had developed more
intensive, extensive, and specialized land use across Bermuda by 1618, but many of these
enterprises remained fledgling.
Settlers continued to look to beyond Bermuda for economic diversification. Robert Rich
wrote to Sir Nathaniel in March 1618 asking him to contract with “Master Nicholas Leatt a
Turkey Merchant” in London for “some Currant vines.” Rich believed that Bermuda's climate
would suit this Middle Eastern fruit. In the same year, he asked Sir Robert to hire a ship to

151
Ibid, 72; 53–54; 57; 92; 59–60.

104
scour the West Indies for “endy [West Indian] plants, goats and salt, whereof we here stand in
great need.”
152
Rich intended for the currants and some of the West Indian plants to serve as
trade commodities. Robert Rich's requests for them marked his continued search for a lucrative
good that would pay both him and his kinsmen great dividends. Not all the plants imported
were attempts to cultivate exotic commodities. Sir Nathaniel commanded Robert Rich to make
trial of English peas, an enterprise that went well. Robert Rich returned half a bushel to
England and informed Sir Nathaniel that he intended to plant two acres next year.
153

English settlers in Bermuda sought out diverse sources of environmental expertise. At
the same time that Robert Rich sought out plants from the West Indies, he implored Sir
Nathaniel to send a vigneron and gardener from England to improve his vineyard and garden.
Rich also sought expertise closer to Bermuda. Rich moved one of his servants and an enslaved
African man to two shares occupied by Goodman Wethersby. The lone adjective Rich used for
these shares was “barrenness.” Yet he looked to his enslaved man for the knowledge and skills
to cultivate “West Indian plants, wherein he hath good skill.” Rich's writings suggest he felt
that African men, likely those who had been enslaved in the Spanish Caribbean, could transform
barren lands into productive shares. His confidence in African or Afro-Caribbean skill extended
to one of Bermuda's key cash crops—tobacco. Robert Rich asked his brother Sir Nathaniel to
procure Francisco, an African man owned by another settler, who's “judgment in the curing of
tobacco” made him more valuable to Rich than any other Africans in Bermuda. Rich must have
gotten his wish fairly quickly. Francisco appeared on a list of people resident in Southampton
Tribe from March 1618, one month after sending his letter requesting that Sir Nathaniel

152
Ibid, 70; 54.
153
Ibid, 56

105
purchase Francisco.
154
Knowledge carried from Africa and acquired while enslaved elsewhere
in the Caribbean proved essential to the fledgling colony. The changing uses to which English
adventurers and estate managers put African agricultural knowledge points towards a shift in the
Bermudian economy. Earlier requests for African pearl divers moved to requests for West
Indian crop cultivators and tobacco curers. Nonetheless, English settlers in Bermuda depended
upon the environmental knowledge of enslaved Africans to correct for their own ignorance
about terrestrial and marine environments.
In late 1619, new governor Nathaniel Butler arrived in the islands and immediately
discounted all previous forms of land use and sources of environmental knowledge. In his
correspondence with Nathaniel Rich and Warwick, Butler bluntly dismissed all the commercial
crops that settlers and adventurers had written about so enthusiastically in 1618. He
characterized Daniel Tucker's enthusiastic plans for sugar as “vain and impossible ones and so
known by himself, and therefore assuredly disguised in their ends.” In a calmer missive from
November, Butler wrote that sugar cane, if profitable, would take up too much space.
Bermudians had no land “to spare from our necessary food, the rather by reason that most of it
consists of bread and loblolly, both which are made of corn.” Vines too, he claimed, “must
necessarily take up too much room for us to rest in any ease.” Only mulberry trees for silk
production and olive trees should be grown. Trees “being planted for fences, will require no
more ground than we allow the unprofitable Palmetto for the same end.” According to Butler,
anything that took up space that could be devoted to corn or tobacco was a waste. Butler
disparaged searches for diverse crops and natural philosophical pursuits as the actions of corrupt
Bermudian officials or naïve English adventurers. “Thousands of your discursative Courts in

154
Ibid, 59; 81.

106
England” he wrote to Warwick, will yield less “true understanding...[than] six months sight and
experience here.” English adventurers, he suggested might play with transported plants, but the
hard truth was, “There will be never found any true ground of hope of any commodity growing
here any way half so beneficial as Tobacco.”
155

Under Butler’s governorship, tobacco was to be king, but reports from 1620 indicated
serious problems with attempts to grow tobacco. In January 1620, Thomas Durham wrote Sir
Nathaniel Rich with a frank assessment of his estates. John Day and John Williams, who
occupied Rich shares in Southampton Tribe, “planted little Corn and potatoes, but never cared
for raising any profit planting tobacco more than for their own use.” Cooke and Creswell, two
servants, “made away” for want of victuals. The tenants on shares at Heron Bay included
“Edward Athens [Athen] and Thomas Turner, politike fellows.” Athen in particular drew
Durham's ire as “a famous man and a great practitioner in phisicke and all not worthy a straw
but flattering and dissimulation.” Mr. Needham “intendeth to plant corn and potatoes upon [his
shares at Brackish Pond, Devonshire] to raise no profit out of them planting tobacco.” The
Richs' most “painful [painstaking]” and “lusty” tenants had not yet reached their productive
potential. They would, Durham wrote, “raise great profit” if only they had a “boy” or two to
labor in the fields. The only group Durham wrote had actually produced anything were
enslaved Africans. As a group, they produced 1,350 pounds of tobacco.
156

In an account from February 1620, Nathaniel Rich informed Warwick of the value of his
Bermudian holdings, £110 12s 7d. Out of this sum, only £56 16s 3d were liquid revenues from
sold tobacco. Just less than half the value was debt repayment owed by Warwick's Bermudian
tenants, including his cousin Robert, who managed many of Warwick's affairs on the islands.

155
Ibid, 189; 222–223; 186; 180.
156
Ibid, 171; 172–173; 176.

107
Thomas Durham, another tenant who corresponded with Warwick, sent a twenty-six pound
bundle of tobacco that still left him 8s 9d in debt to the earl.
157
This ratio of debts to cash was
not a problem so long as Warwick had sufficient liquid assets and credit to manage his affairs in
England and tenants like Durham continued to chip away at their debts. Some evidence pointed
towards the probability that tenants would make good on their debts. In 1619, Warwick's
tenants, save Durham, had repaid the earl for the cost of the goods he sent over.
158
But some
settlers hinted that technical and environmental issues hampering tobacco cultivation would
render Bermudians unable to pay, no matter how much enthusiasm the new governor or
adventurers in England might show for the crop. Dutton wrote to describe the hardships
hampering tobacco cultivators:
Perhaps we may plant four or five times & not get them [to] stand, being
eaten up with worms. When they do stand, want of rain may starve it in, or burn
it off the ground. Or else when it is near ripe the wind torn [tore] it up by the
roots, besides all danger of loosing it when it is in the house... None of the best
shares in the Islands will admit past eight or nine acres to be fallen of any use. In
some of them, five or six, others not singly to be lived on.
159

The picture Dutton painted was bleak. Less than half of a twenty-five acre share could support
tobacco cultivation. Pests, droughts, and wind killed plants repeatedly. Dutton sent tobacco
back to England but told Warwick, “I dare not assure your Lordship it will be so when you
receive it...all the Tobacco is spoiled going home green.” Dutton sought to prevent the spoilage
by building a curing house that October. He reported that the endeavor was a success but that
Warwick's tenants at Shelly Bay needed to fell cedar planks so that other settlers could also
cultivate tobacco.
160

157
Ibid, 347.
158
Ibid, 348.
159
Ibid, 206.
160
Ibid, 203; 180.

108
In response to the struggles with tobacco and Butler’s anxieties about food shortages in
1620, Butler led the newly created assembly, in which two members were elected from each
tribe but over which Butler retained substantial power, to pass a series of acts in to reform
Bermuda’s economy and agriculture. The assembly ordered that all “bad, rotten, and
unmerchantable” tobacco made up by “negligent and wretched hands” be burned. Anyone who
refused to burn tobacco would lose the entire crop. Destroying bad tobacco attempted to control
supply and quality to ensure that Bermuda's tobacco would fetch a good price. Another act
prohibited travel except by established highways. Fears that grounds “sometimes set with corn
and sometimes planted with Tobacco have thereby received much damage and spoil” justified
this measure. Another act allowed settlers to take any turkeys found wandering out of coops
during harvest time. They again justified their action with reference to “great indamageinge
[damaging] of the Corn, Potatoes, etc.” The assembly wrote at length about shortage in their act
“for the setting of a due quantity of corn for every family and for the collection & keeping a
Public store in every Tribe:”
Partly by some few accidental ills of the climate and place, partly through the
negligence and sloth of many people inhabiting here and partly (if not especially)
by the want of due providence and moderate expense there have sundry dearths
& scarcities of corn and bread fallen out amongst us to the great misery of many
private persons and also to the apparent disturbance of divers public and most
necessary works whereby the whole plantation in general hath been shaken and
in danger.

To prevent this condition they required every person over age sixteen to plant one acre of corn
and fifty ears of corn out of every thousand to be conserved in a public store.
161
The assembly's
actions represented a major expansion of the governor's authority over land use, exports, and

161
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:168; 170; 174.

109
even movement around the islands. Fears of shortages and the inability to manage resources
provided the major justification for these acts.
Butler's and the assembly's vision of Bermuda emphasized the increased cultivation of
two staple crops. Their requirement for at least one acre of corn per adult exerted legal pressure
on settlers to make their cultivation more extensive—to farm more acreage. The use of coerced
labor and requests for more “boys” to labor in the fields signaled a drive towards
intensification—the use of technology and labor to draw greater yields. Bermudians focused on
labor. Butler's 1621 letter to Nathaniel Rich sought to increase the labor power under his
direction in Bermuda. “Slaves,” he wrote, “are the most proper and cheap instruments for this
plantation that can be.” Though, Butler added, only the governor could be trusted to handle
them. “Another thing I find would be very useful in these parts,” he added in the next line, “is
the labor of Asses.”
162
Butler's crude discussion of human beings and donkeys in the same
breath marked an important shift in Bermudian slavery. Formerly, slaves possessed special
skills as pearl divers and cultivators of West Indian plants. Nathaniel Rich learned Fernando's
name and valued his skill at curing tobacco. Butler's request devalued African or Caribbean
agricultural skills and instead treated Africans as dehumanized instruments for cheap labor.
Settlers who profited from provisioning and defiant tenants threatened Butler’s vision of
intensive tobacco cultivation and tight gubernatorial control of labor across the islands. In 1621,
there is evidence that some settlers had abandoned tobacco cultivation in favor of food
cultivation for the local and maritime markets. Dutton wrote to protest against letting a share of
land at Burges Point in Warwick Tribe to Daniel Elfrith, captain of the privateering voyage that
brought rats to Bermuda in 1614. Dutton protested that Elfrith would “content him self to plant

162
Ives, The Rich Papers, 229–230.

110
good store of [provisions and] breed poultry and hogs to sell.” Dutton reminded Sir Nathaniel
that without tobacco, “the undertaker hath no halves.” Although provisioning might prove
profitable, the structure of tenancy agreements meant that adventurers were not entitled to a
share of those profits.
163
These agreements set the stage for conflicts between settlers who
could cultivate crops and keep animals profitably and adventurers who depended upon the
export of cash crops to achieve any profit from the islands.
These conflicts played out across the islands. John Ferrar's tenant Francis Dawes was
forced to stand in the stockade bearing a sign around his neck for “his careless neglect of his
profit and of the planting of his land notwithstanding he was formerly supplied in good
manner.” This punishment was not enough to deter Dawes, who responded to Ferrar with “a
most audacious impudent letter, railing against him in so foul and gross terms and in that
scandalous manner as the like hath not been heard of.”
164
Even Butler's own tenants ignored his
orders. In a series of letters beginning in January 1622, Butler asked William Seymour to saw
him planks for building a house and boat. His tenants apparently ignored this request,
prompting the easily exasperated Butler to lament that their dawdling “hath undone me.”
165

Butler’s abrasive style likely prompted many of these labor disputes, but more than
personal dislike motivated settlers to shy away from tobacco cultivation. In the same letter
where he criticized Elfrith, Dutton reiterated his earlier worry that soil exhaustion was
beginning to plague some settlers. The men at Heron Bay, Dutton complained, gave leave to
other settlers to fell and clear their land to plant two crops of corn in order to earn enough to
leave their tobacco fields fallow in an attempt to save them. Without these desperate measures,

163
Ibid, 234.
164
FP 350.
165
TNA CO 1/2 ff. 96r, 98v.

111
Dutton estimated that their tobacco grounds “cannot else last out 2 or 3 years.”
166
Heron Bay
had been under cultivation since at least 1618, when Robert Rich complained about the tenants
seated there. In earlier years, the oldest tenants had fared best, but now the formerly fortunate
appeared to suffer. “In a few years,” Douglas Helms, historian at the United States Department
of Agriculture writes, “annual plants used up... the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium,
and magnesium, which the deep-rooted trees had taken up, concentrated, and stored in trunks
and limbs over several decades.”
167
Early Chesapeake farmers, could expect three years of
tobacco and three years of corn, which has a deeper root system to draw on a new layer of
nutrients, followed by a twenty-year fallow period in unmanured soil.
168
Even after this fallow
period, nutrients remained trapped in deeper soil layers, placing longer-term limits on the
relatively nutrient-poor soils of the North American piedmont and coastal plain.
169
Land was
formed in Bermuda by the aggregation of dunes atop the limestone cap on a drowned volcanic
seamount. “Terra Rosa,” a reddish-brown, clay-rich geological layer occurs occasionally
throughout the island as the result of some combination of dust carried from the Sahara, local
volcanic matter, and possibly North American dust.
170
Put simply, Bermuda is a relatively thin
layer of sand and dust collected over millennia. Nutrient-depleting crops like corn and tobacco

166
Ives, The Rich Papers, 234.
167
Douglas Helms, “Soil and Southern History,” Agricultural History 74, no. 4 (October 1,
2000): 727.
168
Lois Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, “Land, Labor, and Economies of Scale in Early
Maryland: Some Limits to Growth in the Chesapeake System of Husbandry,” The Journal of
Economic History 49, no. 2 (June 1, 1989): 407–418.
169
Helms, “Soil and Southern History,” 727–733.
170
Stanley R. Herwitz, “Quaternary Vegetation Change and Dune Formation on Bermuda: A
Discussion,” Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters 2, no. 3 (May 1, 1992): 65–70;
Stanley R. Herwitz et al., “Origin of Bermuda’s Clay-rich Quaternary Paleosols and Their
Paleoclimatic Significance,” Journal of Geophysical Research 101, no. D18 (October 27,
1996): PGS. 23,389–23,400; François Prognon et al., “Mineralogical Evidence for a Local
Volcanic Origin of the Parent Material of Bermuda Quaternary Paleosols,” Quaternary
Research 75, no. 1 (January 2011): 256–266.

112
quickly ate into Bermuda's nutrient reserves, even after the nutritive booster-shot of decaying
plants that followed land clearances. Wind likely accelerated the process, carrying away soil
without vegetation cover as it has done during local plant extinctions for thousands of years.
171

Allowing other settlers to clear and cultivate ground bought the Heron Bay tenants a few years
for fallowing, but it removed their ability to cultivate other parts of their holdings and leave their
tobacco grounds fallow for a long period of time.
By 1622, the failure of tobacco to deliver profits pushed the Company to change course.
The Company ordered settlers to reduce their dependence on tobacco. Two separate regulations
simply urged settlers to “apply themselves... to more stable and solid commodities” without
giving any specific instructions as to what those commodities might be.
172
The limits on
tobacco cultivation that the company did offer demonstrated that the London adventurers
understood the dangers of monoculture in primarily social terms. They affirmed the Bermuda
assembly's requirement that all settlers cultivate corn to be placed in the company store, noting
that such reserves were required to preserve settlers “in case of general scarcity.” Another two
rules granted “every ship-wright, carpenter, joiner, mason, brick-maker, brick-layer, smith,
cooper, sawyer, and all other of like necessary handicrafts” two acres of land in either the
general land or the tribes where they were to plant a house and garden. Though granted land,
the rules required that they “continue also the exercise of some handicraft occupation, and
wholly forbear the planting of tobacco upon the same lands, and not otherwise.”
173
The lure of
tobacco profits, these rules implied, corroded society, causing artisans to husbands to neglect
provisions and artisans to abandon their trades.

171
Herwitz, “Quaternary Vegetation Change and Dune Formation on Bermuda.”
172
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 2:570; 581.
173
Ibid, 2:582; 568.

113
Evidence from 1622 and 1623 suggests that the government in Bermuda took steps to
implement the adventurers' plan. After railing against viticulture and sugar cane, Butler
entertained commodities other than tobacco. In September 1622, he wrote to William Seymour,
encouraging him to keep up his silk house and worrying that the pomegranate wine they had
made “will scarce keep for England.”
174
Even this hardened proponent for tobacco looked to
cultivate the “stable commodities” that the adventurers requested. In addition to moves by
individual settlers, the government put legal force behind the company's dictates. Four men
were presented to a grand jury in 1623 for failure to plant sufficient corn.
175

Worries about soil exhaustion also continued to circulate. A petition from May of 1623
recorded a dispute between groups of adventurers and settlers over a new taxation plan. The
most active settlers, whose interests the petition represented, accused adventurers who had left
their land uncultivated of propagating “mere fiction.” Instead of owning up to their sloth, they
pretended to forbear planting “out of a care of preserving the Islands because, as they pretend,
the mould of the earth will, by cultivating of it, wear away, and so no ground left for Corn and
provisions hereafter to maintain the Inhabitants.” The authors of the petition offered two
challenges to their opponents. First, they argued that cultivation did not deplete Bermuda's soil:
Even those grounds which bear Tobacco (which as they pretend doth most suck
out the heart of the earth) after they have been so employed for some years and
the rankness of the earth thereby taken away, they do then bear exceeding good
corn. And if after 2 or 3 crops taken they be let to lie fallow a year or two, they
will again bear good Tobacco, and so, for ought we ever heard, like for ever to
continue, especially they have a good Marl for Compost, if occasion be, to mend
with them.
176

174
TNA CO 1/2 f. 95v.
175
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:30. The dating on the presentment
records is unclear; however, Hallett argued that evidence from the collection points to
sometime in 1623.
176
Ives, The Rich Papers, 266–267.

114
Secondly, the petitioners argued that tobacco cultivation only occupied one to 1.5 acres of each
twenty-five acre share. The rest of the land was dedicated to “corn, Victuals, and Provisions”
and fenced with pomegranate and fig trees, “the fruit whereof serve exceedingly for the relief &
comfort of the Inhabitants.” These responses acknowledged that soil depletion was a risk, but
asserted that settlers could overcome it by fertilizing the land with manure. Despite the
confidence with which they dismissed worries about soil exhaustion as poor excuses for sloth,
the petitioners were unwilling to completely disregard the fears. They hedged their earlier claim
that soil exhaustion was wholly fictitious, noting, “if this should fall out that the heart of our
grounds which are planted should be worn out, then are a great many of our Adventurers utterly
undone.” The whole body of adventurers should salve the active planters' fiscal wound “by
contributing liberally to all former charges.”
177
The petition sought to assure readers that
Bermuda would continue to yield agricultural produce, while simultaneously seeking to insulate
settlers and adventurers from the consequences of crop failure through a basic insurance
scheme.
Uncertainty and regional variations characterized settlers' actions in Bermuda. In
Hamilton tribe, Elias Roberts anticipated surpluses. In 1623, the company granted Roberts
permission to build a storehouse near the wharf on Walsingham Bay. Expanding warehousing
beyond the major port at St. George's implied that people from Hamilton would produce and
consume sufficient goods to warrant this construction.
178
Miles Kendall wrote to Sir Edwin
Sandys noting that his land in Somerset tribe was fully peopled and that the tenants would
endeavor to “make good tobacco.” The land on Sandys's shares in Smith's tribe was “bad,” but
Kendall nonetheless requested more “boys” to labor in the fields to “find by this year what it

177
Ibid, 267
178
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:25.

115
will do for Tobacco.”
179
Kendall's request for more labor and the hopeful missives on vines and
silk were at odds with his other correspondence to London that year. In a letter to John Ferrar,
Kendall informed Ferrar that his tenants “have not land sufficient to employ themselves on and
that which they have is not worth any thing but for provision.” He recommended that Ferrar
“transport as many as were willing to Virginia.” Several settlers heeded Kendall's call to leave.
Thomas Day, Edward Healing, and David Lewis all wrote Ferrar demanding that he ship them a
substantial store of provisions to emigrate including substantial amounts of English grains and
legumes. “I know what belongs to a plantation,” Day wrote, “and a man that works hard must
not want victuals.” Healing informed Ferrar that “it is well known to all that are acquainted
with your land that it will not yield tobacco neither find them provision that live upon it.” Even
men who coaxed produce from the soil struggled. Richard Smith pleaded leave to go for
Virginia after the governor declared his entire crop of fifty-three pounds of tobacco worthless.
Smith adventured his remaining goods on a ship and lost everything.
180
Bermudians craved
laborers to intensify production, but struggled to keep settlers, who lamented that their land
yielded neither salable tobacco nor sufficient food to survive.
Other settlers appear to have taken the decline in tobacco production and Governor
Butler’s departure from the governorship at the end of 1622 to return to attempts at economic
diversification. The company's general letter praised settlers for steps towards silk, vine, and
sugar cane cultivation, steps that at least some settlers took. Daniel Tucker wrote John Ferrar
that “the Frenchman Mr. Daniell” had arrived aboard the ill-fated Seaflower, which sank in
Bermuda. Though Daniell lost all his tools in the shipwreck, Tucker promised that the vigneron
would want for nothing. Moreover, Daniell would have the benefit of a two-acre vineyard with

179
FP 468
180
FP 362, 457, 460, 466, 467.

116
five years of cultivation by a “vigneron of Montaubon.” After Daniell worked on the vineyard,
he promised, silk cultivation would begin immediately.
181
These attempts to produce silk and
wine harkened back to the earliest tracts published about Bermuda and Virginia. Tucker took
viticulture seriously, but evidence does not exist to show other settlers with similar commitment.
In 1625, the company issued its clearest denunciation of Bermuda's tobacco. A ship
headed to Bristol carried the islands' crop. The company took a dim view of the shipment:
“The great part of the Tobacco which came over is found to be very base, stinking, and good for
nothing. You should have burned it.” Yet again the adventurers’ offered mixed messages for
why tobacco production suffered. In 1625, they claimed a Scottish man “did teach our people
how to spoil” tobacco.
182
In 1626, however, they requested “that our people may be caused to
give there minds and endeavors to raise some other commodities than only this base tobacco...
besides it is our disgrace of the plantation, doth also deceive us.” Rather than suggest that
unskilled or malicious men had led settlers to destroy otherwise valuable plants, the adventurers
instead blamed inter-colonial and international competition. Bermudian tobacco could not
compete with “Virginia tobacco far better then it was wont to be, also store of Spanish by
license and from St. Christopher's Islands which is very good.” In response to this competition,
the company ordered all settlers to immediately halt tobacco production. The order prompted
vitriolic reactions from each of the tribes, who claimed that they could not survive without
tobacco revenue.
183

The settlers’ protest marked the first implementation and agitation against the so-called
“new contract” of 1622 for tobacco importation from Virginia and Bermuda. The contract was

181
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:297; FP 465
182
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:38–40; Lefroy, Memorials, 1:358.
183
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:398; 374; 379–384.

117
a desperate attempt by Sir Edwin Sandys, leader of the Virginia Company, to secure monopoly
privileges for the sole importation of tobacco and to provide Sandys and his allies with
handsomely paid roles collecting customs revenue from the monopoly. At its first passage,
Warwick, Sir Nathaniel, and their allies in the Virginia and Sommer Islands’ Companies
protested that the contract robbed active planters and the king to line the pockets of unnamed
corrupt middlemen (Sandys and his allies) by imposing hard limits on production with
questionable price protections to ensure that profits would not drop with decreased volume.
One anonymous writer comparing the contracts shortly after 1622, was unsure of the effects of
the new arrangement, though he allied himself with the Richs' contention that middlemen stood
to benefit. Nonetheless, he concluded that the price would hold and even increase as stocks of
foreign tobacco diminished and settlers improved themselves and their land.
184
In 1625, a
printed pamphlet affiliated with the earl of Warwick denounced the new contract in strong
terms. The alterations to the tobacco trade had caused “sudden ruin to the plantations.” The
new contractors, the anonymous author lamented, purchased only half of the tobacco that the
colonies needed to survive.
185
Prior to the new contract, adventurers could encourage greater
tobacco production, even in the face of environmental and technological setbacks. Price
fluctuations in tobacco, limits on production, and the emergence of the contractors led
adventurers to reconsider their dependence on the crop. Despite their misgivings, adventurers
also acknowledged that they were dependent on tobacco for the bulk of their profits. These two
factors pulled adventurers in contradictory directions as they sought to reduce their dependence
on tobacco while maximizing the quality and quantity their estates produced.

184
BL Egerton Mss. 2978 ff. 10v-11r.
185
BL Add. Mss. 12496 f. 420.

118
These contradictory impulses drove the shift in the Company's opinion on the patterns of
land use that had developed in the past few years and their assessment of Bermuda's climate.
They wrote Captain Henry Woodhouse, the islands' new governor, with a long list of projects it
wanted pursued. The settlers needed to pursue “pieces of ground in two several tribes fit to
plant sugar canes.” They lamented that settlers' “eagerness about their tobacco causeth them to
neglect both that and all things else so that they cleared their canes so soon as the came to be fit
for swine before they came to ripeness.” Their doubts extended to other information about
Bermuda. “Surely,” they contended, “your climate which ripens figs and other fruits can not
choose but ripen grapes exceeding well.” The company outlined a detailed and ambitious
project to set up silk works. The ship bearing the company's letter carried seeds from the “great
black and best sort of mulberry, the leaf strong and hearty for the silkworms the fruit very
wholesome and good, and it is the same fruit as whereof in Spain they make their great
quantities of Alegant [Alicant] wine.” The company again informed the settlers that weather
should not hamper the enterprise:
We suppose your climate to be ordinary good and fitting for this work inasmuch
as the Summer is early and brings forth food, whereby you may bring forward
worms betimes in the year which is the only sure help to that business, and that
they may have finished their spinning before the midst of May.

The optimistic reassessments of Bermuda's climate and the wisdom that pests “would destroy all
if painful and diligent prevention were not used” carried an implicit accusation that diligent
labor was lacking.
186

The company's position marked a departure from the pattern that took shape between
1618 and 1624. During those years, agents and governors pushed settlers to cultivate more
tobacco, even going so far as to urge settlers to remove sugar cane and vines to save space.

186
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:358–359.

119
Tobacco had, as these earlier leaders wished, come to dominate the Bermudian landscape. The
proclamations against tobacco from 1625 and 1626 marked a turning point. Settlers continued
to cultivate large quantities of tobacco, but the company and individual adventurers no longer
provided the same encouragement. Instead, they advocated for cultivating different commercial
crops. At times, as in the attempts to cultivate sugar cane and silk, this meant returning to past
experiments, even ones that settlers had already tried. This situation led to increased tension
between adventurers in search of profits and even less willing to take advice from the islands.
In 1625 and 1626, adventurers only profited from small cultivation of foodstuffs, cedars,
and ambergris. Governor Woodhouse sent back “such [plantains] as can be gotten” despite the
ship arriving at “an unreasonable time of the year.” Three adventurers requested cedars from
their shares. Daniel Elfrith found nine ounces of ambergris and duly sent the company their
three-quarters share.
187
Unlike tobacco, these goods generated profits in small volume and had
limited potential to be intensified. In their 1627 petition, the inhabitants of the islands explained
their pattern of land use and the differences between agriculture in England and Bermuda:
[In England,] the husbandman hath his land ready for the plough, and his houses
built; wee no such thing. He hath his beasts of labor to plough his land, wee none
but our hands, his wheat being sown his labor and charge is little or none till
harvest ours is daily and hourly, his crop being housed his care and charge is
ended, then is our care greatest and our danger most, yea of so tickle and
dangerous a nature is this Tobacco, in the house, that one hours neglect or the
least want of help may spoil a whole years crop, neither is it in the power of man
to prevent it when it is come to that pass.

Labor, the settlers argued, could overcome some of the ecological issues that had plagued the
islands. Later in the petition, the authors displayed detailed knowledge of the winds that
“blasted” their crops. The winds arrived late in the season and came from “north west-north,

187
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:347; 373; Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:40.

120
north east, or at east which is common.” Settlers who avoided the winds, the petition noted, had
enough labor to get their crops in the ground early and harvest them quickly.
188

In William Jessop's 19 July letter to the Rich tenant Hugh Wentworth, he certified
receiving three hogsheads of tobacco. “After the deduction of the tax at 60d and for charge per
hogshead 1017d,” Jessop reported that the whole shipment lost 85d. Jessop explained that the
loss was the result of the great quantity of tobacco laded in London that year, but other evidence
suggests that other factors plagued Bermudian tobacco. Sir Nathaniel Rich's letter to Thomas
Durham on 19 July complained that three hogsheads of tobacco was “a very small portion
considering my quantity of land and the former quantity of tobacco which I am wont to
receive.” The earl of Warwick echoed the same sentiment in his 19 July correspondence. In
September, Jessop wrote Durham to add his voice to the litany of complaints about quantity.
Durham, Jessop added, should send between 500 and 1000 pounds of tobacco the next year, five
to ten times the weight Durham had exported in 1634.
189
The next year Rich wrote an almost
identical letter to Durham lamenting the low cost at which tobacco sold and asking his tenants to
labor so “the portion sent in former years may be again recovered, which will the more
encourage me to study their comfort and advantage.” Rich obliquely referenced
“seasonableness of weather,” but he provided no further details.
190
Since the middle of the
1620s, wind and worms had ravaged tobacco crops planted in increasingly depleted soil. Unlike
earlier correspondence, Rich's and Jessop's letters from 1634 and 1635 barely accounted for
environmental issues. Instead, they simply suggested that greater labor could overcome any
difficulties.

188
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:433–435.
189
BL Add. Mss. 63854 ff. 13-15, 16-17, 80-82, 18-19, 10.
190
BL Add. Mss. 63854 ff. 136-137.

