Venturers, vagrants and vessels of glory: Migration from England to the colonies under Charles I

This dissertation, based on the largest extant port register for a single year in the colonial period, explores patterns of movement from England to the colonies in a transatlantic context. In so doing, it provides the only comparative study of British emigration for the seventeenth century. The 1635 London port register contains the names and ages of almost five thousand people who left London in that one year for the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Barbados, Nevis, Saint Christopher, Bermuda, and Providence Island. Quantitative analysis of the register and qualitative archival sources offer a valuable opportunity both to recreate individual careers and to construct a prosopographical portrait of an entire society in motion. In the new world, the 5,000 people who left London in 1635 joined at least that many more travellers from other English ports: these immigrants participated in a crucial migration that established the viability of English colonization in New England, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean in the 1630s. The dissertation contains three sections. The first part details the English context of the immigrants\u27 lives. The second examines the puritan colonies of New England, Bermuda and Providence Island, while the third explores the labor migrations to the Chesapeake and Barbados. In their composition, the two migrant populations could not have been more diverse. Yet the travellers who left London in 1635 displayed the symbols of a shared culture that provided unity to a series of seemingly incompatible colonial adventures. Their experience helps explain the emergence of widely divergent societies from a similar source. This study of the 5,000 London migrants has unearthed astonishing rates of repeat and return migration that affirm the vitality of the Atlantic world. The story told is many layered: it details the experiences of individual voyagers from all ranks of society; it describes the collective impact the migrants had on the colonial societies they joined; and it places those societies within a unified and vibrant Atlantic world at a time of dynamic colonial growth