Flag CHAPTER ONE Antecedents The flag of today represents many centuries of development. Probably no other inanimate object has excited so great an influence over the actions of the human race. It has existed in some form among all peoples and from the earliest times. --Frederic J. Haskin, 1941 H ISTORY DOES NOT record the first time a human being attached pieces of cloth to a staff to use as a symbol. But wooden, metal, and cloth flaglike objects--statues, standards, banners, guidons, ensigns, pennons, and streamers--date from the ancient Egyptians who flew carved elephants and other symbols mounted on poles on boats and perhaps in front of their temples more than five thousand years ago. Other early prehistoric cultures also placed carvings or animal skins atop poles, sometimes accompanied by streamers or feathers. Among the oldest is an ancient Persian metal flagpole that had a metal eagle perched at its top.
There also are recorded uses of flag predecessors--nearly always as communications or identification devices on the field of battle or to signify religious affiliations--among the Assyrians, Phoenicians, Saracens, Indians, Aztecs, and Mongolians. It is believed that the ancient Chinese first used cloth banners in the second century BC. The founder of the Chou dynasty (ca. 1027 BC), for example, is thought to have displayed a white flag to announce his presence. The main use of flags by the Chinese, though, was as a military communications device. "Because they could not hear each other, they made gongs and drums. Because they could not see each other they made pennants andflags," the ancient Chinese military general and philosopher Sun Tzu wrote in his classic The Art of War. "Gongs, drums, pennants and flags are the means to unify the men''s ears and eyes.
" That was the case in China in the fourth century BC, according to Sun Pin, the military strategist and Sun Tzu descendant. "Commands should be carried out by using various colored banners," he advised. "Affix pennants to the chariots to distinguish grade and status. Differentiate among troops that can easily be mistaken for each other by using banners and standards." The ancient Roman legions carried banners called vexilla. These were small square ensigns, most often red in color, that were attached to crossbars at the end of lances. They often were adorned with animal figures, such as horses, eagles, wolves, or boars. Flags in ancient India typically were carried on chariots and elephants.
They were usually red or green triangularly shaped banners that had figures embroidered upon them and were surrounded by gold fringe. The Vikings flew several types of flags, primarily on their famed sailing ships in the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. The most common was the Raven flag, in the shape of a triangle with two straight sides and a curved side. Historians believe that that emblem flew from the masts of Danish Viking ships and probably from the Norwegian Viking ships that landed in Newfoundland a thousand years ago. If so, the Viking Raven banner has the distinction of being the first flag to fly in North America. The idea of flags as symbols of the rulers of nation states began to evolve in Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the banners that Christopher Columbus displayed when he reached the West Indies in 1492, for example, bore the Spanish royal standard: two lions and two castles representing the arms of Castile and Leon. Columbus also carried a special white expeditionary flag with a green cross.
It consisted of the letters F and Y for Ferdinand (Fernando) and Isabella (Ysabel), each of which was topped by a crown. The English flag of the period, the red cross of St. George, the nation''s patron saint, set on a white banner, dates from the Crusades and was considered a type of national emblem as early as 1277. It was not, however, considered a national flag as we know the concept today. The St. George''s Cross rather was a royal banner--the symbol of the king''s authority. It was flown on English ships and emblazoned on soldiers'' shields. English ships also flew several types of rank-identifying pennants called ensigns, including the all-red, all-white and all-blue English naval ensigns.
The word ensign itself derives from the British military rank of the samename; the "ensign" was the officer in charge of carrying the colors into battle. Historical evidence about the use of flags in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries is scant and sketchy. Because flags did not have anything close to the meaning they took on as symbols of nations beginning in the late eighteenth century, primary documents rarely contain descriptions of flags. Much of our knowledge about flags during those centuries, therefore, is based on fragmentary evidence and historic supposition. Historians believe that the first St. George''s Cross to make its way to North America was brought by the Italian navigator and explorer Giovanni Caboto (known by his adopted English name, John Cabot), who sailed under the aegis of King Henry VII. The best historical evidence indicates that Cabot''s small ship, the Matthew, reached Newfoundland in May 1497. When Cabot took possession of the land for England, he unfurled the St.
George''s Cross along with the Venetian flag of St. Mark. The first explorers from the other nations who came to North America also sailed under various types of banners and ensigns, most often representing their countries'' monarchs. That included the blue royal French flag adorned with three fleurs-de-lis likely carried by Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian-born navigator and explorer who sailed under the French king Francis I (François). Verrazzano made landfall off present-day Cape Fear, North Carolina, in March 1524 and sailed on to what is now New York harbor and New England. Jacques Cartier, who explored the Saint Lawrence River for Francis I in 1534, also is believed to have brought his monarch''s banner to these shores. Several types of French merchant flags--typically a white cross on a blue field with the royal arms at its center--were flown by the other pioneering French navigators who came to explore the New World: Samuel de Champlain in 1604; René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and Jacques Marquette in 1666; and Louis Joliet in 1669. The English navigator and explorer Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch, took his ship, the Half Moon, into what is now New York harbor on September 3, 1609.
Hudson did so most likely flying the orange, white, and blue horizontally striped flag of the Dutch United East India Company. Hudson also probably carried the Amsterdam Chamber flag, a red, white, and black horizontal tricolor affair. Both flags also contained initials in the center white stripe. The British Union Jack was created by King James I three years after he succeeded Queen Elizabeth I. James came to England to take the throne in 1603 after serving as James VI of Scotland, where the monarch''s flagsince the time of the Crusades had been the St. Andrew''s Cross, a diagonal white cross on a blue background. On April 12, 1606, James decreed that all English and Scottish ships should fly the new red, white, and blue union flag on their main masts. That flag was known as the Union Jack and also as the "king''s colors.
" It consisted of an amalgam of the crosses and colors of St. George and St. Andrew. The ships were directed also to fly either the banner of St. George or of St. Andrew on their foremasts. It is believed that the Mayflower flew the red cross of St. George when it landed at Plymouth Rock on December 21, 1620, and it is possible that the ship also displayed the Union Jack.
And it also is likely that one or both of those flags was flown by the members of the Virginia Company whose three ships--the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery --had landed on Jamestown Island in Virginia, on May 14, 1607, and began the first permanent British settlement in North America. There is concrete evidence that the Union Jack flew in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as early as 1634. Court records show that John Endicott, a local government official who had previously served as governor, that year ordered the cross cut out of a Union Jack. This was not a protest against British rule however. Endicott, acting probably at the behest of the nonconformist pastor Roger Williams (who later founded the colony of Rhode Island), did so to spotlight his Puritan belief that the cross was an idolatrous and pagan symbol. Endicott was tried in a local court for the offense and censured. The official Union Jack changed several times during the often-chaotic seventeenth century when England underwent two revolutions and a civil war. In 1707, when the turbulence ended under Queen Anne, the new Parliament of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Wales officially adopted James I''s Union Jack.
"The ensigns armorial of our kingdom of Great Britain," Parliament decreed on January 16, 1707, shall be "the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew conjoined to be used on all flags, banners, standards, and ensigns both at sea and land." This flag, which was used exclusively on ships and on government buildings and military fortifications, came to be known as the "Union Flag." English colonial governors and local military commanders in America, most often small militia companies, began designing and displaying their own flags not long after the establis.