Part XXVII: Oak and Ash and Thorn (1481-1500)
The discovery of Brasil and, more importantly, the commercial popularity of jachaing[1], set off a settlement boom across the closing decades of the 15th century. Merchants from across England would clamor to back expeditions to the new world as the returns of even a marginally successful colony would make its backers very rich men indeed. Amongst these private expeditions, there were also several government-backed expeditions sent to maintain order in the colonies and to ensure that the Royal Exchequer got its cut of the bonanza. These first decades would be a period of English hegemony, and both Edward and private investors were eager to make the most of it before continental competitors intervened.
In the spring of 1481, three expeditions put out for Brasil. The largest was that of Edward Weston, which sported a pair of cogs, Adam and Enoch and a hulk, Steady. The Weston expedition was commanded by Edward’s son, William, who had accompanied Jay on his first voyage and managed to survive the wreck of Trinity, being swept onto the deck of George alive but soaked. The Weston expedition departed Bristol on 21 April, carrying one-hundred and thirty-four men. Weston hoped to establish a jachaing plantation, and he outfitted his expedition with farmers, butchers[2], tanners, carpenters, wheel-wrights and mercenaries, everything that was needed to establish and maintain a plantation and its outlying farms. Hell, he even threw in the materials to make wine, just in case the new land had the climate for it[3]. The Weston expedition was the larger of the private expeditions that sailed that year and the best-prepared out of any of them. Many of the crew members aboard these ships were survivors from the first expedition, and so they also had the advantage of technical know-how.
The other private expedition was that of Robert Strumy, who was especially eager to make for Brasil. Had Trinity--his ship--returned with only a third of the jachaing that George had, he would have been the richest man in Bristol, and he was determined to not late fate prevent him from reaching this goal. He commissioned two ships, George and a second anglic caravel[4], Fortune, under George’s navigator from the previous voyage, Walter Fish. There were some hundred and seven men aboard the ships, most of them farmers with a handful of other tradesmen and, of course, mercenaries. Most importantly, however, they carried a great number of cheap goods that could be used as trading chits, which Fish hoped to use to ingratiate himself with the Lenylenapy.
Finally, there was the Royal Colonial Fleet, which was being assembled in London under the supervision of John Jay himself. Jay’s stories of the strange land over the sea had fascinated Edward IV, and the king was willing to support Jay’s proposition to Parliament for funding. Enough MPs were swayed by Jay’s increasingly elaborate tales of Brasil, and an expedition was put together to return to this strange country. Four ships--the cogs Bounty and Rapid, the hulk Graveline and the rush-built anglic caravel Rose of Raby--were given over to Jay, with the total number of crew and colonizers numbering two-hundred and eighty-three. Many of these men were soldiers, sent to secure Fort Saint George and the other cessations, but there were also a great number of landless farmers whom had been recruited for settlement, herdsmen, butchers, carpenters and other craftsmen. Edward tasked Jay with three tasks; One, build a castle at Fort Saint George to defend English territory from hostile natives and/or the French; Two, secure territory for the farming and production (i.e. curing[5] and preparation for the voyage back to England) of jachaing, as well as the production of a sufficient amount of food to supply the forces there; Three, ascertain the source of the gold which Jay had been given by the Lenylenapy so it could be secured for the English crown[6]. He was also instructed by the Bishop of Canterbury, Reginald Peacock, to convert as many of the Lenylenapy to the true faith as possible, and to this end the priest Lewis Johnson was sent to accompany him. Before departing in early May, Jay was invested as “Governour of Colony of New England” and given the authority to collect pledges of fealty to the king from any of the natives of Brasil, as well as permission to knight any of the natives to further their loyalty. Finally, on 6 May 1481, to the cheers of all London, Jay set out on his second voyage.
It was a surprisingly quiet voyage. There were some slight navigation difficulties caused by unexpectedly strong winds blowing the ships towards the south-west, but after Jay ordered a course correction based on sextant coordinates every hour, this problem sorted itself out. After thirty-one days at sea, considerably faster than his previous voyage, Jay and the English fleet sailed into the bay below Fort Saint George, which Jay christened House-of-York Bay, to be later shortened to ‘York Bay’, on 6 June. He would be pleasantly surprised to see Weston’s ships riding at anchor in Upper York Bay. After a slightly longer voyage, William Weston had arrived at Fort Saint George on 28 May, and quickly gone to work on creating a slice of England in the New World. Half of Saint George Island, as it had been known, was being cleared of trees. Weston hoped to create two great jachaing farms surrounded by a number of yeomen farms, which was exactly what Jay had also hoped to do. However, there were too many would-be settlers for the land to be divided along those lines. Neither really cared about the small freeholders, but there just wasn’t enough space for four jachaing farms. Jay claimed that his royal monopoly gave him the right to establish the plantations, while Weston believed that it was his because he had gotten their first. The two quickly had a falling out, and while Jay was able to force Weston to give up the lands, their relationship never recovered. The first crop of jachaing was harvested the next spring, and a few months later Rapid departed back to England with her hold full with that and cured hides from the strange-looking animals of Brasil.
