Introduction
On September 29, 1583, a storm of appalling violence swept across the eastern Atlantic. It caught the Golden Hind and the Squirrel, two ships led by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a scientist and adventurer, as they returned to England from an expedition to plant the first English colony in North America. During the day, according to Captain Edward Hayes, master of the forty-ton Golden Hind, the waves were “breaking short and high, Pyramid-wise . . . men which all their lifetime had occupied the Sea never saw more outragious Seas.” Amid this chaos of white water, Hayes could see downwind of him the ten-ton frigate, Squirrel, that carried Gilbert.
As he watched, a furious blast of the gale suddenly threw the Squirrel on her side. At once, the Hind bore down to offer what help she could. But miraculously the tiny vessel righted herself and, to Hayes’s astonishment, Gilbert could be seen sitting in the stern, holding a book in his hand, and “giving forth signes of Joy.” As the larger ship surged past, Hayes remembered, “[Gilbert] cried out unto us in the Hind, ‘we are as neere to heaven by sea as by land’.”
Nothing about the “valiant and learned” Gilbert was predictable. A character in perpetual conflict, he contrived to be a soldier and a mathematician, openly bisexual, cruel enough to decapitate his enemies after battle then line the path to his tent with their severed heads, creative enough to imagine the growth of a new world beyond the Atlantic, and forceful enough to push through his pioneering expedition without adequate funds or manpower. Perhaps the most striking testament to Gilbert’s unorthodox character was his choice of a partner, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, John Dee, known as the Great Magus.
Tall, bearded, and obsessed with numbers, Dee professed to communicate with the angels he saw in his crystal ball or scrying stone. Such was his authority as a student of the kabbalah and a reader of horoscopes, the young queen had timed her coronation in 1558 according to Dee’s computation of the most auspicious moment for such an event. At his home in Mortlake, close to London, he boasted a fabulous library of six thousand books, the largest in England. Based on this formidable information he had provided charts for Gilbert that were as reliable as contemporary knowledge allowed, and he certainly had an inkling of the wealth waiting in America. In return for his assistance, he persuaded Gilbert to reward him with “5,000 akers of ye new conquest.” While Gilbert adventured abroad, Dee had remained in Mortlake so that he could secretly study with his friend, Edward Kelley, how to transmute the base metal of lead into gold. But none of the Great Magus’s esoteric arts possessed a power comparable to the magic that Gilbert carried to the newfound land beyond the Atlantic.
Its most obvious element was the wording of his royal charter. In response to Gilbert’s proposal to explore “those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida,” Queen Elizabeth had given him permission to own “all the soyle of all such lands, countries, & territories so to be discovered . . . with full power to dispose thereof, & of every part thereof in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of the laws of England.” Among the many different ways of possessing the earth, fee simple was, and is, tantamount to outright ownership. Any part of North America from Florida to Newfoundland not already occupied by “any Christian prince or people” could become his property to be sold, rented, or mortgaged as though he were in England.
A further ritual was needed to convert the wilderness into property. The land had to be measured, mapped, and registered in the name of its owner. Thus when Gilbert sailed in June with a tiny fleet of five vessels, the crew included surveyors armed with measuring poles and compasses. Although one ship commanded by his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, immediately turned back, the remainder took the route followed for more than a century by fishermen from France, Portugal, and England to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.
On August 5, 1583, Gilbert arrived at Saint John’s harbor to find almost forty fishing vessels already there, not only catching cod but drying and salting them onshore. Immediately the surveyors went to work, and, as Hayes put it, “did observe the elevation of the pole and drewe plats [plans] of the countrey exactly graded [to scale].” Before the end of the month, the first transactions had taken place, and parcels of land along the water’s edge were being rented out to fishermen who until then had occupied them freely. “For which grounds” Hayes pointed out, “they did covenant to pay a certain rent and service.” In return, Gilbert assured his tenants they now had the right to occupy their own particular spot from one year to the next.
On the face of it, Gilbert’s behavior was absurd. For uncounted generations the granite hills overlooking the long, dog-leg inlet of Saint John’s had been used by the Mi’kmaq people, who regarded it as their territory. The Basque fishermen who had discovered the sheltered haven perhaps before Columbus sailed to America in 1492 believed that they and any others who had the audacity to cross the ocean to fish for cod had earned the right to use the landing-grounds during the summer season. But that was as far as it went.
Yet now, under English law Sir Humphrey Gilbert asserted just such a right, and on that basis proposed to charge the fishermen rent for using a part of the wilderness for activities that they had always engaged in freely. For the first time, an idea that would revolutionize the structure of society and transform the way people thought about themselves had made itself known outside its homeland.
Biology underpins the pivotal influence that ownership of the earth exerts on human life. There are givens that remain as true for the nearly seven billion of us presently living here as they were for the five hundred million people scattered across the land in 1583. The body’s core temperature must remain within a degree or two of 37 degrees Celsius or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. To maintain this temperature, an adult must consume a minimum of 1,800 calories a day, preferably 2,450 according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and closer to 4,000 calories for the sort of labor demanded of the fishermen in Saint John’s harbor. That adult must also be clothed and sheltered from the burning sun and freezing rain. Except for some coastal communities, the earth’s population in every era has always depended on the land for at least 85 percent of the energy that keeps it alive, and for all its clothing and shelter.