121
Adventurers in London received mainly fruits, trees, and vegetables from their tenants.
In 1637, Jessop, Rich, and Warwick received potatoes, plantains, pineapples, and oranges.
Shipboard spoilage and delays reduced the potatoes and pineapples. Settlers desperate to show
that they had done anything sent back peas. The most profitable good sent back were juniper
planks. The woodlands destroyed at the Crawl provided Jessop with timber on two separate
occasions—four shaped boards, eight trees, and forty-five planks in total.
191
In 1638, Viscount
Mandeville, who took over the recently deceased Nathaniel Rich's shares, praised the quality of
oranges he received from his tenants. In two letters that year, Warwick mentioned tobacco and
oranges in the same breath, thanking his tenants for “the tobacco and token of oranges.”
Warwick forbore commenting on the tobacco, but instructed both agents to send along as much
fruit as possible, “especially of oranges which I do mightily value.”
192
The correspondence over
the later half of the 1630s from Rich, Warwick, and Jessop demonstrates their knowledge of the
poor quality of Bermudian tobacco. Nonetheless, other than their failed attempts to cultivate
junipers, none sought to change the Bermudian economy.
Their inaction spoke to a larger trend among landowners at the end of the 1630s. Leases
and rentals from across the islands between 1637 and 1641 demanded rents in tobacco in
amounts that even experienced tenants like Hugh Wentworth failed to produce. In light of the
correspondence between Bermudians and English adventurers and the decreasing quantities of
increasingly poor tobacco straggling to market in London, these agreements represented
fantasies or attempts at outright exploitation. The Kentish adventurer William Ewen leased
“two shares of land containing by estimation 50 acres” to William Farmer. Ewen's ignorance of
the actual size of his holding is telling. The terms of this agreement demanded Farmer produce

191
BL Add. Mss. 63854 ff. 232, 241, 236-8.
192
BL Add. Mss. 63854 ff. 244, 246, 248.

122
400 pounds of “good, sufficient, and merchantable of the best sort of Bermudas Tobacco.”
Moreover, Ewen was to send “good potatoes and two hundred of good oranges and one hundred
of good lemons.” These amounts were impossible given the state of the shares' orchards, so the
agreement added that Ewen must “at his own charge set and plant upon the leased premises
yearly during the said term twenty orange trees and twenty lemon trees apt and fit to grow.” A
lease of fifty acres in Paget's tribe demanded “250lb of Tobacco of the best sort and also half a
hundred of oranges and lemons of the biggest size there growing, and a barrel of potatoes to be
paid and delivered yearly.” In five leases across Warwick and Sandy's tribes, George Smith
demanded between 250 and 400 pounds of tobacco and 100 to 200 pounds of potatoes for rent.
In a 1638 codicil to a lease, Bennet Mathew ordered his tenant Hugh Beard to search out drugs.
If he found any, Beard was to cultivate them and receive a generous share of two-thirds produce
for himself.
193
Mathew's vague orders may have indicated an interest in natural philosophy or
they may have been an attempt to search out anything profitable on his shares. This codicil
represented the lone innovation in the leases in the 1630s.
These rentals were not simply the result of custom. In 1638, the Middlesex knight Sir
William Killigrew found himself in dispute with Henry Woodhouse over 6 shares of land in
Hamilton Tribe. Woodhouse owed “100 oranges, 100 lemons, and one hundred of potatoes at
the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary” every year beginning in 1634. Unlike
other leases, Woodhouse owed no tobacco. Nonetheless, he had not paid his rent since 1637.
Killigrew ordered his attorney to force Woodhouse to farm his shares or to lease the land “to the
said Thomas Wood for the first three years of the said 21 the yearly rent of 300 of the best
oranges, 100 of the best potato roots, and 350 weight of Tobacco, and after the first 3 years are

193
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 3:77; 80; 81–82.

123
ended the yearly rent shall be 300 of the best oranges, 100 of the best lemons, and four
hundredweight of Tobacco.”
194
In one sense, Killigrew's lease was more reasonable than many
others, requiring the same amount of tobacco from six shares that other adventurers demanded
from two. Yet the addition of tobacco to the agreement at all is puzzling. Why not instead
encourage his tenants to do something else to raise his profit?
The documents tentatively suggest that adventurers’ obstinacy and their conviction that
labor could overcome purported natural limits were to blame. In 1638, Warwick turned down
the lease offers of Thomas Wills and several other tenants for shares near the Crawl, which had
been recently deforested. Warwick wrote, “The rent offered by him for those shares was so
small that I cannot by any means accept thereof.”
195
He would rather let his shares lay
uncultivated than accept a low rent. In the first correspondence between Mandeville and his
tenants, Mandeville chastised them for sending back less tobacco than he was owed.
Mandeville informed his correspondents that he intended for them to make up this shortage in
the next shipment. After years of declining quality and volume, Mandeville's request was
wishful thinking. After recently buying into Bermuda, Mandeville expected regular profits from
high-quality tobacco. He showed little inclination to respond to changing situations on the
ground. Durham wrote to Mandeville, alerting him to a petition by some enslaved Africans for
manumission. Whilst urging Durham against cruelty, Mandeville could see no reason to give up
his property and told Durham to convert chattel slaves to term-bonded servants only “if you
shall show cause.” The uncertain profits from these commodities meant that the overhead costs
of provisioning bonded laborers cut into adventurers' already small profits. From a purely
economic point of view, keeping slaves to produce tobacco made little sense if the product of

194
Ibid, 3:210.
195
Add. Mss. 63854 f. 246

124
their labor netted only yearly losses. Mandeville's closing summed up his attitude—“I pray you
further the tenants' industry and encouragement, and procure as many fruits to be sent me forth
as you shall be able.”
196

Economies of scale and environmental knowledge in Virginia
In both Virginia and Bermuda, profits were key. The promises of rich commodities with
ready markets taken from writing about Roanoke in the 1580s and reiterated in Virginia
Company pamphlets from the early-seventeenth century did not materialize in the first years of
English settlement along the James River. Instead, English settlers experienced starvation,
political struggle, and periodic conflicts with the Powhattans threatened the survival of the
colony in its earliest years. Just as English settlers in Bermuda would be from 1613-1617,
Virginia Company adventurers were consistently unable to understand or respond to testimony
from settlers and even governors about the practical hardships facing English settlers for the
first five years of settlement in Virginia. Simply procuring food proved to be extremely difficult
and the English acknowledged that they depended on the neighboring native peoples for
sustenance.
Adventurers failed to understand the labor required to build settlements and sow crops
for basic sustenance. The Company’s 1609 orders to Governor Sir Thomas Gates implied that
English settlers would easily establish mixed husbandry in Virginia. Gates, the Company
ordered, should select ground with “at the least one good outlet into the Sea, & fresh water to
the land, that it be a dry and wholesome earth, and as free from wood as possibly you may,
whereby you may have Room to discover about you and unshady ground to plant, near you.”
After doing so, settlers needed to erect walls to keep out “Natives who can no way hurt you but

196
BL Add. Mss. 63854 ff. 242-3.

125
by fire or by destroying your Cattle, or hindering your works by Stealth” and build enclosures
for cattle and other livestock so that “they destroy not your corn and other seed provisions.”
The Company clearly assumed that these actions would be easy. “After building, husbandry
and manuring the Country for the provision of life and conveniency,” they wrote, “you must be
very solicitous that our fleets come not home empty nor laden with useless merchandise.” In a
1609 letter, the prominent settler Captain John Radcliff wrote that there were settlements
scattered along the James River in woodlands and “champion” or fields, but that they had built a
boat to trade for necessary supplies. English settlers had established themselves on already
cleared fields but did not cultivate any crops. Radcliff reported, “The labor to prepare so much
ground as would be to any purpose is more then we can afford, our number being so necessarily
dispersed.”
197
Simply clearing enough ground to grow grain and other basic victuals proved
beyond the capacity of the earliest English settlers who had dispersed their labor force across
such a wide area that they were unable to farm.
Instead of quickly establishing mixed husbandry and turning to the production of
valuable commodities to return home, the English settlers starved. George Sommers, captain of
the Sea Venture wrote in 1610 that upon his arrival in Jamestown from Bermuda he found that
the inhabitants had eaten all of their food and that some had eaten “snakes or Adders” in
desperation. Despite these bleak experiences, Governor Thomas West, Lord De La Warr,
informed the Company a year later that Virginia is “wonderful [sic] fertile and very rich, and
makes good whatsoever heretofore hath been reported of it.” De La Warr went on to list
commodities including cattle, hemp, flax, masts, timber, vines, and fish. Nonetheless, he hinted
that exploiting these resources might prove difficult. He noted that he had left fields manured

197
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 3:15-22. TNA CO 1/1 ff. 66-7.

126
and fit for corn and had built forts, but claimed that he could neither plant nor man his military
outposts until the colony received “sufficient men to be employed about those businesses.”
198

Tobacco cultivation saved English Virginians from these dire circumstances. The settler
John Rolfe, who had been aboard the Sea Venture and survived the unplanned landing in
Bermuda, introduced a strain of tobacco that mimicked the properties of Spanish Caribbean
tobacco into Bermuda. The Virginia tobacco proved popular as an English alternative to
imported Spanish tobacco and by 1613 had come to dominate Virginia’s economy. Smoke
provided the profits that the Virginia Company and its investors so desperately craved. By
1618, skepticism had grown among Virginia Company members about the tobacco economy.
These doubts led to Sir Edwin Sandys being elected treasurer of the Virginia Company in
1619.
199
Sandys sought to reorient the economy of colonial Virginia away from tobacco. Upon
his election, he immediately sought to enact a number of diversification schemes that would
enable Virginians to build an economy on what he viewed to be a firmer foundation. Historians
have generally viewed these plans for diversification as ill-conceived and incompetent projects
that held little chance at succeeding.
200

198
TNA CO 1/1 f.84; Huntington Library, MS BR 661; for an account of the “Starving Time”
and the lengths to which English settlers went to survive see Rachel B. Hermann, “The
‘tragicall Historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” The William and
Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 47–74.
199
Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial
Experiment (1932), 24–40.
200
Philip Alexander Bruce has argued that mercantilism was the impetus behind economic
diversification, a ridiculous diversion from agricultural necessities, and the political force that
hobbled Virginia’s nascent manufactures. See his Economic History of Virginia in the
Seventeenth Century (1907), vol. 2, chap. 17; and vol. 1, 46–51; 275; Karen Kupperman has
provided more nuanced accounts for the failure of economic diversification schemes
including political, cultural, and environmental factors. See “The Puzzle of the American
Climate in the Early Colonial Period” and The Jamestown Project (2007), 299–303; Jean and
J. Elliott Russo pointed out that the company had shifted towards land grant policies to
support agriculture that undermined the centralized control of labor necessary for these large

127
Despite the ignominious fate of Sandys’ diversification plans, his schemes provide rich
insights for understanding how English people understood Virginia’s landscape. The plans to
produce silk and silk grass demonstrate that adventurers in England consistently struggled to
obtain reliable information about Virginia’s environment. Writers describing Roanoke and
Virginia commented that the region was well suited to producing silk and silk grass, an opinion
the Virginia Company eagerly endorsed in its printed reports on the colony. Virginia, they
claimed, had abundant mulberry trees, the preferred food for silk worms and a good climate for
sericulture. Moreover, it possessed the hitherto unknown “silk grass,” which, early reports
indicated, might produce expensive cloth or cordage.
201
The attempts to establish sericulture
faced many issues. English settlers believed that the North American red mulberry (morus
rubra) and the Asian white mulberry (morus alba) were variants of the same species and
believed that silk worms would gladly consume the leaves of either type of tree. Moreover,
contemporary knowledge of silkworm reproduction led adventurers and other contemporary
sericulturalists to treat the eggs of the domesticated silk moth as though they were plant seeds,
capable of being dried, stored, and planted. Contemporaries even used the term “seed” to refer
to the silkworm eggs they shipped across the Atlantic. These beliefs made it extremely difficult
for sericulture to succeed. Colonists often received shipments of dead eggs and then attempted

scale projects in their Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America
(2012); James Perry pushed these arguments to their extreme arguing that there was no
chance of success, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615-1655
(1990), 16–17; Even Sandys' biographer, Theodore K. Rabb, claimed that the plans were
"doomed from the start." Theodore K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-
1629, (1998), 348-349. One major exception to this narrative is Warren M. Billings, “Sir
William Berkeley and the Diversification of the Virginia Economy,” Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography 104, no. 4 (1996): 433–454.
201
Harriot, A Briefe and True Report; A True and Sincere Declaration, 18; 26.

128
to feed any insects that survived with the leaves of a different species of tree than the one that
the larva usually fed upon.
202

Other issues that faced the enterprise, however, offer crucial insights into the problems
that adventurers and settlers faced evaluating Virginia’s environment. Unwilling to rely on the
word of settlers they deemed untrustworthy, some adventurers looked for experts to reap the
valuable commodities they believed resided in North America. Expertise was always a source
of contention. Promoters and improvement writers hotly disputed the value of expertise and
frequently cast scorn on writers who they accused of proffering overly complicated advice.
203

Attempts to secure silk experts for Virginia show that adventurers and colonists consistently
disputed the credentials and skills of people sent to bring sericulture to Virginia. In addition, the
attempts to provide sufficient mulberry trees to feed silk worms and to collect enough silk grass
to produce marketable quantities of cordage show that settlers and adventurers struggled to
understand the scale and distribution of plants in Virginia. Promotional writers had described
Virginia as a cornucopia of commodities, but colonists found that the concentration of allegedly
valuable plants could undermine their efforts to transform plants into saleable goods.
In both its early instructions to governors and printed accounts, the Virginia Company
claimed that producing silk was a simple and profitable enterprise. The “strong and lusty soil”
naturally produced silkworms and mulberry trees in great abundance. The climate was so warm
that it “may cherish and feed millions of silk worms, and return us in a very short time, as great
a plenty of silk as is vented into the whole world from all the parts of Italy.” According to these
arguments, nature was so fruitful that little skill was needed to succeed at sericulture. “Ladies,

202
Charles E. Hatch, “Mulberry Trees and Silkworms: Sericulture in Early Virginia,” The
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65, no. 1 (January 1, 1957): 3–61.
203
See chapter 1.

129
Gentlewomen and little children,” one author claimed, “may be all employed with pleasure, in
making Silk, comparable to that of Persia, Turkey, or any other.” This confidence was not
merely promotional rhetoric. In 1609, only instructions the Company offered Governor Thomas
Gates were to set his men to labor “providing the worm” alongside their efforts to make wines,
pitch, tar, sope ashes, steel, iron, and pipestaves. The Company appeared equally optimistic
towards silk grass, ordering Gates to send his laborers out to collect sufficient quantities of the
plants to ship to England.
204

In the years after this initial optimism, however, settlers had failed to ship large
quantities of silk back to England. This led commentators on the Virginia plantations to assess
the sources of failure. John Smith offered the most detailed description of mulberry trees in
1612. He listed two places to find mulberries: “some great mulberry trees,” he wrote, stand “by
the dwelling of the Savages;” others grew in “pretty groves.”
205
Smith’s report cast doubt on
whether the mulberries colonists had seen grew in sufficient quantity to supply a silk industry.
In December of 1618, James I met with the newly appointed governor of Virginia, George
Yeardley to hear a report on the colony and give orders to be carried out after Yeardley’s trans-
Atlantic voyage. James I displayed great interest in sericulture and silk grass and ordered
Yeardley to pick up on the actions already ordered in 1612 to Lord De La Warr. James I’s
instructions attributed problems with attempts to produce silk and silk grass cordage to the lack
of enough mulberry trees and silk grass. His injunction to plant more mulberry trees suggests
that he and some of the Company leadership had come to doubt earlier reports of abundant
mulberry groves. Nonetheless, his orders, which the company repeated in its own instructions

204
R.I., Nova Brittania (1609); Council for Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the
Colonie in Virginia, 55; Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1147, vol.7 no. 2, ff. 187-189.
205
Smith, A Map of Virginia., 11.

130
to Yeardley and which the General Assembly in Virginia codified the next year, assumed that
settlers simply needed to plant more mulberry trees and silk grass in order to create a profitable
commodity.
206

Others within the Virginia enterprise appeared to cast doubt on these assertions. In
1619, Nicholas Ferrar, Sandys’ ally in Parliament and another leader of the Virginia Company,
complained that Rolfe’s optimistic assessment of Virginia’s commodities was “but an ornament
to the thing of substance.” Nicholas urged his son William Ferrar to “keep a perfect day book”
in which he recorded his observations of Virginia’s commodities and climate. Finally, Nicholas
requested silk grass “to make experiment here.”
207
In 1620, John Pory, the secretary of the
Virginia Company, wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys that the colony needed men trained in sericulture
in other countries, “for there belong great curiosity to it.” Sandys did not heed this information
from Virginia and noted his disagreement in the margin. Sericulture, he wrote, was but a “plain
thing” to be learned by all, including children.
208
Despite Sandys’ protestations, experts had
already gone to Virginia. Vignerons, men skilled in growing vines and making wine, claimed
knowledge of silk making as well, but this expertise also was subject to challenges. A Mr.
Chanterton had come to cultivate vines and possibly begin sericulture as well. John Bonoeil, a
Huguenot refugee, had been involved with royal sericulture efforts since 1611. Sometime
around 1615 Bonoeil became involved in Virginia. Contrary to James I and Sandys, Pory
maintained that Virginia already had “as many mulberry trees as in Persia.” The issue, Pory
argued, was that Virginia lacked true experts in sericulture. He urged Sandys to look to the Low

206
FP 92, 93, in his annotations of the King’s instructions, Sir Edwin Sandys noted his
affirmation for James’s suggestion. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:166, the
Virginia Assembly ordered each settler to plant six mulberry trees per year for seven years.
207
FP 99.
208
FP 145

131
Countries. At least some of his objections appeared to have been on confessional grounds. In
June of 1620, Pory again wrote Sandys pleading for experts. Chanterton, Pory claimed,
“smelled too much of Rome.” Rather than skillfully develop commodities, the vigneron
“attempts to work miracles with his crucifix” showing “much zeal in maintaining his senseless
religion.”
209

The failure to immediately realize the rich commodities promised in Harriott’s report left
adventurers and the crown searching for solutions. Orders and acts to increase the cultivation of
mulberry trees and silk grass suggested that settlers had failed by relying on natural bounty
rather than planting. In contrast, Nicholas Ferrar’s requests for better knowledge and Pory’s
posed more serious problems for managing the colony. Requirements to increase planting had
little chance to succeed if Virginian commodities had “great curiosity” and required expertise to
thrive. In early modern Europe, the term “curiosity,” when applied to an object, suggested that
the object was unique and complicated, an object for natural philosophical study and
explication, something perhaps possessing or requiring secret or obscure knowledge.
210
The
earliest proclamations had assumed that settlers could easily turn plants that Virginia’s
indigenous peoples had used into commercial crops. Ferrar and Pory suggested that English
labor alone could not tame “wild” plants or commercialize indigenous products. Both men
made it clear, however, that the hunt for experts left the settlement vulnerable to charlatans
peddling false optimism or Catholic superstition.

209
Warren M Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (2010), 71;
Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture a History from the Black Death to the Present Day
(1997), 125–126; FP 144, 177.
210
Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe : Word Histories (1998); Robert Evans and
Alexander Marr, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2006);
Paula Findlen, “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet
of Curiosities,” in Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (2002), 297–323.

132
Beginning in 1620, around the same time that Sandys disputed Pory’s call for more
experts, the king and the Virginia Company embarked on a new course of action. In 1620, John
Bonoeil became the colony’s chief expert on silk making. In 1620, the Company paid Bonoeil
for sending seven or eight French vignerons alongside Englishmen who “have been trained up
therein.” The King also endorsed Bonoeil’s expertise by granting him lands in Virginia. Royal
and Company favor did not end with the payment and lands. In 1620 and 1622, Bonoeil
published treatises detailing his method for setting up a silk-producing enterprise. The
Company not only sponsored the publication of the works, it also mandated that copies be sent
across the Atlantic. Individual adventurers also endorsed the work, sending copies to agents in
Virginia as instruction manuals.
211
These actions made it clear that the dominant attitude at the
Company had shifted. Experts on the ground and Bonoeil’s texts had become the sole
authorities on Virginia sericulture.
Despite expectations that Bonoeil’s skill would finally enable Virginia to produce silk in
profitable quantities, Bonoeil’s writing cautioned that Virginia settlers needed to plant many
more trees. According to Bonoeil, one ounce of silkworm seed required one thousand-weight of
leaves to produce approximately six pounds of silk. He claimed that roughly twenty or twenty-
five trees would produce one thousand-weight of leaves, though one “old and great” tree might
produce that much. A “good husband” required two- or three-thousand trees. Moreover, simply
harvesting leaves from existing stands did not work. Settlers needed to plant trees with ample
space between them or cut down surrounding plants to ensure the mulberries received sufficient

211
Bonoeil, Observations to Be Followed; FP 379; Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia
Company, 3:397–400; 474; 634–637.

133
light. Bonoeil warned against anything less than intensification: “It is only for women wantonly
to keep a few silk-worms with a few mulberry trees, more for pleasure, than for profit.”
212

In 1622, Bonoeil altered his advice to suggest that Virginia could produce silk without
such a dramatic transformation of the landscape. In the new version, Bonoeil argued that some
Virginia mulberries were so large that one tree could produce enough leaves to make five
pounds of silk. He also suggested that settlers might make good use of stands of mulberries in
the woods by building silk houses among the trees. Nonetheless, his work continued to suggest
that problems faced any enterprise based on harvesting wild leaves. Mulberry trees, he claimed,
were like olives. Laborers needed to dig their roots open and manure them. He also added that
mulberry leaves should only be harvested every other year. More frequent harvesting risked
damaging the plants.
213

The economics of silk production in the colony further cemented the need for large-scale
cultivation. George Sandys’s 1623 request for Bonoeil to send vignerons reported the wages he
was willing to pay—twenty marks per year plus victuals or twenty pounds “if they will accept
of our Virginia payment.” According to the list of commodity prices Bonoeil included at the
end of his 1620 tract, one pound of raw silk sold for one mark. A letter from Virginia settler
Thomas Newce the next year complained that a pound of silk cods (cocoons) sold for only 2s
6d, less than a fifth of Bonoeil’s price. Even at Bonoeil’s rates, the colony needed to produce
140 pounds of raw silk per year to only cover the wages of the seven Frenchmen sent in 1622.
According to the ratio of trees to leaves Bonoeil provided, that would require between 466 and
583 trees, unless sufficient “old and great” trees could be found to reduce the ratio. The number
doubled if the settlers followed Bonoeil’s advice to only harvest leaves once every two years.

212
Bonoeil, Observations to Be Followed, 12–13; 14; 16–17.
213
Idem, His Maiesties Gracious Letter, 2; 6–8; 31–33.

134
Moreover, once the cost of additional laborers was factored in, silk production at anything other
than a massive scale became unprofitable. Newce complained that a Virginia laborer “who hath
no other way but to dig and delve” earned 3 shillings per day and that it might require forty
laborers per day during the busiest times of the silk growing season.
214

As George Sandys’ request for Bonoeil’s vignerons suggests, some settlers continued to
seek expertise for sericulture even after the so-called Massacre of 1622. Sandys attempted to
reestablish silk production by seating all of the Frenchmen at Elizabeth City. The colonial
government under Francis Wyatt reiterated orders to plant vines and mulberries while
complaining that settlers had ignored previous orders to do so.
215
Despite Wyatt and the
colonial assembly’s requirement that settlers plant vines and mulberries, the colonial
government and royal governments were beginning to turn against silk production. In 1626,
Governor Francis Wyatt and the Virginia Council wrote to England, warning that settlers could
not pursue the cornucopia of commodities pursued under the Company. “A choice,” they
warned, “must be made as wine, silk, salt, fish and iron, and it were better seriously to apply our
selves, to the most hopeful and beneficial then to grasp all at once.” By 1628, Charles I had
made his choices clear. His instructions to the colony made no mention of silk or silk grass.
216

The move away from silk and silk grass in the late-1620s captures a broader issue in
English attempts to assess Virginia’s physical environment. As we saw in Bermuda, changing
political regimes prompted reassessments of economic and agricultural policies. During his
tenure as governor in the last year of Virginia Company rule, Francis Wyatt complained about

214
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 4:68; Bonoeil, Observations to Be
Followed. See the list appended at the end of the pamphlet; FP 251.
215
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 4:68; TNA CO 1/2 ff. 168-170; “Wyatt
Manuscripts,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Second Series, 7, no. 4 (October 1, 1927),
253.
216
TNA CO 1/4 ff. 21r-22v, 84.

135
commissioners sent to seek out the “the present estate of the colony, what hopes may be
conceived of it, and the directest way to those hopes.” The faults in the English settlements,
Wyatt claimed, stemmed from the Company’s failure to pay for supplies, not from ignorance of
the natural world. After arriving in Virginia in 1630, Governor Harvey wrote that he proposed
to set out “surveilling the Country” to search out the best locations and commodities. Harvey’s
surveillance coincided with his broader distrust towards pre-existing Virginian political elites.
Harvey, however, was also not immune to skepticism. Just one year after appointing Harvey
governor, Charles I launched a commission to investigate potential commodities in the
colony.
217
Nearly twenty-five years after the first settlers landed on the James River, settlers,
governors, and the state could not agree on what they had found.
Conclusion
In Ireland, Bermuda, and Virginia, landowners, administrators, and governors sought to
bend the land to fit with the promises of promotional writing. At times they were willing to
adjust their expectations in response to information from resident planters, tenants, or experts.
But any change in government personnel or financial situation might prompt crown officials,
large landowners, or company leaders to radically reassess their environmental knowledge and
re-embrace the promises from promotional writing. Authorities’ flexible attitude towards
environmental knowledge grew out of the same uncertainties about the power of labor and
natural limits on production found in improvement writing. In Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda,
landlords and tenants grappled over the precise mix of natural bounty, labor, and skill required
to produce profits. At times, landlords, adventurers, and governors appeared willing to accept
natural limits on the ability to transform landscapes or transplant cash crops. Yet during periods

217
BL Add. MSS 62,135 ff. 23-4; TNA CO 1/5 f. 176-177, 205; CO 1/6 ff. 22-24, 135.

136
of economic and political stress, environmental knowledge was often quickly discarded.
Members of the Virginia Company, rather than questioning the feasibility of sericulture, simply
sought out new experts. As tobacco profits declined, Bermudian adventurers blamed earlier
failed experiments at sugar cultivation on lazy laborers and ordered new trials. Even Boyle,
who appeared far more willing to trust the local knowledge of his agents and long-time tenants,
continued to equate improvement with tillage in the 1630s. Across the Atlantic the goals of
English authorities—whether the reformation of Ireland through the widespread adoption of
tillage or the acquisition of valuable commodities from Bermuda and Virginia—shaped how
those authorities perceived colonial landscapes. Instead of adjusting their visions in response to
information from English residents, authorities questioned the motives and competence of those
reporters.

137
Chapter III: “Fair and large cattle and of our English breed”
Animals and human interactions with animals had a profound effect on early modern
landscapes. In Europe, draught animals pulled plows that created the agrarian landscape. In
England from the late-fifteenth until the mid-sixteenth centuries, many of the nobility and
gentry turned land from agriculture to pasture to raise sheep to supply wool for the booming
European wool market. Parks and royal forests preserved woodlands for elites to hunt deer.
Fences, hedges, and ditches restricted animal movement. In England, laws, regulations, and
customs attempted to govern almost all aspects of human interaction with animals. Restrictions
against poaching confined the killing of certain animals, particularly deer, to certain people—
royalty, nobility, or their authorized agents. Regulations of meat sales within cities and towns
only restricted who could kill animals and where the slaughter could be done. Small tenants and
cottagers vigorously defended customary rights to feed hogs on fallen acorns in woodlands and
forests.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, attempts to redefine these landscapes
provoked conflict. The state passed regulations against “depopulating enclosure,” the expansion
of pastoral land for large herds of sheep at the expense of small farms, though the crown and
local authorities selectively enforced these ordinances. Popular outcry against the increased
allotment of land to livestock rang out in protests, riots, and rebellions during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
218
Illegal hunting and poaching challenged forest laws and also served as
a locus for protests against changes to the landscape and perceived threats to the social order. In

218
Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England; Steve Hindle,
“Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland
Rising of 1607,” History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (September 21, 2008): 21–61.

138
turn, James I’s government passed a sweeping new set of regulations on hunting in 1603 that
sought to further restrict the killing of certain animals.
219

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the relationships between people and the
land was in flux. Animals played a crucial role in these shifting relationships. Conflicts over
enclosure or poaching stemmed from and reflected broader issues facing early modern English
society such as the power of the monarchy, the rights of the poor, and the definition of private
property. Debates about animals and the landscapes that supported them shaped and were in
turn shaped by arguments about social order, political power, and economic policy. Moreover,
these debates took place across the social order. Nobles and members of the gentry battled with
each other over enclosures, pasture rights, and woodland access. They fought their tenants over
evictions and common rights and encouraged them to keep certain types of animals and to
abandon others. The crown intervened in some of these disputes, seeking to maintain social
order while expanding the power and authority of the state. There was no singular English
attitude towards animals. Classifying animals as wild or tame, determining who might kill or
eat them, and setting aside land for animals were political decisions and, in early modern
England, they were very much up for debate.
These debates did not stop at the English coastline. Across Ireland, Virginia, and
Bermuda, settlers, administrators, and adventurers spent significant time thinking about animals.
Virginia and Bermuda, according to contemporaries, needed domestic animals to build a self-
sufficient English colony. On the other hand, they claimed, Ireland suffered from animal
excesses. Claims that pastoralism was a culturally degenerate practice had long been a part of
complaint literature about the Irish and plans to curb excessive reliance on cattle were frequent

219
Roger B. Manning, “Unlawful Hunting in England, 1500-1640,” Forest & Conservation
History 38, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 16–23.

139
parts of plantation plans. Control over animals was always part of English expansion.
Livestock, according to historian Virginia Anderson, were “creatures of empire” in British
North America.
220
Looking closely at the relationship between people and animals shows that
there was not a uniform English vision of ideal animal behavior and that attempts to control
people and nature through animal husbandry practices were frequently applied to fellow
newcomers, as well as natives.
Accommodation, competition, and the role of animals in the Munster Plantations
English writers about Ireland and settlers in Munster contended with a set of ambiguous
visions and legal requirements for the newly seized lands. At times, settlers and administrators
acknowledged the traditions and patterns of land use that had previously existed in Ireland while
effacing these patterns in other documents. Plantation theorists’ calls for a radical break with
the Gaelic past frequently focused on animal husbandry, but their desired shift to tillage did not
materialize. Continued reliance on pastoralism meant that English planters risked being labeled
“degenerate English” or Irish by the state and other planters with whom they had personal or
political feuds. These accusations had serious potential consequences including loss of title to
land for failing to forward the goals of the plantation. Settlers were stuck between the potential
profits and proven success of pastoralism in Munster and the opprobrium of the state. They
slowly chipped away at the blanket indictments of animal husbandry in promotional literature
and attempted to justify the considerable continuities between Irish, Anglo-Irish, and English
land use.
The 1589 surveys taken to assess the state of Munster’s transformation provide examples
of this strategy. As earlier discussion of the surveys indicated, undertakers’ answers ranged

220
Anderson, Creatures of Empire.

140
from relatively detailed descriptions of their activities to actively concealing what they had
done. Security of title and tax burden both depended, in part, on how they answered the survey
questions. As a result, their answers must be treated with care. Nonetheless, the answers
suggest that pastoral farming with limited mixed husbandry remained dominant in Munster.
Most of the undertakers claimed they had planted “corn,” which captured a wide array of plant
species, ostensibly moving towards the goal of reducing Munster to tilled land. Five
undertakers provided further detail on their crops that pointed towards the continued dominance
of a pastoral economy. Undertakers mentioned wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, and beans. One
provided a ratio for these crops: one-hundred acres of wheat and rye, three-hundred acres of
barley and oats, and sixty acres of peas and beans. This set of cereals and legumes suggests
seasonal crop rotation, but it also suggests an agricultural system geared towards livestock
production. Barley and oats could serve human consumption as cheap grains and also in
brewing beer, but both crops also served as animal fodder. The large numbers of cattle, sheep,
and swine reported in the same document suggest that these crops fed animals.
221
The implied
persistence of pastoral farming did nothing to benefit the undertakers and even served as
evidence of their failure to achieve the goals of the plantation.
Other details in the responses made it clear that the undertakers had failed to
immediately and radically transform Munster. One respondent, Edmund Mainwaring, typified
the attitude of the undertakers to land management. Mainwaring claimed ignorance to the
number of cattle that he or his English tenants possessed, but reported on the twenty-four Irish

221
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 27-30, 35, 48, 50; SP 63/145 f.99; Charles Herbert’s responses, though
the most detailed, provide too little information on the ratios of wheat to rye and barley to
oats to offer a firmer classification of the field system. For examples of categorical analysis
of farming see Power and Campbell, “Cluster Analysis and the Classification of Medieval
Demesne-Farming Systems.”

