A World Re-Shaped by Writing The Century That Wrote Itself

My name is Adam Nicolson.

I'm a writer. And ever since I was a teenager,

I have been gripped by the 17th century.

It was Britain's most revolutionary century

when all the forces of modernity

began to stir under the old order,

slugging it out on the great battlegrounds

of religion and politics.

Two civil wars, one king almost blown up,

another with his head cut off,

a third simply got rid of.

But more important than any of that

was the factor which drove the revolutionary changes

in this first truly modern century.

Writing.

Writing was everywhere.

Notebooks, chapbooks, account books,

business correspondence, letters,

diaries, pamphlets, newspapers.

This was the century of the written word.

It was the first great age of self-depiction.

All kinds of people were learning to read and write.

And, through their writings,

we can know them like never before in history.

A woman sent to prison for her conscience.

A sailor who wanted to share his adventures.

A solitary genius who used his notebooks

to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Reading and writing allowed people to question what they'd been told.

To engage in fierce debate

and to rewrite the rules of politics and self-expression.

This was the beginning of the age we now live in.

The moment we left the Middle Ages behind

and set out on the track to modernity.

'And that transformation

'is what fascinates me about the 17th century.'

It was a world on the move.

In the streets of London, there were cart jams

and the roads were filled with people

in search of new lives, new opportunities.

The city tripled in size through the century.

More than half-a-million Englishmen emigrated.

Either in search of God or to get rich.

Distance had entered English lives.

Britain was turning from a small, insignificant island

to a booming international economy.

In this film, I'm going to explore

through the lives and written words of people on the move,

how writing made new ways of life possible in this expanding world.

Fuelling the change from an insular country to an international economy.

The key transition to modern life.

Writing made love possible when the lovers were hundreds of miles apart.

Allowed people to own things the other side of the ocean.

It changed Britain, opening its pores to a modern future.

This was a century of ambition and mobility.

Of people prepared to seek prosperity and happiness

away from their roots.

There was a need to make life coherent at a distance.

And only writing could do that.

My first story begins with a couple who tried to bridge that distance

with some incredibly intense love letters.

Now, of course, people have always written love letters,

but the 17th century sees a sudden burgeoning

of intimate family correspondence.

And here in Suffolk, in the village of Groton,

lived one of the most prolific set

of family correspondents, the Winthrops.

And the letters they wrote to each other

are some of the most poignant and beautiful ever written.

So this is Groton, the village of Groton.

And here is Groton Place, which is the house of the Winthrops.

A great big, chunky gentry house.

This is where the local rulers lived. And this was them.

And the Winthrops, you might think of them as pompous,

stuffed-up gents, but actually,

they're very different from that.

They are Puritans.

I have John Winthrop here on this iPad.

And John looks like the kind of man

who won't have any games played on a Sunday.

Won't have any licentiousness or drunkenness

or bear-baiting or badger-baiting.

All of that is complete anathema to him.

Like other Puritans, he wants to purify the Church of England.

Purify the whole country.

Rid it of all of those Roman Catholic old things

which are part of the past.

He's interested in a new, clean, pure future.

Although the family home was in Suffolk,

John spent much of his time away in London...

where he was a legal official in the Court of Wards and Liveries.

He was influential, well-connected -

a man to be reckoned with.

Living in what was fast becoming the largest city in Europe.

It was a hotbed of vice, drink, theatre and prostitution.

A world away from Suffolk

and, most importantly, from his beloved wife, Margaret.

She was a little grander than him.

She was the daughter of a judge and a knight.

But they'd been brought up in the same Puritan world

and they shared the same values.

Belief in a godly family, a godly community

and an intense personal devotion to God himself.

And, like many young gentry women,

she'd been brought up very well.

Very carefully. Especially to write.

And these are some of her letters here.

And the way that she has written these words on the page

is so carefully done, it's almost as if

she has embroidered them onto the paper.

This is not a busy mail hand.

Here is a letter from her husband.

It's almost scribbled in a rough, busy secretary hand,

like he hasn't really got time to write it on the page.

She has time absolutely flooding into this.

And as she writes, "Most dear and loving husband,

"I cannot express my love to you as I desire

"in these poor, lifeless lines."

There is something amazingly modest about Margaret Winthrop.

But in another way, it is a picture of incredible

warmth and intimacy between them,

bridging that gap between Groton and London.

And so, when she ends, she says,

"And thus desiring to be remembered in your prayers.

"I bid my good husband good night.

"Little Sam, as well.