However, there was one thing that Jay and Weston agreed upon, that being their concern over the disappearance of the Fish expedition. It had departed in late April[7], but was nowhere to be found and never arrived at Fort Saint George. Many speculated that they had gone down in the Atlantic, but this was only partly true.
Only a few weeks out from Bristol, Fortune had been destroyed one night by a massive freak wave[8] that had effectively just swallowed the ship. George, however, managed to survive with only minor damage, and Fish was able to steer onwards towards Brasil. However, severe storms would badly damage George, with another freak wave on 16 May causing the mast to snap off and taking the ship’s only two sextans with it. George then drifted for the next week and a half, with their water supplies quickly becoming exhausted. Only by drinking their own piss were Fish and his crew able to survive long enough to drift ashore. On 27 May, the ship made landfall on the Strumy Islands. Things were still desperate, but at least they would die on land. A sailor then spotted a piece of glinting metal in the sand, which was quickly retrieved and identified as a broken sextant that had been left there the previous year. Fish quickly realized they were only a few miles from the well which he had visited on the previous voyage, and the surviving crew from George quickly scrambled over the sound to the mainland. After quenching his thirst, Fish concluded that they were too far from Fort Saint George to walk there, and decided to make the best of the situation. A gap in the barrier islands was found and George was rowed/pulled through to the sound. A small fort was then erected, called Fort Saint Noah after the patron saint of sailors, on a peninsula jutting out into the sound. Contact was made with the locals, a tribe of Lenylenapy called the Navasing[9], who were very hostile. Fish quickly cordoned off the passage to the mainland and limited his men to the small peninsula. They grew or fished just enough food to survive while George’s mast was rebuilt, and in the spring of 1482 the ship limped into York Bay. Fort Saint Noah would be retaken by a small English force a few weeks later, as Jay didn’t want to show weakness to the natives.
Speaking of conflicts with the natives, early 1485 saw England’s first colonial war. After returning in 1482, Jay had knighted the old chief Thomagwa and his son, Pasaquon, after they had agreed to be baptized. They took this as a sign of friendship, while Jay believed it constituted the formal admission of the ‘Earldom of Sanheecan’ to the Kingdom of England. As such, when members of a neighboring tribe burned several Sanheecan villages on the mainland, Jay was infuriated and offered to help the Sanheecan get revenge on their attackers. Thomagwa told Jay that the attackers had been from the Canarsee and Rowatan[10] tribes; this was false, but the Canarsee and Rowatan were long-time rivals of the Sanheecan, and the old chief was hardly going to give up a chance to crush his rivals. The two rulers then conspired to undo these tribes. Thomagwa sent a message to the Rowatan and challenged them to an honor battle, as was common at the time, on the mainland just north of Saint George Island. The Rowatan chief agreed, and a few days later a number of Sanheecan warriors rowed up the Jay River[11]. As they approached, the Rowatan warriors came out onto the beach to greet them. They were then turned into a fine paste as the waiting Rose of Raby opened fire with grapeshot from a few hundred yards. Then, with their best warriors dead, the Sanheecans and their English allies defeated the rest of the tribe. The Canarsee, upon hearing of this massacre, fled in terror from their settlements on Jay Island. The Sanheecans returned to their homes satisfied, but Jay saw an opportunity to expand English territory in Brasil. He annexed half of the former Rowatan territory and the entirety of Canarsee territory on Jay Island as part of New England. This angered Teedyooscung, who was still the nominal overlord of both the Sanheecan and the vanquished tribes, but after a delegation was sent to Aquancoc by both the Sanheecan and the English, he reluctantly recognized the annexation of the new territories.
This annexation vastly expanded the size of New England, with the English now ruling over the western third of Jay Island. The other two thirds were ruled by the Shynecocks[12] tribe, who were diplomatically isolated but, more importantly, had converted to Catholicism in 1484. Distant cousins of Sanheecans, the Shynecocks had become taken with the faith of these strange new arrivals, and swiftly adopted it in both name and practice. The leader of the Shynecocks, known by his Christian name of Eleazar, was a young and clever ruler, and he saw the opportunities presented by the arrival of the English to advance his people’s position. In 1491, he sent a set of ‘priests’ to their rival tribes and former overlords of the Pequot and the Narragansett, who were then killed as spies. Eleazar appealed to Jay, speaking of how the infidels had slaughtered these pious converts, and when the governor was as fired up as he hoped he would be, the English and Shynecocks struck. The Pequot and Narragansett were defeated in a bloody battle at the village of Weekapaug. The Shynecocks then annexed several islands between Jay Island and the mainland, while the English sent a message that the killing of missionaries would not be tolerated. Eleazar then set about trying to advance his people as the foremost ally of the English. He took the unprecedented step of learning how to write and speak English, and was knighted by Jay in 1492. Two years later, he sailed to London, where he became an object of great spectacle, with curious crowds of Londoners following him wherever he went throughout the town. Eleazar gave homage directly to Edward IV. He was invested as Earl Eleazar I of Shynecocks, founder of the House of Shynecocks[13]. Earl Eleazar would return to Brasil the next year, and would reign until his death in 1506.