141
families living on his county Limerick seignory. These families had two-hundred cows, six-
hundred sheep, and one-hundred goats, and one-hundred swine, and four plows of garrans, an
Irish breed of draught horse.
222
Like the English undertakers, the Irish families on Mainwaring's
land relied primarily, but as the plow garrans suggested, not entirely, on pastoral farming. The
very presence of Irish families was a clear violation of the plantation articles’ strict prohibitions
against intermingling with the Irish. Despite this, Mainwaring listed them and offered a detailed
portrait of how they used animals. Mainwaring’s decision to report having Irish tenants
suggests that he saw these Irish families as capable farmers and pastoralists capable of paying
rent, not as savage nomads constantly fomenting rebellion.
Undertakers had failed to transform Ireland or to adhere strictly to the guidelines set
forth by plantation authorities. They attempted to explain these shortcomings by distinguishing
between good and bad animal husbandry. One of the undertakers, Sir Edward Fitton, urged “the
great men to convert land to tillage,” but moderated his jeremiad against animal husbandry by
asking the government, “to restrain men [from keeping] the multitude of milk kine.”
223
Rather
than simply rejecting all pastoralism, he narrowed his critique to dairy cattle. According to this
logic, the problem with the Irish was not cattle but large herds of dairy cows. This suggested
that the right type of pastoralism might aid the plantation’s purported civilizing enterprise—not
just serve as a source of profit for undertakers.
Distinguishing between “English” and “Irish” animals allowed undertakers to claim that
they were advancing the Anglicizing goals of the plantations while largely maintaining pre-
existing land use patterns, but only a few undertakers used this strategy. Moreover, the numbers
of English animals reported to be in Munster comprised a fraction of the total number of

222
TNA SP 63/145 f.103
223
TNA SP 63/144 f.35

142
animals reported and their importance should not be overstated. Most undertakers did not
distinguish between English and Irish breeds, and even those with English animals frequently
possessed Irish ones as well. Grenville reported Irish cows, oxen, and multiple varieties of
horses. Despite his stated opposition to dairying, Fitton held forty milk cows and his agent
reported that his tenants used Irish plow animals.
224
Even the most boisterous undertakers built
their estates within the context of the system of mixed husbandry that already existed in
Munster.
Only five responses from counties Limerick, Cork, and Waterford mentioned the
presence of “English” animals on their estates or waiting to be imported from England. As the
historian Michael McCarthy-Morrogh noted, distinguishing between Irish cattle with desirable
physical characteristics and animals from England among the animals labeled “English” is
impossible. Labeling the animals as English represented an attempt by settlers to introduce
larger breeding stock and alter the character of their herds but also a method for distinguishing
settler pastoralism from Irish pastoralism. Fitton himself had 39 English “plows” (either horses
or oxen) and two English bulls, far more than any other undertaker. Roger Rice, agent at
Askeaton reported three English plows against six Irish plows. Planter Richard Grenville
claimed he had two English bulls, seven English rams, and seven English oxen.
225
The bulls
had the potential to slowly alter the characteristics of Irish herds through breeding. Nonetheless,
the investment in cattle and the continued reliance on Irish animals indicated that planters saw a
functioning economy that they sought to slowly improve not unworkable chaos that needed to
be replaced.

224
TNA SP 63/144 f. 30; SP 63/146 f.171.
225
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 35, 70v-71r, 231, 233, 235; McCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation,
129.

143
The 1589 survey was a politically perilous moment for new planters. Many had failed to
uphold the conditions that accompanied their land grants. Some undertakers attempted to
demonstrate progress to English authorities by differentiating between English and Irish cattle.
Walter Ralegh adopted a different tactic. Ralegh did not provide detailed answers to the 1589
survey and frequently pled ignorance to the questions. An abstract of his leases from the same
year suggests that Ralegh’s non-response to the official inquiry was an act of evasion rather than
ignorance. Ralegh’s agents listed the tenants on his holdings as well as the number of animals
and fallow acres. Likewise his lists of animals—cattle, sheep, oxen, horses, garrans, goats, and
swine—provide details on more types of animals than the 1589 questionnaire requested.
Ralegh’s personal papers give the most detailed surviving account of how one undertaker
categorized and tracked the animals on his estates. They provide an opportunity for granular
analysis of divisions within an individual seignory rather than the broad, province-wide trends
in the 1589 survey.
226
The data from Ralegh’s agents’ report describe the same incremental
changes to patterns of animal husbandry in Munster that the surveys did and show that changes
occurred at the level of townlands as the result of individuals and small groups of tenants, not
uniformly across seignories.
Some of Ralegh’s holdings had begun to embody the form of mixed husbandry desired
by reformers. Several townlands had relatively high numbers of draught animals relative to the
numbers of sheep and cattle there, an indication that Ralegh’s tenants used animals to plow
fields, not to produce dairy, meat, wool, or hides. Mogeely and the jointly reported townlands
of Ballyphillip and Stroncally had the highest number of draught animals relative to the stock of
cattle of any of his holdings. At Mogeely, Ralegh listed two plow horses and two oxen and did

226
TNA SP 63/144 ff. 60, 62.

144
not list any cattle, though he did report 160 sheep. Ralegh reported three draught animals, nine
garrons, hackneys, and studs to only twenty cattle at Ballyphillip and Stroncally. The
substantial presence of draught animals meant that on these holdings Ralegh's tenants had
sufficient animal labor to engage in tillage.
Ratios of draught animals to livestock in other parts of the survey show that other parts
of Ralegh’s seignories remained predominantly pastoral. Kilmacow, located along the Cork and
Waterford border and a joint entry with the Abbey of Molana and Kill McNicholas had the
highest ratio of cattle to draught animals. The ratio of cattle to draught animals at Kilmacow
was four times greater than at Lisfinny, Tallow, and the Shane, which were counted as a single
unit, and twenty times greater than Mogeely. Molana and Kill McNicholas had a proportion of
cattle to draught animals fifteen times greater than Stroncally and Ballyphillip and nearly three
times greater than Ballynatray. Molana and Kill McNicholas and Kilmacow also had the
highest ratios of sheep to draught animals, though the differences in the ratios of sheep to
draught animals were much smaller.
The stark differences in the animal holdings across the townlands within Ralegh’s lands
demonstrate the different types of information about land use available to undertakers and to
plantation authorities. The 1589 survey asked questions about entire seignories, large tracts of
land. In doing so, they received information about trends across numerous townlands that
blurred distinctions between different areas. In contrast, Ralegh’s estate agents collected
records of animal numbers for smaller units of land. Their records demonstrate that land use
was highly localized. Different townlands had different ratios of sheep and cattle to draught
animals, indicating some areas where tillage dominated and others where pastoralism did.
Unfortunately, Ralegh’s surviving papers and the absence of similar records from other early

145
planters make it impossible to determine the reasons for local differentiation or whether other
undertakers’ estates showed similar patterns. Nonetheless, Ralegh’s agents showed that
pastoralism, tillage, and mixed husbandry coexisted side by side.
Economic considerations compelled the Dublin and London governments to tolerate the
persistent dominance of pastoralism within Munster. Ireland suffered a severe coin shortage
beginning in 1610 that hampered the state’s ability to collect royal rents. In 1611, Lord Deputy
Arthur Chichester wrote that the situation had grown so dire that he might need to collect corn
and cattle in lieu of cash payments. In 1614, Oliver St. John, who followed Chichester as Lord
Deputy in 1616, urged a loosening of trade restrictions in Ireland, specifically the export of corn
and cattle, to bring specie into the realm. The economic dominance of cattle was so absolute
that the Dublin Parliament of 1614 agreed to offer the king a “voluntary contribution” of
£30,000, so long as they could make their gift in cattle.
227

English settlers had built on existing patterns of animal husbandry from the outset of the
Munster plantation. By the 1610s, the Irish economy and the Dublin government’s ability to
collect revenue depended on cattle. In the midst of the continued domination of a pastoral
economy, settlers and governors sought to regulate pastoralism. In 1610, the Corporation of
Youghal passed two regulations on animals in the town. The first lamented that “divers within
this Corporation not having any ground or pasture” allowed their animals to roam freely,
damaging enclosures and consuming privately held pastureland. The act empowered
landholders and tenants to seize any animal found within their enclosures and keep it. The
second regulation stated that keeping swine in the town was “very noisome and dangerous” and

227
TNA SP 63/231 f.289; SP 63/232 ff.184v, 194r

146
allowed residents to kill any pigs in their gardens or in the streets.
228
The Corporation’s
regulations were designed as nuisance restrictions like those common in English towns. The
rules attempted to restrict animal ownership by economic status and the possession of property.
Other attempts to regulate pastoralism also combined nuisance complaints against poor
animal owners with invectives against the Irish. In 1611, Richard Boyle brought a suit against
Thomas FitzGerald, one of his largest tenants, that ended up before the Lord Deputy. The
controversy purportedly stemmed from disputes between animal husbandry and woodland
conservation. As Boyle complained,
Divers poor people, amongst which some 40 of them or thereabouts did only
build poor cabins near the wood side and live by brewing and baking and
keeping of alehouses none of the paying above a noble a year and very many of
them lesser rents, who committed such daily waste and spoil in your petitioner's
woods, as it was lamentable to behold, and the said Thomas placed also very
many Irish tenants in the very wood, who cut down [a] number of trees in the
winter for their cattle to house on the tops of them and with keeping great herds
of goats and otherwise almost destroyed the aforesaid woods.

By lodging this complaint, Boyle suggested that he was concerned with wood shortages;
however, the substance of the complaint deflected blame from his own commercial timbering
activities.
229
Boyle's distaste for poor tenants was palpable in the complaints and the action was
likely designed to remove cottagers from the land. Boyle’s actions were similar to those
undertaken by nobility and gentry across England. Boyle, however, couched his complaint as a
worry about destructive pastoralism and implicitly suggested that FitzGerald’s actions
threatened degeneration to the worst Irish behavior. The tactic was apparently effective. Lord
Deputy and Council ruled that FitzGerald had wasted the woods and ordered him to cede control

228
Richard Caulfield, ed., The Council Book of the Corporation of Youghal (1878), 6-7.
229
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v3, nos. 92, 108.

147
to Boyle for them.
230
Although Boyle referenced the Irish ethnicity of the cottagers in his suit,
his argument, like the contemporaneous regulations in Youghal, focused on the economic status
of animal owners.
Even as the King’s representatives pled for a contribution to the royal coffers likely to be
paid in cattle, they issued directives from James I to prohibit the Irish custom of binding horses’
tails to plows.
231
Plantation promoters like Edmund Spenser had leveled general critiques about
the deleterious effects of animals in Ireland. The laws passed at the beginning of the
seventeenth century instead focused on people—the poor and occasionally the Irish; animals—
wild urban pigs and forest destroying goats; and practices—attaching a plow to a horse’s tail—
as sources of disorder. The shift from blanket condemnations to laws targeting specific people
indicated a growing willingness from authorities in Ireland and England to tolerate regulated
pastoralism that adhered to customs common in England. Plantation promoters had claimed that
civilization would only come if Ireland was brought under the plow, but by the 1610s some
English voices began to acknowledge that their plans to reform Ireland might also come on
hooves.
Evidence from Boyle’s estate papers indicates that some of his tenants had introduced
new and more intensive forms of animals husbandry, but that these changes often provoked
conflicts. Boyle’s leases suggest that he took a pragmatic approach to enclosure, but that when
his tenants enclosed land, it had a dramatic effect on keeping and feeding animals. Enclosures
enabled people to isolate animals to better control breeding partners and herd sizes and, most
importantly, to reserve pastures to be cut for hay to fatten animals for sale and keep animals
from losing weight over the winter. Yet enclosing land also threatened customary rights that

230
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v3, nos. 94, 128.
231
Bodleian Library, MS Carte 62 f. 173

148
had been enshrined in leases pre-dating the plantations. One tenant lamented that he had settled
“in a wild place and just betwixt the wolf and the fox.” The lack of fences, he claimed, left his
cattle vulnerable at worst to being stolen and at best to finding themselves without grass after
other herds had grazed his land. Some Englishmen gave up on their improvements. Boyle’s
tenant William Greatrakes asked permission to abandon his brother’s plan to grow better grass
by enclosing land. After years of disputes, Greatrakes preferred the lack of conflict and steady
rents that came from open pastures tended by Irish horseboys to contentious improvements. In
contrast, another of Boyle’s tenants, Francis Annias managed to mollify his tenants while
simultaneously enclosing land by maintaining grazing rights from earlier leases but allowing the
right-holders to graze their animals in fenced pastures.
232

In addition to concern over customary rights, enclosure disputes reveal the changes to
land use that intensified, commercial husbandry brought to parts of Munster. In 1618, Walter
Norton complained to Boyle that his neighbor, Thomas McHendricke had refused to honor the
lease Boyle had granted. Both sides used grazing to push forward their dispute. According to
Norton, McHendricke's “churls put their cattle on my ground and grazed it unto my door.”
Norton reached an agreement wherein McHendricke's tenants could graze his land save seven
acres to “cut hay and to relieve my Cattle in the winter.”
233
Controversies over grazing rights
also emerged within the New English community. At Enniskeane, a newly formed town west of
Bandon along the River Bandon, Boyle received a string of complaints over broken boundaries
and trespassing cattle. In 1615, Anthony Stowell wrote to Boyle noting that there were “divers
complaints raised up against me both by my tenants and neighbors.” Stowell had angered his

232
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v5, no. 20; v6, no. 118; v14, no. 242; NLI MS 43,266/7;
43,141/2.
233
NLI MS 13,236/14.

149
Irish neighbors by distraining cattle, but disputes over land boundaries and grazing also saw his
English neighbors adopt similar tactics. Later that year, Stowell complained that Richard
Chorley had let all of his animals lose upon Stowell's waste lands. According to Nathaniel
Curteys, Stowell sent his cattle over Curteys's “substantial” bounds because Stowell had too
many animals and not enough land.
234
Enclosing fields for hay was part of a broader shift in
pastoralism in Munster towards more intensified use of pastoral land and to cattle-raising
practices designed to produce animals for sale in commercial markets. The ability to maintain
larger herds required adaptations to yearly shifts in weather by providing hay or culling animals
to ensure sufficient food for the herd. These innovations spurred conflicts between English and
Irish people as well as among fellow English settlers as individuals competed for pasture and
fought to prevent previously open fields from becoming private property as hay. By the end of
the 1610s the hunger for hay had already pushed some of Boyle’s tenants into disputes over bog
straw. The search for grass had already driven settlers to hitherto marginal lands.
235

At the beginning of the 1620s, market failures and political problems threatened to
unsettle the system of land use established in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.
These issues not only shaped Irish animal husbandry but the movement of animals across the
Atlantic. First, settlers and English authorities in Ireland began to encounter new issues
stemming from the livestock trade with England that threatened their uneasy accommodation of
pastoralism. On 21 April 1621, the House of Commons introduced a bill banning the import of
Irish cattle into England. The bill generated significant debate that highlighted the ambiguities
of English goals for Ireland. Several members representing the West Country and English

234
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, nos. 32, 120; Several years later Stowell simply gave up
in desperation, waiting only for his crop of corn to ripen before he fled. See NLI MS
13,237/1; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, no. 36.
235
NLI MS 13,236/17.

150
agricultural interests supported the bill on the grounds that Irish cattle drained English coin from
the realm and threatened to undercut English livestock to the point where landowners would be
unable to survive. The bill’s opponents countered that beef prices in England and particularly in
London had grown so dear that “so many thousands scarce know the taste of flesh” and urged
against any measure that might further increase the cost of provisions. Sir John Jepson, who
had lands in Cork, pleaded against any measure that would impede Irish trade. Sir John Davies,
a former attorney general of Ireland gave an impassioned speech opposing the bill. Banning the
export of Irish cattle, according to Davies, would “barbarize that kingdom again” by destroying
Irish trade and gutting the king’s revenue. Moreover, he claimed, it made little sense to restrict
Irish trade to preserve coinage in England when English specie so frequently left the kingdom in
the holds of Dutch ships.
236
Davies’ comments demonstrate that for at least some of the English
administrators, cattle had gone from the source of barbarism to the lone defense against it. The
Parliamentary session expired without a vote on the cattle ban, providing the opponents with a
victory.
Although Irish exporters dodged a ban, economic downturn in England constrained the
market for Irish animals. In 1621, Ireland experienced cold wet summer, which the historian
Raymond Gillespie demonstrated contributed to declining pastoral output and an increase in
culling.
237
Many of Boyle's tenants complained that grass was difficult to find. Cattle had
already eaten through pastures that settlers had intended to leave ungrazed for hay production.
Attempts to cull the herd without serious financial loss also stalled as Boyle's agents lamented

236
Debates on the bill took place on 9 and 18 May 1621. See Journal of the House of
Commons: Volume 1: 1547-1629 (1802), http://www.british-history.ac.uk; Horning, Ireland
in the Virginian Sea, 280–281.
237
Raymond Gillespie, “Meal and Money: The Irish Harvest Crisis of 1621-4 and the Irish
Economy,” in Famine : the Irish Experience, 900-1900 : Subsistence Crises and Famines in
Ireland, ed. E. Margaret Crawford (1989) 80–81.

151
that they could find no one to purchase their cattle.
238
The combined effects of poor weather,
landscape change, and economic slowdown also drove increasingly vigorous conflicts between
English settlers and their Old English and Irish neighbors. In 1624, letters from across Boyle's
holdings poured in decrying cattle rustling and illegal grazing.
239
The market was meant to
provide a pressure release against ecological constraints on Munster's herds. Selling live
animals or their hides of their culled brethren reduced herd size but also provided profits to
offset the loss of the animals. The failure of the market removed this option and exploitation of
bog straw and other marginal grazing removed the ability to rely on those lands during times of
shortage.
Economic conditions began to improve in 1624, but political issues continued to limit
the market for Irish cattle. In 1626, the Lord Deputy and Council in Ireland banned the export
of cattle on the hoof. They claimed that excessive exports of live animals had destroyed the
livelihoods of artisans whose trades depended upon slaughter and had left Ireland devoid of
affordable meat. Moreover, they worried that many of the exported cattle were making their
way into Catholic countries “by sinister conveyances.” Lord Deputy Falkland and the Council
immediately incurred opposition. Echoing the opposition to earlier attempts to ban cattle
exports, Lord Edward Conway, complained that the bill would have disastrous consequences.
He had apparently intimated that Falkland and the Council crafted the bill out of personal
animosity against Conway, a charge Falkland vigorously denied.
240
Conway’s fears did not
sway Falkland and the year-long ban went forward.

238
NLI MS 43,266/13, 11; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v14, no. 40.
239
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v15, nos. 57, 109, 132; v14, nos. 262, 287, 292.
240
TNA SP 63/243 ff.157, 207; Caulfield, The Council Book of the Corporation of Youghal,
127-128.

152
Unlike the harvest failures and coinage shortages of 1620-1624, this ban did not appear
to have the same destructive effect on farmers in Munster. Instead of selling live cattle, which
fetched a greater profit, exports in salted beef, hides, and tallow increased. Irish farmers and
merchants lost access to the English market in live animals but found new opportunities.
Increasingly ships called in Munster’s ports to acquire provisions before setting off on Atlantic
voyages.
241
Munster’s favorable position along Atlantic shipping routes enabled the province to
find outlets for its cattle beyond the English market.
At the end of the 1630s, a combination of environmental and economic factors again
revealed the vulnerabilities that accompanied changes in the land and economy in Munster.
1638 and 1640 again saw foul weather. In 1640 heavy rain damaged grain crops in the field and
rotted them in the barn. Complaints about the scarcity of money also mounted during these
years.
242
The twinned environmental and economic difficulties did not affect all groups equally.
Reports on cattle available for sale in 1638, indicated that Irish breeds, although lean, had better
survived fodder shortages. Some new English landowners also appeared equipped to survive
the difficulties. In 1638, Sir Phillip Perceval's agent in Waterford assured Perceval that his
lands could handle five- or six-hundred more sheep and cattle. His claim was likely not
unfounded. One year later, as neighboring cattle starved, Perceval gave orders to carry loads of
hay to Dublin for sale. The scale of Perceval's livestock enterprise dwarfed many others. A
surviving report from Waterford recorded annual movements of hundreds of cattle and sheep

241
Joseph Leydon, “A Study of the Irish Cattle and Beef Trades in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of History and Politics 11 (April 1993): 1–34.
242
NLI MS 13,237/24-25; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v21, nos. 74-75.

153
from Cork to Waterford. Perceval's herd remained strong and his pastures fertile into 1640,
though he worried about disease.
243

In contrast, the shortage of pasture and the monetary issues plaguing Munster's economy
had a far more profound effect on Boyle's estate management. In response to arrears, Boyle's
agents would distrain cattle and sell them to erase a portion of the debt. In 1639, this system
began to break down. Boyle’s agents pleaded to be allowed to cease distraints and instead deal
with tenants “upon the best terms I can, rather then hazard the dying of [their cattle] upon the
keeper's hands, for Cattle are so poor and money so scarce.” The situation grew worse in 1640.
Boyle's tenants at Bandon offered to surrender their leases rather than continue to pay rent. New
impositions and duties threatened to exacerbate Munster's economic distress. Boyle’s agents
again warned against distraint. Cattle, he wrote, “may starve in the pounds, and neither the
owners able to redeem them, nor any that will either buy or lend money upon them so as they
prove to be a great trouble to have them securely kept.” In the summer of 1641 the situation
persisted leaving Boyle unable to sell his cattle and struggling to find enough grass on his own
lands to keep cattle fat enough for sale.
244
Ecological and economic factors had again combined
to threaten the system of livestock pastoralism that had developed during the seventeenth
century.
From the 1580s through the outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion, the role of livestock in
English perceptions of and policies towards Munster had been transformed. Despite strident
condemnations from promoters, undertakers and their tenants had embraced pastoralism in
Ireland. Instead of radically transforming the landscape from pastures to tilled fields, new

243
BL Add. MSS 46,922 f. 109; Add. MSS 46,923 ff. 57, 69, 177; Add. MSS 46,924 ff. 46-47,
121, 126-127.
244
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v19, no. 132; v21, no. 24; NLI MS 13,237/25, MS 13,237/26.

154
English settlers made more subtle alterations to animals and land in the province by introducing
new breeds of cattle and by keeping grazing cattle out of certain pastures to produce hay.
During that time period, Munster remained pastoral but the landscape had been transformed to
support commercial pastoralism rather than a predominantly subsistence economy. These
changes provoked conflict as Irish tenants fought to maintain their historic grazing rights and as
new English settlers struggled to get access to the hayfields that would enable their commercial
success. Cattle continued to shape the organization of land in Munster, but the features of the
landscape had shifted to include resources for commercial production. The commercialized
landscape brought increased opportunities for profits, but left small tenants and wealthy planters
alike vulnerable to market fluctuations, harsh weather, and political turmoil.
Attitudes towards animals also shaped Munster’s hydrologic landscapes in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Animals, namely fish and cattle, shaped perceptions over bodies of
water. Improving tenants treated water as a valuable asset and schemed to increase their access
to fishing grounds or watering places for their herds of livestock.
245
Unlike cattle, however, fish
did not evoke the same English cultural anxieties as cattle. Gaelic lords in Munster, particularly
the O’Sullivan Beare chiefs who controlled land in coastal west Cork, did not fish themselves.
Instead they attempted to control access to the coast to sell provisions and space to dry fish
English and European fishing crews. From the first plantation plans in the 1580s, plantation
promoters sought to gain access to rich fishing grounds off Munster’s western coast to catch
more fish.
246
To English observers, fish were a valuable commodity that West Country fishing

245
See Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, no. 29; v9, no.108; v10, no 26; NLI MS 43,156/4
246
Colin Breen, The Gaelic Lordship of the O’Sullivan Beare: A Landscape Cultural History
(2005); Connie Kelleher, “The Gaelic O’Driscoll Lords of Baltimore, Co. Cork: Settlement,
Economy and Conflict in a Maritime Cultural Landscape,” in Lordship in Medieval Ireland:
Image and Reality, ed. Linda Doran and James Lyttleton (2007), 130–59.

155
vessels already harvested off Munster’s shores rather than a powerful cultural symbol laden with
anxieties about social organization, religion, and civility.
Nonetheless, fish were at the center of many conflicts in plantation Munster. Like
enclosures to increase livestock productivity, weirs and watercourses frequently caused friction
with Munster’s Irish inhabitants.
247
Debates, regulations, and suits surrounding fishing,
however, also raised issues surrounding over-exploitation and shared resources in ways that
debates about grasslands could not in the ostensibly anti-pastoralist political climate of the
plantations. These conflicts frequently pitted new English planters against each other. Over the
first four decades of the seventeenth century, contentions over fishing revealed fissures between
the interests of the English administration in Dublin and some of the most powerful settlers as
each group sought to control Munster’s rivers, havens, and harbors.
Boyle’s estate papers show that for much of the early-seventeenth century, his tenants
looked to him to regulate access to water resources. In 1617, Thomas Roper, a tenant from
Crookhaven in west Cork, wrote to Boyle asking that he prohibit any new tenants from building
any more weirs, “for the harbor is already overlaid.” The letter warned that weirs were
preventing fish from reaching the sea. Roper's complaint stemmed from his own professional
interest. Several months later he wrote to Boyle, asking him to finance a fishing venture at
nearby havens. His proposal explained that fish came to west Cork “sooner by three weeks than
... any part of the kingdom.” Competition for fishing grounds had grown vigorous and a
complaint had alleged that foreign fishing fleets were monopolizing Ireland's coastal waters a
year earlier.
248
Roper had built a dock to receive fish and contracted with Dutch merchants. His

247
NLI MS 22,028
248
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v7, no. 105*; v8, nos. 37 and 132; NLI MS 43,292.

156
complaint demonstrates that he understood that his previous efforts to secure fishing lands
would amount to nought if upstream weirs caught all the fish.
There were other attempts to protect fishing in 1617. Daniell McCarthy wrote to Boyle
that two English men were guilty of “insolent and hasty misbehavior.” McCarthy worried that
their behavior posed a threat to the entire fishing industry:
[They] fish now out of hand before the lawful proscribed time of fishing which is
Saint James' tide next, by means whereof they may destroy and banish all the
fishing of the harbor and coast, which we intend (as ever we have done) to
preserve and maintain, with keeping of good order and government betwixt all
fishermen here.
249

Seasonal restrictions on fishing ensured that fish would have time to spawn. McCarthy worried
that the actions of these two fishermen could have widespread repercussions. Without universal
enforcement, fishing regulations would collapse since other fishermen would be forced to
violate the rules to catch fish. The complaints about excessive weirs and early fishing both
show that both English and Irish people involved in the west Cork fisheries sought to “preserve
and maintain” stocks but that these complaints, like issues surrounding enclosed pastures and
cattle grazing, ran through landlords.
In 1638 and 1639, Thomas Strafford, Lord Deputy of Ireland, launched a campaign to
curtail the proliferation of small weirs and mills.
250
Strafford’s actions and the suits from other
large Munster landowners like the Bishop of Waterford were part of a broader struggle for
political power in Ireland. Strafford had come to Ireland to curtail the power of powerful
planters and reform Irish government to generate more revenue for Charles I. At that time,
Boyle was the largest landowner in Ireland. He was politically powerful and continually
worked to improve his family’s social and political position as well as the common interests of

249
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v8, no. 89.
250
BL Add. MSS 46,922 ff. 103-104.

157
other planters. Strafford and Boyle quickly became locked in a conflict over whether agents of
centralizing royal authority or powerful planters would control Ireland. Strafford and the
Bishop of Waterford attacked Boyle through concerns about equitable access to fisheries and the
preservation of fish stocks and migration.
251
The complaints succeeded and Boyle’s agent
warned him that “all the weirs in the Country (and kingdom) are immediately to be pulled
down.”
252
Strafford and the Bishop of Waterford’s assault on Boyle was more than a petty
attempt to irritate their opponent; it threatened Boyle’s ability to build towns, engage in
manufacturing, and control resources that allowed him to attract tenants and partners. If
Strafford succeeded, he would wrest control over defining the landscape from Boyle to the
crown.
Boyle combatted the injunctions against his weirs through petitions. He protested that
the weirs at Dungarvan, Gillabbey, and Lismore posed no nuisance. At Gillabbey, Boyle
claimed that he had already taken down small weirs “by which there is now laid open a fair and
easy passage for Boats and timber aforesaid.” Moreover, “the Salmon hath its full and free
scope to pass through the main current.” He informed Strafford that he had cut a watercourse at
Lismore allowing boats full and free passage around the weir and that the obstruction posed no
harm to fish upstream. He protested that attempts to reduce the size of the weir at Coolefadda
would reduce the flow of water to the mill serving Bandon to a trickle. Strafford received the
petitions and referred them to the Munster assize judges to test Boyle's claims.
253

Simultaneously, Boyle and the holders of mills and weirs sought to relocate mills and weirs to
locations where they would not be subject to legal action. John Marten, the miller at Bandon,

251
NLI MS 43,268/5; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v19, no. 63.
252
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v20, nos. 35, 36*, 93.
253
NLI MS 43,269/1-2, MS 43,268/11.

