Chartered Companies
Under the Tudor monarchs a new life, a bold spirit of adventure seized English merchants and seamen. The so-called "Chartered Companies" or "Regulated Companies" organized in England in the sixteenth century are most memorable. The constitution of these Companies allowed any member to trade, within the sphere of the company's rights and privileges, on his own account. The Levant was the last of these important corporations, and the famous East India Company was the first of the great English Stock Companies. It dates its birth from the very last day of the sixteenth century. But all these corporations were trading, not colonization, companies.
Especially prominent was the Company of Merchant Adventurers, an association which can be traced back nearly to the beginning of the fourteenth century. The first English royal charter, which cannot now be recovered, was given to the Merchants of the Staple, who received privileges in the year 1248 from John, Duke of Brabant, to trade in the Netherlands. The London Guild of Mercers, a company of English merchants who started the first woollen manufacture in England in 1296, and obtained privileges from John, Duke of Brabant, enabling them to settle in Antwerp in association with all other English merchants. These merchants were later amalgamated into the Fraternity or Brotherhood of St. Thomas a Becket, a society which was flourishing about the year 1358, when they are stated to have received ample privileges from Louis, Count of Flanders, for fixing their staple for the sale of English woollen cloth at Bruges.
King Henry VII in 1493 banished all the Flemings out of England, and ordered all intercourse between the two countries to cease; on which the Archduke Philip, the sovereign of the Netherlands, expelled in like manner all the English subjects resident in his dominions. This embargo only lasted a few years, as Bacon noted, Henry VII was " ... a king that loved wealth and treasure, he could not endure to have trade sick, nor any obstruction to continue in the gatevein which dispersed! that blood."
Trade was restored at the behest of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, which a few years after this time (in 1505) was incorporated by royal charter under the title of The Merchant Adventurers of England. Presuming perhaps upon the aid they had afforded to the crown on this occasion, these London merchants appear to have now made an attempt to take possession of the whole foreign trade of the country. It was the Merchant Adventurers who, under the leadership of Sebastian Cabot, sent their vessels to the far East, sailed the Baltic, kept factors at Novgorod.
Towards the close of the reign of Edward VI efforts were for the first time made to open direct trading relations with Russia (or Muscovy, as it was then more commonly called) by the route leading round North Cape to the White Sea. This route was already known in Anglo-Saxon times. The expedition of Sir Hugh Willoughby in 1553 was equipped by a number of gentlemen and merchants to cut out the Portuguese spice trade with the Moluccas by opening direct communication with Cathay (China) by the north-east passage. Richard Chancellor, Captain of one of Willoughby's ships, had reached Archangel on the White Sea, and had been well received by the Tsar. Chancellor reached the Dwina in 1564, and the Muscovy Trading Company was founded in 1556; obtaining from the Grand Duke of Moscow exemption from duty and safe conduct, it carried English goods — mostly cloth — as far as the Caspian Sea and Persia.
The Baltic highway was already known to King Alfred from Ohthere's second voyage as far as Sleswig, and from Wulfstan's voyage into the 'East Sea' as far as Truso, near Danzig. These inland waters continued to be frequented from time to time by English skippers trading on their own account under charters from the Crown down to the time of Elizabeth, when the Baltic was constituted a closed sea in favour of an amalgamated English trading association, appropriately called the Eastland Company. This corporation received its first charter in 1579, being described as 'the Fellowship of Eastland Merchants.
The trade to the Levant had been early cultivated by the English, and had been the subject of negociation and of treaties. A Turkish Company for trade in the Levant was founded in 1581, trading partly on a joint, and partly on a separate stock. Into this trade the English staple produce and manufactures had been received; and the returns were partly made up of assortments of the produce of the countries at the different ports in the Levant, and partly of Indian produce, which had been brought by the ancient routes of the Red Sea, and of the Persian Gulf, and by land carriage, to the Italian Republics.
Noble seamen, like Frobisher, went in search of a northwest passage to the Pacific, and more than one of them found death instead. English commerce increased rapidly. In the year 1585, Drake introduced tobacco into England; the use of the weed soon became so general that cities counted as many tobacco shops as wine and beer shops.
The Marocco or Barbary Company was established by Patent granted in 1585 by Elizabeth to the Earls of Warwick and Leicester, and to forty others, for an exclusive trade to the territory of Marocco for a period of twelve years. To the Emperor, Muley Hamed, the Queen sent her Minister (Roberts), who remained in the country three years, and obtained some privileges for the English, particularly that in future none of the English should be made slaves in his dominions.
A London ship and pinnace having made a prosperous voyage to Benin in 1588, Elizabeth granted in that year a patent for ten years to two London merchants and to others of Exeter and other towns of Devonshire for an exclusive trade to the rivers Senegal and Gambia in Guinea, as all that region of West Africa was then called.