"Thinks it is time for me to go to bed.

"And so I beseech the Lord to keep you in safety and us all here.

"Farewell, my sweet husband."

Honestly, as if she's talking to him.

And then signs off, "Your obedient wife, Margaret Winthrop."

But she misspells obedient and has to put a little "I" in there

when the rest of it has been done.

Their dozens of letters enabled Margaret and John

to coexist at a distance.

A yo-yo exchange of love from Suffolk to London,

London to Suffolk.

Sometimes, Margaret even sent a cheese or a pudding with her letter.

But things weren't altogether peaceful.

Through the 1620s, the Puritans came under increasing pressure

to conform to what they hated -

the new ceremonialist mainstream

promoted by the bishops and at court.

In September 1627, John wrote to Margaret in Groton

expressing his fears,

but reaffirming his trust in their unity.

He felt that they were strangers on Earth,

but he urged her in this passionate letter

to stick to their beliefs

because only there did true rewards lie.

And he wrote to her that they should, "Live that life of faith

"which only affords true peace, comfort and contentment.

"And if the world shall disclaim us as none of hers,

"and refuse to hold out to us

"such full breasts as she doth to others,

"this shall not need to trouble us,

"but rather may give us matter of joy."

It's the deepest possible outpouring of love for this woman

in the vision of their shared life in the future.

Their love was able to blossom through the exchange of letters.

But it wasn't always easy to communicate like this.

Before 1635, when the Royal Mail was opened up to everyone,

there was no organised large-scale postal service.

The way in which letters were carried

throughout the 16th and 17th century

is often very ad hoc.

Certainly, before the 1635 reforms and the Civil War,

the forms of address that people would use are often very vague.

If you were using a personal bearer that was carrying a letter,

you could say, "Give this to my wife

-"and let this be delivered to her."

-Just that?

Literally just that.

But isn't that...? That's on the shift, isn't it?

So if that is the 16th century, early 17th century way of it,

by the end of the century,

these things are becoming rather more official and bureaucratic.

Absolutely. Much more efficient, much more organised,

much more regular and much more secure.

I think that's the key thing.

The letter is becoming increasingly personal and increasingly private.

And that's connected to the post,

it's also connected to shifts in the nature of literacy.

And they are able to put down on paper

personal thoughts and personal emotions

in a way that they haven't in the past.

So this is the birth of privacy.

This is absolutely the birth of privacy.

One of the other things we see over this period

is the rise of the love letter.

The way in which individuals are articulating emotion

in a way they haven't previously.

The private letter was a new kind of vehicle for private emotion.

And this makes for one of the most revelatory paradoxes of the century.

Because they could write to each other

without fear or reserve in private,

we can see these people more clearly

than almost anyone from any earlier time.

And there is another line of Winthrop family correspondence

which allows us even further into their world -

a world which was itself expanding overseas.

The Winthrops' second son Henry had started life as a wayward child

and now was a risk-taking teenager.

Having spent his childhood in quiet rural England,

he was straining at the Puritan leash.

ROCK MUSIC

Margaret and John thought a little international travel

might help him grow up.

Perhaps one day, he, too,

would become a good Puritan with a strong work ethic.

He is my next character.

A young man who tried to use writing to make his fortune.

The Winthrops' son Henry, complete ne'er-do-well,

wayward boy, drunk, girls.

You know, never attending to writing

or anything serious and puritanical.

Any letter he wrote...Whoa!

..was always spattered with appalling grammar

and even worse spelling.

HE LAUGHS

And you can imagine, when I try...Whoa!

..try to read one of these letters, it is totally illegible.

You can only imagine what his dad thought

when one of these arrived home...

Oh! ..at Groton.

Whoa! Bloody hell! Wahey!

Hah! Whoa! Whey!

HE LAUGHS

Oh, Jesus Christ!

Whoa! Anyway...

Thank you.

Despite his dodgy writing,

Henry's future would soon rely on everything

the letter could do for him in an expanding world.

In December 1626, when he was 20,

the Winthrops sent their naughty boy to the West Indies

to gain experience in transatlantic business.

The English Caribbean was just opening and the British had started

to establish footholds on Barbados,

Saint Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat.

These would become the money pump

at the heart of the British colonial empire.

For now, they were rough, wild, drunken and desperate places.

A cockpit of frontier competition

between young English, French and Dutchmen,

all hungry to make their pile.

When Henry Winthrop arrived in Barbados, he decided to stay.