158
had begun building new mills immediately after the old ones were torn down, setting them away
from the main body of rivers and instead drawing watercourses to them. At Lismore, the
longtime leaseholder for the weirs and mills Roger Carew sent Boyle plans to build new mills
and weirs that would leave the Blackwater clear of obstructions.
254

Water, like woods, saw a shift from private management to partial regulation by the
Dublin government during the first three decades of the seventeenth century. Boyle and other
landowners allocated rights to suit their own interests.
255
In the process of doing so, they sought
to protect fish stocks and ensure regulated water flows. From the first decade of the seventeenth
century onward, these efforts sometimes came into conflict with other interests. Grand juries,
committees, and ultimately the Lord Deputy and council sought to adjudicate these disputes,
balancing the interests of people who saw their fields flooded or their fords cut against the
desire for more navigable rivers and water-powered manufactures. Under Strafford, the Dublin
government began to assert its rights with new vigor. Since the 1580s, military men had
clamored for the free passage of troops through Munster’s rivers, but arguments for the free
flow of men had failed to stop private landholders from monopolizing portions of waterways.
256

In contrast, Strafford effectively marshaled the free movement of fish to challenge the power of
the largest landowner in Ireland.
Bermuda: from feral pigs to nuisance hogs
Unlike Munster, where relationships between people, animals, and the land had been
part of the English cultural imaginary since the twelfth century, the windblown crew of the Sea

254
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v20, no. 36*; NLI MS 43,268/6.
255
For example see the conditions attached to: Boyle’s leases to Nicholas Blacknall in NLI MS
43,156/3 and Captain Robert Tyne’s lease to John Seite in NLI MS 43,156/4.
256
This advice had been proffered since the 1580s. See LPL, MS 597 f.384v and MS 614 ff.
47r-62v.

159
Venture saw Bermuda’s birds, fish, and feral pigs as manna and evidence of the islands’ natural
abundance. Quickly English settlers found that the islands’ diverse animals were not always
compatible with agriculture and human settlement. At first settlers worried that wild animals
thwarted attempts to grow crops and might make the islands difficult to inhabit. Within the first
five years of English settlement, however, the islands’ government and the Sommer Islands
Company began expressing fear that the actions of settlers were threatening the diverse species
on the islands. The company and the islands’ assembly passed measures that attempted to
protect birds and fish from destruction. At the same time, both bodies also sought to regulate
domesticated animals to protect property and cultivated land. As in Munster, these attempts to
control domesticated animal ownership and movement also worked to control the poorest
English settlers. Disputes Munster ostensibly about protect fish migration were battlegrounds in
larger disputes over the power of the centralizing state. In Bermuda, preservation acts blended
concern over the loss of potentially valuable animal resources, anxieties about the disappearance
of formerly abundant animals, and attempts to define social order and govern the poor.
Attempts to tame Bermuda’s animals also served as attempts to tame its new human population.
The variety and novelty of animal life on the islands fascinated the first English
observers. In his early description of the archipelago, Strachey listed over twenty kinds of birds.
He focused on a “kind of web-footed fowl” that burrows “like conies in a warren.” The settlers,
claimed Strachey, “would take twenty dozen in two hours of the chiefest of them; and they were
a good and well-relished fowl, fat and full as a partridge.” In January, settlers ate their eggs.
Strachey reported fishing from earliest arrival with a seine net and taking shellfish from the
shallows. Moreover, the settlers were, according to his narrative, able to preserve five-hundred
fish for their upcoming voyage to Virginia. The governor “had procured salt to be made with

160
some brine which happily was preserved, and, once having made a little quantity he kept three
or four pots boiling and two or three men attending nothing else in an house (some little distance
from his bay) set up on purpose for the same work.” Strachey also reported considerable luck
hunting wild hogs. The crew “would go a-hunting with our ship dog and sometimes bring home
thirty, sometimes fifty boars, sows, and pigs in a week alive.”
257

For the desperate crew who survived the shipwreck, these resources provided the means
of survival after losing their ship, but the first observers worried that their first impressions of
abundance were overly optimistic. In his letter, Strachey reported that after being initially
impressed by the rich stores of animals on sea and land, he had begun to notice worrying
changes in the numbers of animals. English fires, he wrote, had scared off nearshore fish
reserves and in January hogs “grew poor.” Moreover, the same animals that had sustained
Bermuda’s accidental population also hindered early attempts at farming. Birds ate seeds from
gardens and fields and hogs rooted up shoots and roots. The difficulty establishing food crops
pushed settlers to consume the livestock that were to form the basis for Bermuda’s herds. In his
1616 letter to the company, Governor Tucker informed the company that all Bermuda's “cows,
sheep, and goats...were destroyed.”
258
Tucker did not explain how the animals perished, but
settlers had likely turned to their domestic livestock as emergency food supplies.

In 1617 and 1618, settlers took steps to rebuild and expand the numbers and types of
domesticated livestock on the islands. Assize records from 1618 recorded thefts of domestic
pigs.
259
Around the same time, Robert Rich wrote to his cousin Sir Nathaniel Rich reporting
conditions on Sir Nathaniel and the earl of Warwick’s lands in Bermuda. Robert thanked both

257
Wright, A Voyage to Virginia, 27-33.
258
Ibid; Ives, The Rich Papers, 8.
259
Ibid, 114, 59, 55, 86; Lefroy, Memorials, 1:131.

161
Sir Nathaniel and Warwick effusively for sending over cattle, which he valued “as if you had
sent me their weight in gold.” He pleaded for more cattle and for his cousin to commission a
ship to voyage into the West Indies in search of goats. In addition, Rich described how cattle
were situated across the archipelago. According to Robert, many of the colony’s cattle lived
collectively on the General Land. Robert added that this situation was likely to persist.
Although he had plans to build an enclosure on “some Convenient place for them,” in
Hamilton’s Tribe, adjacent the collective pasture, the lack of labor constrained his efforts.
260

In addition to attempts to raise more domestic livestock, the chief settlers and governor
in Bermuda attempted to regulate the exploitation of wild animals. In 1620, the General
Assembly in Bermuda sought to protect sea turtles against the depredations of hungry
Bermudians. “In their continual goings out to sea for fish,” the Assembly complained, settlers
“do upon all occasions, and at all times as they can meet with them, snatch & catch up
indifferently all kinds of Tortoises both young & old, little and great and so kill, carry away and
devour them.” This indifferent harvesting risked “scaring off them from of our shores and the
danger of an utter destroying and loss of them.”
261

The Assembly’s actions were part of Governor Butler’s broader attempt to reshape
Bermuda’s economy and to concentrate political power and the control of labor into his hands.
The acts to preserve sea turtles came as part of a huge set of measures that sought to standardize
agriculture across the islands in accordance with Butler’s belief that the intensive production of
tobacco and corn held the only hope for Bermuda’s future.
262
The act to preserve sea turtles was
explicitly written to protect pregnant females and young turtles to attempt to ensure that the

260
Ives, The Rich Papers, 53-54.
261
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:172–173.
262
See chapter 2.

162
animals would not disappear. It also, however, allowed the Governor and the assembly to exert
greater control over a potential food source. Limiting access to sea turtles had the potential to
also force Bermudians to labor in cornfields for their food instead of simply turning to the sea.
In 1620, Butler had pushed the assembly to enact other acts to reduce dependence on animals
for food to encourage agriculture. He asked the assembly “either to lessen [turkeys] by much,
as to send them away into some other Islands un-inhabited.”
263

Butler’s centralizing goals certainly influenced the 1620 preservation acts, but the
Sommer Islands Company’s 1622 orders for governing the islands show that concern with
species loss influenced policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic. Five acts outlined policies
for preservation. Settlers were not to kill birds or tortoises, especially young ones. Moreover,
settlers were relocate human settlements to preserve the birds, “reserving to them those Islands
whereunto they resort.”
264
Adventurers in London recognized that some species, in this case
indigenous birds, could not survive alongside human habitation. The Company did not explain
the reasoning behind its decision, but it is difficult to attribute it entirely to functional or
economic motives. Sea turtles had long served as a food source and the acts against killing
young tortoises echoed contemporary fishing regulations across the Atlantic. In contrast, while
wild birds had once served as sources of food, turkeys and other domestic fowl were
increasingly abundant.
The Bermudian Assembly displayed sensitivity to the power of policies to have
profound impacts on plants and animals, but the assembly and governors continued to try to use
regulations on animals to control other Bermudians’ behavior. In 1622, they reversed Butler’s
1620 attempt to curtail the number of turkeys in Bermuda. Since that ban had been enacted,

263
Ives, The Rich Papers, 181.
264
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 2:568–9.

163
they claimed, “corn and other crops have been wasted in these last years thorough the want of
the said birds going abroad amongst them to devour and destroy the said worms and
caterpillars.”
265
The assembly complained that Bermuda's enslaved Africans took “pigs,
potatoes, poultry, and other fruit and things.” They knew no way to punish a group so
marginalized, “who have nothing where with to make them any satisfaction.”
266
In a fit of
pique, Governor Philip Bell issued a proclamation in April of 1627 that “the straggling and
going abroad of our swine” had caused the figs at St. George's to begin to fail. No swine, he
wrote, should “be kept tied up with lines or strings or otherwise than in their said sties.” Later
in the proclamation it became clear that Bell's personal loss to both animals and people drove
this proclamation. “Not my figs only but pomegranates also are already pillaged and taken
away,” he bitterly exclaimed, “and so those few oranges and lemons are in like danger to be
purloined and what else I shall plant for my own or the public benefit which practice is more
befitting Indians and salvages than a colony of Christians.”
267
Bell sought to ensure that neither
wandering pigs nor people would threaten his property.
Further restrictions from 1627 explicitly targeted the poorest Bermudians. “Divers
apprentices, servants and artificers and other People who have either none or but small store of
land,” the Bermuda assembly complained, “bring up great numbers of Turkeys to the great
damage of their neighbors upon whose land they both breed and feed and oftentimes to their
apparent loss, these apprentices servants Tradesmen and others driving and marking their
neighbors Turkeys.” In response, the assembly prohibited anyone living on less than eight acres
from having more than two turkeys. It followed this prohibition with another injunction against

265
Ibid, 1:302–304.
266
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:309.
267
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:454–455; Bell had previously brought the complaint to the assembly
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:67–68.

164
“some Indulgent masters who give leave unto their apprentices and hired servants to keep hog
(or swine) under them which do oftentimes great damage to their said masters and their
neighbors by breaking loose.”
268
The government took these acts seriously. Shortly after their
passage in 1627, four men were presented to grand juries for keeping turkeys without sufficient
land “by which means the Country is greatly oppressed by destroying every man’s corn in
general”, marking another person's turkeys, and “keeping a hog of a Negro.”
269
The spate of
prosecutions and the direct importation of language from the acts in these presentments marked
one of the most rigorous periods of enforcement in the surviving documents.
The crackdown on the poor extended to the sea, a frequent form of sustenance in times
of crisis. As a part of its 1627 legislative program, the assembly restricted the size of seine nets
for nearshore fishing to ten fathoms. The act drew on the language of preservation, sustainable
husbandry, and protection from scarcity to justify this measure. Overfishing pilchards and other
fry scared “away other great fish from the shore, which live upon the said fry.” In addition to its
effects on the nearshore ecosystem, consumption of small fish “doth hereby cause the said
Pilchards and other small fish to be so shy that there is great scarcity of Bait for necessary
fishing.” The threatened loss of bait threatened settlers' ability to catch “sea fish” to “a great
loss, especially in time of scarcity of corn.” The act allowed settlers to continue to take
pilchards for food, but the council made their preference clear: nearshore fisheries should serve
predominantly as stores of bait for larger, commercial enterprises.
270

268
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:452–453.
269
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:103.
270
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:411–412; For example, see the account of the governor’s household
from 1627 which included two boats, two sets of fishing hooks, a grapple for handling fish
on the boats, and a 20-50 fathom seine net. Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands
Company, 1:95–96.

165
Through the 1610s and 1620s, the Sommer Islands Company pushed settlers to search
for profitable commodities to export. The Company and Bermuda Assembly focused on
plants—tobacco, sugar, vines, and Caribbean imports. As a result, their regulations treated
animals as nuisances that might damage those crops rather than as sources of wealth.
Requirements to fence cattle appeared in the first commission for settling Bermuda in 1612.
After fifteen years, a survey of the islands' cattle recorded twenty-one animals, three of which
had been slaughtered or died in the previous year. The survey reported that animals continued
to be confined to a few parts of the islands, residing only on the estates of Mr. Woodhouse, son
of one of the islands’ governors and former-governor Tucker. Another document also placed a
few animals on Cooper's Island. Few details better exemplify the scale of cultivation than two
separate records of testimony before the council justifying the slaughter of a single cow.
271

By the end of the 1620s, however, settlers whose tobacco crops had failed were finding
that they could profit offering provisions to passing ships. A ship from New England, the
Thunderer arrived in November 1633 to trade. The Bermuda settlers offered pork, beef,
potatoes, turkeys, and chickens. Around the same time, a ship from St. Martin's landed in
Paget's tribe. According to Roger Wood, the tenants traded “hogs and other things I could well
spare” for desperately needed salt.
272
Turkeys, chickens, and pigs had been subject to harsh
regulations over the past decade, but in the late-1620s, they formed the basis for intercolonial
trade alongside slowly increasing cattle herds.
273

271
Ibid, 1:91; 157.
272
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:179; 204 An account from this year
of cattle on the government land recorded that the herd had increased in size, pg. 195.
273
For example, see the 1636 conveyance between Thomas Stokes and Nathaniel Stowe. Stokes
sold Stowe ten acres on David’s Island for a single calf. This transaction differed from earlier
exchanges based on tobacco. Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 3:7–8.

166
Despite the successes in the provisioning trade, adventurers did not focus on animal
husbandry as a source of profits, even as tobacco failed to deliver wealth to English adventurers.
An order from 7 June 1623 detailed the agreement between the earl of Warwick and Mr.
Perinchief for two heifers and a bull. Perinchief was entitled to half of the profits from these
animals over the course of four years.
274
Warwick’s contract was one of the few attempts by
adventurers to create a system of profit based on animal husbandry. Instead, adventurers
attempted to introduce oil seeds or continued to push tobacco cultivation, ignoring potential
profits in provisioning ships even as they struggled to garner a return on their estates.
In Ireland, plantation promoters saw the elimination of animal husbandry as a key part of
the transformation of the Irish landscape. In Munster, keeping larger herds of cattle and
reserving hay for fattening and winter transformed the landscape and provoked conflicts. In
Bermuda, settlers and adventurers viewed animals in more subtle and contradictory ways. The
Sommer Islands Company and Bermuda Assembly regulated poultry and swine to protect
agricultural fields but adventurers in England largely ignored animal husbandry because they
could not devise a method to profit from it. The leaders of the Bermudian Assembly, numerous
governors, and the leaders of the Company showed remarkable sensitivity to the threats facing
the islands’ native birds, turtles, and fish. Ironically, the acts to preserve animals stemmed from
the Company’s desire to push settlers and enslaved Africans to cultivate tobacco or other
agricultural crops to export as commodities.
“Free range of the country:” wild and domestic animals in Virginia
In Bermuda, settlers had rejoiced to find abundant animals after they landed. English
settlers had overcome slight declines in the populations of fish and hogs and were able to feed

274
Ibid, 3:692.

167
themselves richly and salt meat and fish for the voyage to Virginia. In Virginia, printed
accounts delivered contradictory information on the suitability of Virginia for animal husbandry
and the number of animals there. Early printed reports from the Council for Virginia and
governor Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, claimed that imported livestock from Virginia had
multiplied even during a snowy winter. Best of all, settlers “need take no other care of them,
but lest they should stray too far.” Yet in correspondence with the Company in London, De La
Warr suggested dependence on imported animals when he lamented that animals and meat from
the “Islands”—perhaps the West Indies—lacked sufficient numbers of females to sustain their
populations and were poorly cared for on the voyage. John Smith, in his 1612 Map of Virginia,
commented on the abundance of fish, fowl, and deer in Virginia’s woods and waters, but he
lamented the lack of grass and did not count cattle among the potential commodities to be
exploited, nor did he alter his remarks when publishing his General History (1624).
275
Andrew
Whitaker complained that the reports of abundant livestock in Virginia were so wild and
widespread that the survivors of the Sea Venture shipwreck in Bermuda arrived in Virginia
without any of the Bermudian hogs, believing Virginia to be already overflowing with tame
animals.
276

Ralph Hamor’s 1617 True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia provided an
explanation for why adventurers and writers so aggressively promoted Virginia’s pastoral
potential. “There is no man so ignorant to conceive,” Hamor wrote, “that such a main continent
as is Virginia… should be more barren of Cattle, Fish, and Fowl, then other Lands.” Hamor

275
Council for Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (Barret,
1610), 30; Thomas West, The Relation of the Right Honourable the Lord De-La-Warre
(1611); FP 30; Smith, A Map of Virginia, 10, 14–15, 18; idem, The Generall Historie, 25–27.
There were two pamphlets titled A True Declaration… and published in 1610. For clarity, I
have left the publisher’s surname in the citation to distinguish between the pamphlets.
276
Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia. (1613), 7.

168
went on to list the array of animals native to Virginia, reassuring his readers that “they are not
only tasteful, but also wholesome and nourishing food.” Lest English men and women be
discouraged by unfamiliar meat, he claimed that Virginia had “two hundred neat cattle, as many
goats, infinite hogs in herds all over the woods, besides those to every town belonging in
general, and every private man, some Mares, Horses & Colts, Poultry great store, besides tame
Turkeys, Peacocks and Pigeons plentifully increasing and thriving there, in no Country
better.”
277
Settlers in Ireland could expect cattle, which, while perceived to be inferior to
English breeds, were nonetheless cattle. Bermudians had found a steady supply of pigs.
Potential settlers in Virginia needed to be reassured that they would not have to depend
exclusively on hunted animals for their food. Moreover, the Virginia Company’s most
important patron—the king—demanded that the company maintain a store of cattle in the
colony. Before George Yeardley sailed to take up his role as governor in Virginia in 1618,
James I instructed him to “suffer no calves, heifers, or any other young calf to be eaten, till such
time as the country were well provided, and that he should cause the people to train up oxen to
the yoke for plow and cart.” In their instructions from the same year, the Company echoed the
king’s demand, adding that there was “nothing more effectual for the drawing of multitudes
thither” than abundant cattle.
278
Cattle served as crucial sources of meat and milk but also
provided the labor necessary to till land using English farming methods. The absence of cattle
in Virginia threatened to undermine the entire plantation effort. Without the animals, English
settlers would need to alter their diet and would be unable to farm using customary English

277
Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia, and the Successe of the
Affaires There Till the 18 of Iune. 1614 (1617), 19–21.
278
FP 90, 93.

169
methods. Promoters, the king, and the Virginia Company recognized that without cattle,
Virginia’s riches seemed inaccessible to potential emigrants or investors.

A survey of cattle taken in March of 1620 suggests that individual adventurers and the
Company were beginning to take steps towards increasing the numbers of livestock in Virginia.
According to the survey, there were

315 horned cattle in Virginia. The majority of the animals
were located at James City and at Charles Hundred with 112 and 118 animals respectively.
279

Over the next year, however, the Virginia Company’s actions suggest that its leaders were not
satisfied with these numbers. The difficulties facing livestock owners in Ireland would help to
provide an answer to Virginia’s difficulties.
The early 1620s were a difficult time for animal owners in Ireland. Poor weather and
coinage shortages put pressure on overtaxed pastures by reducing the grass available and
hampering the market’s ability to ease the burden through sales. Moreover, political opposition
from anxious MPs representing agricultural and West Country port interests threatened to close
off England as a market for Irish beef. Just months after the Virginia Company conducted its
survey of cattle in the colony, they entered into negotiations with Daniel Gookin, a Munster
settler, to transport cattle from Ireland to Virginia, “provided they were fair and large cattle and
of our English breed.” John Ferrar, part of Sir Edwin Sandys’ ruling faction in the Virginia
Company, strongly opposed the move, arguing that it had little chance of success and implying
that Irish cattle were inferior. Despite Ferrar’s objections, the Virginia Company concluded the
agreement with Gookin, who had followed fellow Munster settler William Newce to Virginia
and demanded similar access to woodland pasture and to take semi-feral animals that had been
released into the woods. Gookin arrived in Virginia on 22 November 1621, prompting the

279
FP 178.

170
governing council in Virginia to celebrate and “hope (if the Irish Plantation prosper) that from
Ireland great multitudes of People will be like to come hither.”
280
English writers describing
Ireland had cast livestock as a scourge on the landscape, but in Virginia, English settlers from
Ireland and their cattle were hailed as saviors.
Shortly after the council in Virginia celebrated the arrival of the settlers from Ireland and
their cattle, Opechancanough led a surprise attack against the settlers that decimated the English
population in Virginia. A census taken in 1624 and 1625 took stock of Virginia after the attack,
which the English referred to as “The Massacre.” In addition to recording the English settlers
who had died or survived the attack, the census takers produced the most comprehensive
account for how imported animals fit in Virginia. Different census takers visited 26 named
settlements and recorded 311 households. In addition to the names of heads of household, they
recorded the names of everyone living there including servants and enslaved people. The
census takers also recorded each household’s provisions of corn or other grains, fish, and
various types of livestock.
281
The livestock data from the census highlight both the widespread

280
Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 1:415, 501; 3:587; FP 311; Audrey Horning
posited a connection between the failed Irish Cattle Bill of 1621 and Gookin’s decision to
emigrate to Virginia; however, the Virginia Company records suggest he began his
negotiations with the Virginia Company before the bill had received substantial debate,
indicating that he may have been motivated by the economic and harvest crises in Munster
more than political pressure. See Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 280-281.
281
Irene Hecht has described the document and the analytical problems it poses. The document
in The National Archives (UK) containing the census is a copy from an original, which does
not survive. Hecht noted the presence of some scribal errors in the document leading to
internal contradictions in the shipping information provided for some individuals. Despite
these issues, Hecht argues that the census can provide a useful source for early-Virginia
demography. Ivor and Audrey Noël Hume have pointed to other problems with the census.
Different census takers, they argued, asked different questions and made judgments about
what objects and animals fit within the categories of the questionnaire. Through the course
of their excavations, they found that the census offered “minimal rather than bona fide totals”
which archaeological evidence might increase. Despite their reservations, the Noël Humes
relied on the census for demographic details and to interpret their archaeological finds. Irene

171
presence of animals in Virginia and the unequal distribution of these animals along geographic
and status lines. Land use in the colony was not uniform. Poultry and goats were
geographically confined to a few settlements. Minorities of settlers at each settlement held
cattle and one household controlled nearly a third of all the colony’s cattle. Even among widely
distributed livestock and provisions such as fish and pigs geography and status mattered.
Even in the aftermath of the massacre, animals remained common across English
Virginia. Only three settlements—Wariscoyack, Mulberry Island, and Captain Roger Smith’s
Men—had no animals or animal provisions. Moreover, the absence of animals at these
locations was likely a quirk of the surveying method rather than a reflection of actual absence.
For example, Roger Smith was listed as residing at James City and had substantial numbers of
fish, cattle, goats, and pigs. It is likely Smith used some of these resources to provision his men,
though the provisions were only recorded as part of his James City household. Despite the wide
geographic distribution of fish and livestock across settlements, these animals were confined to
a minority of households (Table 1). More households reported having fish or pigs than any
other type of animal, but even these animals were confined to less than 40% of households.
Other types and combinations of animals were confined to less than 20% of Virginia’s
households. Although fish and some domestic animals were common in English Virginia,
ownership of and access to these animals was very unequally distributed.

W. D. Hecht, “The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 As a Source for Demographic History,” The
William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 1 (January 1, 1973): 65–92; Perry, The Formation of a
Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615-1655 Perry used the muster to estimate the
population on the Eastern Shore, pg. 25; Ivor Noël Hume and Audrey Noël Hume, The
Archaeology of Martin’s Hundred (2001), 52–43, 134.

172
Table 1: Percentages of Households Reporting Possession of Domestic Animals or Fish in
Virginia. Items reported by less than 5% of households are not included.
Poultry appear to have been widespread across social groups. The census-takers only
reported poultry in five of twenty-six settlements. The concentration of settlements with poultry
in Charles City suggests that the absence of poultry from other locations stemmed from census
takers’ questions, not the actual distribution of animals. In locations where poultry were
present, the census shows that the animals were widely distributed among households. More
than eighty-five percent of households had poultry in four of the five settlements. The largest
poultry owner in Virginia held only six percent of the total number of animals in the colony.
Only the lone settlement outside Charles City to report poultry ownership, the Neck of Land in
James City, bucked this trend with one household out of six owning poultry.
Like poultry, goat ownership was confined to only a few settlements clustered around
James City and Elizabeth City. James City had fifty-three percent of all the goats in the colony
Types of Animals Recorded in Census Percentage of Households
Fish 37%
Pigs 27%
Poultry 17%
Cattle 13%
Goats 6%
Fish and Pigs 13%
Cattle and Pigs 10%
Fish and Poultry 8%
Poultry and Pigs 7%

173
distributed among forty-two percent of households in the settlement. Yet the numbers of goats
were not evenly distributed there. Roger Smith’s and John Burrowes’s households owned
nearly half of all the goats in James City. Other settlements had even less equal distribution. In
Elizabeth City, thirteen percent of households had goats but one household had fifty-three
percent of the total. In the other three settlements that reported goats, only one household
possessed them. More than half of the goats in the colony were in the hands of four households.
Table 2: Distribution of fish in Virginia according to the 1624-1625 census.

The census reflects the importance of fish to diet in early Virginia and signifies the
importance of aquatic environments to the colony. Fish were spread widely across the colony.
The census takers distinguished between wet fish and dry fish, indicating whether the fish had
been preserved by drying or brining. The census did not indicate whether the English
households had caught the fish themselves, received it as supply from English supply ships, or
acquired it from other settlers. Only one of the eighteen settlements where at least one
household reported fish to the census takers recorded less than twenty-five percent of

174
households having fish. Sixty-one percent of settlements reported that at least half of their
households had fish. Nonetheless, the distribution of fish was not entirely even. Elizabeth City
held twenty-six percent of fish in the colony. The households there, alongside those at James
City and Martin’s Hundred, held half of the reported fish in the colony. Different patterns of
ownership existed within those three settlements. At Elizabeth City, fish were relatively evenly
distributed. One household held fourteen percent of the total, but no other household held more
than ten percent. In contrast, at James City, Francis Wyatt held fifty-three percent of all fish.
The two households with the greatest reported stocks of fish held nearly seventy percent of fish
reported at the settlement. At Martin’s Hundred there was a clear division of fish ownership.
Half of the households reported seventy-six percent of the fish at the settlement, which was
divided roughly equitably between them. The remaining fish were divided almost evenly
between the other half of households at the settlement.
Pig ownership was far more common across the colony than poultry or goat ownership.
Seventy-seven percent of settlements reported households with pigs. Like poultry, no individual
household dominated ownership. Despite the wide geographic spread and relatively equitable
distribution of animals among households, James City dominated overall pig ownership in the
colony with forty-one percent of the total animals. Shirley Hundred and James Island, the
settlements with the second and third highest numbers of pigs, had thirteen and eleven percent,
respectively. In James City, there was a combination of a high rate of pig ownership (92% of
households) and several households with large numbers of animals. More than half of the
households at Shirley Hundred and James Island owned pigs but several prominent households
controlled a majority of the animals. The trends in pig ownership suggests that substantial

175
planters had acquired the animals first but that many of their poorer neighbors were able to keep
one or two pigs as well.
Cattle ownership was widely spread across the colony but narrowly concentrated among
few settlements and households. Thirty-six percent of cattle in the colony were at James City.
Thirty percent were at Newport News. The lone household listed for Newport News, under
Daniel Gookin, had thirty percent of the total cattle in the colony and three times more cattle
than Governor George Yeardley, who had the next greatest total for the colony. Only Newport
News with only one household and James City had more than fifty percent of households who
reported cattle, though the majority clustered between twenty-five and forty-two percent
ownership rates.
James City stands out amongst settlements for the substantial numbers of livestock and
fish recorded in the census. At least forty percent of households there had some form of
livestock or animal protein. The settlement also was home to households with the largest stock
of fish and the second largest stocks of cattle and goats. Scattered evidence suggests that
settlers there sought out more diverse animal holdings. In 1623, settlers from James City wrote
letters complaining that they could not purchase hens, even for the apparently excessive sum of
fifteen shillings. John Rolfe’s 1630 will mentioned “three bullocks or oxen which now are and
heretofore have been usually yoked or put to draw in the yoke.”
282
References to gardens and
orchards in land grants for James City also suggest that settlers had adopted some of the
settlement forms recommended in the texts sent to Virginia. John Harvey, who would be
elected governor of Virginia in 1628, apparently had planted “sundry fruits and trees.” Richard
Stephens, a member of the Virginia Council, had also won praise for building a garden and

282
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 4:233; TNA PROB 11/157/567.

176
enclosures.
283
The use of woodlands and swamps as property boundaries, diverse patterns of
animal ownership, and presence of gardens and orchards suggests that prominent landowners at
James City had attempted to follow some of the dictates in agricultural manuals.
Archaeological findings from the Jamestown Rediscovery project provide a chronology
for the trends in animal husbandry and land use at James City. Analysis of the faunal remains
found during the decade of excavations showed a shift in the composition of animal remains
corresponding to the decay and abandonment of the fortifications on Jamestown Island between
1620 and 1623. Prior to that point, the surviving bone fragments suggest that settlers relied on
wildlife for roughly half of the meat in their diet. After that point, settlers relied on wildlife for
only nine percent of their dietary protein. The shift, according to investigators, was abrupt.
284

The abundance and diversity of animals reported in the 1625 census were a relatively new
development but they marked a dramatic shift in how English people in Virginia acquired
sustenance and used the land surrounding them that required increased animal husbandry.
Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that the pattern found in the faunal
remains at Jamestown did not occur across the colony. Excavations at a site on the Neck of
Land at James City uncovered faunal remains that indicated that wildlife, particularly white-
tailed deer remained an important part of the settlers’ diet there after their counterparts at
Jamestown had begun consuming more domestic animals. Nonetheless, settlers at the Neck of
Land raised domestic animals and finds from the site show settlers manipulating the landscape

283
Virginia Land Office, Index to Virginia Land Office Patents, 1623-1643,
http://image.lva.virginia.gov/LONN/LO-1/001/1-100.html, 2, 7; Two booksellers’ accounts
from 1620 included gardening guides and husbandry guides that dealt at length with orchards
and gardening. FP 201; FP 463.
284
Seth Mallios and Beverly A. Straube, 1999 Interim Report on the APVA Excavations at
Jamestown (2000), 23; 29–30.