Though France took the lead as a North American colonizer, England followed close on her track. She created in 1606 two companies whose representatives and successors were to exercise an incalculable influence over the destinies of mankind,—the South Virginia, or London Company, and the Company of Plymouth Adventurers. Neither was the actual corporation under which the Northern and Southern English colonies subsequently held title, nor were they really the first corporate bodies which tried, under English auspices, the experiment of combining trade and colonization on the East coast of North America.
They were the offspring of the heroic but futile efforts made by Raleigh and his lieutenant in the previous century, to found a colony in Virginia. The provisions of the Charter granted Sir Walter in 1583-1584, expressed conclusively the spirit which even then guided England in her colonization schemes. The Charter grants to the colonists "all the privileges of free denizens and persons native of England, in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said Realm of England." And they were to be governed according to such statutes as shall be by him or them established, provided they do not contradict the law of the Realm. The same principles and powers underlie the constitutions of all the subsequent colonies. The contrast between these simple and liberal charters and the concessions, edicts, and ordinances, under which the neighboring French colony was governed, accounts for the opposite course followed by the respective nations from their birth until to-day.
The colonization of both Virginia and Massachusetts was undertaken by trading companies, but the policy of these companies, however mistaken in many respects, was widely different from the purely selfish objects of the French companies. Moreover, they were popular in every sense, for the reorganized London Company enrolled as its shareholders 659 individuals and 56 trade guilds.
The Guiana Company charter was issued about the year 1609, when letters patent were granted to Mr. djarcourt, of Stanton-Harcourt, and sixty others, who had founded a station on the river Weapoco. The first English settlement in Guiana was effected by Captain Ley in 1605.
The Bermuda or Somers Isles Company of about one hundred and twenty members was incorporated by royal charter in 1612, when they purchased the islands from the Virginia Company, who, as first discoverers, claimed possession of them. The discovery, which, however, had been anticipated in the sixteenth century by the Spanish navigator Bermudez. The China Or Cathay Company charter was granted in 1635 by Charles I to Sir William Courten, Sir Paul Pindar, Captain John Weddel, and Endymion Porter to trade to China and Japan, as well as to any parts of India where the East India Company had not established themselves before December 12, 1635, but without prejudice to that company in other respects. A condition was that the grantees should, from the sea of China, Japan, or elsewhere, send one well-furnished ship to attempt the discovery of the North-West Passage. But the venture came to nothing.
The Canary Company was created in 1665 by Charles II., who granted a royal patent to sixty persons therein named, and to all others of his subjects who had within seven years past traded to the Canary Islands to the value of £6,000 yearly. The company was to enjoy the exclusive trade to the Canary Islands, under a Governor, Deputy-Governor, and twelve assistants. Of all the historical corporate bodies, this company had the briefest existence, its charter having been withdrawn on a suit brought against it before Parliament in the year 1667.
Considering the complete failure, from the point of view of colonization, of the chartered companies of the seventeenth century, the revival by England of this method of national expansion in the latter half of the nineteenth century may seem surprising. All the chartered companies of this day are, however, understood to be merely forerunners of Government, and speedily resign their charters for a pecuniary consideration, after giving the powers creating them a title to the district exploited.
The first discoverers of the great goldfield in South Africa are reported to be the Brothers Struben, owing to whose perseverance and patience the Witwatersrandt became the Eldorado of speculators' dreams. In 1886 this locality was declared a public goldfield by formal proclamation, and the South African golden age began. In a little while the regions north of the Limpopo began to be investigated, and each in their turn to yield up their treasures. In 1888 a concession to work mineral upon his territory was obtained from Lobengula, the Matabele king. A year later the British South Africa Company was founded. The Company having obtained its charter, no time was lost.
The British North Borneo Company, founded in 1881, gave place to a protectorate in 1888. The Royal Niger Company of 1886 sold its rights and territory to the British Government for £865,000 in 1900. The Imperial British East Africa Company, created in 1885, disposed of its possessions to the British Government in 1894 for £250,000. Cecil Rhodes' famous British South Africa Company remained longer in existence, but its powers as a governing body were very much crippled since the Jameson raid and the war against Lobengula. The German East Africa Company resigned its governing functions in 1890, and the German New Guinea Company followed its example in 1899.
The British African Commercial Companies alone undoubtedly added to the Empire about 2,000,000 square miles of territory, whose value is by some belittled, even as the worth of Canada was depreciated by the statesmen of France, as it also was by those of England when they resigned Kirke's conquest without a murmur. The charters of the modern companies differed in many material respects from those of the seventeenth century, but they resemble strangely, in their essential features, those of France in the seventeenth century, in so far as they are endowed with political functions while organized as money-making corporations.
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