This most easterly of the West Indies,

90 miles out into the Atlantic,

thrown like a sixpence on Newmarket Heath,

as one English traveller described it,

looked, to Henry, like his future.

One of the first things Henry did when he got to Barbados

was to write home to the family.

It was fantastic here.

"One of the pleasantest islands in all the West Indies,"

as he wrote in his atrocious handwriting to his uncle at home.

He was going to make all of them rich.

He'd already planted some tobacco and, come harvest time,

£500 worth of it would be winging its way to England.

He was going to change the Winthrops' fortunes.

All he needed was a little help.

A couple of servants wouldn't go amiss.

Some saws, some pickaxes, shovels.

Even though he could scarcely write a coherent sentence,

Henry knew he had to rely on his pen.

His transatlantic enterprise would only thrive

if his letters summoned help from home.

The Winthrop dad and uncles all complied.

John sent the equipment out, cousins sent money.

Maybe this was a bandwagon they could climb on.

His mother wrote to say she was pleased.

Perhaps this did represent a good future

for her slightly feckless younger son.

'The formula was this -

'communication plus investment should, anyway, equal cash.'

Don't mess with me! That's a five and a one.

Early settlers in Barbados were quite successful in growing tobacco.

The demand back in London was huge.

Both men and women smoking it,

partly as a stimulant, partly a medicine.

Even sick sheep in 17th-century Wiltshire

were given tobacco to perk them up a bit.

Henry's letters back home were relentlessly optimistic.

Whatever they had heard about conditions in Barbados,

his tobacco was going to make them a fortune.

So if you'd been landing here with Henry Winthrop,

what kind of island would you have found?

They would have found a tropical island completely forested.

A virgin place, an exciting place,

a challenging place, perhaps.

Somewhere quite different

within the experience of the average Englishman.

What did they make of their new world?

It was a frontier society.

We were a frontier society for a short period of time.

It was a young male-dominated society.

What did these young men have to do?

Well, drink themselves stupid most of the time.

Then Cromwell ships all the girls out from the London brothels.

That can't have been good for the moral quality of the place, can it?

Well, I mean, as a gentleman, I really don't want to go there.

Because I suppose these women, unfortunate,

when they came over...you know what,

they made a life for themselves.

So the population started very small,

but it didn't stay small for long, did it?

Once the transition was made with sugar,

then the population literally exploded.

Remember, you're talking about the 1630s

from about 6,000, heavily male

and then by the 1650s, you were in the region of 70,000.

So families on both sides of the Atlantic

were kept together by writing.

Writing was a social bond between these divided parts.

Many of the colonists who came over

had one foot in the West Indies

and one foot in North America.

And people moved between the two areas

or moved back to the British Isles.

So there was constant movement

and a need to constantly inform each other about the situations.

Henry was, of course, keen to prove himself to his family.

Needless to say, awash in the moral anarchy of Barbados,

he did not deliver.

Despite that failure to generate any income,

he waited anxiously for a supportive letter from home.

Is that right?

In 1629, the letter arrived from the dad.

And you can have no doubt that family relationships

were still in full action the full width of the Atlantic

because this was wigging.

Where was the money? Where was any tobacco worth selling?

Because the tobacco Henry had sent already was rubbish.

Ill-conditioned, foul, full of stalks and evil coloured.

They couldn't even sell it for five shillings a pound.

His father gave him the bad news.

"I've dispersed a great deal of money for you.

"More than my estate will bear.

"And I can supply you no further

"unless you send me some commodity," by which he meant tobacco.

"I have many other children that are unprovided."

His uncles would take none of his tobacco.

His family would provide him no more money.

His begging letters had received no handout.

He had failed.

HE SIGHS

Henry had produced nothing but a stream of letters.

And if his family and mother are emblems

of the Puritan frame of mind -

proper, godly and serious.

Henry comes from right the other end of 17th-century English life.

The wild strain. A chancer, a trickster, a shyster.

A man with words and schemes coming pouring out of his mouth.

And a man for whom the powers of seduction

and persuasion were his main currency.

And, for both of them, the written word was of equal use.

And so conversations which would otherwise have happened

in the parlour of a manor house in Suffolk

now took the form of letters.

Letters which were taking two and a half months each way

to cross the 4,000 miles of ocean that separated the family.

And Henry, like most of his contemporaries

and equivalents, had failed.

And, do you know, he couldn't have cared less.

Henry Winthrop was typical of an entire generation

of 17th-century Englishmen.

Just edging into literacy, dependent on it for his life scheme,

with his letters stretched across the width of the Atlantic,

he never quite made it.