177
to promote agriculture by cutting ditches that likely carried water to surrounding fields.
285

Another excavation of a site east along the James River between Jamestown Island and Martin’s
Hundred occupied between the 1620s and the 1650s showed a far higher proportion of wild
fauna along with three harpoons, an otter spear, and an iron point showing specialized weapons
for hunting after settlers at other points had shifted to cultivation and animal husbandry for
food.
286
The variations between the faunal remains at these sites and at Jamestown Island
suggests that the rapid transition in land use there did not occur across all English settlements.
Documentary evidence also suggests different patterns of land use between James City
and other settlements, even among landowners who held property at James City. Abraham
Peirsey’s James City household had a small number of animals, two cattle and three goats, along
with a relatively small number of fish. In contrast, he reported substantial numbers of fish
(1600), cattle (25), and pigs (19) at Peirsey’s Hundred, also known as Flowerdew Hundred. At
Jamestown, Peirsey lived with his two daughters, two male servants and two female servants.
At Peirsey’s Hundred, he had a large complement of servants, four unnamed African men, and
one unnamed African woman and her child. Despite the dramatic differences in the
demographic composition of the two households, there are indications that Peirsey pursued
more than tobacco monoculture at his plantation. The settlers there produced tobacco for an
export market, yet they also were engaged in fishing, agriculture, and animal husbandry.
Commerce, however, was key. The tobacco produced there was stored in warehouses built for
that purpose and shipped to England. The other products of Peirsey’s efforts may also have
been destined for commercial consumption. In 1621, prior to acquiring the land surveyed in

285
Seth Mallios, Archaeological Excavations at 44JC568, The Reverend Richard Buck Site
(1999), 46–47; 52; 58; 60–62.
286
Seth Mallios, At the Edge of the Precipice: Frontier Ventures, Jamestown’s Hinterland, and
the Archaeology of 44JC802 (2000), 59–60.

178
1625, Peirsey wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, lamenting the poor state of tobacco production but
enclosing a parcel of preserved Virginia sturgeon.
287
Peirsey reported having two boats to the
census taker, suggesting that he had not abandoned the enterprise. Peirsey also had acquired the
services of four of the French “vignerons” sent over as silk workers in 1623, further indication
that he sought other goods besides tobacco.
288

The census results also suggest that we must re-examine Gookin’s settlement at Newport
News. Gookin retained ties in both Ireland and Virginia. In 1622, a commission sent to
investigate the progress of the Irish plantations listed Gookin as Richard Boyle’s tenant at
Carrigaline. Gookin resurfaced again in Boyle’s papers in 1624. In 1630, Gookin petitioned for
the right to be proprietor over a plantation on an island, which Gookin claimed had first been
discovered by St. Brendan. Despite the fanciful origin story, the crown granted Gookin’s
request and added that he “have free transportation of all manner of live Cattle, as Horses,
mares, Cows, heifers, sheep, goats & swine.”
289
Exporting livestock and provisioning ships
with salt beef were key aspects of economic growth in Munster. While most of these cattle
went to market in England, Gookin apparently looked across the Atlantic for a livestock trade.
In doing so, Gookin adapted the economic attitudes of many landowners in Ireland in which
cattle were commercial goods to be sold, rather than provisions to feed laborers engaged in
other enterprises.
Unfortunately evidence on how Gookin kept his animals is scarce, save a note in his
contract permitting him to take one hundred pigs from the forest. References to pigs and swine

287
James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619-1864
(1993), chap. 1–2; FP 253.
288
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 4:103.
289
Treadwell, The Irish Commission of 1622, 501; NLI MS 13,237/9; TNA CO 1/6 ff. 12v-13r,
14r.

179
in the records of the Virginia Company suggest that the animals were turned out into the woods
to forage for their own pasture; however, there are indications that the Company’s practices
were not universal. In 1623, Martin Brandon petitioned the court of the Virginia Company for
permission “that he might have therewith those Swamps and bogs as lay near thereabout, which
could not be planted and yet might be of great use unto him for keeping of his Swine.” The
court denied his request.
290
This denied petition suggests that perceived wastelands in Virginia
were not free commons. Smaller tenants may not have been able to turn their animals out into
the woods. Gookin also may have adopted more labor-intensive pastoral practices. Depositions
taken from Carrigaline parish after the 1641 rebellion suggest that the deposed residents
practiced mixed husbandry, listing cattle, horses, and corn in their inventories. Several also
listed hay among their destroyed possessions, suggesting that they were feeding their cattle
during the winter, a necessary step to maintain the animals’ weight for market. Gookin’s
neighbors were transitioning between open-range pastoralism and production for a commercial
market that required increased labor. Gookin and the servants he brought from Ireland would
have had skills tending cattle in open pastures while still preparing them for market by keeping
them in barns and supplementing their winter foraging with hay.
Archaeological evidence from Martin’s Hundred adds further nuances to our knowledge
of free range pastoralism in Virginia. Only future governor William Harwood reported cattle to
the muster-takers, but physical remains in the soil indicate wider animal husbandry. During
excavations of a site dated between 1620 and 1622, archaeologists found clear markers of cattle
hooves in single file through the gate of the palisades surrounding the Wolstenholme Town
settlement there. Further excavations of a pit near the fort there indicated the presence of a

290
For references to the company keeping pigs in the woods see Kingsbury, The Records of the
Virginia Company, 1:501; 4:138, 501; 2:216.

180
cattle wallow fed by a well that also pre-dated the Massacre. At the site of Harwood’s
settlement, archaeologists found two structures ringed by a series of enclosures and separated
from areas of settlement.
291
The presence of enclosed shelters, including one served with water,
suggests that settlers at Martin’s Hundred retained systems of feeding and sheltering animals
from England, rather than adopting the system of open range pastoralism which the Virginia
Company appears to have used elsewhere.
Faunal analysis of the pre-Massacre settlement sites buttresses this structural evidence.
Two fragments of pig teeth found at the fort at Wolstenholme Town suggest the presence of two
different types of pigs in Martin’s Hundred prior to 1622. A canine found in the cattle wallow
pit displayed all of the characteristics of a fully domesticated pig. In an adjacent pit within the
enclosure, archaeologists found a longer tusk characteristic of semi-feral pigs.
292
The
coexistence of both types of teeth within a site for domestic livestock points to the multiplicity
of animal husbandry practices within a single settlement. Sam White has recently documented
the difficulty with which the English maintained sty-raised rather than semi-feral, mast-fed pigs,
and has argued that at times of labor shortages pigs were turned out onto woodlands.
293
The
presence of a domesticated pig tooth and an animal enclosure at Wolstenholme Town suggests
that settlers had adopted a relatively labor-intensive practice, despite the abundance of
woodlands nearby that had been used to raise pigs in England for centuries.
Virginian animal husbandry was a hybrid. Textual and archaeological evidence makes it
clear that some planters adopted the labor saving tactic of turning their animals out onto the

291
Noël Hume and Noël Hume, The Archaeology of Martin’s Hundred Vol. 1, pgs. 108, 134,
208-209.
292
Ibid Vol. 2, 558.
293
Sam White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and
Evolutionary History,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 94–120, See
especially pgs. 100-102.

181
forest but others built structures and adopted practices associated with mixed husbandry. This
hybrid system had consequences for the biology of animals in Virginia as well as patterns of
land use. The Virginia Company’s insistence that Gookin provide only English cattle, showed
their preference for animals that matched English dietary preferences but that required labor,
surplus grain production, and the construction of structures for shelter, as opposed to Irish
breeds more accustomed to open pasturage and exposed winters. Those who followed this
preference needed to invest time, labor, and space to maintaining the animals, endeavors that
would have pushed them away from attempts to cultivate maximal quantities of tobacco. Yet
many of the Company’s settlers in Virginia found it more expedient to allow their relatively
delicate animals free reign of the forest, sending them down a path of decreasing domestication
necessary to survive but allowing their putative owners liberty to pursue agricultural endeavors
without the need to monitor animals.
Domestic and feral pig teeth lying in adjacent pits provide an apt metaphor for
understanding English attitudes towards nature in early-seventeenth century Virginia. The two
teeth point to the coexistence of varying systems of agriculture, animal husbandry, and land use
within individual settlements and the colony at large. Settlers and their animals pushed into
Virginia’s woods, but they did so conscious of some costs.
Conclusion
Across the English Atlantic, animals reflected the often-contradictory purposes of
English expansion. Cattle in Ireland went from the emblem of Gaelic savagery to a source for
planter profits. In Virginia, the need to demonstrate familiarity to potential settlers pushed the
Company and its apologists to emphasize Virginia’s pastoral potential, while simultaneously
urging settlers to survive on wild animals. In Bermuda, authorities fought to force settlers to

182
abandon foraging on wild pigs and instead to keep tame hogs that would not break boundaries
or eat crops. Attitudes and behaviors towards animals helped to shape English colonial
landscapes, but these landscapes were always in contention. English planters and both their
English and Irish neighbors disputed the right to bar animals from pastures to grow hay. Boyle
and the Lord Deputy fought over whether rivers were inviolable resources for the state or open
to potentially disruptive private uses. The Sommer Islands Company and several governors
consistently attempted to push settlers into agriculture by restricting their ability to hunt wild
animals, fish, or keep turkeys, chickens, or pigs. In Virginia, domesticated animals were
distributed among English settlers according to their status and location. Colonial authorities
attempts to regulate people by regulating animals show that conflict in England about people
animals and the landscape extended into the Atlantic World.

183
Chapter IV: “Fit to clear”: preservation, exploitation, and the uses of woodlands in the
English Atlantic
The early modern world was, in many ways, a wooden one. Wood was essential to the
construction of buildings and ships. It served as a fuel for cooking, heating, and manufacturing
products such as iron, tin, and glass. Woodlands provided food and shelter for foraging animals.
By the early modern period, many people began to worry that the wooden foundation for
European economies and societies had begun to rot. From the sixteenth-century forward,
writers, kings, and governments increasingly invoked fears of catastrophic wood shortages
across Europe. Trees were crucial to early modern English life, and contemporaries worried
that trees were disappearing. Historians attempting to understand and evaluate these fears have
shown, however, that systems of rights and labels make it difficult to see trees in early modern
sources. “Forest” was a legal category used to mark land originally reserved for royal hunting
that often but not always included trees. “Woods” or “woodlands” denoted areas with clusters
of trees, though the density of these clusters and the extent of the trees might vary greatly that
were not subject to royal governance. During the seventeenth century, both the crown and
private landowners periodically attempted to count the trees they possessed, but these exercises
tended to focus on mature trees suitable for commercial purposes, ignoring many species.
These two categories did not capture all of the trees in England. Early modern English people
kept trees in orchards and gardens to produce fruit or to serve aesthetic purposes. Trees
sometimes served as property boundaries within hedges. Individual trees or small collections of
trees might be regulated in leases, but were not marked as unique features in surveys or maps of
larger areas.
294
In early modern England, the language used to describe trees situated them

294
For discussion of early modern fears of wood shortages as well as the categories of

184
within landscapes of law and custom that often overlooked the types and arrangements of
trees.
295

Promotional writers frequently invoked acute wood scarcity as a justification for English
settlements abroad. The rhetoric of domestic scarcity and the substantial deforestation that
came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has prompted some historians to conclude that
the English state, company governments, and settlers were ruthless exploiters who immediately
began clear-cutting and stripping newly settled lands.
296
English authorities and individuals did
frequently demonize Irish and later Virginian forests as shelters for bestialized enemies and
recommended aggressive deforestation. But in practice, they regulated trees in response to the
perceived rights of landowners and tenants and economic and ecological feedbacks. In Ireland
and Bermuda, where the most substantial deforestation occurred, overcutting took place
alongside the creation of heavy regulations by private landowners and preservation actions by
the colonial or company governors.
Awareness of the problems of scarcity in England led adventurers and planters in
Munster and Bermuda to adopt established English methods to preserve trees, such as
coppicing—allowing trees to regenerate from stumps—and restrictions on cutting wood. Even
when planters or plantation authorities wished to clear land for fields, they adopted a more
pragmatic approach. The mapmaker and surveying author John Norden’s surveyor chastised the
overeager bailiff in his Suveiors Dialogue (1618) for immediately exclaiming that he would fell

woodlands in early modern Europe see Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of
the Woodland in Europe, c.1450–1850”; idem, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in
Early Modern Germany (2006); Radkau, Nature and Power, 134–142; Joachim Radkau,
Wood: A History, trans. Patrick Camiller (2011).
295
To avoid confusion, I use the term “woodland” to refer to groups of trees unless they were
under royal control.
296
Radkau, Nature and Power, 153–191.

185
an entire grove of alders in response to the surveyor’s complaint that alders were not valuable.
Instead of immediately destroying the trees, the surveyor counseled, the wise husbandman
slowly replaced the alders, selling them when profitable and when he had time and laborers to
fell them. Planters likewise showed patience and the desire to derive whatever profit was
possible from their lands, even if that meant temporarily tolerating woodlands. For colonial
administrators, adventurers, and planters, profitability was bound up with the complex, shifting
systems of rights, measurement, and classification of trees in England.
Commerce and cutting in the Munster Plantations
The destruction of Irish woodlands is the best-known environmental aspect of the
plantations. Historians have frequently pointed to complaints about woodland destruction as
evidence for planters' “asset stripping” and ravenous desire for instant profit.
297
The Scottish
environmental historian T.C. Smout chalked the destruction of Irish woodlands up to
“opportunity cost” from landlords seeking to increase the amount of agricultural land they
possessed.
298
Researchers associated with the Irish National Committee for Biology came to
different conclusions. These scholars argue that Irish woodland depletion began far earlier than
the sixteenth century and question the accuracy of documentary sources. On the basis of bog
pollen samples, they argue that iron production was less destructive than the documents suggest
and instead place the blame for declining Irish forest stock on intensified agriculture.
299
The
foremost scholar of early modern Irish forests, Eileen McCracken, offered a middle ground,

297
Canny, Making Ireland British, 314–317; Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, 361; 372–377;
Gillespie, The Transformation of the Irish Economy 1550-1700, 34–35.
298
T.C. Smout, Exploring Environmental History: Selected Essays (2009), chap. 7, especially
pgs. 131–133.
299
Valerie A. Hall, “Woodland Depletion in Ireland Over the Last Millennium,” in Wood, Trees
and Forests in Ireland: Proceedings of a Seminar Held on 22 and 23 February 1994, ed. Jon
R Pilcher and Seán Mac an tSaoir (1995), 13–22; Oliver Rackham, “Looking for Ancient
Woodland in Ireland,” in Wood, Trees and Forests in Ireland, 1–12.

186
pointing to evidence for wood shortages, but also noting that records of timber sales from the
eighteenth century indicate that the plantations did not deforest Ireland completely.
300

Ralegh’s and Boyle's estate records show that at different times and different places in
the plantation period, all of these arguments were true. At the outset of the plantation, Ralegh
included restrictions on access and uses of woodlands. Boyle expanded on these regulations
with rigorous restrictions on woodland use, developed alternative fuel sources, and practiced
coppicing to preserve long-term supplies of wood. Contemporaries also railed against Boyle for
destroying Munster's woods. To understand these conflicting reactions, we must look beyond
destruction. The historian Paul Warde has set out useful guidelines to analyze early modern
forests and discourses of wood shortage. “Woodland,” according to Warde, is a term with a
whole host of meanings. Trees stood in hedges and scattered plots as well as legally protected
forests or established woodlands. Moreover, different timber users sought different tree species
and arrangements: shipbuilders wanted straight, mature oaks; small farmers and cottagers
sought pasturage for animals. These different use systems influenced when different groups
saw shortages and the steps taken to preserve or regenerate woods.
301
From 1602-1642 Boyle's
woodland management policies evolved to encourage different types of landscapes that would
provide sufficient resources for timber industries, deer parks, construction, and fuel. Despite
these conscious attempts to regulate his estates for profit and self-sufficiency, Boyle's policies
failed to deliver the desired results sparking conflicts with tenants, estate agents, and the Dublin
government.

300
Eileen McCracken, The Irish Woods Since Tudor Times: Distribution and Exploitation
(1971) McCracken chronicles shortages throughout but explicitly warns against total
woodland destruction on pg. 98.
301
Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, C.1450–1850,”
see especially pgs. 34-36.

187
Close examination of the correspondence between landlords, tenants, and agents
alongside leases shows the diverse uses to which settlers put Munster lands. Ralegh, Boyle, and
other planters felled wood to produce iron and pipestaves. The crown sought oaks to build
ships. Settlers used bark to tan wood. Wattles made of saplings built weirs and enclosures.
Elite landowners reserved woods to build deer parks and eyries. Birch trees could be uprooted
and burnt to fertilize fields.
302
Settlers developed different uses for different tree species,
growth stages, and parts. At times, they assigned different woodlands for different uses. At
other points, groups came into conflict over different ways to use the woods. Understanding the
changes in Munster's woodlands during the plantations requires sketching the history of use
patterns and the conflict over usage and rights.
Ralegh's leases showed a complicated relationship towards improvement that
encouraged building and enclosure but also sought to safeguard potential resources on his lands.
He required several tenants to build English-style houses, repair castles, or enclose land as a
condition of their tenancy.
303
His lease of two weirs at Lismore to Roger Carew required Carew
to “build a good large and sufficient sluice or flood gate in some convenient place of 12 foot
broad” to transform the existing weirs along the model of English ones.
304
Ralegh backed many
of these requirements to build or enclose with access to the timber required to do so. At the
same time, Ralegh took several steps to prevent exploitation of his woods. His leases provided

302
H. F. Kearney, “Richard Boyle, Ironmaster. A Footnote to Irish Economic History,” The
Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 83, no. 2 (January 1, 1953): 156–162;
Eileen McCracken, “Charcoal-Burning Ironworks in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Ireland,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 20, Third Series (January 1, 1957): 123–138;
McCracken, The Irish Woods Since Tudor Times; For examples of these restrictions in leases
see Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, no. 150; v8, nos. 35, 159; v10, no. 7; NLI MS
43,308/7; MS 43,153/2; MS 43,268/4; MS 43,156/5.
303
NLI MS 43,143/4; MS 43,156/1; MS 43,150/2.
304
NLI MS 43,153/1.

188
only limited rights to timber, and he hired a woodward to enforce these limitations. Tenants
were allowed to cut timber in the wood at Lisfinny for the purposes of building their houses.
Ralegh explicitly exempted “great timber” from another lease and retained his rights to the
woods at the Shane Wood and Ballyduff, granting the tenant access to coppices, indicating that
he had adopted a system of woodland conservation and regeneration as early as the 1580s.
Ralegh's lease to Henry Dorrell for Ballyghilly near Youghal exemplified the measured rights
Ralegh granted. He allowed Dorrell to cut timber from Ralegh's woods near Youghal and
provided him permission to build a mill and divert water to feed it but limited Dorrell's
timbering and restricted the volume of water he might take to prevent injury to neighboring
tenants.
305

Ralegh's larger tenants, who rented portions of their land to smaller tenants, also set
regulations to govern wood use. William Floyer and Nicholas Myn prohibited their tenants
from cutting their great woods but like Ralegh allowed access to wood and underwood.
306
Most
of Ralegh's tenants allowed more latitude. Edward Lochland's seven leases for lands at
Lisnabreen and Curraglass placed no restrictions on how his tenants could use the woods save
that Lochland or his agents could access some of their lands to cut timber for himself. The lack
of regulation did not condemn these forests to overexploitation, but it removed one check
against it. Moreover, Lochland maintained rights to fell timber on many of these lands, leaving
trees his tenants preserved vulnerable to Lochland's incursions. Another of Ralegh's tenants,
Edmond Colthurst also created a situation that threatened the long-term viability of a wood.
Colthurst restricted access to timber at Lisfinny, but allowed his tenant at Tallowbridge to

305
NLI MS 43,143/4; MS 43,150/2; MS 43,156/1; Ralegh reported paying a woodward in MS
43,307/1; BL Add. Ch. 17,352.
306
NLI MS 43,150/2.

189
pasture animals there.
307
Cattle eat the shoots of trees, hampering regeneration. Pasturing
animals in woods was common in Highland Scotland, but landlords frequently specified the
number of cattle allowed to pasture or only allowed them into the woods during winter.
308

Colthurst's lease did not limit the right to woodland pasture: he guarded his right to one
generation of timber trees while simultaneously allowing behavior that threatened his continued
access to the resource.
Irish landowners who rented woodlands to new English planters distributed rights and
regulated their land in similar ways to Ralegh and his tenants. In 1593, Conogher O'Callaghan's
1593 granted the planter Thomas Norris nine plowlands of Cromore woodland to supply an
ironworks for seven years. O'Callaghan restricted the use of the woods solely to Norris,
emphatically adding, “but only the said Sir Thomas.” He further added that Norris was not to
“spoil” any woods save those that had been explicitly marked out for him. O'Callaghan's lease
restricted Norris's felling to a fixed area over a fixed period of time. Yet O'Callaghan's lease
lacked many of the detailed regulations common to contemporary English and Scottish forest
leases. O'Callaghan made no mention of coppicing. His description of the rights included in the
land added both pasture and grass, suggesting that the land had previously been stocked and
might continue to be used for woodland pasture.
309
Both English and Irish landlords had rules
of forest management, but they were vague and simplistic.
In part, the lack of detailed woodland management policies may reflect the small scale of
extractive industries in the late-sixteenth century. Two versions of a map dating from the 1590s

307
NLI MS 43,156/1.
308
Smout, Exploring Environmental History, chap. 3.
309
Chatsworth House Cork MSS, v1. no. 9, ff. 30v-31r.

190
or early-1600s showed Norris' ironworks at the edge of O'Callaghan's woods (Figure 6).
310
Both
versions depicted Norris' ironworks, a sign that he did not let his leased land sit idle. The size of
the ironworks and the land surrounding it was much smaller than O'Callaghan's holding, which
the artist(s) showed well-stocked with trees. Although nine plowlands might contain roughly
five-hundred acres of woodland, O'Callaghan had not leased all of his woods to Norris nor did
he grant him a long lease to the woods. This strategy allowed O'Callaghan to retain long-term
control over his woodlands. Even if Norris clear-cut the plowlands, they would return to
O'Callaghan, who could allow them to regenerate.

During the seventeenth century, Richard Boyle intensified the use of lands he had
acquired from Ralegh. Boyle’s patterns of wood regulation show that he followed the general
pattern of the 1580s and 1590s demonstrated by Ralegh and Norris. Ralegh set guidelines in

310
NMM P/49, ff. 20 and 27.
Figure 6: A detail from the Dartmouth Atlas (National Maritime Museum P/49 f.20) showing Thomas Norris's ironworks.
The map shows that O’Callahan possessed a substantial amount of land, dotted with trees relative to Norris’s two holdings.

191
leases to control access to and use of woods to which he held title. Norris acquired wood rights
outside his estates to fuel manufacturing enterprises. Boyle acquired woods in two ways. First,
he picked up wood rights as a part of a general set of appurtenances attached to land purchases
and leases designed to expand on the central holdings he acquired with Ralegh's seignories.
Between 1602 and 1611, Boyle began acquiring substantial woodland rights along with lands
around Ballynatray, Kilmacow, Kill St. Nicholas, Mogeely, and Cappoquin. These leases
demonstrate that wood was an asset on lands worth listing, but did not indicate specific uses for
the land since Boyle acquired all woods, underwoods, and timber trees.
311
Second, Boyle made
deals with Conogher and Terlagh O'Callaghan for the right to cut timber in their woodlands, just
as Norris had previously done. These leases carried specific conditions for the kind and
quantity of wood to be cut. Both leases included a surcharge of £5 per oak or timber tree cut in
addition to the yearly rent, but granted “so many ash trees, witch elm trees, birch trees, or such
like wood” at no additional cost. The terms of Boyle's lease emphasized “standards,” mature
oak trees that were lauded in contemporary English commentaries on woodlands. Conogher
O'Callaghan had previously leased these woods to Sir Thomas Norris and explicitly granted him
the right to use his trees to fuel an iron forge.
312
The leases from the O'Callaghans were
explicitly commercial transactions. They treated sections of O'Callaghan's woods as
commodities to be taken and used for commercial benefit.
The distinction between these two types of woods—woods located on land to which
Boyle had rights and rights to wood on someone else's land—help to explain the different sets of
woodland use practices that Boyle developed. On the lands Boyle held from the O'Callaghans,

311
NLI MS 43,150/2; MS 43,156/2; MS 43,142/3-4; MS 43,149/1-2; MS 43, 095/2-3.
312
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v2, nos. 42-44; v1. no.9, ff. 30v-31r; On “standard” trees, see
Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, C.1450–1850,”
36.

192
he pursued pipestave manufacturing and clear-cut woods. O'Callaghan seemed to approve of
this behavior. After Boyle's first lease expired, O'Callaghan granted Boyle a new lease in 1618
authorizing Boyle and his agents “so long and until the woods are wrought clear out”.
313

O'Callaghan forged relationships with numerous English planters. In 1617, he gave the
timberman Christopher Colthurst liberty to cut as much timber as necessary to produce 30,000
pipestaves from two areas of woods “without disturbance or imposition.” Colthurst, who made
pipestaves for Boyle and other planters, agreed to deliver these woods at Youghal or Cork.
314
In
1618, the Sir John Jephson wrote to Boyle inquiring about his relationship with O'Callaghan. In
the course of these letters, Jephson noted that he too enjoyed a lease from O'Callaghan to cut
timber and also to supply his tenants with necessary wood for construction and fuel.
315
In 1640,
O'Callaghan “spared” Sir Phillip Perceval enough land for a park, which Colthurst was to
“square,” though its final acreage was uncertain.
316
The content and conditions for
O'Callaghan's dissemination of woodland rights changed from 1593 to 1640, the first leases
sought to ensure woodland pasture for O'Callaghan's tenants whereas his final grant to Perceval
created a park to pursue noble pleasures like hunting and hawking, but O'Callaghan remained
firmly in control of his woodlands throughout. The only complaint to arise regarding
O'Callaghan's woods came in 1620 against John McTeig Garrosse, alleging raids aimed at
terrorizing woodcutters and taking pipestaves.
317

313
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v8, no. 140 informed Boyle that O’Callaghan’s woods were
“cleared in September 1616,” an indication for clear-cutting. For the agreements between
Boyle and the O’Callaghans see Cork MSS, v5, no. 51; v9, no. 29.
314
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v8, no. 23.
315
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v9, nos. 5, 21.
316
BL Add. MSS 46,924 f.54.
317
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v11, no. 72.

193
Boyle also pursued pipestave contracts with other Irish landholders. Beginning in 1613,
Dermod McCarthy provided Boyle with a series of contracts to cut pipestaves from his woods.
He offered Boyle similar terms, allowing Boyle’s workmen free liberty to his woods to cut
timber. McCarthy, however, specified how many pipestaves the cut timber should produce
rather than granting Boyle broad access to a parcel of woods and charging him for the number
of oak trees felled. This difference from the O'Callaghans leases led to periodic conflicts
between Boyle and McCarthy. Granting a parcel of land, allowing clear-cutting, and charging
per tree placed the burden of efficiency on English sawyers. McCarthy's grants for specific
numbers of pipestaves offered no such guarantees. In 1615, McCarthy wrote to Boyle worrying
that the sawyers were “very careless.” McCarthy asked for greater oversight for the enterprise
and the ability to mark trees—particularly those nearest to bodies of water and easiest to
access—and ensure that workmen got as many pales and staves as possible from them.
318

Similar conflicts also cropped up in Boyle's dealings with English landholders. In 1617,
Allen Apsley, who had served as a commissioner for victuals in Munster during the Nine Years
War and held posts as a naval administrator during the seventeenth century, wrote to Boyle
complaining that Boyle's agent, Nicholas Blacknall, had violated the terms of their woodland
agreement. According to Apsley, Blacknall cut beyond the confines of their agreement,
destroying woods valued at £20 per year. He demanded that Boyle cease forcing him to fell all
his trees.
319
Unfortunately for Apsley, Boyle capitalized on Apsley's debts to Boyle in 1618 and
1619 as Boyle began to fear shortages in his own woods, and pressured Apsley to surrender part

318
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v4, no. 60; v7, nos. 42, 54; v8, nos. 21, 134; v9, nos. 20, 68;
v14, no. 53.
319
JH Round and RM Armstrong, “Apsley, Sir Allen (1566/7–1630),” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/article/599; In
addition, Apsley bore a connection to new world ventures. William Strachey dedicated his
history of Virginia to Apsley. See Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1758.

194
of his woods to be felled for pipestaves.
320
In 1623, Apsley again attempted to halt Blacknall's
activities in his woods. He complained that Blacknall's destructive felling had ruined his
mineral and battery works. In 1623, as Apsley alleged that Boyle's workmen had spoiled his
woods in defiance of an order by the Lord Deputy and Council prohibiting them from doing
so.
321

Boyle's most spectacular conflict over leased timbering rights came in a series of fights
over woods with the Lord Deputy in 1638 and 1639. One of the major contested sites was
Ballydorgan, a plowland located along the Cork/Waterford border between Tallow and Fermoy.
These woods and others, referred to by contemporaries as “Condon's Country,” were part of
land that had been partially seized from members of the Condon family after the Desmond
rebellion.
322
Boyle had gained access to these woods to cut pipestaves since 1608 and used
them to supply timber to a Dutch merchant.
323
Title and access rights to these woods had been a
source of contention since they were first granted as members of the Condon family, Henry
Pyne, and Boyle all fought for their control.
324
In 1638, the disputes over Boyle's behavior on
these lands wound up before the council table in Dublin. Lord Deputy Strafford, who had been
involved in a political battle with Boyle since his arrival in Ireland took this opportunity to
batter his rival. Strafford threatened a host of punishments and issued an injunction prohibiting
Boyle from access to the woods, “save only for necessary uses on the land.” This case brought
Boyle's woodland activities under even greater scrutiny as Strafford pressed the council to

320
NLI MS 43,298/2; MS 13,236/15; MS 43,266/9.
321
NLI MS 43,266/12.
322
Patrick Condon is referenced in a 1589 survey of attainted lands granted to Ralegh. NLI MS
43,308/3.
323
Boyle had a relationship with Van der Bogarde that lasted into the 1630s, however, only
leases from 1608-1610 mentioned Condon’s land explicitly NLI MS 43,296/1.
324
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v7, no. 130.

195
investigate whether Boyle had defrauded the government of naval stores from other woods.
325

According to John Walley, Boyle's estate agent at Lismore, Condon's claims hampered their
ability to negotiate leases for wood rights elsewhere.
326

The next year Condon reappeared in the picture offering a lease on woods but warning
that Boyle would be liable for any “impeachment of waste,” words Boyle took as an implicit
threat of further action before the council table in Dublin. At the same time, the Lord Deputy
dealt Boyle two blows in battles over woodland use. First, he decided that Boyle had
wrongfully used woodlands belonging to the Bishop of Cork and Ross and ordered Boyle to pay
rent for those woods. Second, he ruled that Boyle's tenants at Bandon had damaged the King's
woods and that the King's naval stores should be cut from Boyle's woods, denying Boyle's
petition that the stores should be taken from the Bishop's land.
327
The issues Boyle faced during
these years had much to do with bigger political issues—the decades-long struggle for Anglo-
Irish families to regain attainted lands and the conflict between Boyle and Strafford over the
course of English government in Ireland. Nonetheless, Boyle's extensive timbering enterprises
and his cavalier approach to others' property rights provided the kindling for a flare up of these
broader political problems.
Boyle sought to maximize the yield for any lands to which he had woodland rights and
left the consequences for the landowners to face on their own. His behavior on lands on which
he held wood rights fed his reputation amongst contemporaries as a waster of woods. Boyle and

325
NLI MS 43,268/5 ff. 11-12; For discussion of the conflicts between Boyle and Strafford see:
Hugh F Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633-41: a Study in Absolutism (1989); Patrick Little,
“The Earl of Cork and the Fall of the Earl of Strafford, 1638-41,” The Historical Journal 39,
no. 3 (September 1, 1996): 619–635; Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the
Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566-1643 (1982).
326
NLI MS 43,266/17, National Library of Ireland.
327
NLI MS 13,237/23; MS 43,268/5.