However, the greatest impact of the conquest or vassalization of Jay Island would not be the creation of the first Brasilian Earldom. Rather, it would be the resultant flood of settlers into New England. There was now more than enough space for farming, and in 1486 Weston moved across to Jay Island and established his own plantation. Over the next fifteen years, seven other plantations[14] were established on Jay Island, as well as several dozen smaller farms settled by yeomen. The promise of land and good wages caused many of the more fortunate farmers to pick up sticks and move across the Atlantic. They came in increasing numbers as the number of voyages to the New World increased with the number of plantations, and by the year 1500 there were nearly 2,000 settlers living in New England. Of course, these weren’t enough to grow all the jachaing that the markets in Europe desired, and so the wicked practice of slavery first spread into the (European) New World. Jay, having briefly been a slave himself in the Barbary Coast, adamantly refused to support the practice, but after he and his wife[15] retired to a small farm near Fort Saint George in 1496, the new governor, a bastard son of Edward IV named Arthur of Lisle, wholeheartedly embraced it. The English launched several slave raids against the tribes who lived on the mainland across from Jay Island, with Eleazar frequently leading them out of a desire for revenge against his rivals in the region, as well as the Navasing, who had migrated northwards to the shores of York Bay. The latter raided the Sanheecan on several occasions in hopes of forcing the English to halt, but this only served to drive them closer to their European patrons. In 1497, the Sanheecan were baptized en masse and Pasaquon voyaged back to England, where he became the second of the Brasilian Earls[16].
These vassalizations and raids brought the English and the natives into close proximity, and in 1498 the first bout of plague began. Entire villages surrounding Fort Saint George were stricken by an apocalyptic combination of smallpox, tuberculosis and dozens of other diseases. Entire tribes collapsed in the space of months, with often only a handful of survivors escaping to spread the disease further into the interior. Secondary outbreaks occurred far up the York River[17], which Jay’s half-brother, Robert Hammond, had been sent to explore the previous year. Once-prosperous villages were left shells of their former selves, and the great tribal confederations that had once dominated the region collapsed in a matter of weeks. The horrors of this period are too great to describe, but can be summed as following; It is estimated that within a hundred-mile range of Fort Saint George, three out of every four of the native Brasilians died.
The plagues that struck Brasil would be one of the greatest mass deaths in human history. These, combined with the enslavement which occurred after his retirement--which, to be fair, he did little to oppose after abdicating the governorship--have led many to accuse Jay of being a genocidal maniac. There is little truth to this, as he does seem to have done his best to treat the natives well. Most notably, he effectively ignored his mission to search for gold, although why he did this is unknown. It is entirely possible that this appears like a humanitarian decision to us due to the sheer bloodiness of Lisle’s gold hunt and the ensuing wars…
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[1] Lenape word of tobacco
[2] At this time, butchers smoked a good deal of meat, and so it was logically concluded that they were the best-suited to smoke-dry tobacco like the Brasilians did.
[3] At this time, a good bit of wine was still produced in the south of England, as the Little Ice Age had not yet begun.
[4] An Anglic or English caravel was a knock-off of the Portuguese caravel which was produced in England.
[5] The English produced jachaing in the following manner; The leaves would be gathered up and spread in the sun to dry. Then, they would be placed on racks in a smoky room, where they would be kept to prepare them for their voyage. They would then be bundled up, stuffed into containers, and then shipped back to England. From there, they would be sold domestically or abroad, raking in a good deal of money for their producers and distributors.
[6] Recall that Jay had been given a small amount of gold by the natives; this would later be the cause of much bloodshed during Lisle’s tenure as governor.
[7] Weston had rushed his putting out in hopes of beating Strumy to Fort Saint George.
[8] These are disturbingly frequent in the present day, and I see no reason why they wouldn’t be back then.
[9] The Navasing are the OTL Navasing. Fort Saint Noah is located at OTL Toms River, New Jersey
[10] Those are the OTL Carnasey and Raritan tribes
[11] TTL name for the East River; The battle was fought somewhere in the Bronx
[12] TTL’s Shinnecock people
[13] Motto: Primus est in fide et fidelis (First in faith and loyalty), Arms: Or a stag passant argent in full, per fess sable.
[14] ‘Plantations’ here means a farm dedicated to growing jachaing and only jachaing, not the massive sprawling farms of the OTL South.
[15] In 1484, he married a Saheecan woman who is known by her baptismal name, Anne of Saint George.
[16] The Earldom of Saheecan; Motto: Forti fidelique (Strong and loyal), Arms:Azure a castle sable in full, per fess vert
[17] TTL name for the Hudson. In 1497, Hammond had sailed up the York as far north as OTL Fort Edward
I should also note that I wasn’t very clear about how the jachaing trade worked; Companies and individuals could run their own plantations, but they were required to give a percentage of it to the crown as tax, as well as pay for their rights to grow and process the crop.
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Please comment, I spent a long time on writing all of this.