This inescapable fact of life makes the challenge of caring for the nine billion inhabitants who will inhabit the earth in fifty years’ time daunting. They must be fed, clothed, and housed on the produce of some forty-five million square kilometers of farmland, roughly eighteen million square miles. In optimum conditions, less than half of this area might be sufficient to produce the calories needed for survival. But the land must also produce biofuels, animal feed, minerals, timber, and cotton and other clothing fibers. At the same time, the soil degrades, cities spread, climate changes, and natural disasters such as droughts and floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, whittle away spare capacity to danger levels.
Any realistic scenario for 2050 has to consider how the earth will be owned.
In 2010, for the first time in human existence, more people lived in cities than in the country. But even in the sprawl of metal and plastic shacks that make up the slums of Kibera outside the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, or the intricate warren of dwellings that house a million people in the Dharavi slum in India’s Mumbai, the same fundamentals hold good. The food and sometimes the clothing may be produced elsewhere, but occupancy of a room or a corrugated iron shack is the essential base every family needs for sleeping, eating, and working, so that it will be strong enough to produce whatever labor or goods are necessary to buy a bag of rice and a T-shirt. Laying claim to the ground in some form is an inescapable condition of human existence.
Yet it is never a purely economic relationship. In 1890, the pioneering psychologist William James speculated that the urge to possess was intrinsic to human nature. “We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves,” he wrote. “Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.” It was not so much a materialist or acquisitive desire as an elemental urge for attachment, a “blind impulse” as he put it, that embraced both people and objects. Everything that could have the adjective “my” in front of it—parents, spouse and children, clothes, jewelry, and home—strengthened the inner sense of identity by offering external evidence of who a person really was. And, James added, “An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves.”
Whether we live in a slum, a town house, or a castle, that possessive need touches each of us, not just economically but through the emotional pull that the locality called home exercises upon our head and heart.
“This was the room I had to live in,” mused Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. “It was all I had in the way of a home. It was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.” For Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hardbitten private eye, the room was his backstory, its spareness a guarantee that, however flawed, he was ultimately incorruptible. The space we occupy always has that double function, a carapace that is intended to protect us and a canvas where we paint our inner secrets. Few things in our lives affect us more directly and persistently.
Most inhabitants of the Western world live in a private property society and are consequently prejudiced in its favor. But across the globe people have evolved a myriad means of owning the places they live in, and, as Rudyard Kipling said of competing tribal myths, “Every-single-one-of-them-is-right!” The differences affect the way we look at ourselves and the world.
As late as 1800, much of the world’s grassland—the North American prairies, the South American pampas, the Australian outback, the African savannah—was still communally owned by indigenous peoples. The most extensive single pattern of land ownership was the feudal monstrosity of the serf estate that reached with the Russian Empire from the Baltic to the Pacific. The majority of the world’s population, however, understood land ownership to take various forms of peasant farming. In much of Europe, in India, and in China, the most populous and powerful nation in the world until the late eighteenth century, peasants worked the ground and owned its produce, but ownership of each small plot was shared, with a family or a clan, with a local potentate, or with the monarch. And in the wide swath of Islamic states from North Africa to Java, peasants worked, landlords possessed, but ultimately the earth was deemed to belong to its creator.
The disruption of this pattern is the great revolution of the last two hundred years. The idea of individual, exclusive ownership, not just of what can be carried or occupied, but of the immovable, near-eternal earth, has proved to be the most destructive and creative cultural force in written history. It has eliminated ancient civilizations wherever it has encountered them, and displaced entire peoples from their homelands, but it has also spread an undreamed-of degree of personal freedom and protected it with democratic institutions wherever it has taken hold.
All this potential was contained in the magic that Sir Humphrey Gilbert took with him to Newfoundland. His original intention had been to extend his ownership over more land a thousand miles to the southwest around what is now Rhode Island, but one of his vessels had to be sent home early, and another was driven ashore in a gale. With only the Golden Hind and the Squirrel left, he decided to return to England for the winter. Nevertheless, the potential for profit in America convinced “the General,” as he was known, that Queen Elizabeth would finance his next voyage there to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Perhaps it was this thought that kept his spirits high even when the storm almost capsized the Squirrel as they approached the English Channel in the fall of 1583.
Several times the Golden Hind sailed close to check that all was well on the smaller boat. On each occasion, Gilbert cheerfully waved his book and shouted his belief that heaven was as close to the ocean as to the land. Some have conjectured that he must have been reading Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which contains a sentence with a similar phrase, the inference being that this was his blueprint for an ideal community to be founded in America. But Utopia contained a savage attack on the destructive effects of private property. More probably, Gilbert was immersed in General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation by his partner, John Dee. This book was devoted to the magus’s vision of an “incomparable Brytish Impire” that the future would bring.
Whatever prompted Dee’s vision, his scrying glass or simply Gilbert’s manic ambition, it was undoubtedly prophetic. According to the Memorials, the empire would be spread across the seas by a mighty navy. Implicitly, as this British Empire expanded, it would carry with it Gilbert’s wild idea that land could be owned as private property around the world.
The general, however, was not destined to live long enough to test the accuracy of Dee’s foresight. As night fell, the Squirrel hoisted two lanterns so that the Golden Hind could follow her through the raging seas. But soon after midnight, wrote Captain Hayes, “suddenly her lights were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the sight, and withall our watch cryed, the Generall was cast away, which was so true. For in that moment the Frigat was devoured and swallowed up of the Sea.”