196
his workers or agents displayed little concern for the long-term health of woods on other
people's lands and sought to maximize the yield of marketable oak from each of these leases, but
“waste” took on different meanings in each. In the case of Apsley, Boyle used his kinsman's
financial distress to acquire rights to his woodlands and fell them against his wishes. Apsley
protested against waste and spoil that inhibited his own mineral and battery industries. In
contrast, Conogher O'Callaghan doled out rights that suited his needs, acknowledging that
Boyle's workmen would strip the area bare but limiting the geographical scope of their clear-
cutting to specific sections of his large wooded holdings. He issued no complaints about waste.
McCarthy disputed the way timber rights were being exercised but not the rights given. After
his complaint that workmen were not harvesting his best timber efficiently, he engaged in
several larger orders for pipestaves and no further complaints survive. The cases of Condon and
Stafford were the most complex complaints about waste. In the case of Condon's woods,
Boyle's workers had felled timber and made pipestaves, an activity that required felling the same
trees that were at the center of shipbuilding and other commercial uses, but the dispute over
waste stemmed from who had the right to exploit those trees—New English planter, Old English
lord, or the crown. Condon offered Boyle a lease of woodland rights the year after he brought a
suit before the council table, offering to allow Boyle's efforts in those woodlands to continue but
seeking to profit from them.
Commercial timbering did not guarantee the destruction of woodlands. In 1610, Henry
Beecher, Blacknall, and John Shipward, allocated woodlands across three plowlands with
numerous restrictions. The lease reserved “the said woods underwoods, timber, and trees,
standing, growing and being” on three plowlands south of the highway near Blacknall's home
over the course of 24 years. Like O'Callaghan's leases, this document limited the area for

197
felling; however, it also preserved “all and every young timber tree which shall be hereafter left
unfelled for standalls and storons.” Like Ralegh’s earlier lease, this document provided clear
evidence for a regeneration scheme, not just restrictions on access.
328
For at least some planters,
clear cutting and maintaining woodland landscapes were not mutually exclusive.
Boyle's management practices for woods on his land revealed different management
practices and priorities. Boyle and his tenants required woods for more purposes than timber.
Woods provided fuel for homes and construction materials for the buildings and fences
demanded to improve lands. Woods yielded wattles for building the weirs that increasingly
diverted Munster's rivers. They offered bark for tanneries and charcoal for iron mines. Animals
pastured there. Deer lived in wooded parks. Hawks lived in eyries. Different individuals and
groups supported different uses and required different measures to exploit woods that included
clear cutting, selective felling, and gathering. Boyle changed his policies over time in response
to perceived wood shortages, shifts in the markets for pipestaves and iron, and changing
settlement dynamics. Between 1602 and 1641, Boyle's woodland management began to include
stricter prohibitions on wood gathering, the integration of alternative fuels into leases, and the
creation of coppices to regenerate wood.
Boyle's early leases granted limited rights to woods on properties but did not enact any
larger conservation or preservation measures. His 1607 lease for Ballyphillip, Co. Waterford
provided unambigous guidance for woodland use. According to the document, Boyle reserved
all woods and underwoods save “six small boatloads of wood to be exchanged yearly for sand to
be used in mending the demised premises and lands and also mete and sufficient houseboot,

328
NLI MS 43,095/2.

198
hedgeboot, cartboot, fireboot, and plowboot.”
329
Boyle's lease to Heward regulated woods on
the land she was leasing and highlighted the diverse uses of timber as a part of a holding that
also contained agricultural land. As in many leases, trees, branches, and twigs provided fuel and
building supplies. Trees also served as a barter to acquire sand, which could be used to dry
boggy soil. These regulations strove to preserve a resource on an individual property while
allowing it to be used for necessary household uses or to make improvements to the land.
Boyle's 1606 extension of Ralegh’s lease to Robert Carew for mills and weirs around Lismore
added the right to take wood and timber to enclose the land, repair houses, and to repair the weir
and mills.
330
These different uses pointed to the value of diverse types of wood. Construction
drew on the timber planks and trees, some of which might also have served as pipestaves.
Repairing the weir required flexible branches to make wattles. Together these leases show that
Boyle did not treat his woodlands as mere timber repositories but as diverse resources that could
serve many different functions.
In the first years after acquiring Ralegh's seignories, Boyle's leases attempted to balance
the need to induce tenants to his land with generous terms against the desire to protect his
resources. A 1605 lease to Thomas Fitz-John Gerald for several townlands near Tallow
highlighted the difficulty doing both. Boyle granted Fitz-John Gerald all the commodities
growing in the woods but later reserved woods, underwoods, timber save that sufficient to repair
his house and hedges, fuel his fires, or maintain carts. Boyle noted that he had appointed a
woodward to ensure that these conditions were followed. The conditions themselves remained
unclear. A confused contemporary left the marginal query, “whether those woods be not well

329
NLI MS 43,156/2.
330
NLI MS 43,153/1-2.

199
reserved?”
331
Fitz-John Gerald took advantage of the ambiguities in Boyle's leases, granting the
rights to cut timber for building new houses instead of confining wood cutting to maintenance
purposes only.
332
Fitz-John Gerald’s lease was exceptionally ambiguous, but the dense,
potentially overlapping, and possibly contradictory sets of rights were characteristic of Boyle’s
earliest attempts to regulate woodlands. His 1615 lease to Mathew Harris for five plowlands
granted woods at one point only to later reserve “all timber trees, woods, underwoods in and
upon the premises” to Boyle.
333

Boyle's dense but ambiguous management policies also shone through in the
development of ironworks on his lands. Boyle began dealing in iron in 1604 shortly after
receiving confirmation of his purchase of Ralegh's lands. In a request dated the day after that
confirmation, William Greatrakes wrote to Boyle asking for access to woods to set up an
ironworks. Greatrakes, whose brother John was already producing iron for Boyle, promised to
leave Boyle's woods as he found them and reserve any trees fit for timber to Boyle.
334
William
Greatrakes's appeal to Boyle suggested two motivations for forest management. First,
promising to leave the woods as he found them suggested that he would replace felled trees
through coppicing or replanting. Second, reserving timber trees to Boyle promised to protect
the most valuable part of the woodlands—salable timber from standard trees—for Boyle's own
use. Taken together they suggest concern with profit and the rights of a landlord to a valuable

331
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v1, no. 130.
332
The leases that included woodland rights were to Michael Burden, Richard Holland, and
Alexander Potter (NLI MS 43,156/2) and William Newman and Margrett Rogers (NLI MS
43,152/1; The only other restriction on woodland use was a ban on tanning in his lease to
Thomas Braunch MS 43,152/1.
333
NLI MS 43,156/3.
334
NLI MS 43,087/2, 4; MS 41,984/4; MS 43,266/1; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v1, no.
123.

200
asset alongside the desire to maintain woodlands around timber trees as a useful landscape
feature.
As Boyle's ironworks grew, issues surrounding woodland management began to emerge.
Complaints about woodland destruction and shortages accompanied Boyle's woodland actions
from their inception. The controversies and the measures taken to counteract them crescendoed
from simple orders to cease felling trees to a combination of prohibitions against use and
coppices to regenerate woods. None of these efforts resulted in a system that contemporaries
believed could meet their woodland needs. The complaints and Boyle's responses to them
demonstrate that Boyle and his agents did not simply allow for the destruction of woods to
create more valuable arable land or pasture. Instead, they attempted to carefully guard trees to
meet the needs of their tenants and to continuously supply pipestaves and the raw materials for
iron production.
Boyle's first responses to complaints of woodland destruction simply attempted to ensure
that those exploiting his resources did so efficiently. In 1606, Thomas Ball wrote to Boyle
complaining that Henry Pyne, who had plagued Ralegh's timber activities in the 1590s, was an
unreliable partner.
335
The next year Pyne wrote to Boyle informing him that he was pressing his
woodsmen to work through the winter in Mogeely wood to meet the growing demand for wood
from iron forges and pipestave merchants.
336
In 1608, Boyle's agent Henry Wright sought to
slow Pyne's felling. Pyne's workmen cut the best timber then converted it to planks or fuel for
the furnaces, rather than working through other trees. In addition, Pyne's men wasted wood by
leaving downed trees or cut planks deemed inferior to rot in the woods. According to Wright,
Pyne had ordered his men to fell as many trees as possible and then to draw out the best to make

335
NLI MS 13,236/3.
336
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v2, nos. 75, 79, 114, 135 [f.221], 144; NLI MS 43,096.

201
planks. Wright ordered Pyne's woodcutters to cease working and set squarers to cut already
felled trees before anymore were cut, fearing that the downed wood would rot before they could
finish it.
337
Wright feared that Pyne was exploiting his rights to Boyle's woods by felling more
timber than he could process and by taking tall, straight hardwood trees to produce pipestaves
and cordwood fuel. His fear was that Pyne was both cutting trees that should have been
reserved for other uses and inefficiently using those that were cut, a complaint that echoed
landowners who had leased Boyle wood rights.
Other voices also cried out against wasting woods. The Bristol merchant William Kellet
queried Boyle why a “Gentleman of your quality” would permit a tenant who cut down and
spoiled woods to remain in his holding.
338
Lord Deputy Chichester lamented the spoil of
Munster's woods. According to Chichester, all the best timber near rivers and coasts had been
wasted. The navy, he lamented, would have difficulty building ships.
339
Chichester's
complaint, like Wright's, highlights the need to examine the details of complaints about wasted
woods. Both Chichester and Wright worried about the destruction of certain kinds of trees in
certain locations. Each complained that careless felling had removed easily accessible woods,
forcing producers to take on additional carriage costs. In addition, each feared that sawyers
were felling “great” timber, rather than producing pipestaves and fuel from underwoods and
crooked trees less suited to shipbuilding or construction. After a few years of substantial timber
exploitation both the Dublin government and timber producers began to worry that certain types
of trees were being depleted. These warnings appeared to fall on deaf years for the next two
years. In 1609, Boyle continued to fill orders for pipestaves and to expand iron production by

337
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v2, nos. 125, 138, 156.
338
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v3, no. 14.
339
TNA SP 63/225 f.159.

202
adding another forge at Kilmacow and developing the infrastructure to support a forge at
Cappoquin, Co. Waterford.
340
In 1610, Boyle negotiated a new agreement with Pyne for
manufacturing pipestaves at Mogeely.
341

Boyle’s issues surrounding purported wood shortages were part of broader anxieties
about the perceived depletion of Munster’s woodlands. In 1611, the Dublin government began
to take actions to protect certain kinds of woodlands in Ireland. In January, the Privy Council
wrote to Lord Deputy Chichester urging him to study “how timber may be maintained and
preserved in other places where it is for the good of the State.” The Dublin government took
actions to preserve woodlands three years after Chichester worried about the state of Munster
woods. Royal woodwards marked trees throughout Cork and Waterford to be reserved for the
King's shipping. The Dublin government also proposed a law to the Irish Parliament banning
the removal of bark from standing oak trees and the preservation of timber. The Privy Council,
Chichester, and the Dublin government only took action to preserve oak trees deemed useful for
the navy. Other actions taken the same year suggest that they were willing to tolerate
potentially damaging timber enterprises. Propositions to increase the King's revenue in Ireland
suggested taxing ironworks and pipestaves, suggesting their willingness to allow actions they
believed threatened Irish woods so long as they enhanced royal coffers. This kind of thinking
became practice when marking trees: Boyle's woods were exempt from royal supervision since
he agreed to provide the crown a portion of any woods he felled.
342

These actions did not assuage worries about shortages of ship timber. In 1615, “ES,” the
author of a survey of Ireland, advocated that planters “ought to be restrained, and if they have

340
NLI MS 43,296/1; MS 43,297/1; MS 43,156/2; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v3, no. 21.
341
NLI MS 43,310/1, National Library of Ireland.
342
TNA SP 63/231 f.2; LPL MS 629 ff. 29-39, 165-166; Bodleian Library MS Carte 61 ff.78-
79.

203
offended, against any former proviso to the contrary to be punished, for they have destroyed a
mast of good timber for shipping and in the end will consume all the good timber upon South
coast.” He went on to call for an outright ban on pipestaves, “for no other but ship timber will
make pipestaves.” The government appeared open to this reasoning. The same year they
limited felling woods. John Jephson wrote to Boyle that he was “most undone by this new
restraint of pipestaves.” In light of the new restrictions, he informed Boyle that he would “leave
now troubling you any farther” over woods. These restrictions may have hampered Jephson's
enterprise but they had little effect on Boyle, who continued to produce pipestaves unabated.
343

Boyle circumvented regulations from Dublin but intensified restrictions on woodland
use on his own estates. In 1612, Boyle attempted to change the conditions for woodland access
with Thomas Ball, his partner in ironworks. Ball rejected these claims. Ball refused to reserve
any timber trees or bark save those marked out prior to the agreement. In addition, he
demanded that he be allowed to clear cut “steep glens” without coppicing the trees there. He
refused any restrictions on barking wood and Boyle's request that he enclose woodlands. Ball
claimed that all Boyle's requests were impractical. Cattle, he argued, cannot feed on
regenerating shoots in steep glens, so coppicing is unnecessary. He objected to the restriction
on barking claiming that bark “will not strip but in unsensible times for the felling of wood.”
Colliers needed access to the steep glens without any restrictions or the cost of producing
charcoal would exceed the cost of building scaffolding to access the trees. Enclosing timber to
protect regenerating wood from animals might cost more than the coals manufactured from it
would yield. Boyle lost the early rounds of this dispute. In a note summarizing the case,
Greatrakes and Blacknall reported that Ball was held harmless for his activities in the woods.

343
Huntington Library MS EL 1746; NLI MS 13,236/5; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, nos.
48, 90.

204
After this setback, Boyle continued to deal with Ball and by the end of the year Ball's account
reported that he had felled more trees to feed the forges and manufacture pipestaves.
344

In response to the failure to introduce conservation measures to his business partners,
Boyle sought to both acquire wood rights to ease pressure on his own lands and to enact
restrictions on access against tenants and some of his business partners. In 1613, Boyle and his
Dutch pipestave partner Van der Bogarde began paying tenants around Tallow to rent
woodlands.
345
Boyle's earlier leases from O'Callaghan and McCarthy acquired rights to
substantial properties to produce tens of thousands of pipestaves. In contrast, these leases near
Tallow were a stopgap measure designed to shift the consequences of intensive pipestave
production out of Boyle’s woods. In 1614, Boyle received several requests to cut woods as well
as reports naming those who cut without permission. These letters complain that wood is
difficult to get, in part because Boyle had created strict new regulations against felling trees.
These actions limited woodland access to both small tenants and international merchants.
346

Boyle only granted carpenters the right to woods they had been felling without permission after
his agent informed him that they had not been licensed to cut wood in six years. A report of
timber cut near Cappoquin detailed why a stand containing 14 trees was felled and outlined the
uses for the wood.
347
Boyle’s earliest grants demonstrated his concern with his rights as a
landlord, but the grants following 1614 signaled his move towards the aggressive and active
management of woods in response to more detailed information about their condition.
Boyle began codifying prohibitions against using standing trees in his leases. Beginning
in 1616, the majority of Boyle's leases restricted tenants to windfalls, roots, and “moots” for

344
NLI MS 43,281, Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v4, nos. 8, 18.
345
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v4, no. 155.
346
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v5, nos. 56, 6.
347
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v5, nos. 56, 14, 34.

205
their firewood and building materials.
348
Confining tenants to downed trees and roots departed
from previous grants that had permitted cutting trees with the permission of Boyle's woodward.
The concentration of leases with these restrictions is unique in the surviving documents. Only
five leases spread over a twenty-year span contained similar conditions.
349
Imposing these
conditions in Lisfinny wood and other stands of trees near Tallow marked a unique attempt to
preserve existing woodland by prohibiting felling.
Boyle's tenants and workmen claimed that they were following these restrictions.
Nicholas Symonton, a tenant accused of unlicensed felling near Bandon, justified his action by
claiming that he had taken only boughs from the tree. Moreover, the trees he surreptitiously
pruned were “not worth felling, utterly uncut for any kind of timber or wood being unfit to
clear.”
350
Tenants were beginning to draw on fallen trees, saving growing wood for other
purposes. Carpenters, joiners, and builders were drawing on boughs and crooked trees,
preserving tall, straight ones for Boyle. Symonton's justification demonstrates the presence of a
rough system of woodland classification in Munster. Some woods were “fit to clear” and could
be regenerated in coppices. Others should be selectively cut for specific joints or boards.
Others should only have boughs felled.
The move to harvest windfalls was also a response to perceived shortages and the failure
of other restrictions. Boyle had a woodward at Lisfinny to regulate his trees but nonetheless

348
The following leases restricted access to stumps and fallen trees: George Benbery; Osyas
Thorne; Cornelius Gafney; Joan Ellen; Thomas Warren; Thomas Ellwell (NLI MS 43,152/1);
John Lock (MS 43,156/3); Ambrosse Marshfielde (MS 43,156/4) Walter Nicholas; John
Offman; Sergeant Walter Jones (MS 43,156/5); Thomas Coffer; Boyle’s lease to William
Bragg (MS 43,156/6); and Boyle’s lease to Richard Fleming (MS 43,152/2), the first to offer
rights to both turf and wood.
349
Leases to James Foster (NLI MS 43,156/3); Henry Hull; Richard Bayly (MS 43,156/5);
Thomas Swayn (MS 43,153/5), National Library of Ireland; William Browning (MS
43,156/11).
350
Chatsworth House Cork MSS, v6, nos. 112, 135; v5, no. 144.

206
added lease conditions between 1616 and 1627 to halt felling for household use. His 1637 lease
to William Browning, which restricted Browning to downed trees and stumps, renewed a lease
granted in 1625 that had only required Browning to confine his wood use to assigned trees.
351

These moves suggest that Boyle felt his own attempts to regulate felling through a woodward
had failed. Forcing tenants to harvest downed and rotting timber represented a significant
downgrade in the quality of wood. Nonetheless, William Cook pleaded with Boyle in 1615 to
keep 40 wind-felled trees from the ironworkers, arguing that they were necessary to serve the
local population. In 1616, Cornelius Gaffny, a tenant from Tircullen, Co. Waterford voiced a
similar concern. He begged Boyle for wood to finish his mill. According to his request, Gaffny
had already built the walls of the mill from timber purchased nearby but was unable to locate
any more wood. “There is no manner of timber at all,” he lamented, “but only firewood.”
Gaffny's requirements were modest. He sought only “some oaken saplings” to keep the wind
and rain from spoiling his building.
352
Boyle and his tenants attempted to adapt to an already
developing shortage, not to prevent future dearth.
Boyle began granting tenants the right to cut turf for fuel around the same time as he
tightened restrictions on felling trees. The earliest turbary grants came in Clonakilty in 1615
and in Bandon in 1618. Both towns in west Cork had bogs that were used to provide fuel for
tenants almost as soon as Boyle acquired them. Each of Boyle's surviving leases from
Clonakilty granted turbary rights to his tenants and, when Boyle leased the bog that served
Clonakilty, he required that his tenants have uninterupted access to the bog to cut turf.
353
In

351
The 1625 lease to William Browning is in NLI MS 43,156/6. The 1637 lease in MS
43,156/11.
352
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, nos. 135, 150.
353
Bodleian Library, MS Carte 62 f. 137; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v6, no. 155; Leases to
Humphrey Fisher; John Binden; Richard Willoughby (NLI MS 43,146); Nicholas Barrham

207
1619, Boyle finalized his purchase of Bandon and several surrounding townlands from Henry
Becher.
354
From this date forward, Boyle rarely granted wood rights near Bandon. The only
leases that granted access to woods were for larger holdings outside of the town. For the town
itself, turf was the only source of fuel granted between 1619 and 1635.
355
At Tallow leases in
1620 and 1622 provided access to turf for fuel. The 1622 lease indicated that gathering turf at
Tallow may have been more expansive than the surviving documentary evidence indicates since
it granted “turf and turbary to be had and taken of the mountains where the rest of the tenants of
Tallow shall dig or cut the same.”
356
Boyle enumerated turbary rights in two areas where
conflict over woods had been greatest—Tallow and Bandon. English and Irish inhabitants had
likely used turf in these areas since their first arrival; therefore Boyle's turbary grants should be
seen as attempts to steer tenants towards turf as fuel and reduce pressure on woods.
In other parts of Boyle's holdings the tenants refused to obey these dictates. Boyle
acquired lands and the right to hold a fair at Bandon in 1614 and immediately sought to bring
similar woodland restrictions there. He appointed a woodward and had his agents order
workmen out of the woods. Boyle’s woodward John Nobbes informed Boyle that he had “been
careful of your woods...and forbidden the workmen, yet they came on still.” Unable to
physically stop the influx, Nobbes promised to report the incursion at the next assize. One of
Boyle’s tenants, Herbert Nichollas, provided Boyle with a list of men who cut his woods near

(MS 43,156/11).
354
Henry Becher’s lease to Richard Tickner (NLI MS 43,156/4); MS 43,094/4.
355
Lease to John Zane; William Bowlton (NLI MS 43,141/2); to William Wiseman; Captain
Richard Newce; John Turner; Robert Williams (MS 43,141/3); Francis Barnard; John West;
William Lovytt (MS 43,156/8); Walter Haynes (MS 43,156/9). The following leases were for
properties in the town and granted the right to enter Boyle’s turf land to cut and dry fuel:
Lease to Evan Wodroffe; Christopher Burke; Thomas Rowland; Nicholas Baker; Richard
Crofte; Mary Turner; John Moorley (MS 43,141/1); Richard Dabson; John Fenton (MS
43,156/4); Edward Turner; William Newman (MS 43,156/5).
356
Lease to John Offman (NLI MS 43,156/5); Richard Fleming (MS 43,152/2).

208
Bandon without permission but noted that none of those accused seemed likely to stop. John
Shipward disputed Boyle's right to the woods and dared Boyle to take the case to court. The
miller Robert Sheate bluntly informed Boyle’s agent that “he will cut and carry away in spite of
you.” On newly acquired land far from Boyle's major holdings, his writ held little sway. The
failure of these requests drove Boyle to a familiar tactic—buying out his opponent. At the end
of 1614, he acquired Henry Becher's lands, using the purchase to neutralize one of the men who
refused to cease cutting his woods. Nonetheless, complaints continued. The next year
Nathaniel Curteys lamented to Boyle that large numbers of Irish cottagers and cattle allowed to
roam across boundaries threatened his woodlands. By 1618 these confrontations had become
violent. Walter Cooke, Boyle's woodward for Clonakilty and Bandon, wrote that he had tried to
preserve the trees but that a group of men “struck me on the head with a dagger, and sent me to
the ground, and rising again cut me [across] the head.” The previous woodward, wrote Cooke,
had experienced similar treatment. An angry crowd “had broken his man's head” when he tried
to prevent them from taking wood.
357

Despite these setbacks, Boyle's management changes were beginning to take effect. He
and Ball negotiated new woodland conditions that won Boyle many of the concessions he
previously had failed to achieve. Boyle retained the power to mark trees and bark which Ball
could take. Ball agreed to enclose woods to protect them against animals and to set up coppices.
Evidence from a later lease suggests that coppices were set up near Tallow.
358
Leases and
letters from the 1620s and 1630s provide scattered references coppicing at other locations in

357
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v4, no. 160; v5, no. 156; v6, no. 36; v9, no. 139; NLI MS
43,094/2.
358
NLI MS 43,149/3; MS 43,156/6.

209
Cork and Waterford.
359
Settlers also made other attempts to protect regenerating forests.
Between 1628 and 1636, Boyle's agent for lands in west Cork, Morgan Polden prohibited his
tenants from “doing any waste or spoile upon any the young timber trees.” These restrictions
represented a departure from earlier leases that simply restricted felling.
360
Boyle and his agents
had come to realize by the end of the 1620s that they needed to supplement restrictions on
woodcutting and promoting turf as an alternative fuel with actions to regenerate felled trees.
Despite Boyle’s attempts to preserve woodlands through conservation, fuel substitution,
and regeneration, competition for fuel for ironworks boiled over at the end of the decade. By
1617, the East India Company ironworkers at Dundaniel, near Bandon, had begun to exhaust
their original store of wood and began looking for a new supply. Their search placed them in
direct competition with Boyle, who, his enemies claimed, resorted to dirty tricks to fend them
off. They accused the sheriff of Cork, who had partnered with Boyle in earlier woodcutting
enterprises, of commanding the East India Company ironworkers to tear down their weirs in
order to hamper their ironworks, claiming that they impeded salmon migrations.
361
Boyle’s
attempt to hobble the competing ironworks was an act of desperation. In 1618, his partner,
Thomas Ball, complained that high transportation costs and growing fuel prices resulting from
cutting restrictions had made the business untenable. Ball resigned his leases to Boyle, but they
did not part amicably. Boyle accused him of absconding with the timber, ore, and other stocks

359
See leases to Hugh Roberts and Edward Power (NLI MS 43,156/5); John Lowntagh (MS
43,151), Thomas Pomfrett (MS 43,156/10) and Thomas Mason (MS 43,156/8); MS 13,237/9.
360
See leases from Morgan Polden to John Powell, John Shulte, John Fowller, and George
Glanfield (NLI MS 43,156/7); to William Richard (MS 43,156/6); to Nicholas Shulte (MS
43,156/8); to Catherine Burlye (MS 43,156/9); Four years prior to this string of leases,
Polden had granted land without any protections for young timber trees. See the lease to
Robert in MS 43,156/6.
361
Paddy O’Sullivan, “The East India Company at Dundaniel,” Bandon Historical Journal 4
(1988), see especially pgs. 13-14, TNA SP 63/235 ff.110-111; for Boyle’s relationship with
Banaster see Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v8, no. 33; v9, no. 72; NLI MS 13,236/18.

210
from a forge and selling them to the East India Company. The case found its way before the
Privy Council and the Star Chamber, which set up arbitration. The settlement, reached in
October of 1619, dealt Boyle a heavy blow. His opponents retained the disputed forge stock,
and the Star Chamber ordered Boyle to pay over £1000 in cash or sow iron in punitive
damages.
362

Issues with Boyle's ironworks mounted through the early years of the 1620s as harvest
crises and coin shortages threw the Irish economy into disarray.
363
Competing ironworks in
Ireland and the Forest of Dean and a proposed ironworks in Newfoundland began to limit the
market for Boyle's iron. One of Boyle's Bristol clients refused to honor a contract with Boyle
and invested in the Dean works instead. In addition, Boyle's conflict with Ball prompted him to
export sow iron, a less-refined product, instead of the more refined bar iron he had previously
sold. Bristol merchants complained that there was no market for sows and pressed Boyle to
resume selling bars.
364
Boyle again attempted to sell bars, but English ironmongers
complained that there were quality issues with Boyle's iron, warning that it would only sell if it
was “good and well drawn” and complaining about the quality of Irish ore.
365
These quality
issues continued to plague Boyle's iron into the 1630s. In 1631, the London ironmonger George
Hooker attempted to diagnose the issues with Boyle's iron. After blaming careless workers,
Hooker sent samples of Boyle's iron to workers in England. The English ironworkers concluded
that Boyle's iron was “coldshere,” perhaps coldshort or containing too much phosphorous. They

362
NLI MS 43,297/2, 43,280, MS 13,236/16, MS 13,237/1; TNA SP 63/235 f.128, PC 2/30 ff.
307, 459, 447, 621.
363
Gillespie, “Meal and Money,” 75–95; idem, “Harvest Crisis in Early Seventeenth-Century
Ireland,” Irish Economic and Social History 11 (1984): 5–18.
364
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v10, no. 64; v11, nos. 36, 62, 116, 199; v12, no. 33; v13, nos.
58, 181 NLI MS 13,237/2.
365
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v10, no. 90; v12, no. 2.

211
added that when drawing the iron into bars the charcoal was failing to properly integrate with
the metal, leaving small holes throughout that rendered it unusable.
366

Issues over wood management may have contributed to many of these production issues.
In 1622, Blacknall provided instructions to Peter Baker to repair the mines at Ballyregan, which
provided some of the supplies for Boyle's ironworks. Water had flooded the pits, but by sinking
them deeper and building a water wheel in accordance with the plan included in the letter, the
mine might again produce. Over the next year, Baker complained that he was unable to carry
out this request due to lack of wood. He informed Boyle that he sought to use trees carefully
and when possible to take only bark or limbs, but “the mineworks must be kept up and propped
by timber.”
367
Finers needed to sufficiently heat ore and charcoal to burn off impurities in the
iron and residue from the charcoal. No documents survive to provide evidence for wood
consumption at Boyle's ironworks or the construction of the forges themselves, so the causes for
issues in iron production must remain unclear. Scattered evidence provides hints that wood
shortages may have been an issue. According to his agent Henry Wright, the stock of ore and
wood which Ball took during his dispute with Boyle in 1620 had not been replaced three years
later. Blacknall seconded Wright's complaint about stock shortages in 1623.
368
Boyle, however,
appeared to ignore complaints about wood shortages at the mine. His earlier dispute with Ball
pressed for the works to be maintained with less timber. In 1631, after learning that his iron was
plagued with impurities, Boyle blasted his workers, complaining that, in his absence, they
“failed in their workmanship.”
369

366
NLI MS 43,266/16; MS 13,237/13.
367
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v12, no. 136; NLI MS 43,266/12.
368
NLI MS 13,237/7; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v14, no. 301.
369
NLI MS 13,237/13.

