Welcome to the Way Backs' Website!

"The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone...This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry around the dustiest record." --George Macauley Trevalyan quoted by Ballen
Sir Humphrey Gilbert "received the right to govern and to make any laws provided they were not contrary to the laws of England," Pomfret tells us of Gilbert's letter patent.

Gilbert spent his and his wife's fortunes gearing up to colonize the North American continent.

He made landing at St. John's in Newfoundland in 1583 and took possession of it in the Queen's name.  Newfoundland is considered the first and oldest overseas colony for the English.



I'm envisioning a little Dutch ship that goes sailing by on the screen as people read this block because the whole time the English were tethered to their Mothercountry and the chores of settling and not just exploiting the continent, the Dutch seem to have been hard at work mercantil-ing.  The Dutch come across as being less tied up in bureaucracy and more industrious.  Even where the Dutch and English colonists get embroiled in dispute about territory, the Dutch colonists give us the impression they were too busy sailing around to do more than call out as they passed by, we'll see about that.

This may just be our misunderstanding based on, for example, less studying of the Dutch.  But now that Google can translate everything maybe we'll have more to read.  Maybe we'll be able to dig in and understand Dutch operations--governance and mercantile--better.