The riches which that transatlantic trade

would deliver within a decade or two

were never quite within his reach.

He had little choice but to return to England.

But back in London, to the horror of his parents,

he went on living it up.

Buying a scarlet suit and a cloak lined with plush,

and then, to general dismay, seducing his cousin Bess.

But then radical change arrived in the Winthrops' lives.

Through the late 1620s, as devout Puritans,

John and Margaret were being increasingly marginalised

in their own country

as Crown and Church turned against their Puritan way.

When suddenly, they were offered an escape route.

In 1620, a small group of English Puritans

had crossed the Atlantic to settle in New England.

Now, nine years later, John Winthrop was offered the post

of Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

They moved there and the Winthrops became a truly Atlantic family.

Part of the great 17th-century wave of expansion

which saw the literate English start to embrace the world ocean.

The Winthrops, Henry included, all ended up in Massachusetts.

And, from that point onward,

scarcely one word written between them survived.

They were all together now.

Safe in God's embrace, in a better, purer place.

And the need for writing had simply dropped away.

Distance had been eradicated

and they had left the world of words behind.

But there's one rather sad footnote to this story.

Henry, of course, showing off, as ever,

decided when he got to Massachusetts

that he'd go for a swim in a river,

whose water was far, far too cold for him.

And inevitably, having got in the river, he drowned.

SPLASH

Writing played a major part in the life of the Winthrops.

It allowed the parents to stay in touch at a distance

and their son Henry to try his hand at making money from the Tropics.

An expanding world, an increasingly literate world.

These twin aspects of the 17th century

were intimately bound up with each other.

Written communication allowed

this country's engagement with the world to stretch and swell.

At the same time, accounts of the exotic and the foreign

deeply stimulated the English imagination.

There is no piece of 17th-century writing

which embodies that relationship more richly

than the extraordinary illustrated journal

of the country boy turned world straddling seaman, Edward Barlow.

His memoir brought a whole new world home for the people to read.

Barlow's life track is simple enough.

From poor farmer's son

to captain of a great East India Company merchantman.

But even more remarkable than that story of ambition fulfilled

is his own dazzling account of it.

From the beginning, his book was always intended

as a public declaration.

He had an audience in mind.

Like many ancient mariners and foreign correspondents,

he wanted to grab people at home by the collar and say to them,

"Don't you realise what it is I've been going through?"

This is a copy of this book.

A really extraordinary document.

An incredibly-rare survival

from that world of itinerant working men

that had ballooned in the 17th century.

And in it is the only portrait we have of Barlow himself,

drawn by him, of himself as a boy

on the day he decided to leave home and head out to sea.

Edward Barlow grew up in a small village.

For him, his horizons felt limited.

He wanted a challenge in life.

Whoo!

HE LAUGHS

Well, even as a 13 year old, Barlow thought village life was dull.

It wasn't for him and he couldn't understand why people

weren't wanting to get out, to escape, to get on.

And so this is what he wrote in his diary later on in life.

"I thought I as good go see what I could.

"Knowing it couldn't be much worse whosesoever I came.

"And that, at any rate, I would be out of the ill will

"of some of our neighbours.

"Some of them wouldn't even venture a day's journey

"from out of the smoke of their chimneys

"or the taste of their mother's milk."

To Barlow, that's just crazy.

Oi! Out the way!

In 1657, he decided it was time to leave

the confines of his Lancashire village and see the world.

He waved goodbye to his mother across a wheat field.

She begged him to stay.

Barlow arrived in London.

A spectacular moment for a country boy.

London was accelerating into its late 17th-century boom.

It was the city of promise.

And at its heart, the river.

The route to a wider world.

Here on a bridge over the Thames, right in the middle of the city,

he came across something he'd never seen or even heard of before.

And he describes it in his journal.

"Looking below the bridge upon the river

"and seeing so many things upon the water,

"with long poles standing up in them

"and a great deal of ropes about them.

"Which made me wonder what they should be.

"Not knowing that they were ships.

"For I never had seen any before that time."

"Sometimes I would stand here, where I could see the river,

"for half an hour to see the ships and boats sail along,

"taking great pleasure therein."

There is a fascinating link here.

As the country expanded in its connections with the world,

Barlow's own perception of himself expanded with it.

Via those beautiful ships, Barlow and Britain could both go global.

How rare was it for a man on the lower deck

to write a journal like this?

Anything to do with the lower deck in this period

is extremely difficult to get your hands on.

So we're very lucky to have Barlow as a way into that world.

It's beautifully made.

It would be incredible if this had emerged from a drawing room.

If you imagine the lower deck world, you think of it kind of dark,

rough, difficult, illiterate.

You know, a kind of dominating, rather bullying place.

How does this emerge from that world?

Barlow's life starts as a very poor boy indeed.

In the memoir part of the journal,

he writes that his parents couldn't afford clothes

suitable for him to attend church on a Sunday.

But they did put him to school.

So he knew how to write, do you think, before he went to sea?

I think so, yes.

So, this is not some old tar teaching him the skills of writing?

Not teaching him the skills of writing,

but perhaps teaching him the skills of drawing.

And what is that extraordinary thing there?

That could be a tree.

I don't think that's a tree!

-A great fir tree.

-A Christmas tree!

Yes.

This is a painting of London, Deptford, I think,

just at the moment when Barlow arrives in London.

Here we have essentially the world of the East India Company.

This is a shipyard that's been used by the company

to build and repair ships.

This is seriously blinged up here, isn't it?

Oh, yes. This is advertising the wealth and the status of the company,

but also the wealth and the status of the country.

So, in the journal, what does he tell us?

Well, it's sort of the great arc of his life at sea.

It begins as a memoir

and then quickly gets down to the nitty-gritty of life at sea.

So, in this section here,

he's essentially complaining about how hard his life is.

"I... always thinking that beggars had a far better life of it

"and lived better than I did."

It's a tough life at sea.

The financial rewards clearly here

are not as great as he perhaps had hoped.

But Barlow does have this sense of adventure.

He has gone to sea to see the world.

He sailed from this coast. London's just down there.

The Thames Estuary is just down there.

He would've headed out and had, really,

the whole world in his hands. Anywhere you like.

You could go to Suriname, you could go to Barbados,

you could go to New England, the coast of Africa.

Anything was possible.

And that is what is different.

It is a kind of new world, ready to be grabbed.

Barlow was as green as they come.

He didn't even know that seawater was salty.

And they gave him a cabin which he wrote in his journal, was like,

"A gentleman's dog kennel."

It wouldn't have been at all unlike this.

And here, he set off on a career

which, for the next five decades, embraced the world.

The global reach of it is really extraordinary.

And every part of it is in his journal.

Barlow was joining one of the boom businesses of the century.

In 1603, the navy had only 41 ships and 8,000 sailors.

As the century drew to a close,

those numbers had increased fivefold.

The navy needed men.

So for Barlow and thousands of others like him,

this was a chance for a whole new scale of life.

It's perfectly possible to imagine

Barlow living exactly this kind of life.

It's a hot autumn day and sweat is pouring off me.

And so when the young boy arrives to work on the naval ship in London,

it would have been a shock.

There is no, er...sympathy here for weakness.

This is a place for strong men doing capable things.

The purpose of his journal in part

was to establish how this country boy

had won dignity through the life of a sailor.

Even his account of how he came to write the book

was a reflection on the dangers of that life at sea.

In 1672, unknown to Barlow and his shipmates,

Britain went to war with the Dutch,

fighting for the lucrative trade in all the valuable goods of the east.

Spices and silks, coffee and calico.

Barlow's ship was jumped by the Dutch off the coast of Sumatra.

The outnumbered British surrendered

and the heavily-armed Dutch clamoured onboard.

So the Dutch were swarming all over the boat.

This was the great crisis of his life.

It's when they were taken prisoner.

And of course, he wrote about it in the journal.

"Seeing that in an instant, all our goods, chests and clothes

"and ship and all were made prize of."

The crew of a surrendering ship

could expect everything to be taken off them.

And Barlow, of course, himself,

was desperate that his own gold was going to be nicked.

So he stuffed his shoes full of it

and, amazingly, got away with that.

Now Barlow was a prisoner.

And in the long expanses of nothing to do,

he began to write the great monument to his own life.

"And thus I thought good

"to describe to my friends or acquaintance,

"or to any which might take the pains to read it over.

"And here, they may understand in part

"what dangers and troubles poor seamen passed through

"and also of the manners and situation

"of most places which I have been at since I first went to sea."

The impressive nature of the world

and his own equally-impressive energies and enterprise

sit side-by-side on the page.

His book is a hymn to adventure and self-congratulation.

See how great the world is.

See how big I now am.

The more you look at Barlow's book, the more marvellous it becomes.

It is absolutely stuffed to over-brimming with the marvellous,

with the marvellous things he's been out into the world to see

and which he's capturing and setting down here in his book.

So here's a picture,

the true picture of a shark eating a man, chewing off his leg.

Then, on the next page, these fantastic images

of what he calls man-of-war files

that catch and did eat flying fish in the seas.

And things which previously might have been

part of the world of fantasy.

I mean, weirdly-imagined fish that flew

and birds catching the fish as they flew across the sea.

And then this really marvellous page

of a scene in India with an elephant and a river with its shoals.

And here, a rhinoceros - a big statuesque rhinoceros.

And he describes it, "The emblem of the rhinoceros

"that was brought from Bengal in the year 1684

"and sold at London for £2,100."

The book is a measure of the multiple expansions

going on in the 17th century.

Of country boys into world citizens,

of farmer sons into practise writers and describers of the world.

Of a frame of mind that knew only cows and sheep

to familiarity with elephants and rhinoceroses.

Literacy brought the world home to Barlow's readers.

He could give it to them. They could receive it.

It made him a man he could never otherwise have been.

And it showed them a world they could never otherwise have known.

Barlow's journal is the great statement

of the value and dignity of his own life.

He climbed the coastal ladder

to become a master of an East Indiaman,

a great writer, illustrator and a storyteller.

And one of the stories at the heart of that journal

is that when his ship was wrecked, hit a rock, everything was awash,

all his possessions were in danger, and what did he save?

He saved his book.

Barlow had sailed the world, but had never done that well out of it.

He died pretty poor. Almost his only legacy, his book.

But writing was not only there

to record the century's global expansiveness.

It also helped drive that expansion.

By the 1660s, British trade across the Atlantic

was expanding dramatically.

Slaves from Africa, beef from Ireland,

wine from Madeira, sugar from the Caribbean.

All of that depended on a dense network of written words.

Instructions, orders, receipts,

commissions, complaints.

And at the centre of that web, driving the expansion,

and deeply knowable

because their writing survives,

were a few often slightly-shadowy figures

like my next character, the networking businessman.

Never off his Blackberry, communicating, communicating,

communicating every moment of the day.

Sugar, one of the great new stimulants of the century

would soon remake the world.

By 1670, the Caribbean was producing

well over half of all the sugar consumed in England.

This highly-desirable commodity

was about to create a new class of British sugar oligarchs.

One of the best documented of early English traders in the Caribbean

is a man called William Freeman.

He was born in 1645, the son of a sugar planter from Saint Kitts,

one of the English possessions in the Leeward Islands.

Now, Freeman, was part of that coarse

and aggressive class of new Englishmen

who were ruthlessly starting to make their fortune out of the sugar boom.

Incredibly entrepreneurial,

fiercely energetic, always hungry for more.

And when he was 19,

he was already working as a merchant on his own account in Nevis.

A man already on the make.

Freeman's life was devoted to one thing and one thing only - money.

Fluently literate, he became the writer

of a vast compendium of demanding and imperious letters

whose tone is completely unmistakable today.

Urgent, businesslike, often furious,

sometimes capable of a kind of commercial charm.

But, in the end, interested only in his own needs.

His own self-promotion and his own ever-growing stash.

For people like Freeman, writing was the all-important tool.

Its key quality was to convey information at a distance.

Writing shrank distance and so made possible that new phenomenon,

the transatlantic businessman.

His business relied on sugar.

Sugar needed labour and the place to get the best labour was Africa.

Freeman's business relied on slaves.

Whenever one of Freeman's ships came from Africa,

one of his slave ships, usually to Nevis or Montserrat,

to a beach just like this,

he would go down there, either as a slave trader on his own behalf

or as an agent for the Royal African Company.

And there's no doubt that Freeman would have thought of this

as a completely straightforward commercial transaction.

But of course, there is another

gruesome human dimension to this story.

And very occasionally, it just leaks out of the edges of his letters.

And he says he proposes to sell them by the whole ship's lading.

That is the whole cargo in one go.

"Such as were able to go over the ship's side."

It takes a moment or two to recognise what that means,

but of course, what it means

is that some of the people who'd been brought from Africa

were unable to get out of the hold in which they'd travelled here.

Dead or ill or just disabled.

This business built on human blood and human suffering

became one of the most important of the 17th century.

And Freeman was right at the heart of it.

By 1684, there were over 46,000 African slaves in Barbados.

More than the population of whites.

Writing, essentially an instrument of power and control,

remained the reserve of the whites.

Slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write,

but their European owners meticulously documented them,

and that's how we know what little we know about them today.

How brutal a world was it?

Very brutal.

You're talking punishments that range from castration on one hand

to perhaps mild mutilation on the other hand.

Hands off, or...?

Hands off, fingers off, noses cut off.

-Ears cut off, feet, in an extreme case.

-Really?

And then you have stories of slave workers

being buried up to their necks in the ground

in an ants' nest, an ant hole.

And the ants bring allowed to eat them alive literally.

You pour some molasses or treacle on them.

And in law in the Caribbean,

slaves are defined as property.

-Property?

-Property.

They're not quite persons.

I've seen people's wills where they just list their belongings.

And it's the furniture, the paintings, the prints,

the books, the boats, the slaves.

That's typical.

In some cases, you find references to slaves and other stock.

Yeah.

And the other stock would have been cows and sheep and goats,

horses, that kind of thing.

How literate a society was this? Were people able to write?

There was landowners, the estate owners, almost always literate.

And they bring that literacy with them for the most part from England.

But the basic reason, again, is economic.

You need to keep records.

You need to look after your business.

You need to know whether you're making a profit.

-So the society's literate because cash is king.

-Precisely.

-Yeah.

-Yes, precisely.

Freeman's next step up was to go to London.

London was fast becoming the world's greatest metropolis.

The exchange centre of this word web.

It couldn't have been more different from rural Nevis.

There was profit in slaving and profit in sugar,

but the real secret of Caribbean moneymaking was fingers in pies.

And the place where the pies were made was London.

Writing allowed Freeman to conduct his business transatlantically.

But with each letter taking four months to get a reply,

the level of stress was overwhelming.

And he was finding it difficult to keep up with the London pace.

He fell out with John Bramley,

his partner in the Montserrat plantation,

who he suspected of cheating him.

And again and again,

he wrote in frustration to a lawyer on the island, William Fox,

"I am so exasperated by the disingenuity of Mr Bramley,

"who I find makes use of all means,

"be they ever so indirect,

"to circumvent and defraud me."

These anxious letters were a measure of just how difficult it was

to run a 17th-century transatlantic network.

Geography expanded to the point where communication

had become almost impossible.

Only the sight of the profits

could have made such a pressured life tolerable.

Freeman often finished off his letters with a phrase

that he had a world of business to do.

And that was the vision of his life.

One in which his business had expanded to embrace an ocean.

And as a product of that tautened and strained world,

there's one modern quality which emerges

from every page of his letter book. Stress.

This was the beginning of modern working life as we know it.

Emerging out of the capital city.

London grows remarkably fast in the course of the 17th century.

It's a city of 200,000 in 1600,

575,000 by the end of the century.

So more than doubling, nearly tripling in 100 years.

And overtaking Paris, just about 1660,

to become the largest city in western Europe.

And why is it booming that fast?

Well, London has two big things going for it.

It's both a capital city and it's a port.

The key commodities for the Atlantic trades were tobacco and sugar

and there are enormous increases in the imports of those commodities.

It's been estimated that there's enough tobacco there

for half the population to consume half a pipeful of tobacco a day.

What's London like as a result of this new business?

Well, it's a more diverse and vibrant place.

We're here walking through these alleyways

which I think would have been with a hubbub of different voices

from different corners of the world.

The Royal Exchange has been described as early as 1607 as like a babel,

so many different voices.

There's a lovely engraving of the Exchange in the 1640s

done by Wenceslaus Hollar

in which we can see Turks clearly visible with their turbans

and Muscovites with their fur hats.

-There's a kind of vitality in that, isn't there?

-Absolutely.

It would have been a real buzz, the Exchange.

Freeman was at the centre of the buzz.

And like his fellow entrepreneurs, money was running in their blood.

But the boundaries between legitimate

and illegitimate trade were completely blurred.

Everyone was on the make.

And it was expected they would be.

At least half of English overseas trade

came from that cut-throat business, smuggling.

Anything from wool and wine to spirits and fine linen.

And Freeman's transatlantic letter connections

provided the perfect setup

for some deeply-profitable black market shenanigans.

In September 1678, he wrote to his friend Robert Helms in Nevis

to tell him of a scheme he had.

A scheme to make money by smuggling French brandy.

He'd boat a small boat called the Batchelor,

probably no more than 50 foot from stem to stern.

And with it, he was going to smuggle French brandy out to the Caribbean.

This was completely illegal because no French brandy

could be sold in any possession of the English crown.

But there was money in it.

And Freeman wanted to do it.

This was his plan.