212
After the iron issues that began the 1620s and 1630s, Boyle had several quiet years in
which he appeared to scale back iron production. In 1633, a group of London ironmongers
enjoined Boyle to cease sending nails and scraps. A year later, Thomas Bourke bluntly
informed Boyle, “You should cut no more of your Barre Iron into Nail Iron.” Boyle persisted in
making nails. In 1637, Boyle finalized a contract with his refiner at Lisfinny, Edward Russell.
Boyle granted Russell the right to dig through the cinder pit for scrap and to convert other scrap
iron to nails and “sufficient merchantable bar iron.”
370
His move to producing nails allowed
Boyle's laborers to conserve ore and fuel by recycling iron scraps. In the face of difficulty
finding fuel and selling his iron, Boyle sought to scale down his manufacturing efforts to more
manageable levels.
Despite scaling back iron production in the 1630s, other projects in the woods around
Bandon continued to draw on woodlands. In 1634, workmen began felling timber to build the
almshouse at Bandon. Boyle's construction venture displayed many of the hallmarks of his
previous woodland activities. He sought to reduce pressure on and competition for standing
trees. In this case, Boyle's agent Augustine Atkins attempted to purchase access to a turf bog to
provide fuel for tenants. He also sought to protect his own trees by acquiring woods on lands he
did not own. In this case, another of Boyle's Bandon agents, William Wiseman, sent workers to
fell trees on Donogh McCouger's plowlands. According to Wiseman, McCouger consented to
the workers harvesting his trees but then changed his mind and threatened to bring the case
before Boyle to stop Wiseman.
371
In addition to cutting timber to build his almshouse, Boyle
also had workers strip bark from trees near Bandon.
372

370
NLI MS 13,237/1; MS 43,266/16; MS 43,096.
371
NLI MS 13,237/17-18; Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v17, no. 191.
372
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v19, no. 119.

213
Boyle's moves to scale back iron production appear to have corresponded with
decreasing concern with a decline in his previously stringent lease restrictions in the 1630s.
After 1627, leases at Tallow began to provide inconsistent wood rights. Some offered no wood
rights at all. Others continued to limit collection to fallen trees and roots. Others allowed the
tenant to fell wood for fuel and construction. One lease requiring the construction of an English
house mandated that the tenants build a roof “of sawed timber and covered with slat.” Many of
the leases made no mention of woodlands as assets reserved to Boyle or granted to tenants.
373

In 1637, Boyle's leases at Tallow began to include more frequent references to turbary rights
along with the suggestion that other tenants at Tallow whose leases have not survived also had
those rights.
374

In 1638, as we have already discussed, Boyle's woodland management provoked a new
skirmish in the ongoing battle between him and Strafford in which Boyle was accused of
encroaching on woodlands belonging to other landowners. Strafford and the parties suing Boyle
accused him of thoughtless destruction motivated by unchecked greed, but Boyle's
correspondence with his Lismore estate agent John Walley shows that the motivations for
Boyle's actions were far more complex. Walley warned Boyle that “preservation of your
Lordship's woods which is one of the most necessary things to be looked unto.” Walley's letter

373
Several of Boyle’s leases made no mentions of woodlands at all. See the leases to Henry
Gay; William Bluett; William Todd; William Jones; John Marren; Thomas Carter; Lawrence
Lyne (NLI MS 43,152/2); John Warren; Roger Bartlett (MS 43,156/9); Alice Halin (MS
43,156/10); Rebecca Uphall; John Sanders; Richard Casey; Richard Taylor (MS 43,152/3);
Only one lease limited wood rights to downed trees and roots: John Symonds (MS 43,152/2);
Some long-time tenants retained the right to cut wood for fuel and consturction without pre-
approval from Boyle’s woodward: William Greatrakes (MS 43,156/9); Boyle required one
tenant to build with sawed timber, a move away from construction with windfalls: Thomas
Taylor (MS 43,152/2).
374
See Boyle’s leases to William Bragg (MS 43,156/6); Frances Poole (MS 43,152/3); Walter
Nicholas (MS 43,156/5)

214
implied that those efforts had failed miserably as a result of incompetent execution of Boyle's
conservation policies and excessive demand. Walley replaced Boyle's woodward at Lisfinny
and informed Boyle that the coppices which were supposed to supply Boyle's forges at
Mogeely, Arglin, and Cappoquin were insufficient. Felling those coppices to provide timber for
one forge would leave the others without fuel because they were too small and had been raided
by wood-hungry tenants. In the meantime, Walley and Adam Waring began searching to
purchase woods to make up for the shortage. They struggled to do so. The lord of Kilmallock
in Limerick refused to sell any wood besides green wood and windfalls “all of it in such deep
and narrow glens as little use can be made of it.”
375
Boyle's desperate scramble to find enough
wood to meet his needs continued in 1639 along with his political difficulties. He searched for
wood around Munster but his desperation led to continued problems with the Lord Deputy and
Anglo-Irish lords who blocked his attempts to buy woodlands. After procuring some timber and
felling coppices, Walley informed Boyle that he would run out of fuel well before he completed
the 200 tons of bar iron he was tasked to produce that year and continued to issue forth a torrent
of complaints about wasted woods.
376
1640 brought no relief. Accusations of destruction flew
in west Cork, and one correspondent informed Boyle that tenants simply ignored his orders to
cease felling trees. Walley's anger with the woodward at Lisfinny grew: “For the waste of
wood, Charles Pyne is the cause, that doth look to prevent it.” Boyle's agents continued to
struggle to find wood.
377

Boyle was not alone in his struggle to find wood. In 1641, Perceval's agent informed
him that after months of searching he still had not found a supply of timber. Woodworkers, the

375
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v19, no. 62; NLI MS 43,266/17.
376
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v20, no. 79*; v19, nos. 85, 97; v20, nos. 11, 68; NLI MS
13,237/21.
377
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v21, nos. 16, 20, 30; NLI MS 13,237/25; MS 13,237/25.

215
agent complained, refused to cut trees “because that they might lose their labor because they had
been so often stopped and lost their labor.”
378
The woodworkers' challenge and the refusal of
Irish landowners to sell their timber made it increasingly difficult for large planters to satiate
their demand for timber. The woodworkers feared that rapid exploitation threatened their
livelihood and attempted to preserve trees they did not own by withholding their labor. Their
action added to the number of voices within the New English community who challenged
forestry practices they deemed exploitative.
The wood shortage that plagued Boyle from 1638 to 1641 emerged from the failure of
Boyle's wood management practices, not their absence. From his first arrival in Ireland, Boyle
had used a combination of leases for wood rights and his own woodlands to provide fuel,
construction materials, and the supplies for his pipestave and iron-making ventures. On his own
lands, Boyle enacted numerous measures to preserve woods that grew stricter in response to
wood shortages in the 1610s and 1620s. Boyle did not rely solely on prohibitions to preserve
woods but deployed regeneration programs that contemporaries used to manage English forests.
He also sought to ease the pressure on his own woodlands by promoting turf as a fuel where it
was available. These policies failed to produce enough timber to meet the demand from Boyle's
iron forges. In moments of political and economic crisis in 1619 and from 1638 to 1641, the
flaws in Boyle’s conservation and replanting strategies became apparent. Boyle sought to both
maintain the forests on lands he owned while also continuously profiting from pipestave and
iron production. His antagonistic relationships with his English merchant partner (Ball) and
with the English Lord Deputy (Strafford) threatened the precarious basis for his system.

378
BL Add. MSS 46,924 f. 186.

216
“Subject to blasting”: environmental feedbacks and conservation in Bermuda
The history of woodland management in Bermuda showed marked differences from
Munster. English settlers in Bermuda experienced immediate environmental feedbacks from
deforestation when hurricanes and tropical storms destroyed their crops and crafted policies to
respond to them. In addition, the scale of woodlands in Bermuda and the presence of high value
trees traded as luxury goods prompted different regulatory practices. Unlike Munster, where the
desire to sustain profits and issues of access to fuel and construction materials drove woodland
management, Bermudians saw trees as essential protection against harsh winds from tropical
storms. Nonetheless, Bermudians and the adventurers who backed the colony still sought to
transform the islands’ trees to ensure their profit. Examining the motives for conserving trees in
the context of attempts to transform the islands’ woodlands demonstrates that, unlike the
attempts to protect native birds, which we have already discussed, Bermudian conservation
schemes were firmly rooted in English attempts to settle and transform the islands.
From the accidental landing of the Sea Venture during a storm, two trees defined early
English settlements in Bermuda—the cedar and the palmetto. The Bermuda cedar (juniperus
bermudiana) is, in botanical fact, not a cedar at all but a juniper. It was at the time of English
settlement, the most dominant tree in Bermuda. The Bermuda palmetto (sabal bermudana) is a
species of cabbage palmetto related to those common in the southern United States. Each
species had adapted to Bermuda’s unique environmental conditions, developing root systems,
bark, and leaves tolerant of high winds and salt spray.
379
English settlers on the islands

379
For further information on these species see the entries from the Bermuda Department of
Conservation Services. http://www.conservation.bm/bermuda-cedar/ and
http://www.conservation.bm/bermuda-palmetto/.

217
immediately developed uses for each, but the different economic niches each filled led to
dramatically different systems of regulation and valuation for each.
The first English report on Bermuda cedars painted them in glowing, if slightly
disappointed terms. William Strachey wrote that Bermuda’s cedars were “fairer than ours here
in Virginia,” although they were not the famous cedars of Lebanon described by Peter Martyr.
Nonetheless, they produced a pleasant berry, which he compared to a currant. In contrast, his
description of Bermuda’s palmettos vacillated between reports of utility and lamentations of
valuelessness. The palmettos were “not the right Indian palms, such as in San Juan, Puerto
Rico.” They did not bear coconuts or figs and had a trunk “sappy and spongious, unfirm for any
use.” Yet the leaves proved excellent shelter against “the greatest storm,” the bark could be
peeled and dried to form paper, and most fantastically Strachey claimed that he spotted
“silkworms” among the leaves, which he confusingly claimed were similar to the cochineal
found on the prickly pear cactus described by José de Acosta.
380
Strachey’s descriptions
conveyed practical uses for each tree as well as ways to use each as a merchantable commodity.
Within a few years, settlers and writers had clearly abandoned Strachey’s optimistic, if
muddled, claims about the insects growing on the palmetto. Letters from Bermuda reveal that
the tree served to roof houses and likely other utilitarian purposes, but that it had been deemed
“unprofitable” due to the lack of any saleable goods to be generated from it. Governor Butler
recommended that adventurers order their tenants to dig up palmettos and replant olives and
mulberries. If only Bermudians could enact this replacement, Butler continued, “what a little
Paradise would your sweet islands prove.”
381
In contrast, commercial exploitation of large
cedars as timber had been part of the Sommer Islands Company’s plan to derive profit since

380
Wright, A Voyage to Virginia, 23.
381
Ives, The Rich Papers, 10; 20–21; 222.

218
early 1616. The commercial applications for cedar planks had produced some form of
regulation protecting the trees from illegal felling, under which at least one man was prosecuted,
though unfortunately the specifics do not survive.
382
As in Munster, settlers and governors
created legal protections for trees that could be used in timbering; however, in Bermuda no
regulations governed trees with more quotidian utility.
In Bermuda, wind forced the islands’ governors to reconsider their forestry policies. As
early as 1617, settlers began complaining that strong gusts had “blasted” their corn and tobacco,
leaving them with shortages of food and no commodities to send to England. In 1620, Governor
Butler lamented that “huge great winds and their frequent blasts” left settlers consistently unable
to provide good returns for adventurers and left public projects in a state of disrepair.
383
In
1622, the Company took steps to mitigate the destructive effects of wind. They required settlers
to protect “all sorts of trees” because they “defend the Islands from winds and tempests.”
Although Bermudians had deemed the palmetto unprofitable, the Company appeared to
recognize that they served an important purpose as windbreaks. Nonetheless, the company did
not completely abandon commercial timbering. Instead, they attempted to create a system of
oversight to ensure that they could exercise tight control over felling. One act prohibited
anyone from cutting down trees unless an overseer had surveyed the land and approved the
action. Another regulation banned anyone from exporting trees, save to owners in England.
384

The Company backed these acts with action, issuing orders to the master of the Barnstable the

382
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:114; Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:11.
383
Ives, The Rich Papers, 49; 99; 180.
384
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 2:569.

219
same year to refuse “any planks or chests of cedar wood, full or empty...without the Governor's
special warrant.”
385

The commercial market for cedars became crucial to Bermuda’s economy in the years
following the acts to preserve trees. As Bermuda’s tobacco declined in quality and price
between 1622 and 1626, adventurers often received only small shipments of potatoes, oranges,
and plantains. Without tobacco, cedar planks appeared to be one of the few truly valuable
commodities the islands could produce. Through these tough years, Bermuda’s governors took
steps to prohibit unlicensed cutting.
386
But by the 1630s, this system of regulations began to
show cracks. In 1632, the council reiterated the 1622 acts preserving woodlands and extended
them to include “yellow wood trees.”
387
The council enacted these measures with good reason.
Two of the London adventurer William Lecroft's tenants—James Ragsdall and John
Trimmingham—found themselves in dispute over the cedar on their shares. Trimmingham and
Ragsdall negotiated a lease with Lecroft where each should receive a division of land with equal
timber. Upon finding that Trimmingham's share contained more timber, Ragsdall began felling
trees. The alarmed Lecroft wrote the council repudiating the entire agreement and ordering
Ragsdall to cease and desist immediately.
388

In contrast, there appears to have been little enforcement of the ostensible protections
against felling palmettos. The only record of legislative or judicial attention to palmettos in the
1620s came in 1627, when the council passed an act prohibiting anyone from felling palmetto
trees to make “bibbie,” a cheap liquor fermented from the hearts of the palmettos. The purpose
of this legislation was social control, not the preservation of property or protection against the

385
Ibid, 3: 536.
386
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:347; 373; Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:40.
387
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:166–167.
388
Ibid, 1:205.

220
wind. The authors of the act complained, “Servants and other ill disposed persons...spend much
time and thrift in drinking thereof to the prejudice of their masters and undertakers and evil
example unto other good inhabitants of this plantation.”
389
Palmettos, the act suggested, not
only failed to offer any profits for the Company or adventurers, they undermined public order
and sobriety by yielding a cheap liquor to distract settlers from more profitable pursuits.
The sets of regulations, prosecutions, and negotiations over cedar and palmetto in the
1620s and early 1630s convinced adventurers that Bermuda’s endemic trees could not serve as
effective replacements for declining tobacco profits. In the 1630s, adventurers resumed their
search for imported trees that would serve as windbreaks but also allow for the production of
profitable bulk commodities. In 1632, settlers attempted to cultivate “oil seeds,” which were
either olive trees, castor oil plants (ricinus communis), African oil palms (elaeis guineensis), or
part of the aleurites genus, which the council immediately protected with an injunction against
“purloiners” stealing oil trees. The next year, Governor Roger Wood shipped a box of seeds
back to England with a letter requesting an oil press to refine them in Bermuda.
390
Despite this
auspicious beginning, correspondence from 1634 revealed a confused mess of production,
refining, and sale. One of Wood's letters lamented low output of seeds as the result of
Bermuda's lingering malady—tobacco overproduction. In another, he proudly exclaimed, “We

389
Lefroy, Memorials, 1:453; Restrictions on drinking were common fare for early modern
English governments, particularly at times of social upheaval or economic distress. See
Keith Wrightson, “Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590-1660,” in
Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and
Leisure, ed. Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (1981), 1–27; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A
Social History, 1200-1830 (1983); Steve Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of Poor
Relief in Rural England C. 1550-1750 (2004).
390
According to the OED, “oil tree” has been used to refer to any of the above plants. Among
the potential species planted in Bermuda, a member of the aleurites genus is least likely as
they were primarily cultivated in Asia. Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands
Company, 1:166–167; 178–179.

221
have planted and gathered so much seed as it may be likened to Joseph's provision for corn in
Egypt.” Wood sat on this abundance unable to find a press to extract the oil, a complaint he
repeated in another letter that year. This technical limitation was the least of Wood's problems.
“Before I will put a finger to a press to make this oil for 12d a gallon,” he spat, “I will pluck up
all my trees and burn them.” Wood issued this threat for good reason. He wrote the adventurer
Thomas Cumberford that one of his tenants in Paget's tribe, John Carter, had planted no tobacco,
only oil seeds. He had so many that “no men will buy them of him nor can he make [oil]
himself for all the Tribes’ estates will not erect a mill and press for that business.” The other
tenants in Paget's learned from Carter's mistake and tore up their trees to plant tobacco, lest the
low price of oil “make us all beggars.” On John Woodall's shares in Paget's, tenants simply left
their homes, convinced that the leases for half tobacco and half oil would leave them destitute.
The problems with oil occurred in other parts of the islands. Wood reported that in Smith's tribe
“most men pull up their trees and intend to plant Tobacco [in] their places for they cannot sell
their seed rough.” It would be better, Wood wrote, “the land should lie fallow than worn out for
no profit.”
391

In 1634, William Jessop ordered his agent in Bermuda to cease renting Rich shares in
Hamilton tribe for tobacco, which was “like to be of small value.” Instead, Jessop, Warwick,
and Rich all implored their tenants to pursue junipers and “juniper juice,” which was “likely to
be of good value.” Like the oil trees they required a press, which only one tenant had built.
Like the oil trees Wood described, Warwick lamented that the juniper juice sold poorly.
Despite, Rich, Warwick, and Jessop's encouragement of juniper, their tenants apparently
responded the same way as their fellow Bermudians and tore out their trees. Unlike annual

391
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:185; 187; 203; 209; 218; Lefroy,
Memorials, 1:538.

222
crops of corn or tobacco, trees, even shrubby ones like juniper, take years to mature and bear
fruit. The earl of Warwick correctly deduced that planting and destroying them in a few years
prevented “more accurate trial...of the commodity.”
392
After such an abysmal start to the
enterprise, Rich continued actively promoting it in 1635. He praised Christopher Parker's
efforts and offered him refining machinery and labor and chastised Thomas Durham for not
working hard enough “although as yet your encouragement be small and the price uncertain.”
393

Rich's message was clear: settlers who followed the patterns of cultivation he desired would be
rewarded with access to resources and labor.
394
Those who did not would be left to fend for
themselves.
Like the experiment with oil trees, commodity prices doomed the Nathaniel Rich and the
earl of Warwick’s experiment with juniper juice. Despite these spectacular failures, smaller
attempts at planting citrus orchards proved more successful. Rich, Warwick, and Jessop's
tenants sent back oranges, lemons, pineapples, and plantains. Although the pineapples and
plantains came back spoiled, the London recipients expressed their pleasure with the goods and
expressed the hope that more would be forthcoming.
395
The next year more oranges made it
back to England and were met with further encouragement from Rich and Jessop, who pressed
settlers to add pomegranate, citron, and other trees to their shares.
396
Despite the enthusiasm for
pomegranates and citrus in their correspondence, adventurers continued to offer leases that
required their tenants to produce tobacco.

392
BL Add. Mss. 63,854 ff. 2, 5, 10, 13-15, 18-20, 77-79.
393
BL Add. Mss. 63,854 ff. 133, 136-137.
394
Rich’s letter to Thomas Kemble praised Kemble for keeping a vineyard and promised him
timber and labor to improve it. Rich also informed Kemble that his request for more laborers
depended on his success with juniper. BL Add. Mss. 63854 f. 134.
395
BL Add. Mss. 63,854 ff. 10, 13-17, 77-82.
396
BL Add. Mss. 63,854 ff. 131, 134, 148-150.

223
The continued commercial failure of Bermudian tobacco put strain on regulations
designed to conserve cedars. As the 1630s progressed, tenants began harvesting cedars and
other trees with greater vigor, despite regulations prohibiting felling the trees. In Paget's tribe,
settlers battled against churchwardens to prevent them from chopping down all the trees on their
common land. Another tenant in Paget's “turned cooper” leaving the land “impoverished of
timber.” Nathaniel Rich pressed both the governor and his tenants to procure him four cedar
trees for construction in England.
397
Even tenants under Rich's watchful eye wound up
destroying woodlands. In 1635, he lamented to Thomas Durham that his tenants at Crawl had
“unnecessarily wasted” the trees and urged him “hereafter to prevent all injurious course in that
kind.” Nonetheless, he continued to ask after cedar boards.
398

Rich’s actions provide a useful epilogue for the story of timber management in
Bermuda. Slightly more than a decade earlier, adventurers, the Company, and the government
in Bermuda had passed regulations aimed at preserving Bermuda’s woodlands, recognizing the
important role that trees played in protecting the islands from the full brunt of Atlantic storms.
Just three years after the council in Bermuda re-iterated the preservation measures, Rich’s
motivation appears to have shifted. In the face of failing tobacco revenues, cedar planks became
a crucial source of income. The increased commercial importance of the trees did not eliminate
regulations of felling them. Instead, landlords and the Bermudian government sought to control
felling to ensure that adventurers, whose hopes of tobacco profits were proving illusory, could
still continue to derive some value from their island holdings.

397
Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company, 1:204; 206; BL Add. Mss. 63,854 ff.
18-19, 21.
398
BL Add. Mss. 63,854 ff. 136-137

224
“Great labor and great loss:” the political economy of woods in Virginia
Attempts to develop woodland industries in Virginia reveal the nexus of economic,
political, and ecological conditions that impeded the development of these commodities in the
first half of the seventeenth century. The Virginia Company and its settlers attempted to
establish trade in silk, iron, pitch and tar, and timber to no avail. Settlers struggled to translate
the diverse range of commodities described in promotional literature into stable and profitable
trade. The arrangement of trees within Virginia’s woodlands made silk and pitch production
difficult without substantial changes to the landscape and increased labor. Iron and timber both
offered opportunities for profit less constrained by woodland type; however, settlers and the
Company pursued iron and timber with a keen eye on the international trade in both. The
Virginia Company and many prominent settlers saw Virginia’s woodlands through the lenses of
commodities, but doing so blinded them to differences between North American and European
woods.
The area along the James River where the English first settled overlapped with a series
of ecological borderlands where vegetation and terrain slowly transition. Moving from south to
north the longleaf pine becomes less prevalent and oak-hickory-pine forests become more
common. Moving from east to west, the terrain becomes hillier and oak comes to dominate
forests. The river also carved out further division with the ebb and flow of its waters.
Floodplains and patches of swampy land housed bottomland oaks, red maple, green ash,
sweetgum, and American elm, and areas of bald cypress, pond cypress, and water tupelo.
Variations in soil nutrients and flood patterns produce variations in vegetation. The blurry

225
boundaries and subtle gradations between geology, hydrology, and climate supported a diverse
range of plant and animal life.
399

Long before the English arrived, natives in the region had adapted to the diversity that
surrounded them. Algonquian-speaking peoples from the James River to the Chesapeake Bay
supported themselves with agriculture, hunting, fishing, and gathering that shifted according to
seasonal availability. Their activities further contributed to the shape of the landscape. They
used fire to clear fields for agriculture, fertilize land, and hunt deer. Periodic burning shaped the
forests and vegetation, creating stands of successional pines and grasslands in abandoned fields.
There were notes of discord within this relatively harmonious relationship. Some scholars have
speculated that over-hunting may have threatened the white-tailed deer population, though these
claims are tenuous. More significantly, the increasing power of the Powhatan people created
conflicts over resource use. These struggles were over access to resources in different
landscapes—namely fishing and hunting grounds—rather than attempts to transform the
countryside.
400

English settlers in Virginia immediately perceived the value of pine trees. The need for
naval stores to outfit the king’s vessels animated plantation efforts across the Atlantic.
401
A
store of pine trees promised an opportunity to manufacture pitch and tar and the Virginia

399
Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South
Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800, Studies in Environment and History (1990), 1–5; Virginia
Department of Conservation and Recreation, “The Natural Communities Of Virginia
Classification Of Ecological Community Groups,” Virginia Department of Conservation and
Recreation, accessed February 5, 2015,
http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural_heritage/natural_communities/ncoverview.shtml.
400
Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner, Before and after Jamestown: Virginia’s
Powhatans and Their Predecessors (2002); idem, “The Powhatans and the English: A Case
of Multiple Conflicting Agendas,” in Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722, ed. Helen C.
Rountree (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 173–205.
401
For example, see William Strachey’s dedicatory to Sir Allen Apsley, an Irish planter and
commissioner for the navy. Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1758.

226
Company sent over Polish artisans to set up production. They soon encountered issues. In
1620, John Pory wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys informing him that the Polish workers had produced
pitch and tar but warning that he should not expect large quantities of it. The Polish workers
informed him that Virginia’s pine stands grew only in small groves and that gathering enough
trees to start the industry would result in “great labor and great loss.”
402
In their response to
inquiries from London, the governor and council in Virginia downplayed Pory’s assessment of
Virginia’s woods. The issue, they claimed, was labor: the cost was high and the Polish workers
had grown recalcitrant after being made freedmen.
403

The difference between Pory’s assessment, on the one hand, and the governor and
council’s, on the other, revealed how perceptions of commercial viability shaped visions of
Virginia’s landscape. Pory wrote to Sandys offering a candid assessment. In contrast, the
governor and council faced pressure from the Company to show results. Between 1618 and
1622, the Virginia Company launched multiple initiatives at diversification under the control of
the Sandys group. As Wesley Craven documented in his classic study of the Virginia Company,
the political pressure on the Sandys group was immense. The Company denied any issues with
Virginia’s physical environment to avoid abandoning options for economic diversification. The
Company’s demise changed the opinion of the government in Virginia. In 1628, a new
governor and council attempted to reconcile the reports of abundance with difficulties setting up
pitch and tar works. Virginia possessed numerous pines, they wrote, but the stands were
scattered and the settlers were unable to carry felled trees to a central location without quickly
pushing the cost of the pitch and tar above their potential return.
404
The new government made

402
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 1:251; FP 177.
403
FP 256.
404
Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company; TNA CO 1/4 ff. 118r-121r.

227
it clear that they had little interest in producing a commodity that was not economically viable,
unless the king demanded it.
Timber and iron production were less constrained by forest structure. Charcoal makers
and sawyers could process trees of different species and ages, though they had preferences.
Nonetheless, seventeenth-century English settlers did not fell Virginia’s trees in large numbers
to produce either commodity. In both cases, price was the issue. Commodification of
Virginia’s woods was a failure. As they had done to produce pitch and tar, the Company drew
on European artisans, in this case sawyers from Hamburg occasionally referred to as Dutch.
Failure to provide beer rations and difficulty locating appropriate streams to power a mill
slowed the enterprise, but multiple correspondents warned the Company that even after these
issues were ironed out, transportation costs were greater than the value of timber or boards.
405

Unlike Ireland, where planters could turn profits selling pipestaves to European and English
merchants, distance and transportation limited the exploitative possibilities for Virginians. The
failure of timber to achieve commodity status did not mean that settlers left Virginia’s trees
alone. Other companies set up saw mills on their own land to provide timber for housing and
other construction projects. After the demise of the Virginia Company in 1625, the remaining
English colonists built a wooden palisade between Queen’s and Archer’s Hope Creeks.
406
They
felled trees in Virginia’s woods to meet local needs rather than international or trans-Atlantic
demands.

405
FP 177; FP 256; Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 3:486–487; 1:392–393.
406
Philip Levy, “A New Look at an Old Wall. Indians, Englishmen, Landscape, and the 1634
Palisade at Middle Plantation,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 3
(January 1, 2004): 226–65; idem, “Middle Plantation’s Changing Landscape: Persistence,
Continuity, and the Building of Community,” in Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the
Old Dominion, ed. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, (2011), 185–206.

228
The failed attempts to set up iron production in Virginia provide the most detailed
example of the relationship between labor, forest structure, and the international economy. On
the morning of March 22, 1622 Powhatan warriors crept towards the fledgling ironworks at
Falling Creek, in present-day Chesterfield County, Virginia. Without warning, they fell upon
the English settlement. At the onset of the attack, the colonists fled for their lives. A few may
have attempted to shelter in a small stone hideaway at the site, but to no avail. Two children
managed to conceal themselves in reeds along the creek: they would be the only survivors.
Twenty-seven English men, women, and children perished in the assault, including the
ironmaster and all of the workers onsite. As the Powhatans attacked the site’s inhabitants, they
shredded bellows, hurled iron tools and building stones into the river, and slaughtered the
draught animals. After this destruction, English projects to produce iron in a blast furnace in
Virginia lapsed for a century.
407

407
The project left such a sparse documentary record that some historians doubted it existed
until archaeologists and metallurgists analyzed artifacts accidentally unearthed and
examined in the 1950s and 1960s. FP 449; Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia
Company, 3:565; 548; 670–671; Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, 2:444–452; Edward
Neal Hartley, Ironworks on the Saugus: The Lynn and Braintree Ventures of the Company of
Undertakers of the Ironworks in New England (1971), 29–43 Hartley wrote that his own
inspection of the purported site in 1951 yielded no physical evidence that an ironworks had
ever existed there. The narrative of the discovery of the Falling Creek site can be found in
Thurlow Gates Gregory, “Iron of America Was Made First in Virginia” (Cleveland, OH,
April 17, 1957), VHS MSS7:3 HD9510 G861:1; It was first published in Charles E. Hatch
and Thurlow Gates Gregory, “The First American Blast Furnace, 1619-1622: The Birth of a
Mighty Industry on Falling Creek in Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography 70, no. 3 (July 1, 1962): 259–296; Further archaeological work was carried out in
the 1960s and 1990s that appeared to confirm Gregory’s thesis. See Howard A. MacCord,
Sr., “Exploratory Excavations at the First Ironworks in America,” in Pots, Pipes, and Trash
Pits, ed. Edward Bottoms and Cynthia S Hansen, vol. 1, (2006), 95–107 and Thomas F.
Higgins et al, Archaeological Investigations Of Site 44CF7, Falling Creek Iron Works And
Vicinity, Chesterfield County, Virginia (1995), report on file at the Virginia Department of
Historic Resources; Subsequent historians have accepted the archaeological evidence from
Falling Creek. See James A. Mulholland, A History of Metals in Colonial America (1981),
22–24; John S. Salmon, “Ironworks on the Frontier: Virginia’s Iron Industry, 1607-1783,”

229
General histories of early Virginia spend little time on the ironworks, treating it as one of
many doomed attempts at economic diversification.
408
But recent reappraisals of Virginia’s
economic development and of political economy in the English Atlantic have called for

Virginia Cavalcade 35, Autumn (1986): 184–191; Robert B. Gordon, “Industrial
Archeology of American Iron and Steel,” IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial
Archeology 18, no. 1/2 (January 1, 1992): 5–18; idem, American Iron, 1607-1900 (1996),
55; John Bezís-Selfa, Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious
Revolution. (2004), 45-49. Archaeological work since 1994 has cast doubt on Hatch and
Gregory’s assessment of the material evidence that the furnace had produced iron. Geoffrey
Jones has conducted magnetic imaging that offers new clues on the location of the
seventeenth century forge in, “Geophysical Investigation at the Falling Creek Ironworks, an
Early Industrial Site in Virginia,” Archaeological Prospection 8, no. 4 (December 1, 2001),
247–56. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesized location of the forge from earlier
analysis. Lyle E. Browning has presented a convincing case against the previous material
evidence in “Falling Creek Ironworks: Past, Geophysics, and Future,” Quarterly Bulletin of
the Archeological Society of Virginia 60, no. 1 (March 2005), 43–55. Audrey Horning
summarizes these findings and echoes Browning’s doubts in Ireland in the Virginian Sea,
309. Browning has begun to systematically re-evaluate the physical evidence at the site. He
has found no evidence that the blast furnace produced before its destruction, though new
excavations and carbon dating of artifacts may provide more clues in the coming years. For
current projects at Falling Creek see http://www.fallingcreekironworks.org/.
408
More general histories of early Virginia spend little time on the ironworks, treating it as one
of the ill-advised attempts at economic diversification under Sir Edwin Sandys between
1619 and 1624. Philip Alexander Bruce has argued that mercantilism was the impetus
behind economic diversification, a ridiculous diversion from agricultural necessities, and the
political force that hobbled Virginia’s nascent manufactures. See Economic History of
Virginia, vol. 2, chap. 17; and vol. 1, 46–51; 275; Karen Kupperman has provided more
nuanced accounts for the failure of economic diversification schemes including political,
cultural, and environmental factors. See “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early
Colonial Period” and The Jamestown Project, 299–303; Brenner mentioned the ironworks
explicitly but argued that they, alongside Sandys’s other projects, had little chance of
success due to lack of merchant investment or gentry support. See Merchants and
Revolution, 94-99. Jean and J. Elliott Russo pointed to the tension between the Virginia
Company private land grants and their attempts to encourage company projects while also
emphasizing environmental factors. Planting an Empire; James Perry offered the bluntest
assessment of economic diversification projects, arguing that their failure was “inevitable.”
Perry, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 16–17; Theodore Rabb
offered a similarly blunt assessment of diversification schemes, claiming they were
“doomed from the start,” though he hints that ironworks may have had a slightly greater
chance of success. See Jacobean Gentleman, 348-349. One major exception to this
narrative is Billings, “Sir William Berkeley and the Diversification of the Virginia
Economy”.

