Sir Alexander of Mentrie, a courtier of James VI who persuaded the monarch to establish a ‘New Scotland’ in the Canadian Maritimes
When James VI became king of England as James I in 1603, he inherited a kingdom that was beginning to carve out a transatlantic empire, a trend that would only accelerate during his reign. But in James’s original realm of Scotland, deficiencies in capital, expertise, manpower and political will ensured that empirebuilding remained a distant dream. Many Scots responded enthusiastically to James’s plantations in Ulster after 1609, but it would not be until the 1620s that the first serious effort was made to establish Scottish colonies in the New World.
The story begins with the poet and courtier Sir William Alexander of Mentrie, who developed a scheme for establishing a Scottish colony in what is now the Canadian Maritimes. In 1621, Menstie persuaded James to grant him by charter a huge swathe of Canada, claimed by the English crown but not so far settled, with a view to establishing a ‘New Scotland’, or Nova Scotia, centred on the modern peninsula of that name. ‘New Scotland’ was to be funded by the creation and sale (mainly to members of the Scottish gentry) of a new title of nobility, the ‘baronetcies of Nova Scotia’, and it was to be settled and run according to Scots law. Mentrie’s scheme appealed instinctively to James because it furthered his agenda of building a truly ‘British’ empire, and it also held out to Scots the promise of privileged access to Canada’s vast stocks of fish, timber and fur.
On paper the project looked potentially viable. European settlement in this part of the New World was as yet very sparse; the nearest colony was the French territory of Quebec, rather further in-land, while all England’s populated possessions were much further south, in New England, Virginia and the Caribbean. With this in mind, Menstrie sent out two exploratory expeditions, in 1622 and 1623, to reconnoitre Nova Scotia. This done, two batches of settlers arrived in 1628 and 1629, establishing themselves primarily at the new settlement of Port Royal, on mainland Nova Scotia, but with a secondary satellite on Cape Breton island, just off the peninsula’s eastern coast.