The Batchelor was to leave London

and head off down to Saint Martin in south-west France, near La Rochelle.

There, it was going to load up with French brandy

and with some salt to cover his tracks.

From Saint Martin, it was to sail to Waterford in southern Ireland.

There, the salt was going to be unloaded

and beef and pipe staves,

that's wood to make barrels with,

were going to be loaded on top of the brandy.

You wouldn't see the brandy in the hold.

Then, from southern Ireland,

it would sail all the way across the Atlantic to Nevis.

And that's where the brandy would be sold.

And that's where the money would be made.

It was a deliberately smoky and complicated scheme

designed to throw the authorities off the track.

He put Robert Helms in charge of the Caribbean connection.

And he writes to Helms to say that Helms must be ready

for when the ship arrives with the brandy onboard.

"So that all things may be carried on with safety and silence,

"which we have not been wanting in here

"in laying it as well as we can."

This is Freeman just arranging the deal

across the other side of the Atlantic.

But he's absolutely adamant about one thing.

That his name should nowhere appear in any of the documents.

They had 20 of these barrels.

And each barrel had 40 gallons of French brandy in it.

That's 800 gallons of the very best brandy that Freeman could buy.

So this isn't some poxy deal,

this is a real business transaction.

And you can imagine him back home in England

desperately writing letter after letter.

Are they being safe enough? Are they looking after his stuff?

Are they looking after his money?

His clever scheme worked.

The devious plot was not discovered.

The brandy arrived in the Caribbean.

It was distributed around the planters of the Leeward Islands

who were desperate for some relief in the heat,

and it looked as if the £1,000 Freeman had gambled

on his exploit was in for a profit.

It was a minor triumph for the world of the letter.

Only by arranging it all in advance

with his agents and co-smugglers

in France and Ireland, Montserrat and Nevis,

could he have tricked the authorities so cleverly.

And only by making it slip between the cracks

of his already existing ocean networks

could the brandy arrive unseen.

In a way, it's a kind of emblem of the modern world.

International contraband,

officials making money out of their knowledge of the way the system works,

as Freeman was still the official London agent

for the Governor of Montserrat.

And to do it using the world's most advanced information technology,

the letter.

Freeman's letters to his friends, his ship captains,

his fellow traders, his debtors and creditors,

his contraband suppliers, his partners in crime,

had turned him into one of the first transatlantic businessmen.

All that anxiety had been funnelled into the Freeman coffers.

And he was now what he always wanted to be - rich.

Freeman had made a fortune.

By the time he was 38, he was rich enough to retire.

And he came down here to Fawley Court near Henley

in the Thames Valley.

A house he'd built himself on an estate of 10,000 acres

which he'd bought for more than £7,000.

And he'd married a very rich girl, Elizabeth Baxter,

whose family was incredibly well-connected.

He had really arrived in capitalist heaven.

And this was the house he built. Orderly, rational, calm.

Near the river and crucially away from the grief of London.

And he wrote to a friend in the Caribbean

to tell him just how happy he was.

"If you hear not from me so often as I would, blame me not.

"I have lately purchased a small seat

"on the Thames near Henley,

"being resolved to withdraw from London."

At last, he was going to relax.

Neither Fawley nor Freeman's life and riches

would have been possible without the letter.

This was global success built on words.

Not as a vehicle for poetry or philosophy,

but as a way of squeezing money out of an increasingly juicy world.

Back in the Caribbean,

his slaves continued to do the work on his plantations

that kept Fawley Court running.

Freeman's profits continued to flow across the Atlantic.

When he died at 62, he left assets of around £20,000.

The equivalent of 35 million today.

Entrepreneurial colonial merchants like Freeman

are the engine of the Atlantic trade, high on blood sugar.

And there's a straightforward connection between African slaves,

growing and selling sugar,

the development of London as a global entrepot

and the creation of the British empire.

None of it would have happened

unless people like Freeman had a quill in their hands.

This was an empire founded on ink and paper.

At an intimate level, the 17th century

was the most revolutionary time this country has ever known.

It was an age in which more people in this country

could read and write than ever before.

England's communications revolution,

a transforming moment in our history.

You could call it the English Spring.

A time when the whole geometry of the country shifted and revolved.

The moment when everything we now think and feel

first came into the open.

The dignity of the individual

mattering more than the old hierarchies.

Science taking its place alongside religion

as a way of understanding the world.

The broad expanses of the world itself

as the arena for a rich and fulfilling life.

And none of it would have happened without writing.

Writing made this revolution possible.

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