230
historians to reexamine the received narrative of English expansion.
409
The Falling Creek
furnace provides an ideal case study for reassessing English settlement under the Virginia
Company (1607-1624). Specifically, examining the Virginia ironworks in its Atlantic context
forces us to reconsider how contemporaries understood their economic world and how that
economic vision shaped the environmental history of Virginia. While it remains uncertain
whether the blast furnace ever produced iron, its destruction marked a decisive moment in the
history of English policies towards woodlands in Virginia.
English promoters marshaled fears of acute domestic wood shortages as one justification
for planting colonies in Virginia. The aggressive rhetoric of shortage, however, attempted to
mask evidence that necessity would not drive iron production to Virginia. John Smith and
William Strachey each recounted attempts to take advantage of the colony’s iron deposits in
1608 and 1609. According to Strachey, the East India Company (EIC) purchased ore shipped
back in 1609 and preferred it “before any other Iron of what Country soever.”
410
Despite the

409
In July of 2011, the William and Mary Quarterly published a forum on new histories of the
Chesapeake that advanced the call for historians to reassess the region. In particular see John
C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early
Virginia,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 332–60; Paul G. E.
Clemens, “Reimagining the Political Economy of Early Virginia,” The William and Mary
Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 393–97; Peter A. Coclanis, “Tobacco Road: New Views
of the Early Chesapeake,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 398–
404; William A. Pettigrew, “Historicizing Supply and Demand in Early American Economic
History: The Importance of Transatlantic Politics,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no.
3 (July 1, 2011): 409–13; April Lee Hatfield, “Slavery, Trade, War, and the Purposes of
Empire,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 405–8; see also
Hatfield's earlier work, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century
(2004) and Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs edited volume further expanding on the
themes of the roundtable, Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, (2011);
For a provocative call to revisit the political economy of the British Atlantic see Pincus,
“Rethinking Mercantilism," 3–34.
410
Smith, The General Historie, 71–72; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia
Britania (1612), ed. Louis B Wright (1953), 132; Hatch and Gregory, “The First American
Blast Furnace, 1619-1622,” 262; Hartley, Ironworks on the Saugus, 29–30.

231
apparent quality of Virginia ore, the enterprise never got off the ground. The EIC did not pursue
more shipments, and instead launched a project to erect ironworks and a shipbuilding facility at
Dundaniel Castle in County Cork in Ireland in 1610.
411
Dudley Digges and other English writers
and merchants contested the rhetoric of shortage employed by the Virginia Company.
412

In November 1619, just days after the Privy Council had ordered Boyle to make
reparations to Burrell, Sir Edwin Sandys told the other leaders of the Virginia Company that he
intended “very shortly to set in hand with ironworks.” Instead of returning to the East India
Company, Sandys and the other Company leaders looked to English iron producers. Benjamin
Bluett and David Middleton were both from extensive Sussex families with iron manufacturing
backgrounds. Both families were in the process of expanding their iron businesses beyond
Sussex and Kent. Bluett’s records show that he had been visiting members of the Virginia
Company since 1618, but that he began preparation for the ironworks “in earnest” sometime in
1619, composing a report for the chief adventurers of the Virginia Company and investigating
sources of men and materials at several English ironworks. The timing was particularly good for
Middleton, whose erstwhile business partner, the holder of a valuable monopoly selling guns,
had taken over a forge from him without compensation or notification. Middleton’s relations
had set up a blast furnace in Leicestershire at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Other
family members began building ironworks in Staffordshire at roughly the same time as the
Virginia enterprise.
413
Middleton and Bluett appear to have drawn on these connections to

411
Eileen McCracken, “Charcoal-Burning Ironworks in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Ireland”; TNA SP 63/229 F.192.
412
See chapter 1.
413
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 1:258. “Bluett” and “Middleton” appear
frequently in the Wealden Iron Research Group’s database of ironworkers
http://www.wirgdata.org/; For work on the Middleton family see King, “The Iron Trade in
England and Wales 1500-1815,” chap. 4 especially pg. 3 (fn. 13); 5-6; 11-12; 15; For more

232
source the workers, materials, and inspiration for the ironworks. According to the accounts they
submitted to the Virginia Company, Bluett took several trips to Staffordshire to view slitting
mills, which cut iron into nails, and to recruit colliers. On these trips, he contracted with John
and Abraham Bluett to find workmen, though Benjamin Bluett’s exact relationship with these
two men is unclear. Middleton purchased iron tools, stones, and building materials from
Sussex. Despite the purported quality of Virginia’s iron ore, Middleton and Bluett brought
some Sussex iron with them as well.
414

An odd set of circumstances helped the fledgling project. In February 1620, as
Middleton and Bluett’s ship prepared to sail, an anonymous donor, writing under the
pseudonym “Dust and Ashes,” gave the Company £550 for “Converting of Infidels to the faith
of Christ” by establishing a religious school for Native American children taken from their
families. The Company initially delegated the task to Southampton and Martin’s Hundreds—
neither group wanted it. Martin’s Hundred claimed “their Plantation was sorely weakened and
as then in much confusion.” Southampton Hundred offered to add £100 to the grant so long as
they were not responsible for the endeavor. “Finding no other means how to set forward that
great work,” the Company decided to allow Southampton Hundred to use the funds to cover
some of the costs in setting up an ironworks. The Hundred promised to provide a “ratable
portion” of its profits “for the educating of 30 of the Infidels’ Children in Christian Religion.”
415

on the Middleton enterprises in Staffordshire see Peter King, “The Development of the Iron
Industry in South Staffordshire in the Seventeenth Century: History and Myth,” Transactions
of the Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society 28 (1996): 64–68; On David
Middleton’s relationship with Sackville Crowe see Henry Cleere and David W. Crossley, The
Iron Industry of the Weald (1985), 74.
414
FP 136, 142, 148, 160; Hatch and Gregory, “The First American Blast Furnace, 1619-1622,”
266–267; Mulholland, A History of Metals in Colonial America, 22–24.
415
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 1:307–308; 585–587. The Company did
not inform the donor about their investment. The details only emerged in 1622 after Dust

233
The expedition now had a source of funding, experienced ironmasters, and a market
opportunity.
Fate intervened before Middleton and Bluett could test their skill in Virginia’s woods:
both took ill on the voyage over and died along with many of the ironworkers who had
accompanied them. The deaths threw the enterprise into disarray. Virginia Governor George
Yeardley wrote that Bluett’s death “will give a great blow to the staggering of that business.”
Yeardley vowed to keep the surviving workers busy, but a year later he could only repeat his
promise “to set the work in what a forwardness we can.”
416
There is no indication that other
Sussex men attempted to restart their enterprise.
417
The loss of Middleton and Bluett threatened
to stymie Virginian iron production before it began, and with it the main hope for extracting
profitable commodities from Virginia’s woodlands.
Several other leaders emerged to fill the void left by Bluett and Middleton, testifying to
contemporaries’ sense that Virginia offered a valuable opportunity to produce iron. The
grasping settler Michael Lapworth offered a blunt assessment of the state of the ironworks in an
open letter to Southampton Hundred in 1621. Only twenty-five ironworkers survived, Lapworth
wrote, and the dead were “the most material men.” None of the Sussex men behind the original
proposal showed an inclination to restart the project, and without skilled leaders, Lapworth
argued, the enterprise would go nowhere. He offered to write to ironmasters he knew in
Herefordshire or to Sir Edward Wintour in the Forest of Dean, but his assistance came with

and Ashes attempted to make a second donation and asked for a report on the results from his
earlier gift. Anonymous gifts to establish schools or churches in Virginia were not
uncommon. See The Records of the Virginia Company, 3:576.
416
FP 173, 175, 194, and 256.
417
Middleton’s family and commercial ties had problems closer to home. The partnership to
build ironworks in Staffordshire was dissolving amidst court proceedings and attempts to sell
off forge materials. King, “The Development of the Iron Industry in South Staffordshire in
the Seventeenth Century: History and Myth,” 64–67.

234
strings attached. Lapworth, still stung from being denied a place on the Virginia Council, railed
against the Company’s attempt to have him manage the works for a lower rate than his
predecessors. “Money be not the follower [but] the stream which drives all the wheels about,”
he wrote. His point was clear: he would spill no ink until he had been paid.
418

Lapworth’s brash demands went over poorly. The Company assigned the works to John
Berkeley of Beverston, a distant relation to the noble Berkeleys from the Forest of Dean, who
had by 1620 acquired a reputation as a competent ironmaster to his relatives and the Virginia
Company. Lapworth’s proposal and the Company’s decision to award the ironworks to
Berkeley both pointed to importance of Dean in the development of iron forges in Virginia.
419

Members of John Berkeley’s extended family and their partners in a Virginia plantation, George
Thorpe and Richard Throckmorton, had been part of attempts to establish ironworks in Dean
since 1610 but riots and lawsuits had felled their enterprises before they had begun. In 1621, the
king dealt their hopes in Dean a blow when he granted Richard Challoner, part of a family
involved in iron production since the 1590s, a license to smelt iron.
420
Members of the Berkeley
Hundred group had been denied the opportunity to produce iron in Dean but had found an
opportunity in Virginia, where they had unchallenged access to trees, ore, and water and a
family member with the skill and experience to exploit them.

418
FP 268. The OED notes that “material” can be used adjectivally to mean “Of serious or
substantial import; significant, important, of consequence.” In using this term, Lapworth
reported that those who died were crucial to the ironworks moving forward.
419
FP 268; FP 285; Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 1:472,476; 3:581-588.
420
John Smyth, The Lives of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle, and Manor of
Berkeley, ed. John Maclean, vol. 2 (1883), 254; 298; Hart, Royal Forest, 87–99; TNA SP
14/141 f.158; King, “The Iron Trade in England and Wales 1500-1815,” 81. For details of
the Berkeley Hundred plantation see Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company,
3:109–114; 190; 207–210. See also J.E. Gethyn-Jones, George Thorpe and the Berkeley
Company: A Gloucestershire Enterprise in Virginia (1982.)

235
Challoner’s license to build a forge in the Forest of Dean must have been a setback for
the Berkeley Hundred group, but Challoner’s actions after establishing his forge indirectly aided
the Virginia enterprise. Dean iron quickly captured the market in Bristol, in part due to its
superior quality. Challoner, who had previously purchased Irish iron, led the campaign against
Irish iron, complaining that it was “proving far worse than our Forest Iron.” Challoner was
hardly a disinterested party, but other Bristol merchants agreed with his assessment. They
informed Boyle that they would not deal with any further shipments unless the iron was “good
and well drawn.” Once Challoner’s forge began producing, Boyle’s iron sat unsold.
421

The backers of John Berkeley’s ironworks likely knew about the struggles facing their
Irish competitors. They were all connected to iron projects to Dean. In stocking their first
supply ship to Virginia, they traded in Bristol, Ireland, and Dean. These connections would
have provided them with excellent information about the continued struggles facing Irish
ironworks. Other Bristol merchants saw the same opportunities offered by foundering Irish
forges. They proposed to build an ironworks in Newfoundland using ore from the Forest of
Dean.
422

The Berkeley Hundred group were able to react swiftly because they had considered
ironworks from the outset of the enterprise as part of a broad program to develop profitable
commodities launched at the same time as Middleton and Bluett’s forge. An inventory of goods
sent in 1619 included saws, bellows, hammers, wedges, and “iron for the mills,” but the
Berkeley group ordered settlers to select a site suited to diverse economic activity. The lands
needed healthy air, good access to water, and rich soil. They should also be stocked with “iron

421
Chatsworth House, Cork MSS, v11, no. 199; v12, nos. 33, 68, 99; v13, no. 58; NLI MS
13,237/2.
422
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 3:178–189; 195–196; 417–418; TNA Co
1/1 no. 50.

236
ore, silk grass, mulberry trees for nourishing of silk worms, apt for vines, English wheat, maize
and other Virginia corn and for rice, Aniseeds, flax, oil seed, and the like, rich also in meadow
and pasture for cattle and in timber for shipping and other uses.” After the Sussex ironworkers
died, the Berkeley Hundred adventurers turned aggressively to building a forge. In 1621,
Thorpe wrote to London reporting the “poor taking” of the remainder of Bluett’s workers and
offering to supply a “mason of my own that hath built many Iron furnaces in England.” By the
beginning of the next year, the Virginia Company received reports in London that the works
were in “great forwardness.”
423

Members of the Berkeley group were poised to take advantage of the opportunity. They
had experience with ironworks and connections with merchants in Bristol. They selected a site
at Falling Creek well supplied with water, woods, and ore. The Irish competitors who had
foiled previous attempts to produce iron in Virginia were struggling. For the first time,
conditions in England and Ireland justified iron production in Virginia. Amidst the failure of
simultaneous projects to erect saw mills and produce naval stores, Falling Creek provided the
last and best opportunity for Sir Edwin Sandys to prove that Virginia’s economy need not be
built on a foundation of smoke.
424
Opechancanough’s warriors extinguished that potential when
they sacked the site and killed the workers in March of 1622.
The failure of the Company to restart the enterprise at Falling Creek gives the
appearance that the project was doomed to be abandoned. The records detailing the destruction
of the forge, the financial and political status of the Company after the Massacre, and the

423
Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company, 3:178–189; 207–210; 1:623; FP 247; the
Company used the phrase “great forwardness” to describe the state of the ironworks in a later
response to critics of the company in FP 527.
424
For discussion of the failure of these other attempts see Kingsbury, The Records of the
Virginia Company, 3:302-305. The letter from the Council in Virginia made it clear that they
viewed ironworks as the only viable possibility for exploiting Virginia’s woods.

237
broader context of European trade show that this was not the case. The Massacre gutted the
infrastructure at Falling Creek. An inventory cataloged the extent of the destruction. First, the
raid killed John Berkeley and most of the other skilled laborers. To restart the forges, the
Company would require hammermen, founders, miners, finers, filers, master colliers,
carpenters, masons, workmen for casting ordinance, potters, and twenty general forge laborers.
Save the twenty laborers, all of the other positions required skilled workers. The Company
would almost certainly have had to offer special inducements to convince these artisans to leave
the relative comfort and safety of England. Second, the inventory indicated that the forge
infrastructure had also been destroyed. The scales and bellows would need to be rebuilt. The
draught animals and carriages required to move the raw materials and iron would need to be
replaced. Tools for processing the wood and mine prior to it being in the furnace would need to
be replenished.
425

Further, a series of shifts in trade policy removed the competitive advantages that had
briefly opened a space for Virginia iron within the English market. Shortly after the Massacre,
James I’s government abandoned its attempt to bolster English shipping and the production of
staple commodities by protectionism. In 1623, the Privy Council granted Plymouth, Dartmouth,
and other unnamed “Western port towns” the right to purchase Baltic goods from Dutch ships as
they had done prior to the bans on Dutch traders launched two years earlier.
426
This
proclamation allowed Baltic iron carried cheaply on Dutch vessels back into the English market.
As the 1620s progressed, structural changes began to take place in the Swedish iron industry

425
FP 449.
426
The attempt to ban Dutch ships from carrying Baltic goods began in 1620. Two members of
the Virginia Company’s governing council, Thomas Smyth and John Wolstenholme
persuaded the Privy Council to ban Dutch shipping. See TNA SP 14/115 ff. 169-172; SP
14/118 f. 236, 230; PC 2/31 f. 51. The 1622 grant is SP 14/132 f.48. PC 2/31 f. 715.

238
that would allow it to dominate the English market by the eighteenth century. The Swedish state
privatized ironworks. Among those who purchased the valuable Swedish works were Dutch
merchants with a keen interest in boosting exports: English ironmakers faced new competition
from the Baltic.
427

Iron production in England and Ireland required regulations on woodland access and use
as well as coppicing and other measures to ensure the steady supply of wood necessary to fuel
the works, but the Massacre, the ensuing wars with the Powhatan, and the failure of the
ironworks provoked a shift in attitudes towards Virginia’s woodlands that undermined this
supply. Francis Wyatt, the first governor to serve after the dissolution of the Virginia Company,
shifted the colony to a war footing and focused all available resources on war against the
Powhatans. He ordered settlers to build “a strong Palisade from Martin’s Hundred to
Cheschiacqia to Plant Pawnenka.” He neatly summed up the purpose of the barrier: “winning
of the Forest.” By 1626, Wyatt and the council in Virginia had further developed the idea. The
span of the proposed wall had decreased to six miles but the phrase “winning of the Forest”
remained. The plan identified Virginia’s wooded landscape as an asset for the Powhattans and a
danger to the colony and recommended agricultural policies and land grants designed to deforest
the region. The council urged against granting large swathes of the newly palisaded territory to
any lone individual lest sloth, illness, or death leave the valuable new territory untended waste.
Wyatt and the council called for the woods to be “stocked immediately with Cattle, Horses, and

427
Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century
(2007), 31–32; Chris Evans, Owen Jackson, and Göran Rydén, “Baltic Iron and the British
Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century,” The Economic History Review 55, no. 4 (November
1, 2002): 642–65; D. G Kirby, Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic
World, 1492-1772 (New York: Longman, 1990), 149.

239
Asses as the foundation of all other great works.”
428
Early promotional literature for Virginia
cast the abundance of Virginia’s forests as a profitable solution to England’s scarce woods. The
proposals to win the forest instead treated them as an impediment to settlement to be slowly
eroded by pasturing animals and then cleared to make room for farms.
429

Through the 1620s and 1630s, land grants in Virginia codified this policy and gave
individual landowners further incentives to clear woodlands. Grants near Elizabeth City
extended “to the edge of the forest” until around 1629 when boundaries expanded beyond the
tree line. In contrast, grants from elsewhere in the colony recognized woods as part of the
landscape but did not treat them as property boundaries. One 1624 grant extended “directly
striking up into the woods one hundred acres.” Subsequent grants in the area used the same
language. Many grants in Accomack and on the Eastern Shore extended property lines past the
edge of woodlands. By the 1630s, few grants treated woods as boundaries and none contained
restrictions on wood use designed to preserve trees as a resource.
430
Pushing land grants past the
edge of the woods represented a break from traditional land management practices in England,
where royal forests and some woodlands were governed by unique laws and customs.

428
BL Add. 62,135 ff. 23-4; TNA CO 1/4 ff. 21r-22v, 28r-v.
429
Levy has written extensively on the relationship between the Palisade and the transformation
of Virginia's landscape. See “A New Look at an Old Wall. Indians, Englishmen, Landscape,
and the 1634 Palisade at Middle Plantation” and “Middle Plantation’s Changing Landscape:
Persistence, Continuity, and the Building of Community.” On the war against the Powhatans
from 1622-1632 see Rountree, “The Powhatans and the English: A Case of Multiple
Conflicting Agendas,” 190-192; Rountree and Turner, Before and after Jamestown, 150-153;
Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (1997),
159-169
430
Virginia Land Office, Index to Virginia Land Office Patents, 1623-1643. Early Elizabeth
City grants using the woods as a boundary see pgs. 18-20, 40-41, 73-74, and 80-84. For the
shift in leases see pgs. 99, 109-110, 117-119, 152. For Jamestown and James City using
woods and marshes as barriers see pgs. 10-11 and 55-56. For the shift after 1628 see pgs. 61-
63 and 142-143. Warwick River grants see pgs. 33-34, 88, 94-95. Accomack and Eastern
Shore pgs. 71-73, 98, 100.

240
Conclusion
English settlers did not thoughtlessly spoil Irish, American, and Bermudian woods. In
Munster and in Virginia after the escalation of hostilities with the Powhatans in 1622, English
writers frequently depicted woodlands as places of peril and barbarism; however, only in
Virginia, where woodland industries had failed to be economically viable, did the state simply
turn over lands for deforestation. In Munster and Bermuda, individual landowners and the
state/company crafted regulations designed to protect profit and property. In each case,
however, conflicts erupted within the English community. The backers of Irish and Virginian
iron industries competed against each other and against domestic English producers. In
Munster, Boyle and his merchant partners clashed over appropriate amounts of regulation and
access. Artisans dependent on timber for their trade vied with ironworkers and pipestave cutters
for access to woods. Tenants struggled to get reliable access to fuel. In Bermuda, adventurers
and the government in Bermuda used restrictions of felling palmettos to crack down on the
allegedly immoral behavior of the poor. English settlers were willing, as most clearly
demonstrated by the case of the Bermuda cedar, to assimilate native trees into the Atlantic
economy, but showed little regard for trees perceived to have little commercial value.
Deforestation occurred in Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda, not because English settlers had
abandoned the prohibitions on cutting, coppicing, and enclosure that comprised English forest
management but because those regulations primarily protected property and profit.
241
Conclusion: English Political Economy and Political Ecology
Defining and exploiting nature in the early modern English Atlantic was never a simple
process. Simply put, there was no single “English” attitude towards colonial environments.
Instead, different individuals and interest groups vied for their visions of the newly available
lands. Commissioners sent out by the crown or one of the joint-stock companies and
pamphleteers frequently cast these disagreements as evidence for the moral failings of settlers.
John Smith’s English enemies in Virginia were “gilded refiners,” unable to overcome their lust
for gold. In Munster, English settlers had become “degenerate” and had fallen into the
disreputable habits of the Gaelic Irish. Bermudian governors blamed poor harvests and
hurricanes on the actions of drunkards, atheists, and blasphemers. Yet, English attitudes towards
colonial environments cannot simply be reduced down to disjunctures between theory and
practice or disputes between governors and the governed. Instead, conflicts among the English
turned on several points.
First, settlers, administrators, and governors did not achieve consensus on expertise or the
sources of natural knowledge. Understanding exactly what newly available lands held was a
constant struggle. In plantation-era Munster, despite centuries of loose English involvement and
more recent attempts at conquest and government, administrators launched a major mapping
campaign and commissioned surveys of potential harbors and woodlands. The available
mapping techniques and the general surveys of attainted lands, however, failed to provide the
granular details of land quality and potential use that were essential to the division and taxation
of land under the plantation settlement. In Virginia and Bermuda, experts competed with each
other for contracts. John Smith could lambast sophist “silkmen” in one breath, while praising the
potential for Virginia sericulture in the next. Throughout the English Atlantic, landlords,
242
governors, and adventurers frequently treated reports from poorer settlers and their tenants with
skepticism. Competing sources of expertise and the climate of distrust made evaluating the
potential of attempts to transform the natural world difficult. Irish landlords continued to rely on
the concept of improvement to evaluate their estates, even as they took other steps to move away
from the mixed husbandry envisioned by plantation promoters. Virginian adventurers and
governors continued to invest in sericulture, even after years of failure. Bermudian landlords and
governors fought over the islands’ tolerance for sugar cane.
Second, politics mattered in defining the productive capacity of nature and in governing
how natural resources were exploited. James I’s consistent and vocal support for sericulture kept
the attempts to establish silk production in Virginia afloat, and Charles I’s lack of concern left
them to languish. James I’s strong opposition to tobacco, expressed in his 1604 Counterblaste to
Tobacco, led to anxieties within the Virginia and Sommer Islands Companies over their financial
dependence on a plant that had provoked royal displeasure. Bermudian governor Butler
launched a program to completely transform the economy of Bermuda, in which he impugned
the actions and natural evaluation of his predecessor in the post and of the committee of
adventurers in London who set policies for the island. Butler claimed that his own experience
and expertise justified his governance. In Ireland, the wide-ranging conflict between Boyle and
Strafford included disputes over the rights to trees and waterways that had previously gone
untouched.
Third, commercialization did much to shape the definition and exploitation of resources
in the English Atlantic. The boom in timber products and iron in Munster limited the market for
Virginian woodland goods, which contributed to the perception that Virginian woodlands were at
best a nuisance and at worst a threat that followed the onset of war with the Powhatans in 1622.
243
In contrast, the commercial potential of cedars in Bermuda and of bulk timber in Ireland led to a
series of regulations designed to protect profit that also preserved a wooded landscape, even if
they did not extend to protections for other indigenous trees. Similarly, regulations in Ireland
and Bermuda sought to protect spawning fish to ensure that fishing would continue to generate
profits.
Taken together, these three factors show that the English did not ruthlessly exploit
colonial lands in the earliest years after establishing settlements. Instead, their search for
merchantable commodities led them to establish systems of use and regulation that drew on
traditions of resource regulation in England. But none could have predicted that
commercialization and commodification created issues to which traditional systems of resource
management were often poorly adapted. Periods of economic stress threatened the starvation of
cattle in Ireland or led to the planting and uprooting of oil trees and junipers in Bermuda. The
international market for Irish timber led Boyle and his agents to fell faster than their coppices
could regenerate. Resource regulations designed to protect property and profit for individual
landowners often failed to protect those resources.
The first attempts to expand English power into the Atlantic from the 1580s through the
1640s failed to generate the abundant profits or the radical transformations that colonial
promoters had envisioned. Many promoters had claimed that colonies would alleviate myriad
social, political, and economic ills facing England, though they often disagreed about what
exactly those maladies were and how colonial projects should rectify them. The failure of
colonies in Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda to solve England’s problems and the ways in which
colonial governors and English settlers managed colonial lands instead reveal that historians
244
must reconsider the ways that ideas about nature and the contingent and culturally constructed
nature of resources have shaped historical development.
In Seeing like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott argued that states have organized
nature into resources defined by how plants, animals, and landscapes fit into capitalist market
economies. In doing so, states crushed local sources and types of environmental knowledge and
embarked on projects that often created immense human suffering. For Scott, the early modern
period served as the origin of this development. At that time, he argued, states sought to turn
trees into timber and to exert absolute control over those resources.
431
Conflicts over landscapes
and resources in Munster, Virginia, and Bermuda from the 1580s through the onset of the
English Civil War challenge Scott’s assertions. The Tudor and Stuart governments, colonial
promoters, planters, and settlers from across the English social spectrum rarely agreed on how to
define or regulate resources. The state did not simply impose a vision of nature from above.
Instead, elites battled with each other and with governing authorities around the English Atlantic
to define and control lands and landscapes. Natural knowledge remained flexible in the colonial
English Atlantic. Frequently, authorities preferred to explain the failure of various economic
visions as the result of social or moral issues rather than natural limits on production. The
Elizabethan and Stuart states did not impose order on the natural world; they struggled to see it at
all.

431
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (1998) For Scott’s arguments about wood in the early modern period, see pgs.
11-13.
245
*
On Sunday, September 21, 2014, an estimated 400,000 people marched through Central
Park and Times Square calling on the UN and its member states to take action on climate
change. The New York City march was the keystone of a series of global protests and billed
itself as the largest demonstration on climate change to date.
432
As the marchers coursed
through New York, I sat in drought-addled Los Angeles pondering if a study of early modern
English resource regulation offered any insights into our current ecological malaise. English
attempts to understand the environments they encountered in their colonies often appear distant
and bizarre to modern observers able to identify plants and animals with a smartphone app.
Nonetheless, the problem of resource regulation persists, although it is debated in different
terms. The proceeding chapters have shown that natural resources are defined by human use.
Determining whether a plant, animal, organism or landscape is a resource is an economic,
cultural, and political question. Experts, be they early modern natural philosophers or twenty-
first century scientists, can provide advice and guidance, but defining something as a resource is
ultimately a value judgment subject to contestation.
Value judgments reveal the fractures and tensions within the society that produces them.
Inequalities in rights and standing can easily be encoded into the definition of a plant, animal, or
landform as a resource. Bermudians depended on the palmetto for shelter, cordage, and
emergency food, yet its failure as a commodity on the international market prompted governors
to brand it a nuisance. The Bermudian government only sought to preserve palmettos as part of
a general crackdown on the poor. In Ireland, regulations governing woodlands protected only
valuable types of trees and rationed fuel and building resources for poorer tenants that likely left

432
For more details on the march, see www.peoplesclimate.org.
246
many in perilous circumstances during colder months. Resources are products of particular
people, places, and times, but the language of sustainability seeks to define resources for both
present and future generations. As we seek to craft policies to manage our relationship with the
physical environment, it is important to remember that politics are inescapable.
Environmentalists cannot simply point to bodies of scientific evidence demonstrating the loss of
biodiversity or the potential consequences of climate change. We must constantly argue before
the public that ecosystems have value.
247
Works Cited
Archival Sources
Bodleian Library, Oxford
Ashmole 1147, volume 7. Papers relating to the government of Virginia
MS Carte 62. Irish state papers chiefly from Sir Arthur Chichester and Sir John Davies.
British Library, London (BL)
Additional Manuscripts (Add. Mss.) 35865. Hardwicke Papers, Record of tobacco
entered at the port of London
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Environmental historians have cast England's Atlantic expansion as a brutal and destructive process that ravaged the natural world in search of property and profits. This dissertation argues that English settlers did not just colonize land: they colonized landscapes. Landscapes are ephemeral and subjective. They are subject to contestation. Through case studies of southwest Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, I trace conflicts within English society in attempts to define and describe nature, set policies for land use, and regulate natural resources.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Pluymers, Keith (author)

Core Title Colonizing lands and landscapes in the English Atlantic, c.1580 - c.1640

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 04/16/2015

Defense Date 03/02/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Atlantic history,Bermuda,Colonization,commodification,England,environmental history,Ireland,Land,Landscape,Nature,OAI-PMH Harvest,Virginia,Wood

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Herrup, Cynthia B. (committee chair), Mancall, Peter C. (committee chair), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan (committee member)

Creator Email kdpluymers@gmail.com,kpluymer@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-550262

Unique identifier UC11298569

Identifier etd-PluymersKe-3309.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-550262 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PluymersKe-3309.pdf

Dmrecord 550262

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Pluymers, Keith

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA